Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
31-03-2019
More than 100 UFOs sightings reported in NY last year
More than 100 UFOs sightings reported in NY last year
More than 100 UFOs sightings reported in NY last year
More than 100 UFO sightings were reported in New York last year to the National UFO Reporting Center. The center, based in Davenport, Wash., says it makes no claims as to the validity of the information in any of these reports. “Obvious hoaxes have been omitted, however most reports have been posted exactly as received in the author’s own words.”
“We hope that this information will prove to be useful to the general public and the UFO community at large.” Whether or not you believe these reports, the New York state UFOs are worth a look. In all, there were 103 UFO reports from the state in 2018.
Many mention triangular-shaped objects or groups of objects, blinking lights, hovering objects and either saucer-shaped or cigar-shaped craft.
The majority of sightings happened after dark, but one student spotted an object while taking a test on the morning of April 17 in Burnt Hills.
“I was sitting in class and looked out of my class window and noticed a small egg-shaped object made of metal. It was floating above my school, but since I was taking a test I didn’t point it out.”
The National UFO Reporting Center site indicates whether anyone checked out the report (some are labeled “hoax?”) or view video or photos.
A sighting from Route 88 near Richmondville, Schoharie County, in July mentioned a semi truck with trooper and military escort: “On the flatbed was a craft that resembled a somewhat flattened bullet, with the back end flatter and 3 or 4 round things inside the back end for possible propulsion or exhaust function. no windows. no wings.”
The center noted: “Nice illustration provided by witness. We suspect that the object probably was some type of military platform.”
And then there’s the report that begins, “please keep me anonymous we just want to know if we are safe.”
“My son and sister witnessed a creature at 3:20 in the morning while letting dog out.they came in running and screaming.they said the thing was 7-8 feet tall grey green elongated head, no genitals and when they startled it it ran at an impossible speed covering over 150 in two seconds and was out of sight.”
A 2017 study by Chapman University in California found that 35 percent of Americans believe that aliens have come to Earth in the ancient past; 23 percent believe aliens are still visiting in modern times.
The National UFO Reporting Center said it has recently seen a high volume of prank calls on its hotline, “typically dozens per day … we suspect that the same problem may spill over to the stream of incoming written reports.”
However, it said, “there are, nevertheless, many excellent reports, submitted by anonymous parties, that deserve a reader’s attention, so a anonymous report is not necessarily unreliable.”
Attribution:Jim Shay and Teresa Buckley - Timesunion
Video – The Moon is Artificial and I Can Prove It: Alien Observatory
Video – The Moon is Artificial and I Can Prove It: Alien Observatory
No doubt you’ve heard some of the completely unexplainable stories about the moon. There are the enigmatic structures that made front-page news of major new publications… but were then dismissed from all media, and even photo-shopped out of photos. There are the strange “lunar wave” videos of recent years, which seem to show the moon’s image actually jumping – as though it were a projected hologram; and.. you only need to search YouTube to see hundreds of entirely credible videos of strange lights, flurries, and unidentified flying aircraft departing and landing on the surface of the moon. Yet, the US supposedly quit landing on the moon in 1973, was our every scientific question answered? Why are these credible testimonies ignored… or dismissed? Could there be more to that ball in the sky than meets the eye
If you research the moon, you might be surprised. Its reference in ancient history, its perfect geometrical symmetry, astronaut testimonies, all seem to point to only one logical conclusion: that our moon is most likely a hollowed out structure, and an artificial satellite, that was intentionally placed into Earth’s orbit only a few hundred thousand years ago – and that the advanced engineers accomplished this intending not only to influence the Earth’s biology but to oversee and control her inhabitants.
A supernova explosion flung out a super-dense, whirling stellar core, sending it streaking across space at almost 2.5 million mph (4 million km/h) with a glowing trail 13 light-years long in its wake.
Researchers tracked the stellar core, called a pulsar, using NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) astronomical observatory. The pulsar is about 6,500 light-years from Earth and was first discovered in 2017 by a citizen science project, Einstein@Home. It is moving fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in just 6 minutes — 5 times faster than the average pulsar moves, and faster than 99 percent of pulsar speeds previously documented by researchers. Scientists described the pulsar as a cosmic "cannonball" in a NASA statement.
"Thanks to its narrow dart-like tail and a fortuitous viewing angle, we can trace this pulsar straight back to its birthplace," Frank Schinzel, a researcher at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico, said in the statement. "Further study of this object will help us better understand how these explosions are able to 'kick' neutron stars to such high speed."
The pulsar J0002+6216 streaks away from the bubble-like supernova remnant CTB 1. This composite image combines radio, visible light and infrared data. CTB 1, if viewed in the night sky, would appear to be the size of a full moon.
Pulsar J0002+6126 was likely flung from the system after its predecessor star's supernova, eventually surpassing the expanding shell of gas and dust also released in the explosion, officials said in the statement. The object's long tail, which can be detected in radio wavelengths, comes from shockwaves as it travels through interstellar gas and dust, called the interstellar medium.
The pulsar flashes regularly, its jets of gamma-rays sweeping by Earth 8.7 times per second as it spins. The research team took advantage of its regularity to measure the object's precise speed and direction.
"The longer the data set, the more powerful the pulsar timing technique is," Matthew Kerr, a co-collaborator on the discovery and a researcher at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, said in the statement. "Fermi's lovely 10-year data set is essentially what made this measurement possible."
The supernova explosion that initially propelled the pulsar likely occurred about 10,000 years ago; the object has travelled 53 light-years away from the epicenter of the blast. After about 5,000 years, the pulsar shot past the shell of gas and debris, which was slowed even more by the interstellar medium. The researchers are unsure how the supernova kickstarted the pulsar's flight; one explanation, officials said in the statement, could be that a dense patch of matter formed during the star's collapse and lasted long enough to tug the stellar core toward it.
Future observations with the VLA, the NSF's Very Large Baseline Array and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory may shed more light on the pulsar's swift exit.
The new work was presented at an American Astronomical Society meeting in California and has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Missiles shot from California'sVandenberg Air Force Basesuccessfully destroyed an airborne target Monday (March 25) as part of a U.S. missile defense test, military officials said.
The target was an intercontinental ballistic missile launched from the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, about 4,000 miles (6,440 kilometers) from Vandenberg.
During the test, sensors in space, on the ground and at sea helped guide two ground-based interceptors (GBI) fired from Vandenberg. The first interceptor destroyed the target, a re-entry vehicle, while the second one searched the remaining debris for other threatening objects. Since there were no re-entry vehicles in the debris, the second missile hit the next "most lethal object" in the wreckage and also destroyed it, U.S. Department of Defense Missile Defense Agency (MDA) officials said in a statement.
A threat-representative ICBM target launches from the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands March 25, 2019 in this long-exposure photo. It was successfully intercepted by two ground-based interceptor missiles launched from California.
One of two Ground-Based Interceptors launches from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to destroy an ICBM target launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean on March 25, 2019.
The 'lead' Ground-based Interceptor is launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., March 25, 2019, in the first-ever salvo engagement test of a threat-representative ICBM target. It was the first of two missiles launched to intercept an ICBM target vehicle by the Missile Defense Agency.
The 'trail' Ground-based Interceptor is launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., March 25, 2019. The remnants of a plume from a second launch in the salvo can be seen at right.
This infrared image shows the successful destruction of a threat-representative ICBM target by two long-range Ground-based Interceptors launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., March 25, 2019. The salvo missile intercept was the first of its kind.
A final infrared image of the successful intercept of a threat-representative ICBM target by two long-range Ground-based Interceptors launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., March 25, 2019.
"This was the first GBI salvo intercept of a complex, threat-representative ICBM target, and it was a critical milestone," Lt. Gen. Samuel A. Greaves, director of the MDA, said in the statement. "The system worked exactly as it was designed to do ... The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system is vitally important to the defense of our homeland, and this test demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat."
A first-ever test March 25, 2019 saw two ground-based interceptors launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California intercepting an intercontinental ballistic missile target launched from a separate test site.
Officials added in the statement that they are evaluating the system performance to get more information, but everything received so far shows that the test "met requirements."
This is the latest in a series of tests testing examining how the United States would respond to ICBM threats. One possible nation that could be threatening is North Korea, which has conducted its own tests and said in the past that the United States is among the nations it hopes to destroy.
#NASA reports earth suffered a near miss in December as a meteor exploded in the atmosphere over the#Bering Sea, close to #Russia‘s Kamchatka Peninsula. The meteor travelling at over 20 miles per second, exploded with the force of more than 10 times (173 kilotons) the strength, of the #atomic blast which obliterated #Hiroshima ending World War II.
A spokesperson for NASA, Lindley Johnson, NASA’s #planetary defence official told BBC.UK that “a fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every 100 years,” the actual extraterrestrial rock exploded 25.6km above the Earth's surface and over water, and this is why people did not see the explosion. Furthermore, the #meteor entered the earth's atmosphere at a very steep trajectory of seven degrees making it hard to see with the naked eye.
This is not the first time that the #Kamchatka Peninsula has witnessed such an extraterrestrial event such as this, just six years ago Chelyabinsk in Russia suffered an even greater meteor explosion 40% higher than this latest event and that one happened over land, so the fireball was noticed by many people.
Authors note: If it were not for US Air Force #military#satellites which picked up the event before reporting it to NASA no one would have been the wiser. However, the area where the space rock entered the earth's atmosphere is used by civilian #airlines for some of their essential routes so NASA is hoping some of the pilots who may have witnessed the event, will come forward.
FIRST LOOK The first image from the Event Horizon Telescope may show that the black hole at the center of our galaxy looks something like this simulation.
BRONZWAER, DAVELAAR, MOSCIBRODZKA AND FALCKE/RADBOUD UNIVERSITY
We’re about to see the first close-up of a black hole.
TheEvent Horizon Telescope,a network of eight radio observatories spanning the globe, has set its sights on a pair of behemoths: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, and an even more massive black hole 53.5 million light-years away in galaxy M87 (SN Online: 4/5/17).
In April 2017, the observatories teamed up to observe the black holes’ event horizons, the boundary beyond which gravity is so extreme that even light can’t escape (SN: 5/31/14, p. 16). After almost two years of rendering the data, scientists are gearing up to release the first images in April.
Here’s what scientists hope those images can tell us.
What does a black hole really look like?
Black holes live up to their names: The great gravitational beasts emit no light in any part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so they themselves don’t look like much.
But astronomers know the objects are there because of a black hole’s entourage. As a black hole’s gravity pulls in gas and dust, matter settles into an orbiting disk, with atoms jostling one another at extreme speeds. All that activity heats the matter white-hot, so it emits X-rays and other high-energy radiation. The most voraciously feeding black holes in the universe have disks that outshine all the stars in their galaxies (SN Online: 3/16/18).
A CAMERA THE SIZE OF EARTH How did scientists take a picture of a black hole?
Science News explains.
The EHT’s image of the Milky Way’s Sagittarius A*, also called SgrA*, is expected to capture the black hole’s shadow on its accompanying disk of bright material. Computer simulations and the laws of gravitational physics give astronomers a pretty good idea of what to expect. Because of the intense gravity near a black hole, the disk’s light will be warped around the event horizon in a ring, so even the material behind the black hole will be visible.
And the image will probably look asymmetrical: Gravity will bend light from the inner part of the disk toward Earth more strongly than the outer part, making one side appear brighter in a lopsided ring.
Does general relativity hold up close to a black hole?
The exact shape of the ring may help break one of the most frustrating stalemates in theoretical physics.
The twin pillars of physics are Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which governs massive and gravitationally rich things like black holes, and quantum mechanics, which governs the weird world of subatomic particles. Each works precisely in its own domain. But they can’t work together.
“General relativity as it is and quantum mechanics as it is are incompatible with each other,” says physicist Lia Medeiros of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Rock, hard place. Something has to give.” If general relativity buckles at a black hole’s boundary, it may point the way forward for theorists.
Since black holes are the most extreme gravitational environments in the universe, they’re the best environment to crash test theories of gravity. It’s like throwing theories at a wall and seeing whether — or how — they break. If general relativity does hold up, scientists expect that the black hole will have a particular shadow and thus ring shape; if Einstein’s theory of gravity breaks down, a different shadow.
Medeiros and her colleagues ran computer simulations of 12,000 different black hole shadows that could differ from Einstein’s predictions. “If it’s anything different, [alternative theories of gravity] just got a Christmas present,” says Medeiros, who presented the simulation results in January in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society meeting. Even slight deviations from general relativity could create different enough shadows for EHT to probe, allowing astronomers to quantify how different what they see is from what they expect.
CONSIDERING ALL POSSIBILITIES Physicists expect black holes to follow Einstein’s rules of general relativity, but it might be more interesting if they don’t. This computer simulation shows one possibility for how a black hole would look if it behaved unexpectedly.
Do stellar corpses called pulsars surround the Milky Way’s black hole?
Another way to test general relativity around black holes is to watch how stars careen around them. As light flees the extreme gravity in a black hole’s vicinity, its waves get stretched out, making the light appear redder. This process, called gravitational redshift, is predicted by general relativity and was observed near SgrA* last year (SN: 8/18/18, p. 12). So far, so good for Einstein.
An even better way to do the same test would be with a pulsar, a rapidly spinning stellar corpse that sweeps the sky with a beam of radiation in a regular cadence that makes it appear to pulse (SN: 3/17/18, p. 4). Gravitational redshift would mess up the pulsars’ metronomic pacing, potentially giving a far more precise test of general relativity.
“The dream for most people who are trying to do SgrA* science, in general, is to try to find a pulsar or pulsars orbiting” the black hole, says astronomer Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va. “There are a lot of quite interesting and quite deep tests of [general relativity] that pulsars can provide, that EHT [alone] won’t.”
Despite careful searches, no pulsars have been found near enough to SgrA* yet, partly because gas and dust in the galactic center scatters their beams and makes them difficult to spot. But EHT is taking the best look yet at that center in radio wavelengths, so Ransom and colleagues hope it might be able to spot some.
“It’s a fishing expedition, and the chances of catching a whopper are really small,” Ransom says. “But if we do, it’s totally worth it.”
ONE OF MANY? The pulsar PSR J1745-2900 (left in this illustration) was discovered in 2013 orbiting roughly 150 light-years from the black hole at the center of the galaxy. That’s too far to use it to do precise tests of general relativity, but astronomers hope that the pulsar’s existence means the Event Horizon Telescope will find many more even closer to the black hole.
RALPH EATOUGH/MPIFR
How do some black holes make jets?
Some black holes are ravenous gluttons, pulling in massive amounts of gas and dust, while others are picky eaters. No one knows why. SgrA* seems to be one of the fussy ones, with a surprisingly dim accretion disk despite its 4 million solar mass heft. EHT’s other target, the black hole in galaxy M87, is a voracious eater, weighing in at about 2.4 trillion solar masses. And it doesn’t just amass a bright accretion disk. It also launches a bright, fast jet of charged subatomic particles that stretches for about 5,000 light-years.
“It’s a little bit counterintuitive to think a black hole spills out something,” says astrophysicist Thomas Krichbaum of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. “Usually people think it only swallows something.”
Many other black holes produce jets that are longer and wider than entire galaxies and can extend billions of light-years from the black hole. “The natural question arises: What is so powerful to launch these jets to such large distances?” Krichbaum says. “Now with the EHT, we can for the first time trace what is happening.”
EHT’s measurements of M87’s black hole will help estimate the strength of its magnetic field, which astronomers think is related to the jet-launching mechanism. And measurements of the jet’s properties when it’s close to the black hole will help determine where the jet originates — in the innermost part of the accretion disk, farther out in the disk or from the black hole itself. Those observations might also reveal whether the jet is launched by something about the black hole itself or by the fast-flowing material in the accretion disk.
Since jets can carry material out of the galactic center and into the regions between galaxies, they can influence how galaxies grow and evolve, and even where stars and planets form (SN: 7/21/18, p. 16).
“It is important to understanding the evolution of galaxies, from the early formation of black holes to the formation of stars and later to the formation of life,” Krichbaum says. “This is a big, big story. We are just contributing with our studies of black hole jets a little bit to the bigger puzzle.”
The first close-up observations by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft of its target, asteroid Bennu, reveal new details that pose a bigger challenge than scientists expected to the mission’s objective of collecting a sample of the asteroid.
The OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft reached Bennu on December 3, 2018, after traveling 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km). For the past three months, OSIRIS-REx has been investigating Bennu at close range, beginning to search for an ideal site to collect a sample, and getting to know the asteroid in much greater detail.
While the spacecraft’s observations have confirmed many of the measurements obtained by ground-based observations, recent findings have revealed that Bennu is a more challenging target than the mission was originally designed for.
Bennu’s surface is rockier than expected, creating challenges for the team whose mission is to scoop up a sample of pristine material and return it to Earth in 2023.
The OSIRIS-REx team developed its sampling strategy around what they knew about Bennu when they designed the mission. They anticipated plentiful patches of relatively smooth surface with gravel and pebbles less than 1 inch in size that extend over at least 55 yards (50 meters). Instead, the spacecraft observed only a small number of regions, each between 5.4 and 22 yards (5 and 20 m), that are devoid of large boulders that pose a hazard to the spacecraft when it touches down to collect its sample.
This trio of images was taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on February 25, 2019, in orbit around Bennu, about 1.1 miles (1.8 km) from the asteroid’s surface. The images show a wide shot and 2 close-ups of a region in Bennu’s northern hemisphere.
Instead of having the equivalent of half a football field to navigate in, the spacecraft will have to operate within the confines of sampling sites that are half the size of a basketball court or smaller.
High-resolution images made with the OSIRIS-REx cameras reveal a surface packed with more than 200 boulders larger than 33 feet (10 m) in diameter and many more that are 3 feet (1 m) or larger. The largest boulder measures 63 yards (58 m) across.
Bennu is very dark
OSIRIS-REx measurements also confirm that Bennu is one of the darkest objects in the solar system, reflecting only 4 percent of sunlight. One of the surprises turned out to be a larger-than-expected variability in surface albedo, the proportion of light reflected by a surface. In other words, Bennu’s surface features vary greatly from one another with respect to their brightness. The high variability in albedo presents a challenge for the laser of the spacecraft’s lidar system, designed to guide the sample acquisition approach.
This view of asteroid Bennu ejecting particles from its surface on January 19, 2019, was created by combining 2 images taken on board the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.
In another strange discovery, OSIRIS-REx observed plumes of particles being energetically ejected from the surface of Bennu. It’s the first-ever close-up observations of particle plumes erupting from an asteroid’s surface.
The OSIRIS-REx team first spotted the particle plumes in images while the spacecraft was orbiting Bennu at a distance of about one mile (1.61 km). The mission team did a safety assessment and concluded the particles did not pose a risk to the spacecraft. The team continues to analyze the particle plumes and their possible causes. Read more about the discovery from NASA.
Dante Lauretta is OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona. Lauretta said in a statement:
The discovery of plumes is one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career. And the rugged terrain went against all of our predictions. Bennu is already surprising us, and our exciting journey there is just getting started.
The size of asteroid Bennu, which is 1,614 feet (492 meters) wide, compared with the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower in this NASA image.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was only 15 miles (24 km) from asteroid Bennu – on December 2, 2018 – when it captured the 12 high-resolution images that make up this mosaic. The mosaic shows features as small as 20 feet (6 meters)
Image via NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona.
Bottom line: New findings about asteroid Bennu from the OSIRIS-REx mission.
The Space Telescope’s sharp imaging provided detail on activity from active asteroid Gault, which is now known to be spinning on its axis so fast that material on its surface at times flies off into space.
A Hubble Space Telescope view of asteroid 6478 Gault, showing 2 narrow, comet-like tails of debris. The bright streaks surrounding the asteroid are background stars.
Image via NASA, ESA, K. Meech and J. Kleyna (University of Hawaii), O. Hainaut (European Southern Observatory)/SpaceTelescope.org.
Asteroids are typically solid rocky or metallic bodies; comets are fragile, icy bodies that sometimes sprout tails when they come near the sun. But some asteroids have been found to appear comet-like, in that they also have tails. Scientists said on March 28, 2019, that they used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe such an asteroid, called 6478 Gault. Clear images from the telescope provided researchers with new insight into this asteroid’s unusual past, they said. They now believe that Gault is self-destructing slowly, which is the reason for its two narrow, comet-like tails of debris. Each tail is evidence of an active event that released material into space. Why is it self-destructing? The reason is thought to be its unusually fast spin on its axis.
The team’s results have been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewedAstrophysical Journal Letters (preprint here).
Astronomers have known about asteroid Gault for some time. It was discovered in 1988. The object is 2.5 to 5.5 miles (4 to 9 km) wide, and it’s located in the main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers said in a statement:
… the recent observation of two debris tails is the first indication of the asteroid’s instability. This asteroid is one of only a handful to be caught disintegrating by a process known as a YORP torque. When sunlight heats an asteroid, the infrared radiation that escapes from its warmed surface carries off both heat and momentum. This creates a small force that can cause the asteroid to spin faster.
If this centrifugal force eventually overcomes gravity, the asteroid becomes unstable. Landslides on the object can release rubble and dust into space, leaving behind a tail of debris, as seen here with asteroid Gault.
Astronomers estimate that among the 800,000 known asteroids that occupy the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, YORP disruptions occur roughly once per year. From the Hubble observations, researchers inferred that the release of material from the asteroid took place in short episodes lasting from a few hours to a couple of days. They commented:
The direct observation of this activity by the Hubble Space Telescope has provided [us] with a special opportunity to study the composition of asteroids. By researching the material that this unstable asteroid releases into space, [we] can get a glimpse into the history of planet formation in the early ages of the solar system.
Follow-up observations have been made by various ground-based telescopes, and, these astronomers said:
These data were used to deduce a two-hour rotation period for Gault, which is very close to the critical speed at which material will begin to tumble and slide across the asteroid’s surface before drifting off into space.
Astronomer Jan Kleyna of the University of Hawaii – lead author of the new paper – commented:
Gault is the best ‘smoking-gun’ example of a fast rotator right at the two-hour limit. It could have been on the brink of instability for 10 million years. Even a tiny disturbance, like a small impact from a pebble, might have triggered the recent outbursts.
Astronomer Olivier Hainaut of the European Southern Observatory in Germany explained:
This self-destruction event is rare. Active and unstable asteroids such as Gault are only now being detected by means of new survey telescopes that scan the entire sky, which means asteroids such as Gault that are misbehaving cannot escape detection any more.
Bottom line:Hubble Space Telescope sharp imaging has provided valuable detail on activity from active asteroid Gault, which is now known to be spinning on its axis so fast – about every two hours – that material on its surface at times flies off into space.
Devon Island in the Arctic is one of Earth’s most Mars-like places. NASA is there, training scientists and testing technologies for future Mars exploration. Now Google has joined in, to bring Devon Island’s Mars-like wonders to you.
Here’s one of the Mars-like wonders of Devon Island in the High Arctic, featured in Google’s new documentary short on the NASA Haughton-Mars Project. This earthly canyon – called Astronaut Canyon by scientists – was carved by glaciers and resembles some of the tributary canyons to Ius Chasma on Mars.
A crewed mission to Mars might be a long way off, but researchers are busy preparing, nonetheless. One of the best ways to prepare is by training scientists and testing new technologies in some of the most Mars-like locations on Earth, simulating the experience as much as possible.
On March 25, 2019, the Mars Institute and the SETI Institute jointly announced a new partnership between Google and NASA’s Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) to further the goal of human Mars exploration and the public’s understanding of it. Their focus is Devon Island in Nunavut, Canada, in the Arctic. Devon Island is one of the most Mars-like places that can be found on Earth and the single largest continuous area of barren rocky polar desert on Earth. The announcement was accompanied by the release of new public outreach products including Street View imagery; a Google Earth guided tour highlighting the Mars-like geology of Devon Island (Chrome browser needed); and a documentary short captured at NASA’s Haughton-Mars Project with a Google Pixel 3. Want an example? Highlights from Google Street View include:
The new Google Earth guided tour of Devon Island and NASA’s facilities there is called Mars on Earth. It illustrates – via factual narrative – how Devon Island is similar to the “magnificent desolation” of Mars. Please note that Google Earth is optimized for Google’s Chrome browser and might not work with other browsers.
According to Pascal Lee, director of NASA HMP at Ames Research Center:
We are excited about this new partnership with Google on the Haughton-Mars Project and about the data products being released. They allow us to share with the world some of the Mars-like wonders of the site and the fieldwork that we do.
Devon Island (Inuit: Tatlurutit) is an island in Canada and the largest uninhabited island on Earth. It is located in Baffin Bay, Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada.
Aerial view of the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station and surrounding desolate terrain on Devon Island.
Image via Mars Institute.
Closer aerial view and map of Haughton-Mars Project Research Station.
Image via Mars Institute.
Google captured its images in August 2018, when it took part in HMP’s 2018 summer field campaign as a new Education and Public Outreach partner.
The team also produced a 10-minute documentary called “Mars On Earth: A Visit to Devon Island,” filmed in HD using a Google Pixel 3 smartphone. The film provides an overview of the activities at Haughton-Mars Project Research Station (HMPRS) over a 10-day period. Also included in the documentary are flight tests and science application studies of NASA’s Mars Electric Reusable Flyer (MERF), an experimental aircraft for Mars exploration being developed at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. As Katja Minitsenka, leader of the Google team, noted:
We were very humbled by the opportunity to get a glimpse into the work planetary scientists are doing on Devon Island. Now we are thrilled to share the results of our time on the world’s largest uninhabited island with Google users.
Watch the film here:
According to Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute:
This new partnership between Google and the NASA Haughton-Mars Project, one of many groundbreaking research projects at the SETI Institute, is a beautiful example of how private industry and nonprofits can come together to advance science, exploration, education and public outreach. Stay tuned for more in the near future.
The Haughton-Mars Project, by the way, is based at Devon Island’s Haughton Crater – a 12-mile-wide (20-km-wide) meteorite impact crater – and surrounding terrain. A leading international Mars analog field research project, HMP has conducted numerous field studies during its 22-year history.
Locations like Devon Island, or the Atacama Desert in Chile, are about the closest one can get to Mars-like extremely dry conditions on Earth, with little to no vegetation, rainfall or other moisture. As such, they are ideal places to conduct experiments and prepare for future human missions.
Map of Devon Island with location of Haughton Crater.
Image via NASA/HMP/Pascal Lee.
A K10 Black rover doing a site survey in Haughton Crater.
Image via Matt Deans/NASA.
Testing of analog pressurized rovers at Haughton-Mars Project Research Station on Devon Island. Left: field test with robotic arm. Right: test of rover equipped with two EVA suit ports for astronauts.
Image via Mars Institute.
Comparison of similar canyons on Devon Island and Mars. Left: Astronaut Canyon on Devon Island. Right: Ius Chasma on Mars.
Image via Mars Institute.
Bottom line: The partnership between NASA and Google provides new and innovative ways to not only advance testing for human exploration of Mars, but also to share that adventure with the public at large.
A look at why some scientists are calling for an international ban of autonomous killer robots.
Dozens of scientists, health care professionals and academics have written a letter to the U.N. calling for an international ban of autonomous killerrobots, saying recent advances in artificial intelligence "have brought us to the brink of a new arms race in lethal autonomous weapons."
The letter, which has been signed by more than 70 health care professionals and was put together by the Future of Life Institute, states that lethal autonomous weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and despots, lower the barrier to armed conflict and "become weapons of mass destruction enabling very few to kill very many."
"Furthermore, autonomous weapons are morally abhorrent, as we should never cede the decision to take a human life to algorithms," the letter continues. "As healthcare professionals, we believe that breakthroughs in science have tremendous potential to benefit society and should not be used to automate harm. We therefore call for an international ban on lethal autonomous weapons."
In addition to the letter, a study written by Dr. Emilia Javorsky posits that recent advances by a number of countries working on lethal autonomous weapon systems "would represent a third revolution in warfare," following gunpowder and nuclear weapons.
The effort put forth by the Future of Life Institute follows a 2018 pledge from more than 2,400 individuals from companies and organizations around the world. Those from Google DeepMind, the European Association for AI and University College London and others said they would “neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade, or use of lethal autonomous weapons.”
Past concerns
Others have raised concerns to the U.N. as well about the benefits and costs of killers robots. Experts from several countries met in August 2018 at the Geneva offices of the U.N. to focus on lethal autonomous weapons systems and explore ways of possibly regulating them, among other issues.
In theory, fully autonomous, computer-controlled weapons don’t exist yet, UN officials said at the time. The debate is still in its infancy and the experts have at times grappled with basic definitions. The United States has argued that it’s premature to establish a definition of such systems, much less regulate them.
Some advocacy groups say governments and militaries should be prevented from developing such systems, which have sparked fears and led some critics to envisage harrowing scenarios about their use.
In 2017, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other leading artificial intelligence experts called on the United Nations to issue a global ban on the use of killer robots, which includes drones, tanks and machine guns. “Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close,” Musk and 115 other specialists from around the globe wrote in the letter.
Research firm IDC expects that global spending on robotics and drones will reach $201.3 billion by 2022, up from an estimated $95.9 billion in 2018.
Over the years, several luminaries, including Musk, legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and a host of others have warned against the rise of artificial intelligence.
In September 2017, Musk tweeted that he thought AI could play a direct role in causing World War III. Musk's thoughts were in response to comments made by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said that "who becomes the leader in this sphere [artificial intelligence] will be the ruler of the world."
In November 2017, prior to his death, Hawking theorized that AI could eventually "destroy" humanity if we are not careful about it.
Bizarre geheime CIA-stukken over verloren beschavingen op aarde openbaar gemaakt. Wat mogen wij niet weten?
Bizarre geheime CIA-stukken over verloren beschavingen op aarde openbaar gemaakt. Wat mogen wij niet weten?
Recentelijk heeft de CIA een document vrijgegeven over verloren beschavingen op aarde en catastrofes die vele duizenden jaren geleden hebben plaatsgevonden, en die ervoor hebben gezorgd dat ze zomaar ineens van de aardbodem verdwenen.
Het document geeft antwoord op de vraag waarom ons verleden is omgeven door zoveel mysterie en onzekerheden.
In het vrijgegeven document, dat 57 pagina’s telt, wordt ook gesproken over Atlantis.
Grote raadsels
Het oorspronkelijke stuk bestond uit ruim 200 pagina’s, maar de CIA heeft er slechts een aantal geopenbaard. Het is niet bekend waarom het grootste deel nog altijd geheim is.
De auteur stelt in het stuk dat de Piramide van Gizeh in Egypte, Paaseiland, Tiahuanaco en Baalbek grote raadsels zijn.
Anno 2019 kunnen we nog altijd niet met zekerheid zeggen hoe de Piramide van Gizeh is gebouwd en met welk doel.
Verloren continent
In de drie grote piramides zijn geen mummies gevonden en daarnaast bevatten ze geen hiërogliefen. Sterker nog: nergens in Egypte zijn hiërogliefen gevonden die verwijzen naar een piramide.
Duizenden jaren lang was de Piramide van Gizeh het hoogste bouwwerk op aarde.
In het document wordt verder gesteld dat Paaseiland ooit deel uitmaakte van een verloren continent genaamd Mu, dat grotendeels is gezonken na een catastrofe.
Meer dan 1000 ton
Ook de enorme stenen in Baalkbek komen aan bod. De monolithische steunmuren van de stad in Libanon werden gebouwd met stenen die meer dan 1000 ton wogen.
In een steengroeve in de buurt van de stad ligt een nog grotere steen, die nog zwaarder is.
Volgens wetenschappers is Baalbek gebouwd door de Romeinen, maar die beschikten niet over de technologie om zulke zware stenen van de grond te tillen.
Was koningin Nefertiti niet afkomstig van deze aarde? Dit is wat egyptologen erover zeggen
Was koningin Nefertiti niet afkomstig van deze aarde? Dit is wat egyptologen erover zeggen
In 1922 werd de sarcofaag van koning Toetanchamon ontdekt. Men sprak van één van de belangrijkste archeologische ontdekkingen aller tijden.
Bijna een eeuw later bleek dat er meer zit achter de laatste rustplaats van de koning dan je zou denken.
In 2015 ontdekte egyptoloog Nicholas Reeves iets opvallends: twee verborgen openingen die verbonden zijn met de grafkamer van Toetanchamon.
Nefertiti
Reeves vermoedt dat één van de openingen leidt naar de tombe van koningin Nefertiti, de vrouw van farao Achnaton.
Dan rijst de vraag waarom de tombe van Nefertiti verborgen is achter die van koning Toet.
Volgens sommigen is de reden dat Nefertiti niet afkomstig was van deze aarde.
Langwerpige schedel
“Het is onbekend wie de ouders van Nefertiti waren,” zegt schrijver Erich von Däniken in het televisieprogramma Ancient Aliens. “Op afbeeldingen staat ze afgebeeld met een langwerpige schedel.”
Hij wees erop dat de Egyptische goden ook van deze langwerpige schedels hadden en volgens oude geschriften ‘soms de aarde verlieten en soms weer terugkeerden naar de aarde’.
Buitenaards
Misschien waren de ouders van Nefertiti buitenaards, aldus Von Däniken.
“Koning Achnaton en zijn vrouw zagen er volstrekt anders uit dan andere Egyptische koningen,” merkte egyptoloog Ramy Romany op.
Hij voegde toe dat Achnaton altijd werd afgebeeld met een langwerpige schedel.
New Linda Moulton Howe Something Huge Has Been Discovered in Antarctica
New Linda Moulton Howe Something Huge Has Been Discovered in Antarctica
Underground in Antarctica they have found doors up-to 18 feet thick, made of rock hard basalt. Even though they weigh many tonnes they can open with just the touch of a finger.
On the back of these doors are the symbol of the black sun. The interior was heated to around 68-72 degrees Fahrenheit (20-22 Celsius), and was also lighted by a lime green source projected from the ceiling and floor.
He did not see any heating or lighting equipment, which added to the mystery of the buried structure. Only part of the structure has been uncovered so far by the archaeological teams, with the rest buried under the ice and extending far below.
Some discoveries change everything. Most just explain a lot. A few explain a LOT. The latter is the case of a new discovery in North Dakota – a killing field formed perhaps no more than hours after the event that caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago … the asteroid or comet that smashed into the Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula and created the Chicxulub crater. Fossils found in what was once an inland sea show that the dinosaurs and other creatures there died in a rain of glass crystals formed when molten particles tossed skyward cooled and fell to the ground. And if that didn’t kill them, the seismic waves did. Is this the best picture ever of the day the Cretaceous Period ended? The day the K-T boundary was formed? The day the dinosaurs stood still?
“This is the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with the K-T boundary. At no other K-T boundary section on Earth can you find such a collection consisting of a large number of species representing different ages of organisms and different stages of life, all of which died at the same time, on the same day.”
In an interview published in the University of California Berkeley News, Robert DePalma, curator of paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida and a doctoral student at the University of Kansas, explained how his very first career dig in the summer of 2013 triggered the interest that kept bringing him back to North Dakota to slowly reveal that the Hell Creek Formation — a fossil cornucopia of preserved remains of fish, tree trunks, conifer branches, dead mammals, mosasaurs, insects, Triceratops, dinoflagellates, ammonites and more — was created within 24 hours of the impact that created Chicxulub and ended Cretaceous. That day is described in “Prelude to Extinction: a seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota,” to be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It’s like a museum of the end of the Cretaceous in a layer a meter-and-a-half thick.”
Mark Richards, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus and provost and professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, and Walter Alvarez, the UC Berkeley Professor who is credited with coming up with the extinction-causing asteroid over 40 years ago, were brought in by DePalma to analyze this layer of history. (Photos and videos of the site and the researchers can be viewed here.) The key to linking it to the Chicxulub impact was perfectly-preserved beads of glass called tektites that blanketed the creatures to the point that they appeared in the gills of fossilized fish. These beads did more than fall – they were propelled from the sly at up to 200 miles-per-hour.
A meteor impact 66 million years ago generated a tsunami-like wave in an inland sea that killed and buried fish, mammals, insects and a dinosaur, the first victims of Earth’s last mass extinction event. The death scene from within an hour of the impact has been excavated at an unprecedented fossil site in North Dakota. (Graphics and photos courtesy of Robert DePalma)
Fossilized fish piled one atop another, suggesting that they were flung ashore and died stranded together on a sand bar after the seiche withdrew.
Walter Alvarez and Robert DePalma at the Tanis outcrop in North Dakota.
Tektites, 1 millimeter spheres of glass, recovered from the Tanis fossil bed.
Robert DePalma excavating at the Tanis fossil site in North Dakota.
Fish carcasses and two logs tossed together by the seiche created by seismic waves from the meteor impact.
A perfectly preserved fish tail from Tanis deposit.
“You can imagine standing there being pelted by these glass spherules. They could have killed you.”
Run!
This is the most well-preserved example of death by tektites in the world and funnels of them in perfect shape were found buried in the ground. How did that happen? That was the second key discovery, according to DePalma.
“Tsunamis from the Chicxulub impact are certainly well-documented, but no one knew how far something like that would go into an inland sea. When Mark came aboard, he discovered a remarkable artifact — that the incoming seismic waves from the impact site would have arrived at just about the same time as the atmospheric travel time of the ejecta. That was our big breakthrough.”
Instead of a single tsunami, the area was hit with seismic waves called seiches that we now know were created far from the impact. Richards described the scene on that day 66 million years ago:
“The seismic waves start arising within nine to 10 minutes of the impact, so they had a chance to get the water sloshing before all the spherules (small spheres) had fallen out of the sky. These spherules coming in cratered the surface, making funnels — you can see the deformed layers in what used to be soft mud — and then rubble covered the spherules. No one has seen these funnels before.”
These layers of fossils, tektites and sediment are topped by a coating of iridium, a metal rarely found on Earth because it comes from … you guessed it … asteroids and comets. No matter where you dig around the world, when you hit the 66 million years ago mark, you find a layer of iridium that has come to be called the K-T or K-Pg boundary when Cretaceous ends and the Tertiary or Paleogene Period begins.
And now we know that the best place to see how the whole thing happened, including definitive proof that dinosaurs were still alive moments before the Chicxulub impact, is not in the Gulf of Mexico but in North Dakota.
Members of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) gathered in Paris last week to talk about aliens and what they came up with is quite interesting to say the least. They mentioned that although researchers have been searching the skies for many decades, there is a lack of actual evidence proving that aliens exist.
Since there are billions of stars surrounding us, we’ve never heard any communication from extraterrestrials and this where the Fermi Paradox comes in, which is the contradiction between the lack of evidence that extraterrestrials exist and the high probability that they do in fact exist.
There are many theories as to why we haven’t had any contact with aliens, such as they’re sleeping, or they’re not around anymore. But one theory in particular was discussed in Paris last week by the METI researchers and it’s that maybe we have been quarantined by the extraterrestrials. They suggested that we may be in a type of cage like we’re in some kind of galactic zoo.
Florence Raulin Cerceau, who is the METI director as well as an astrobiologist, explained, “This puzzle of why we haven’t detected extraterrestrial life has been discussed often,” adding, “But in this workshop’s unique focus, many of the talks tackled a controversial explanation first suggested in the 1970s, called the ‘zoo hypothesis’.” METI president Douglas Vakoch weighed in by saying, “Perhaps extraterrestrials are watching humans on Earth, much like we watch animals in a zoo.”
The zoo hypothesis was first presented by MIT researcher John Ball in a 1973 paper. He wrote, “Extraterrestrial intelligent life may be almost ubiquitous,” adding, “The apparent failure of such life to interact with us may be understood in terms of the hypothesis that they have set us aside as part of a wilderness area or zoo.” He later wrote in another research paper, “ETI may be discreetly and inconspicuously watching us but not dabbling.”
In 2016, Josh Hrala told ScienceAlertthat while the zoo hypothesis does assume that aliens exist, perhaps the reason why they’re not interacting with us is because they don’t want to have any influence on our society and they just want to keep observing us from far away.
The zoo hypothesis is one of many theories involving alien life, but it’s definitely an interesting hypothesis to consider. “It seems likely that extraterrestrials are imposing a ‘galactic quarantine’ because they realize it would be culturally disruptive for us to learn about them,” stated researcher Jean-Pierre Rospars from the Institut national de la recherche agronomique and who attended the METI workshop.
Whether we’re in some sort of galactic zoo or not, it would still be very exciting and life-changing if we could somehow receive any type of communication from extraterrestrials, or even solid proof that they do in fact exist.
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Bizarre Secret Files Released on Lost Ancient Human Civilizations
Bizarre Secret Files Released on Lost Ancient Human Civilizations
A recently declassified document discussed the topic of lost ancient human civilizations, and cataclysms that occurred on earth thousands of years ago – causing them to vanish from the earth and without explanation.
Thus answering the question of why there is so much mystery and unanswered questions involving our true ancient past. The creator of this document also states that the Great Pyramid of Giza, Egypt, Easter Island, Tiahuanaco, and Baalbek are ancient Enigmas.
The lost city of Atlantis is also mentioned in the declassified files.
Welcoming our new overlords of any kind is becoming more than just a funny meme … it may be a warning that their arrival could be happening faster than we can perceive, comprehend … or stop. That seems to be the case if the overlords are artificially intelligent robots as the tech news media this week brings stories of AI robots reproducing, evolving and reciting bible verses to humans based on data collected to determine what their spiritual needs at the moment might be. Robots controlling what you pray for? Will they stop you from praying for less robots?
Wired reports this week on research in the field of evolutionary robotics being conducted at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam by computer scientist Gusz Eiben. Ebsen uses simple AI robots with simple “genomes” that define what their color will be. He then has them “mate” via connections and combine their genomes. Like in humans, he programmed the connection and combination to have flaws that can cause mutations in the “offspring.” The end result?
“One parent is fully green, and the other parent is fully blue. Then the child has some modules that are blue and some that are green, but the head is white. That’s not what we put in—it’s a mutation effect.”
Obviously, negative or flawed mutations would not be the goal. Programmers of evolutionary robots would design them to combine their strongest “genes” or characteristics to produce a baby bot with the best of both robot parents. With computers powering their intelligence and decision-making, this “evolution” could result in combinations not foreseen by human engineers. Additionally, what humans may see as genetic flaws may have uses that the AI determines to be valuable.
Everything will be OK as long as humans tightly control the algorithms … right? Research scientist David Howard, who recently published a framework for evolutionary robotics in Nature Machine Intelligence, proposes a scenario where scientists developing robots for exploring jungles do it by sending robots out into jungle to learn for themselves.
“What we’d do is get lots of small robots that are quite simple and cheap to make. We’d send them out, and some of them would do better than others.”
By “do better than others,” Howard means make it back to the lab in one piece. Those that do would be allowed to “mate” and create the next generation of bots to send out into the jungle again and repeat the process. What could possibly go wrong?
Where did every bot-ty go?
“From the Gospel according to Matthew. Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Sage advice, you say? Would you feel the same way if you knew it was an AI robot’s response to your concern? In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Gabriele Trovato, a roboticist and assistant professor at Waseda University in Japan, introduces SanTO, a 17-inch-tall robot equipped with a microphone, sensors and a facial recognition-enabled camera. Trovato developed SanTO with a specific purpose in mind (view photos of SanTO here):
Roboticist Gabriele Trovato designed SanTO, a robot shaped like a figurine of a Catholic saint, to provide comfort and assistance to the elderly.
A woman interacts with SanTO at a nursing home in Siegen, Germany.
PHOTO: GABRIELE TROVATO
Built from the body of an automated-teller machine, the BlessU-2 robot can communicate in seven languages and offers several different types of prayers, such as those focused on tradition or renewal.
PHOTO: DIANA LOEFFLER
“Religion has evolved through history, from oral tradition to written tradition to press and mass media. So it’s very reasonable to think that AI and robotics will help religion to spread out more.”
Although Trovato was warned by religious officials that SanTO should not offer biblical interpretations, it comes close by making decisions which text to recite by interpreting the needs of the person it is working for based on the questions asked and cues picked up by the facial recognition system. Isn’t that counseling and teaching using biblical quotations?
Robots are reproducing, evolving and “spreading the word” of religious texts. Perhaps when we worry about our eventual takeover by the robot overlords, we should less concerned about the “over” and fret more about the “lord” part.
Archaeologists have discovered over 100 ancient inscriptions that were carved into the rock at Wadi el-Hudi, which is where the Egyptians mined amethysts in ancient times. They also found 14 stele (which are inscriptions that are carved on a slab of stone or pillar) and 45 ostraca (which are inscriptions that are written on pottery pieces).
While tests are currently being conducted on the findings, archaeologists have already concluded that several of the inscriptions were from approximately 3,900 years ago (a time period known as the “Middle Kingdom”), and several of the ostraca were from around 2,000 years ago (approximately the same time that Egypt was taken over by Rome).
Egypt
During the Middle Kingdom time period in Egypt, the pharaohs discovered that Wadi el-Hudi was an excellent source for amethysts and started mining it. “They were bringing it back and making it into jewelry and doling it out to their elite and their princesses,” Kate Liszka, who is the director of the Wadi el-Hudi expedition, told Live Science.
Although other scholars previously surveyed Wadi el-Hudi, many of the inscriptions were overlooked. “The site is just so full of inscriptions behind every boulder and around every wall that they missed a lot of them,” Liszka stated. In order to find new inscriptions, the team is using 3D modeling, photogrammetry, and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI).
The team hopes that the inscriptions will answer many of the mysteries surrounding Wadi el-Hudi, such as whether or not the miners were being forced to work against their free will. “I don’t know if I’m excavating a legitimate settlement where people were treated well or if I’m excavating a prison camp,” explained Liszka.
Amethyst
Some of the inscriptions indicate that there were groups of soldiers who were staring down at the miners while they worked, which makes researchers wonder whether the soldiers were keeping a watchful eye on the miners to make sure they were working hard, or if they were just protecting them.
Dating back around 3,900 years, this site at Wadi el-Hudi houses a settlement in a valley between two hills and an amethyst mine.
Credit: Photo courtesy Wadi el-Hudi Expedition
One of more than 100 inscriptions that were recently discovered by researchers at Wadi el-Hudi.
Credit: Photo courtesy Wadi el-Hudi Expedition
Another unanswered question is how the miners got access to water since the closest well was 1.9 miles away from them. And since it’s very possible that the well wasn’t even in use at that time, the Nile River was around 18.6 miles away.
Researchers also found a 3,400-year-old stela which had the name Usersatet written on it, who was viceroy of Kush in southern Egypt. What’s so mysterious about the finding is that no mining was being conducted at Wadi el-Hudi during that time, leaving it completely abandoned, so why did someone bring it 18.6 miles throughout the desert in order to leave it there? Hopefully with more research being done there, some of these questions may eventually be answered.
Deadly blizzard, UFO or...? Prosecutors travel to Dyatlov Pass to solve 60yo Mystery
Deadly blizzard, UFO or...? Prosecutors travel to Dyatlov Pass to solve 60yo Mystery
Located in the Ural Mountains, the remote patch of wilderness became infamous in paranormal lore after a 1959 incident where a group of hikers were found dead in the Ural Mountains under unclear circumstances.
Despite a contemporaneous investigation by Russian officials and subsequent decades of study from independent researchers, the cause of the strange event has never been fully determined.
Back in 2008 an unnamed individual reportedly stumbled upon an intriguing piece of metal while visiting the area and was only recently confirmed after an expedition finally made their way out to the specific location to both see the object for themselves and to bring it back to civilization to be studied.
And now Russian prosecutors conducted a week-long expedition in March to re-open a probe in to the mysterious Dyatlov Pass case.
In 2017, several news organizations revealed the existence of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a U.S. government-funded investigation into unidentified flying objects from 2007 to 2012. This secret $22 million program, however, was not the first of its kind. Official government UFO studies began in the late 1940s with Project Sign, providing some of the most credible videos of aerial phenomena to date. The 2017 revelation that the U.S. government was actively researching UFOs re-ignited world interest in UFOs and aliens. Below are five of the most believable UFO sightings of the 21st century.
1. The Lights Above the New Jersey Turnpike (2001)
It takes a lot for motorists to stop alongside a highway to look toward the sky, but on July 14, 2001, drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike did just that. For around 15 minutes just after midnight, they marveled at the sight of strange orange-and-yellow lights in a V formation over the Arthur Kill Waterway between Staten Island, New York, and Carteret, New Jersey. Carteret Police Department’s Lt. Daniel Tarrant was one of the witnesses, as well as other metro-area residents from the Throgs Neck Bridge on Long Island and Fort Lee, New Jersey near the George Washington Bridge.
Air-traffic controllers initially denied that any airplanes, military jets or space flights could have caused the mysterious lights, but a group known as the New York Strange Phenomena Investigators (NY-SPI) claimed to receive FAA radar data that corroborated the UFO sightings from that night.
An image taken from a video released by the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program of a 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an unknown object. (Credit: U.S. Department of Defense via The New York Times/Redux)
2. The USS Nimitz Encounter (2004)
On November 14, 2004, the aircraft carrier USS Princeton noted an unknown craft on radar 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. For two weeks, the crew had been tracking objects that appeared at 80,000 feet and then plummeted to hover right above the Pacific Ocean.
When two FA-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz arrived in the area, they first saw what appeared to be churning boiling water in an oval shape underneath the surface. Then, in a few moments, a white Tic Tac-shaped object appeared above the water. It had no visible markings to indicate an engine, wings or windows, and infrared monitors didn't reveal any exhaust. Commander David Fravor and Lt. Commander Jim Slaight of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 attempted to intercept the craft, but it accelerated away, re-appearing on radar 60 miles away. It moved three times the speed of sound and twice the speed of the fighter jets.
Flight 446 was getting ready to fly to North Carolina from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, when a United Airlines employee on the tarmac noticed a dark grey metallic craft hovering over gate C17. That day, November 7, 2006, a total of 12 United employees—and a few witnesses outside the airport—spotted the saucer-shaped craft around 4:15 p.m.
The witnesses say it hovered for about five minutes before shooting upward, where it broke a hole in the clouds—enough that pilots and mechanics could see the blue sky. The news report became the most-read story on The Chicago Tribune’s website to that date and made international news. However, because the UFO was not seen on radar, the FAA called it a “weather phenomenon” and declined to investigate.
The small town of Stephenville, Texas, 100 miles southwest of Dallas, is mostly known for its dairy farms, but in the evening of January 8, 2008, dozens of its residents viewed something unique in the sky. Citizens reported seeing white lights above Highway 67, first in a single horizontal arc and then in vertical parallel lines. Local pilot Steve Allen estimated that the strobe lights “spanned about a mile long and a half mile wide,” traveling about 3,000 miles per hour. No sound was reported.
Witnesses believed the event was reminiscent of the Phoenix Lights sightings of 1997. While the U.S. Air Force revealed weeks later that F-16s were flying in the Brownwood Military Operating Areas (just southwest of Stephenville), many townspeople didn’t buy that explanation, believing that what they saw was too technologically advanced for current human abilities.
Leaked in 2017 along with the news of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was a video that revealed an encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unidentified flying vehicle. Seen along the East Coast on a Raytheon Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) Pod, the craft was similar to that spotted off San Diego in 2004: a fast-moving white oval about 45-feet-long without wings or exhaust plume.
The pilots tracked the object at 25,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean as it flew away and simultaneously rotated on its axis. No explanation ever emerged.
They were waiting for the Aurora Australis, but amateur photographers were left guessing after seeing a bright green flash light up the Tasmanian sky.
Key points:
Residents in Tasmania's south saw a bright green flash in the starry sky
Social media users suggested it was a meteor, glowing green because of the metals inside the rock
An expert says it could also be space debris, but added it was a "spectacular" sight
Amateur photographer Leoni Williams captured a shot of the green streak about 9:30pm on Thursday by "accident".
Overlooking Pipe Clay Lagoon, toward Clifton Beach in southern Tasmania, Ms Williams had her camera facing south in anticipation of an Aurora.
"I was very lucky to capture this bright green object before it disappeared over the horizon," Ms Williams said.
"I'm still not sure what it was. I didn't actually see it with the naked eye as I wasn't watching. I had just set the camera on 30 seconds and pushed the shutter and turned back to my phone.
"I would imagine it was pretty quick. I nearly missed it because it was at the end of the exposure."
Photo sparked social media debate
Ms Williams took to social media to try and find out what she'd captured on camera.
Opinions varied, with some thinking it was a shooting star, a fallen satellite or even a UFO.
Spotted from the Huon Valley to Dodges Ferry, other photos began popping up on social media.
Eventually, it was shared on social media page Australian Meteor Reports.
"It's definitely a meteor," page administrator David Finlay said.
"That flash that's been captured is a very, very bright meteor — it's what we'd call a 'fireball'. It probably lit up the countryside."
Mr Finlay — a former industrial chemist who has been studying astronomy from an very early age — said the flash was created by a "small rock from space, blazing through the atmosphere, creating friction with the atmosphere".
"It glows and ionises gas — that's what you see as this fireball blazing through the sky.
"If it actually survives atmospheric entry and lands as a rock on land, that's what we call a meteorite — only if it makes it to the ground."
Why is it green?
As for the bright green glow, Mr Finlay said it had to do with the elemental components of the meteor.
"The green is produced by a combination of the nickel and iron in the meteor," he said.
"It's probably just a normal rocky meteor but it would contain flecks of metal in the rock, producing that colour. It's very cool.
"It's what we colloquially call a 'fish squisher' because it's over the ocean," he said.
Professor Simon Ellingsen, the head of physics at the University of Tasmania, said it was possible the object was manmade space debris rather than a meteor.
"[The colour] is almost certainly because of the specific elements and minerals in the object," he said.
"It probably wouldn't have looked that green to the naked eye [because] digital cameras are so good at picking up the light."
He said while it wasn't unusual to spot a meteor or space debris over Tasmania, this object would have been a special sight to see.
"The sort of rule of thumb is if you go outside to a clear, dark sight, you'll see a shooting star, so to speak, about every 10 minutes or so," he said.
"This one that's been caught is bigger than normal and more spectacular than you normally get.
"This photographer was obviously in the right place at the right time."
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SpaceX readies 'Starship Hopper' spacecraft prototype for first test
SpaceX readies 'Starship Hopper' spacecraft prototype for first test
The uncrewed vehicle is a small version of a 100-passenger spaceship that will take humans to Mars.
SpaceX is planning to test a mini prototype of its 100-passenger Starship, which the company is developing to carry people to and from Mars.
SpaceX
By Denise Chow
SpaceX is preparing to test a prototype of a sleek, stainless steel spaceship that the company is developing to ferry passengers on trips to Mars.
The prototype, a small version of the huge, 100-passenger Starship now in development, could undergo its first test soon, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted on March 17. The uncrewed vehicle, called Starship Hopper, is expected to take brief “hops” during the test, lifting off “only barely,” according to Musk.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared this photo of the Starship test flight rocket on Twitter on Jan. 10, 2019.Elon Musk / SpaceX via AFP - Getty Images file
Neither Musk nor the company specified a date for the test, to be conducted at the company's launch facility near Brownsville, Texas. But a county judge told the Brownsville Herald on March 21 that he had signed an order to close roads around the area on two consecutive days so SpaceX could fuel the spaceship and “test the tank.”
Views of the rocket and launch pad are being live-streamed by SPadre.com, a site that promotes tourism in South Padre Island, a resort town that is separated from the launch facility by a narrow waterway.
SpaceX intends to use the Starship as a reusable interplanetary transportation system that will launch atop a gigantic new booster known as the Super Heavy.
Musk want to use the 100-passenger Starship to colonize Mars to avoid extinction if runaway climate change or another cataclysm renders Earth uninhabitable. He said earlier this year that the vehicle could begin flying to the Red Planet in the 2020s.
The Pathfinder mission landed in Mars’ Ares Vallis, where the Sojourner rover catalogued rocks that may have been eroded by floodwaters. 7
(Credit: NASA/JPL)
Mars may be a dry, cold planet today, but it was once a warmer, wetter one.NASA’s Opportunity roverwas the first rover to find solid evidence of water on Mars — but years before Opportunity’s discoveries, NASA’s first Martian rover mission spent its time exploring an ancient spillway that once connected Mars’ northern ocean to an inland sea.
Mars Pathfinder landed 22 years ago, on July 4, 1997. The mission’s 23-pound (10.6 kilograms) rover, Sojourner, was the first rover to explore the surface of Mars, wheeling through Ares Vallis for 83 days. The mission investigated whether massive channels in the landscape, spotted by Mariner 9, were caused by floodwaters, as indicated from orbit. But the rover’s findings were inconclusive, leaving open the possibility that the shallow channels had been carved by lava instead of water. But that possibility is no longer viable, according to a paper published February 25 in Nature Scientific Reports, which states that the features Sojourner mapped are, in fact, the result of cataclysmic flooding on the Red Planet.
Formed by Martian Water
“Our paper shows a basin, with roughly the surface area of California, that separates most of the gigantic Martian channels from the Pathfinder landing site. Debris or lava flows would have filled the basin before reaching the Pathfinder landing site. The very existence of the basin requires cataclysmic floods as the channels’ primary formational mechanism,” said lead author Alexis Rodriguez of the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in a press release.
The basin, according to Rodriguez, contains sedimentary rock consistent with deposits that would have been left by groundwater flooding, which formed an inland sea. “This sea is approximately 155 miles (250 kilometers) upstream from the Pathfinder landing site, an observation that reframes its paleo-geographic setting as part of a marine spillway, which formed a land barrier separating the inland sea and a northern ocean,” she said. “Our simulation shows that the presence of the sea would have attenuated cataclysmic floods, leading to shallow spillovers that reached the Pathfinder landing site and produced the bedforms detected by the spacecraft.”
According to the researchers, the ancient inland sea resembles the disappearing Aral Sea on Earth. “Our numerical simulations indicate that the [Martian] sea rapidly became ice-covered and disappeared within a few thousand years due to its rapid evaporation and sublimation. During this time, however, it remained liquid below its ice cover,” said co-author Bryan Travis, also of PSI.
Though its presence was brief, Rodriguez said the sea could have hosted life — and the deposits it left at the Pathfinder landing site could contain evidence of that life. That evidence could even be within reach, she added, as its location is “easily accessible by future missions.”
Did Curiosity snap an image of a mysterious “creature” on Mars?
Did Curiosity snap an image of a mysterious “creature” on Mars?
Ultimate evidence of life on Mars: Did NASA’s Curiosity rover snap an image of a mysterious “creature” on the surface of Mars?
NASA’s Curiosity rover has snapped another incredible image of Mars that has led to a lot of debate whether there is life or not on the red planet. Many people believe that even though the surface conditions of Mars are far too harsh to sustain life, there is life beneath the Martian surface, and this new image of NASA’s curiosity rover has awakened the debate among researchers, ufologists, and media whether Mars is home to alien life.
For all of you who remain skeptical head over to NASA’s archives and see the RAW image file, to do so, click here.
The “peculiar” image seems to show “something” hanging onto the cliffs on the red planet, at least that’s how it looks, doesn’t it? Can’t see the object in question? Look carefully to the center-right part of the image, there, you will notice a strange object that clearly stands out from the rest of the surrounding landscape. There are rocks on Mars, there are rocks that might look a bit strange, and then you have objects like the one in this image. Something that is completely out of place and doesn’t seem to be a rock.
The object in question seems to have ten weirdly shaped “lines” or “tentacles” coming from the center of the oval-shaped “structure?”
If it is a rock, then it surely is the strangest rock ever seen on the red planet, wouldn’t you agree?
But, what is this thing? Is it just another rock? Or is it possible that this image is the ultimate proof of life on Mars, and that this isn’t just another rock, like many claim it to be? A Very strange-looking rock that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere in the surrounding landscape of the red planet.
You cannot deny seeing a curiously shaped object in the image, an object that doesn’t look like a rock and doesn’t seem to belong to the cliff, where the object is seen.
Interestingly, people who have seen the image believe that this mysterious objects is in fact guarding some sort of entrance to an underground tunnel on Mars. Too much science fiction? Well could be, but if you see the image closely, you will see that behind this mysterious “tentacle object,” there seems to be some sort of entrance, of course this could be just another shadow behind it, but you cannot help and wonder what the heck this object actually is?
Rock or not, this image has certainly awakened the interest in a lot of people for Mars, and everything that is going on at the surface of neighbour planet.
What if, there actually is life on Mars, life that somehow, managed to survive the harsh conditions on the red planet, and found a safe harbor beneath the Red Planet’s surface.
Let us know what you think this mysterious object might be!
TheUFOclaim was made by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) following a submitted witness report. A Scottish UFO witness claims to have seen an unidentified flying object of possible extraterrestrial origin last year. The MUFON report, dubbed Case 89841, states the witness saw the UFO on January 24, 2018, while indoors and playing the Xbox. The supposed spacecraft appeared around 8.04pm local time in the form of a “fast-moving” object emitting lights.
The lights on the UFO appeared to twist and turn before they got brighter “as if to focus on something”.
When I saw the UFO move, I felt threatened
UFO eyewitness, Case 89841
According to the witness, the UFO created a thick, white screen of light from which the three lights merged at the front.
The UFO then shot off in a northeast direction before changing course back and forth.
The report reads: “I lost visual contact when it managed to do five or six quick movements, seemingly defying what direction it had intended to go in, before hovering and vanishing.”
Surprising new evidence reveals that the British Government showed an active interest in using psychics for espionage purposes. In a document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by UFO author and investigator Timothy Good, it was discovered that the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) undertook a study between 2001 and 2002 to investigate the efficiency of remote viewing.
For those who don’t know, remote viewing – also called ‘travelling clairvoyance’ – is the ability to perceive places, persons and actions using psychic means. As is now well known, the US Army and various other tax payer supported government agencies, including the CIA, investigated and utilised remote viewing during the 1970s and 1980s.
Now that it’s been declassified, all of the documentation pertaining to the British MoD’s remote viewing study can be obtained from their website – or so they claim. In one section it states that the results they obtained were largely unsuccessful and “undoubtedly disappointing with no one achieving any useful performance as an RV subject.” However, given the fact that untrained novices were used in the study, as well as the fact that the remote viewing methods they employed left much to be desired, this is not surprising.
The MoD initially attempted to recruit 12 ‘known’ psychics who had advertised their abilities on the Internet. When every single one of them refused to be a part of the program, however, novice volunteers were drafted instead. One of the tests conducted involved blind-folding participants, and asking them to psychically determine the contents of sealed brown envelopes. Around 28% of the participants were successful in this endeavour. Most of them, the report states, were hopelessly off the mark.
According to a spokeswoman for the MoD, their £18,000 remote viewing study “was conducted to assess claims made in some academic circles and to validate research carried out by other nations on psychic ability.” She adds: “The study concluded that remote viewing theories had little value to the MoD and was taken no further.”
UFO investigator and author Nick Pope, who worked for the MoD for 21 years, suggests there may have been an undisclosed purpose to the study. Given its timing, he says, the study may have concerned military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It can only be speculated,” he says, “but you don’t employ that kind of time and effort to find money down the back of the sofa. You go to this trouble for high value assets. We must be talking about Bin Laden and weapons of mass destruction.”
In response to media criticism for “wasting taxpayer’s money” on a project seen as being ludicrous, MoD defended their actions, perhaps indicating they take the subject of parapsychology – a so called “pseudoscience” – far more seriously than they would have the public believe.
“I don’t think this was a waste of public money,” says Pope. “Many people will say so, but I think it is marvellous that the government is prepared to think outside the box. And this is as outside the box as it gets.”
Parapsychology – the scientific study of psychic phenomena – has been around since at least the 1800s. However, it wasn’t until the 1930s, when J.B. Rhine began conducting ESP experiments under controlled laboratory conditions at Duke University, that parapsychology became a legitimate scientific field. Since that time, knowledge in this area has rapidly advanced, and, thanks to improvements in experimental design, the presence of psi (psychic or paranormal phenomena) – which is generally weak and inconsistent – can now be detected far more easily. Also of aid to this process is the use of meta-analysis, a new statistical tool, whereby the results of many different studies can be successfully combined to render the aggregate result statistically significant.
In his fascinating book Entangled Minds, parapsychologist Dean Radin – a man with impressive credentials, who once served as a scientist at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) where he worked on a highly-classified program investigating psi phenomena for the US government – says we should no longer be trying to determine if psi exists, but how psi works. “After a century of increasingly sophisticated investigations and more than a thousand controlled studies with combined odds against chance of 10104 to 1, there is now strong evidence that some psi phenomena exist,” he explains.
In light of the fact that parapsychology is now a sophisticated and legitimate branch of science, and has been for many years, one can’t help but wonder why the MoD’s rather expensive remote viewing study was of such poor standard. It simply defies logic. Why, in other words, didn’t their study draw more heavily from the impressive body of knowledge accumulated over years and years of parapsychological research? And why didn’t their methodology follow the well-known and highly successful controlled remote viewing (CRV) protocols developed by Ingo Swann and utilised in STAR GATE and other programs? And how come, when they couldn’t recruit the twelve ‘known’ psychics for the study, they settled for novice volunteers?
By tracing the history of modern remote viewing, we can begin to answer these questions.
Ingo Swann
One of the most important figures responsible for today’s understanding of remote viewing is Ingo Swann, a scholar, artist, scientist and natural psychic. After acquiring a pet chinchilla, which, he discovered, “could read and apprehend” his thoughts, Swann developed an interest in psychic phenomena. When he began to move into the circles of those studying such phenomena, he soon became acquainted with Cleve Backster. Backster, a New York polygraph operator, is famous for his experiments in “primary perception,” in which he demonstrated, with the use of polygraph equipment, that every single type of living tissue, even the bacilli in yoghurt, possesses some degree of sentience. Swann worked in Backster’s laboratory for a year.
Soon after that, Swann participated in a series of psychic experiments for the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). According to Time-Life, a typical experiment would take place as follows: “Swann would sit in an easy chair illuminated by a soft overhead light, virtually immobilised by wires that hooked him up to a polygraph machine, which monitored his brain waves, respiration and blood pressure. Puffing away on his cigar, he would, as he put it, ‘liberate his mind’; then he would be asked to describe or draw his impression of objects that were set out of sight in a box on a platform suspended from the ceiling.”
“At first,” says Swann, “I was not very good at this kind of ‘perceiving’, but as the months went on, I got even better at it.” The term “remote viewing,” coined by Swann and a research assistant at the ASPR named Janet Mitchell, was used to describe a particular kind of experiment conducted by Swann at around this time. Whilst in an out-of-body state, Swann would attempt to “see,” then report on the weather conditions in distant cities.
Swann became more heavily involved in parapsychological research, when, in 1972, he agreed to work at SRI for Harold Puthoff, a highly successful physicist. Puthoff, after reading the seminal book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain in which he heard about the work of Cleve Backster, was eager to conduct some parapsychological experiments of his own. The research project conducted by Puthoff – then later by him and another physicist named Russell Targ – was initially funded by the Sciences Research Foundation of San Antonia, Texas. Later on, when their successful remote viewing work at SRI began to gain wider attention, they started to receive funding from other government agencies, including the CIA.
In one early remote viewing experiment at SRI, Swann was accurately able to describe – and sketch in great detail – the features of a uniquely designed magnetometer buried six feet in concrete beneath the floor. Not only that, he managed to affect the equipment’s output signal, as displayed on a strip chart recorder. Another subject, a photographer by the name of Hella Hammid, was able to accurately describe five out of nine target sites, resulting in odds against chance of more than 500,000 to 1.
Thanks to the advent of coordinate remote viewing (CRV) – now called controlled remote viewing – numerous complications were eliminated. For example, it was no longer necessary for a person – known as the ‘beacon’ – to visit the spot that was chosen as the remote viewer’s target. This enabled remote viewing to be more easily used for espionage purposes.
CRV is a method by which coordinates are employed to identify the target to be viewed. The coordinates used, however, needn’t be geographical in nature. They can be, and usually are, completely random numbers. Once a particular target has already been ‘visited’ by a remote viewer, and this target has been assigned a set of random coordinates, it is possible for another remote viewer to ‘visit’ the same location – which could be any point in time and space – simply by focusing on the same set of coordinates. The theory behind how this works is based on Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. “Once these numbers have been assigned,” writes British author and paranormal expert Colin Wilson, “they become part of the psychic ether, much as the letters assigned to a website on the Internet will enable anybody to access the site.”
During the Cold War, when the American government discovered they were lagging behind the Soviet Union in paranormal research, they grew concerned, thinking the Soviets might use their newly acquired knowledge for hostile purposes. Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, published in 1970 by two Western authors named Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder documented that numerous scientists throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were starting to take parapsychological research – or ‘psychotronics’ – very seriously indeed.
“But interest in psychic phenomena within the ruling circles of Cold War leaders on both sides of the Atlantic remained very much a hidden agenda,” writes Jim Marrs in Psi Spies. “Officially, the United States had no interest in nonexistent phenomena.” However, a 1972 CIA report, released years later, proves agency officials were concerned about Soviet psychic research, even though, at the time, organisations such as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) were beginning to give parapsychology a bad name, as was the media.
As quoted by the editors of Time-Life, the aforementioned CIA report stated, “Soviet efforts in the field of psi research, sooner or later, might enable them to do some of the following: (a) Know the contents of top secret US documents, the movement of our troops and ships and the location and nature of our military installations. (b) Mold the thoughts of key US military and civilian leaders at a distant. (c) Cause the instant death of any US official at a distance. (d) Disable, at a distance, US military equipment of all types, including spacecraft.”
The first remote viewing research program conducted by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding was named project SCANATE. Held at SRI, the program went on for two years, yielding some remarkable results. The CIA, happy with the success of the program, felt their money was being well-spent. A CIA intelligence consultant named Joseph A. Ball, who, according to Mind Wars author Ronald McRae, was commissioned to evaluate SCANATE, allegedly said the project “produced manifestations of extrasensory perception sufficiently sharp and clear-cut to justify serious considerations of possible applications.”
According to McRae, the AiResearch Manufacturing Company of Torrence, California, another consulting firm, was also contracted by the CIA to evaluate SCANATE, reaching essentially the same conclusion as Ball.
As well as Swann, another notable member of the SCANATE team, and an equally successful remote viewer, was a former police commissioner named Patrick H. Price, who died suddenly of a heart attack in July of 1975. As a result of conducting a highly successful operational test for the CIA, in which his descriptions of a missile and guerrilla training site in Libya were confirmed by the CIA’s Libyan Desk officer, Swann helped ensure that government funding for project SCANATE would continue. Also of help to this process was the publication of SRI’s remote viewing research in a prestigious technical periodical, Proceedings of the IEEE, the editor of which was almost fired for choosing to deal with such controversial material.
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Operation GRILL FLAME
By the late 1970s, when the SRI team began receiving sponsorship from the US Army instead of the CIA, an operational unit of soldiers trained in remote viewing – known by many as the ‘psi spies’ – was created in order to help gather intelligence during the Cold War. One of the first units of remote viewers created by the US Army was called GRILL FLAME, previously named GONDOLA WISH. According to Joseph McMoneagle, one of the original psi spies, the Army interviewed around 3,000 people for GRILL FLAME, selecting, in the end, a total of six.
Early on, the members of GRILL FLAME practised remote viewing using a variety of different experimental methods. Consciousness-altering techniques such as Transcendental Meditation (TM) and biorhythm were tested, but proved to be of little value. Remote viewing in an out-of-body state was also found to be largely unsuccessful, in that, although it could be achieved, the viewer would often lose interest in the mission at hand, focusing instead on the awe-inspiring nature of the experience. The team decided, in the end, to adhere to Swann’s structured CRV methodology, as this produced the most consistently accurate results.
While in an out-of-body state, Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute for Applied Sciences – which, among other things, was used to screen remote viewers for GRILL FLAME and other programs – discovered he was being ‘observed’ by a group of strangers, one of whom appeared to be a powerful female psychic. He felt they were trying to probe his mind. Shaken by the experience, Monroe asked the GRILL FLAME team to investigate the matter. They soon discovered that the Soviet Union had a psi spies team of their own. “The Soviet KGB,” says Marrs, “laboriously screened more than a million people in an effort to locate ‘super naturals’, persons with the greatest amount of psychic power. These super psychics became the Soviet Union’s psi spies, sometimes assigned to seek out their Western counterparts.”
For many years, the two teams indulged in a game of harmless psychic cat and mouse with each other, but that’s as far as the matter went. According to former military remote viewer Mel Riley, the two teams had a kind of “gentleman’s agreement” with each other, which involved keeping the existence of the opposing team a secret from their respective bosses, so as not to cause trouble for each other.
In 1985 GRILL FLAME came under control of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). From that point onwards, the unit codename underwent several changes. GRILL FLAME became CENTER LANE, then SUN STREAK, and finally STAR GATE.
According to many of the original psi spies, the unit went downhill once it was placed under civilian control during the late 1980s. At around this time, two female trainees named Angela and Robin showed up. Called “the witches” by the others, they practised channelling, tarot card reading and automatic writing in place of CRV, consequently obtaining poor results in their work. The entire unit became something of a joke, especially when congressmen began to visit for psychic “readings.” By 1990, all of the military-trained psi spies had left the unit, leaving “the witches” in charge. Some of them retired. Others joined different units within the US Army.
During its full operational period, before things went awry, the psi spies unit provided information of critical intelligence in hundreds of very specific cases. “On scores of occasions,” writes Swann, “this information was also described within government documents as being unavailable from any other source(s).” He continues: “Also contrary to popular belief, the program operated throughout its history under the very watchful eyes of numerous oversight committees, which were both scientific and governmental. During the seventeen and a half years it ran, it provided support to nearly all of the United States intelligence agencies.”
Early on, most of the operational missions conducted by the psi spies involved investigating targets in the Soviet Union. Being highly classified and concerning issues of national security, the unit received little or no feedback about the success of these missions. One of the most talked about missions that the psi spies were asked to undertake was conducted by McMoneagle, who managed to correctly describe, in thorough detail, a new type of Soviet Submarine, which was then being constructed in a secret facility in Severodvinsk.
Another mission noted for its stunning success was undertaken in May of 1978, in response to a plane crash that occurred in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The plane, a Soviet Tupolev-22 bomber, was seen as being invaluable to the Americans, who wanted to recover the wreckage in order to examine its communication equipment. Two remote viewers working independently of one another, Frances Bryan and Gary Langford, each managed to draw detailed sketches of the area where the plane crash occurred. The plane was eventually located within barely 5 kilometres of the spot they had both described.
The story of military remote viewing hit the mainstream press in late 1995, but not before the CIA had arranged for the American Institute of Research (AIR) to conduct a biased review concerning the value and success of STAR GATE. Their aim was to discredit remote viewing and other psi abilities, in order to thwart public interest in the subject. Jessica Utts, a professor of statistics with a positive opinion on psi phenomena, and Dr. Raymond Hyman, a professor of psychology and luminary of CSICOP – in other words, a fanatical sceptic of anything remotely ‘paranormal’ – were chosen to lead the review. “It was a good strategy to select evaluators from opposite camps; it gave the appearance of balance to the evaluation – an appearance that is deceiving,” writes W. Adam Mandelbaum in his book The Psychic Battlefield.
The report evaluated only three remote viewing projects, which were carried out within one year towards the end of STAR GATE, a period of decline for the program. The other 16 or so years that it ran (though under numerous different codenames) were totally disregarded. Moreover, according to Dr. Edwin May, former director of remote viewing research, the AIR panel was denied access to an estimated 80,000 pages of program documents, due to their highly-classified nature. And, to make matters worse, the panel interviewed only three remote viewers involved in the program, all of whom were of “the witches” variety, in that they commonly relied upon tarot card reading, automatic writing and other unconventional methods to obtain their information. Ergo, only the very weakest data was used in the AIR evaluation.
The AIR report states, “The evidence accrued from research, interviews and user-assessments all indicate that the remote viewing phenomenon has no real value for intelligence operations at present.” It also mentions, however, that a “statistically significant effect” had been observed in laboratory remote viewing experiments. Despite these findings, the report goes on to mention that, “no compelling explanation has been provided for the observed effects… to say a phenomenon has been demonstrated we must know the reason for its existence.”
One can’t help but wonder if the real purpose of the British MoD’s remote viewing study was to further discredit the phenomenon. It was, after all, something of a joke – especially in comparison to the remote viewing program undertaken by the US government. Or, perhaps, as Nick Pope suggests, its real purpose has not been disclosed to the public.
In his book Psi Spies, Marrs claims that several separate unofficial sources have informed him the US government’s remote viewing program never truly ended. It only ended in the eyes of the public – just as the CIA intended. According to these sources, says Marrs, “the remote viewing methodology was simply moved to even more secret government agencies where its use continues today.”
WETENSCHAPEen groep Europese wetenschappers trekt volgend jaar naar Antarctica om er te boren naar het oudste ijs ter wereld. Het moet ons meer leren over hoe ons klimaat de afgelopen 1,5 miljoen jaar veranderde en het kan ons helpen om prognoses te maken voor de toekomst.
Op 9 april zal de precieze locatie van de boring bekend worden gemaakt. Een team van prominente ijs- en klimaatwetenschappers uit 10 Europese landen hebben twee jaar lang naar de ideale plek gezocht. Het enige wat we voorlopig weten is dat het in het oosten van Antarctica zal zijn, in een gebied dat Little Dome C heet en op 3.200 meter boven zeeniveau ligt. Daar zal tot onderaan een 2.750 meter dikke ijsplaat worden gedrild. De werken zullen in juni 2020 van start gaan.
Beyond Epica heet het project en het wordt gesponsord door de Europese Commissie. Die zou maar liefst 11 miljoen euro in het project pompen.
15 jaar geleden slaagden wetenschappers van Epica er al in om ijs te vinden van 800.000 jaar oud. Dat toonde een heel nauwe relatie tussen het niveau van CO2 en de temperatuur op aarde. “We kwamen toen ook te weten dat de concentraties van broeikasgassen die we vandaag kennen, veel hoger liggen dan ze de afgelopen 800.000 jaar ooit geweest zijn”, aldus professor kwarternaire wetenschappen Raimund Muscheler van de universiteit van Lund in Zweden in de Britse krant The Guardian.
Muscheler houdt zich bezig met de studie van het Kwartair, de jongste en tegelijk kortste periode in de aardgeschiedenis, die de jongste 2,6 miljoen jaar overspant. (lees hieronder verder)
Getty Images
Hoe het komt dat het ijs ons zo veel kan vertellen? Wel, ijsplaten worden gevormd door sneeuwval die jarenlang opbouwt. Elke keer het sneeuwt, wordt er een extra laagje gevormd. Die laagjes worden vervolgens samengeperst tot ijs door nieuwe lagen die erop vallen. In die sneeuw zitten echter ook luchtbellen, gassen en stofdeeltjes en die kunnen een beeld geven van de temperatuur, de atmosfeer en het klimaat op een bepaald moment in onze geschiedenis.
Grote verandering
“Ruwweg een miljoen jaar geleden deed er zich een grote verandering in het klimaatsysteem van de Aarde voor”, aldus glacioloog Poul Christoffersen van de universiteit van Cambridge. “Die wordt de Mid-Pleistocene Transitie genoemd. Ervoor kwamen ijstijden om de 40.000 jaar voor, erna om de 100.000 jaar. Als we voor het eerst ijs zouden kunnen vinden dat meer dan een miljoen jaar oud is, kan ons dat iets leren over hoe het klimaat vroeger werkte en wat die Transitie veroorzaakt kan hebben. Het zou te maken kunnen hebben met broeikasgassen zoals CO2, maar dat weten we niet. Als dat zo is, betekent het dat die stoffen het klimaat op Aarde echt heel dramatisch kunnen veranderen.”
NASAEen meanderende bedding van een oude rivier op Mars. De foto werd ingekleurd om hoogteverschillen aan te duiden: blauw is laag, geel is hoog.
WETENSCHAPMars is vandaag koud en droog, met een ijle atmosfeer. Maar ooit - en minder lang geleden dan gedacht - stroomden er grote, woeste rivieren op de rode planeet. Ze waren dubbel zo breed als de rivieren op aarde, ontdekten wetenschappers van de universiteit van Chicago.
De conclusies maken het niet makkelijker voor onderzoekers die Mars’ drastische transitie van de natte naar de droge periode bestuderen. Die zou tot later in de geschiedenis van de planeet hebben geduurd dan tot nu toe gedacht. Met andere woorden: er was tot minder lang geleden dan gedacht water op Mars, tot het allerlaatste moment van de natte periode. Tussen 3,6 en 1 miljard jaar geleden stroomde dagelijks 3 tot 20 kg water per vierkante meter door de rivierbeddingen over de hele planeet verspreid. De nieuwe studie schat het nu op 1 miljard jaar geleden en zelfs nog later. Of: minstens 1 miljard jaar recenter dan vorige berekeningen.
Edwin Kite en zijn team onderzochten meer dan 200 oude, al lang opgedroogde rivierbeddingen op Mars aan de hand van foto’s gemaakt met NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), die rond de planeet cirkelt. De diepe geulen op de foto’s bevatten informatie over het water dat er ooit doorstroomde en over de klimatologische omstandigheden waarin dat gebeurde. De grootte van de beddingen wijst op een continue eerder dan op een tijdelijke waterstroom enkel ’s middags.
AP
De gemiddelde dagtemperaturen lagen dus boven het vriespunt, wat dan weer een sterk broeikaseffect suggereert. “Maar dat wordt niet gestaafd door de bestaande modellen van Mars’ klimaatveranderingen”, zegt de studie. De atmosfeer van Mars was vroeger zo dik dat er maar een derde van zonnestralen die wij nu op de aarde ontvangen doorkwam. Onvoldoende voor vloeibaar water.
Als de vooropgestelde periodes van stromende rivieren op Mars kloppen, dan zou dat kunnen betekenen dat de atmosfeer van de rode planeet sneller verdween dan eerder werd gedacht. Uit vorige studies bleek dat de verdunning 4 miljard jaar geleden zou zijn ingezet en zo zou hebben geleid tot het geleidelijk uitdrogen van de rivieren. De nieuwe studie plaatst dat uitdunnen van de Martiaanse atmosfeer nu miljarden jaren later.
Kite schuift nog een andere optie naar voren: mogelijk versprong het klimaat op Mars herhaaldelijk als een op/aan-knop van droge naar natte periodes.
WETENSCHAPVoor het eerst is fysiek bewijs geleverd dat een verwoestende vloedgolf op de meteorieteninslag op het Mexicaanse schiereiland Yucatan 66 miljoen jaar geleden volgde. Het leven op aarde kwam grotendeels door deze ramp aan het einde. Het bewijs werd na een onderzoek in een gesteentelaag in Noord-Dakota (VS) gevonden. Dat meldt geoloog Johan Vellekoop (KU Leuven/VUB), die als postdoctoraal onderzoeker meewerkt aan de studie.
De inslag van de 10 kilometer brede meteoriet veroorzaakte verschillende zware aardbevingen. Tot hiertoe waren er weinig fysieke bewijzen dat die meteorieteninslag vloedgolven teweeggebracht zou hebben. Uit de studie blijkt dat de gesteentelaag in Noord-Dakota gevormd werd door een vloedgolf die binnen enkele uren na de meteorieteninslag het land in de omgeving overspoelde. De gesteentelaag lag zo’n 3.000 kilometer ten noorden van de krater.
In de gesteentelaag werden honderden fossielen gevonden van vissen en dinosauriërs, tot bomen en haaientanden. “In de kieuwen van de vissen bevonden zich tektieten, fragmenten aards gesteente die door de inslag van de meteoriet gesmolten zijn en in de ruimte werd gekatapulteerd. Tijdens hun val naar de aarde stollen ze weer. Ook in de hars van fossiele bomen vonden we zulke tektieten terug. Deze vondsten bewijzen dat de dier- en plantensoorten gesneuveld zijn als rechtstreeks gevolg van de meteorieteninslag”, aldus Vellekoop.
De resultaten van de studie zullen op 1 april in het vakblad PNAS gepubliceerd worden.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET NASA-ingenieurs zijn erin geslaagd om een helikopter te laten vliegen in omstandigheden die vergelijkbaar zijn met de condities op Mars. De Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie wil de kleine helikopter volgend jaar met de Mars 2020 Rover-missie naar de rode planeet sturen.
De dichtheid van de atmosfeer op Mars is ongeveer 1 procent van die op aarde. Om de 1,8 kilo zware helikopter te testen, zouden de onderzoekers het toestel op een hoogte van 30.480 meter moeten laten vliegen, wat verre van praktisch is. NASA koos er daarom voor om de omstandigheden op Mars na te bootsen in de JPL Space Simulator in Pasadena, Californië. In deze simulator vonden op verschillende dagen twee succesvolle testvluchten plaats, zo laat NASA weten op zijn website.
De atmosfeer van Mars heeft niet alleen een andere dichtheid dan die op aarde, ook de temperatuur is er veel lager; tot -90 graden Celsius. Om de omstandigheden op Mars na te bootsen, werd de JPL Space Simulator, een cilinder met een diagonaal van 7,62 meter, eerst vacuüm gezogen. De stikstof en de zuurstof werden vervolgens vervangen door koolstofdioxide, het belangrijkste bestanddeel van de atmosfeer van Mars.
NASA
Testcase
Als alles volgens plan verloopt, wordt de Mars-helikopter in juli 2020 gelanceerd, samen met de Mars 2020 Rover. De landing op Mars, waarbij de helikopter onder de ‘buik’ van de rover hangt, is gepland voor februari 2021. De eerste testvlucht op de rode planeet, waarbij de heli tot anderhalve minuut in de lucht blijft, volgt enkele maanden later.
Na de landing op Mars dient de helikopter vooral als testcase voor toekomstige ’unmanned aerial vehicles’of uav’s. De Rover 2020 gaat de gesteenten op de planeet bestuderen, onder meer door via boringen monsters te verzamelen.
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Water found under surface of MARS could be critical resource for human settlers
Water found under surface of MARS could be critical resource for human settlers
Scientists found high pressure deep below the surface forced the water through fractures within some of Mars' craters
By Tony Whitfield
Mars
(Image: Science Photo Library RF)
Water could be flowing deep underground around the equator of Mars providing ideal locations for future bases, a new study found.
The springs bubble up from groundwater 750 metres deep through cracks in craters pockmarking the Red Planet's surface.
Scientists found high pressure deep below the surface forced the water through fractures within some of Mars' craters.
These springs leaked onto the surface, generating the sharp and distinct linear features found on the walls of these craters.
And these water features fluctuate with the seasons on the Red Planet.
In 2018 researchers supported by the Italian Space Agency detected the presence of a deep-water lake on Mars under its south polar ice caps.
What living conditions on Mars might be like(Image: National Geographic / SWNS.com)
Now the new study by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles suggested groundwater likely exists in a broader geographical area than just the poles of Mars and that there is an active system.
The findings were based on the studying the characteristics of Mars Recurrent Slope Linea, which are akin to dried, short streams of water that appears on some crater walls on Mars.
Scientists previously thought these features were affiliated with surface water flow or close subsurface water flow.
Dr Essam Heggy, who is a member of the Mars Express Sounding radar experiment MARSIS probing Mars subsurface, said: "We suggest that this may not be true.
"We propose an alternative hypothesis that they originate from a deep pressurised groundwater source which comes to surface moving upward along ground cracks."
First author Dr Abotalib Abotalib added: "The experience we gained from our research in desert hydrology was the cornerstone in reaching this conclusion.
"We have seen the same mechanisms in the North African Sahara and in the Arabian Peninsula, and it helped us explore the same mechanism on Mars."
Planet Mars(Image: PA)
Previous research to explore groundwater on Mars relied on interpreting the returned electromagnetic echoes sent from the radar-probing experiments from orbit onboard Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
These experiments measured the reflection of the waves from both the surface and the subsurface whenever penetration was possible.
However, this earlier method did not yet provide evidence of groundwater occurrence beyond the 2018 South Pole detection.
The researchers used hi-resolution optical images and modelling to study the walls of large impact craters on Mars.
The goal was to correlate the presence of fractures with the sources of streams that generate short water flows.
The pair, who have long studied subsurface aquifers and groundwater flow movement on Earth and in desert environments, found similarities between the groundwater moving mechanisms in the Sahara and on Mars.
Dr Heggy said: "Groundwater is strong evidence for the past similarity between Mars and Earth - it suggest they have a similar evolution, to some extent.".
He added this deep source of groundwater was the most convincing evidence of similarities between the two planets.
It suggested both may have had wet periods long enough to create such an active groundwater system.
Dr Heggy said: "Understanding how groundwater has formed on Mars, where it is today and how it is moving helps us constrain ambiguities on the evolution of climatic conditions on Mars for the last three billion years and how these conditions formed this groundwater system.
"It helps us to understand the similarities to our own planet and if we are going through the same climate evolution and the same path that Mars is going.
"Understanding Mars' evolution is crucial for understanding our own Earth's long-term evolution and groundwater is a key element in this process. "
The new study suggests that the groundwater that is the source of these water flows could be at depths starting at 750 meters deep.
He concluded: "Such depth requires us to consider more deep-probing techniques to look for the source of this groundwater versus looking for shallow sources of water."
An active groundwater system may still be thriving on Mars hundreds of meters beneath the surface, according to new research.
Though recent studies have detected the presence of deep lakes near Mars’ south pole, features linked to water in areas closer to the equator have largely been attributed to flows at or near the surface.
But, a new investigation using data from Mars Express and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter now suggests groundwater is much more prevalent across the red planet than previously suspected.
Scientists now say active groundwater likely exists far beyond the Martian poles, in some cases as deep as 750 meters, and gives rise to surface streams that leave snaking streaks along many crater walls.
Scroll down for video
The team studied high resolution images to analyze ground fractures along the walls of large impact craters, such as Mars' Recurrent Slope Linea (pictured). And, they say these characteristics appear similar to features seen on Earth. Water sources as deep as 750 meters below the surface could be producing streams even outside of the poles
In the study, the team studied features observed on Mars’ Recurrent Slope Linea, which appear to have been created by short streams of water.
While it’s been suggested that these were the result of surface water flows, the researchers say ‘this may not be true.’
‘We propose an alternative hypothesis that they originate from a deep pressurized groundwater source which comes to the surface moving upward along ground cracks,’ said Essam Heggy, a member of the Mars Express Sounding radar experiment MARSIS.
The team studied high resolution images to analyze ground fractures along the walls of large impact craters.
And, they say these characteristics appear similar to features seen on Earth.
‘The experience we gained from our research in desert hydrology was the cornerstone in reaching this conclusion,’ said lead author Abotalib Z. Abotalib.
‘We have seen the same mechanisms in the North African Sahara and in the Arabian Peninsula, and it helped us explore the same mechanism on Mars.’
‘Groundwater is strong evidence for the past similarity between Mars and Earth – it suggests they have a similar evolution, to some extent,’ Heggy said.
According to the researchers, the newly hypothesized groundwater system may be the best sign yet that Mars had a long wet period in its past.
Water sources as deep as 750 meters below the surface could be producing streams in equatorial areas.
A separate study published earlier this year identified what's said to be the first evidence of such a groundwater system. The researchers say numerous features seen on the crater floors at depths of 4,000-4,500 meters are suggestive of water, with evidence of pools and flows that changed over time. Some of these features can be seen in the deep basin, above
‘Understanding how groundwater has formed on Mars, where it is today and how it is moving helps us constrain ambiguities on the evolution of climatic conditions on Mars for the last three billion years and how these conditions formed this groundwater system,’
‘It helps us to understand the similarities to our own planet and if we are going through the same climate evolution and the same path that Mars is going.
‘Understanding Mars’ evolution is crucial for understanding our own Earth’s long-term evolution and groundwater is a key element in this process.’
‘Such depth requires us to consider more deep-probing techniques to look for the source of this groundwater versus looking for shallow sources of water,’ Heggy says.
WHAT SIGNS OF WATER HAVE RESEARCHERS FOUND?
A new study on data from the Mars Express satellite has now revealed the extent of an ancient groundwater system on the red planet.
Researchers found features that indicate the presence of past water at depths of 4,000-4,500m, including:
Channels etched into crater walls
Valleys carved out by groundwater
Curved deltas that may have formed as water levels rose and fell
Ridged terraces in crater walls from standing water
Fan-shaped deposits of sediment
Researchers also found minerals linked to the emergence of life: clays, carbonates, and silicates.
Scientists have detected the first geological evidence of an interconnected system of water reservoirs deep beneath the surface of Mars. This includes channels, valleys, curved deltas, ridged terraces, and fan-shaped deposits of sediments, as illustrated above
There may be a vast and active system of water running underneath the surface of Mars, scientists have said.
Groundwater on Mars may run much deeper than previously thought, with streams flowing invisibly under the surface, a new study has found.
Recurrent Slope Linae on the Palikir Crater walls on Mars. (Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)
NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
The discovery may help fundamentally change our understanding of the red planet, as well as informing our search for life.
Last year, scientists working with the Italian Space Agency found the presence of a dee-water lake on Mars, under its south pole. The new study suggests that groundwater could still be flowing in active system, and that it could lead to streams flowing on the surface in parts of the planet near the equator.
The researchers found the groundwater probably exists in areas much broader than the plus and that the system could run as deep as 750 meters.
The researchers made the discovery after analysing the characteristics of the Mars Recurrent Slope Linea, which are like dried, short streams of water that appear on the walls of some of the planet's craters.
Previously, researchers thought those features were the result of flowing water across the surface or just underneath it. But now the researchers believe they are actually coming up from a deep pressurised source from where water is pushed up.
"We propose an alternative hypothesis that they originate from a deep pressurised groundwater source which comes to surface moving upward along ground cracks," said Essam Heggy, one of the co-authors on the new paper.
Researchers came to the conclusion after seeing similar mechanisms at work on Earth.
"The experience we gained from our research in desert hydrology was the cornerstone in reaching this conclusion. We have seen the same mechanisms in the North African Sahara and in the Arabian Peninsula, and it helped us explore the same mechanism on Mars," said Abotalib Z. Abotalib, the paper's first author.
Some of Mars craters have fractures in, and the scientists say those allow water springs to rise up to its surface, pushed up by the pressure deep below. Those springs then leak out onto the surface, which leads to the clear features that can be seen in images of the walls of those creators.
That would explain why the water features seem to fluctuate according to Mars' seasons, the researchers say as part of the new study published in Nature Geosciences.
Scientists should consider those exposed parts where the water springs out as primary candidates when looking to explore Mars and understand how habitable it could be, the researchers say. Water of this kind is likely to key to the question of whether Mars could support life – either future human exploration, or basic life that could have lived there in the past or even survive now.
New probing methods would allow scientists to explore those fractures and understand any potential water system that is lurking beneath the surface, the scientists write in the study.
As well as shedding light on the possibility of living on the planet, the new findings are convincing evidence that Mars has important similarities to our own Earth.
"Groundwater is strong evidence for the past similarity between Mars and Earth – it suggests they have a similar evolution, to some extent," said Heggy.
That could help shed light on our own planet and its evolution, as much as the red planet itself.
"Understanding how groundwater has formed on Mars, where it is today and how it is moving helps us constrain ambiguities on the evolution of climatic conditions on Mars for the last three billion years and how these conditions formed this groundwater system," said Heggy in a statement.
"It helps us to understand the similarities to our own planet and if we are going through the same climate evolution and the same path that Mars is going. Understanding Mars' evolution is crucial for understanding our own Earth's long-term evolution and groundwater is a key element in this process."
Gigantisch ‘actief watersysteem’ verborgen onder het oppervlak van Mars. Wetenschappers vinden nieuw bewijs
Gigantisch ‘actief watersysteem’ verborgen onder het oppervlak van Mars. Wetenschappers vinden nieuw bewijs
Onder het oppervlak van de planeet Mars bevindt zich waarschijnlijk een enorm actief watersysteem, zo hebben wetenschappers gezegd.
Het grondwater op Mars stroomt veel dieper dan gedacht, blijkt uit een nieuwe studie. De ontdekking kan onze kijk op de rode planeet drastisch veranderen.
Vorig jaar ontdekten wetenschappers van de Italiaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie een groot meer op Mars, onder de zuidpool.
750 meter
De nieuwe studie suggereert dat grondwater nog altijd onderdeel uitmaakt van een actief systeem en zo rond de evenaar aan de oppervlakte komt.
De onderzoekers hebben ontdekt dat er waarschijnlijk veel meer grondwater is dan gedacht en dat het systeem tot wel 750 meter diep is.
De onderzoekers deden de ontdekking na het bestuderen van opgedroogde waterstromen langs kraterwanden op het Marsoppervlak.
Soortgelijke mechanismen
In eerste instantie dacht men dat die het gevolg waren van water dat over het oppervlak of vlak eronder stroomde.
Nu denken onderzoekers dat het water afkomstig was uit het binnenste van de planeet en omhoog werd gestuwd.
De wetenschappers zagen op aarde soortgelijke mechanismen.
Scheuren
“We hebben dezelfde mechanismen gezien in de Sahara en op het Arabisch Schiereiland, en dat heeft ons geholpen om hetzelfde mechanisme op Mars te onderzoeken,” zei hoofdonderzoeker Abotalib Z. Abotalib.
Sommige kraters op Mars bevatten scheuren en de wetenschappers zeggen dat het water via deze openingen naar het oppervlak stroomt.
(Natural News)Your tax dollars, believe it or not, are (or at leastwere) being used by the federal government to research crazy sci-fi concepts like “warp drives,” wormhole travel, high-energy laser weapons, andinvisibility cloaking, newly-declassified documents reveal.
Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was forced to make public the details of some 38 formerly top-secret government projects, which had been classified and sent to Congress last year.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, made the request to see what the DIA was up to, only to learn that all sorts of hair-brained projects were being conducted using tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.
“I think anyone who looks at these titles will scratch their heads and wonder what on earth the Defense Intelligence Agency was thinking,” Aftergood reportedly told Motherboard(VICE).
Among these titles was a research endeavor entitled, “Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy,” which was headed up by Eric Davis from the Austin, Texas-based EarthTech International Inc. This project was described as an effort aimed at “exploring the forefront reaches of science and engineering,” with a focus on the theories of spacetime, studies of the quantum vacuum, and the government’s search for extraterrestrial intelligence, aka UFOs and space aliens.
Another project was entitled, “Invisibility Cloaking,” and was led by German scientists Dr. Ulf Leonhardt from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This one focused on theoretical quantum optics, and the theoretical creation of “an invisible ‘hole’ in space, inside which objects can be hidden.”
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Yet another, entitled, “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions,” focused on “researching technologies that will enable breakthroughs in interstellar travel.” Richard Obousy, the man behind the project, was reportedly credited byGizmodoback in 2009 for developing “a scientifically accurate warship design” that could hypothetically use dark energy to propel itself through space.
“The list of research papers tells us something more than previous reporting did about this odd program,” Aftergood added in an email to Motherboard. “Now we have a better idea of exactly what the Defense Intelligence Agency was up to, and what it produced.”
For more news about space, be sure to check out Space.news.
Harry Reid secretly funded these crazy UFO space projects with $22 million stolen from taxpayers
As far as the American public was concerned, such projects didn’t exist. But now that the media has grabbed hold of them, thanks to Aftergood’s FOIA request, we now know a bit more about what was going on, and how much it was costing taxpayers.
Then-Senate majority leader, Democrat and Big Pharma hack Harry Reid, it turns out, had secretly allotted $22 million in taxpayer funding – without taxpayers’ consent, it’s important to note – for the program, though it remains unclear how the individual projects within the program were selected.
“These are the kinds of topics you pursue when you have more money than you know what to do with,” points out Aftergood about this gross abuse of the public coffers.
Not surprising is the fact that most of this $22 million budget went to Reid’s buddy, a UFO hunter by the name of Robert Bigelow of the Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace company. Bigelow, as you might recall, was the protagonist in the documentary Hunt for the Skinwalker, which told of the billionaire entrepreneur’s extraterrestrial Skinwalker Ranch.
“I loved science fiction when I was younger,” Aftergood says. “Today, I love good government. So I was not especially amused,” he added, jokingly.
Screenshots of the now-declassified documents containing a complete list of all of Harry Reid’s pet UFO and space projects are available at this link.
Deze vrijgegeven documenten onthullen schokkende overheidsprojecten, waaronder studies naar warp drives, UFO’s, dimensies en meer
Deze vrijgegeven documenten onthullen schokkende overheidsprojecten, waaronder studies naar warp drives, UFO’s, dimensies en meer
Het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie stopt veel geld in onderzoek naar UFO’s, sterrenpoorten, het manipuleren van extra dimensies en warp drives, blijkt uitdocumentendie via Wob-verzoeken boven water zijn gehaald.
Directeur Steven Aftergood van het Project on Government Secrecy heeft de hand weten te leggen op de stukken.
Het ministerie investeerde in onderzoeksprojecten gericht op onzichtbaarheidsmantels, wormgaten in de ruimte en biomaterialen.
Donkere energie
Het is voor het eerst dat de onderzoeksprojecten rechtstreeks zijn gelinkt aan black operations die worden uitgevoerd door het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie.
In 2008 bleek al dat de NASA zich bezighoudt met het onderzoek naar warp drives. In 2013 leverde een project van het Jet Propulsion Laboratory van de NASA rond een warpveld ‘onduidelijke’ resultaten op.
Ook theoretisch astrofysicus en directeur van Icarus Interstellar Richard Obousy doet onderzoek naar interstellaire warp drives die worden aangedreven door donkere energie via andere universa, laten de stukken zien.
Geheim onderzoek
Hoewel we nog geen wormgaten hebben ontdekt, probeert EarthTech International er één te creëren waarmee we door de ruimte en tijd kunnen reizen, zo blijkt uit de vrijgegeven documenten.
In 2017 bleek al dat het Pentagon jaarlijks 22 miljoen dollar had geïnvesteerd in een geheim onderzoek naar UFO’s.
Dit programma zou in 2012 zijn stopgezet, maar is volgens ingewijden nooit beëindigd.
A high-tech surveillance aircraft was recently seen flying over Area 51, one of the world’s most mysterious and infamous military research sites. While aliens are the usual suspect whenever the words “aircraft” and “Area 51” are uttered, a much more frightening boogeyman is behind this latest flyover: the Russians.
“Did someone say boogeyman?”
On March 28th, 2019, Russia flew several Tupolev Tu-154M aircraft over many of America’s most sensitive military installations in the deserts of Nevada and California. The Tu-154 was designed in the 1960s by the Soviet Union and is still used today for passenger flights, cosmonaut training, and can be fitted with state-of-the-art electronic or optical surveillance equipment. The Tu-154M, the variant used in these flights, is used exclusively for surveillance and imagery collection.
A Russian Air Force Tu-154M
According to radar data tracked by FlightRadar24 and reportedby The Drive, the Tu-154M left Travis AFB near San Francisco before flying over Edwards Air Force Base, Fort Irwin, and Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake before making a turn to survey the holy grail of military aerospace secrecy: the Nevada Test and Training Range near Area 51. The aircraft mostly stayed between 14,000 and 15,000 feet while it was conducting surveillance, plenty low enough for panoramic cameras to capture every detail of whatever was happening on the ground below. Good thing the really good stuff is in bunkers deep below the ground or inside Robert Bigelow’s hangars.
While it’s unnerving to thing about Russian spy planes flying over America’s most sensitive research facilities, it turns out this flight was a completely routine part of the Open Skies Treaty, an agreement between the U.S., Russia, and 32 other nations which allows each state to conduct “short-notice, unarmed, reconnaissance flights over the others’ entire territories to collect data on military forces and activities.” These flights are conducted periodically in order to allow nations to keep tabs on each other’s activities – or at least let each other see what they want each other to see. Over the years since the Open Skies Treaty was ratified, Russia and the U.S. have both accused one another of breaking the terms of the treaty time and time again. American intelligence agencies recently conducted Open Skies flights over Russia in February 2019 just when it looked like the agreement would fall apart due to rising tensions between the two superpowers.
Area 51
If we allow Russia to fly over our most sensitive airspace and research installations, it makes you wonder what types of flights aren’t being sanctioned by treaties. How many anomalous aerial phenomena or sightings of unidentified flying vehicles over the years can be attributed to non-sanctioned surveillance flights? Could the recent “disclosures” of government UFO programs have anything to do with incursions into American airspace by advanced surveillance drones or other aircraft flown by rival superpowers or even non-state actors? While those questions remain unanswered, this incident shows above all else that there is much more spooky activity going on overhead than we know. Could the entire extraterrestrial angle be a psy-op to keep the public from freaking out about the Russians or anyone else flying aircraft or weapons over our heads?
A team of international astronauts spent six days in a pitch-black Sa Grutta cave system underneath Sardinia, Italy. When they emerged from the cave, they had a newly discovered species of a blind, colorless crustaceans with them.
"[It's] like walking in an underground wonderland," said NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, describing his experience underground in the Sa Grutta caves in Sardinia, Italy. Credit: ESA–V. Crobu
The cave-dwelling crustacean is the size of a fingernail (just 8 millimeters long) and is named Alpioniscus sideralis which is the Latin word for “stellar”. The astronauts found it running around in a pitch-black pool inside of the Italian cave.
Cave in Sardinia
The expedition was conducted in 2012 with astronaut trainees from the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, China, and Japan. When they noticed the tiny crustaceans in the small pond, they lured them out of the water by using liver and rotten cheese as bait.
The astronauts were training underground as part of the European Space Agency’s CAVES program. This training helps International Space Station candidates to perform research together while in dangerous subterranean environments.
Paolo Marcia, who is a zoologist from the University of Sassari, explained the expedition in a statement, “I would like to think that when humans land on Mars and explore its caves, this experience will help them to look for other species, knowing that life has few limits and can develop in the most inhospitable places.”
After studying the genetics of the Alpioniscus sideralis by using molecular analysis, it was confirmed that it doesn’t match up with the other species found around that region. The astronauts described their findings in a December 2018 study that was published in the journal ZooKeys which can be read here.
Sardinia
The Alpioniscus sideralis is a type of woodlice, which are very small crustaceans that left their watery habitat millions of years ago in order to colonize on land. However, with this new discovery, it appears as if the species went back to its original roots and is back living in the water – this time in a subterranean cave pool located in Sardinia.
You can see a picture of the Alpioniscus sideralis by clicking here.
This crustacean from the Alpioniscus species, just 8 millimeters long, was discovered in the Sa Grutta caves in Italy.
Credit: ESA–M. Fincke
It’s incredible to think that astronauts on a training exercise in a pitch-black cave ended up discovering a new species of crustaceans. Maybe they’ll find some unknown living creatures when they’re finally able to explore Mars.
This type of UFO has been seen in South America several times. When close to the craft it will appear as a bright orange light, too bright to make out any detail, but if its high enough in the sky, it can easily be mistaken as the sun during a sunset. This particular craft is flown by an alien species that is almost godlike. They came in hopes of preventing a horrible future for humanity and have constantly come back to abduct people and then teach them about how humanity has several possible endings looming very close in time. They hoped that they could change the future by teaching a few humans, but they were wrong. The humans they spoke to were too frightened and had no social power or important roles in which they could make those changes. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Rodríguez pointed out that while they were not far from the place where the UFO apparently landed, he preferred not to approach it. "I was happy to have recorded it and kept going. I wasn't too sure about going back and looking at something that could have an uncertain outcome."
Linda Moulton Howe: Why Are Insects Dying Out in Huge Numbers?
Linda Moulton Howe: Why Are Insects Dying Out in Huge Numbers?
COAST TO COAST AM. Linda Moulton Howe said insects are in a crisis around the world, dying out in huge, shocking numbers. A new report in the October 15, 2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that even in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, there has been a devastating loss of insect life.
She interviewed David Wagner, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Univ. of Connecticut, who cited how we are going through the sixth great extinction, and with climate change and increased droughts, we’ll see a major reduction in biodiversity.
“This Oct. 15th, 2018, PNAS report is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read.”
– David Wagner, Ph.D., Prof. of Ecology, Univ. of Connecticut.
“If all humankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
— Edward O Wilson, Ph.D., Prof. of Biology, Harvard University
Swallow Tail butterfly on an orange lantana flower. Image courtesy Pexels.com.
December 30, 2018 Storrs, Connecticut – A recent news headline from the School of Biological Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, says it all: “Two Degrees Decimated Puerto Rico’s Insect Populations.”
So, what is killing all those insects? Scientists think a lot of the damage is due to global warming. Here is one astonishing fact. The average temperature in northeastern Puerto Rico tropical forests since the 1970s has steadily climbed and is now 2 degrees Celsius warmer. That’s a climb of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Those sound like small numbers, but the fragile balance of nature on our planet lives within narrow temperature ranges. Biologists from Rensselaer decided to study insects in a place on Earth not much bothered by humans. They chose the Luquillo forest of northeastern Puerto Rico to see what was happening to the populations of winged insects called arthropods. Think of butterflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers, moths, spiders and beetles.
After a 2-year study, the findings were reported in the recent October 2018 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by lead biologist Brad Lister. He says: “The insect populations in the Luquillo forest of Puerto Rico are crashing — our results suggest that the effects of climate warming in tropical forests may be even greater than anticipated.” The crash is a nearly 60% decline in the number of arthropods in only the past four to five decades.
Luquillo experimental forest in northeastern Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest.
Prof. Lister warns that this severe decline in the Puerto Rico insects will be like dominoes falling for lizards, frogs and birds, who normally eat flying and other insects. Those amphibians and birds no longer have the abundant insect food supply they once had and their numbers are declining as well. And it is not only Puerto Rico. It’s happening from North America to Central and South America. And across the globe in Germany, flying insects there have declined 76%!
It’s as if the insects are now like the canary in the coal mine, sending us warnings that something is very wrong. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) has been warning of severe environmental threats to our entire planet if there is a 2- degrees Celsius elevation in average global temperature. Like some other tropical locations, the study area in the Luquillo forest, has already reached or exceeded a 2-degree Celsius average rise in temperature. And the study warns that the consequences are “potentially catastrophic.”
Upon reading the October Academy of Sciences report, I contacted Professor David Wagner in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut.
The “Replicator”: New 3D Printer Uses Rays of Light to Shape Objects, Transform Product Design
The “Replicator”: New 3D Printer Uses Rays of Light to Shape Objects, Transform Product Design
A new 3D printer uses light to transform gooey liquids into complex solid objects in only a matter of minutes.
Nicknamed the “replicator” by the inventors — after the Star Trek device that can materialize any object on demand — the 3D printer can create objects that are smoother, more flexible and more complex than what is possible with traditional 3D printers. It can also encase an already existing object with new materials — for instance, adding a handle to a metal screwdriver shaft — which current printers struggle to do.
Credit; UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally
The technology has the potential to transform how products from prosthetics to eyeglass lenses are designed and manufactured, the researchers say.
“I think this is a route to being able to mass-customize objects even more, whether they are prosthetics or running shoes,” said Hayden Taylor, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper describing the printer, which appears online today (Jan. 31) in the journal Science.
“The fact that you could take a metallic component or something from another manufacturing process and add on customizable geometry, I think that may change the way products are designed,” Taylor said.
UC Berkeley researchers used a new light-based 3D printing technique to add a handle onto a screwdriver shaft
UC Berkeley photo by Stephen McNally
Most 3D printers, including other light-based techniques, build up 3D objects layer by layer. This leads to a “stair-step” effect along the edges. They also have difficulties creating flexible objects because bendable materials could deform during the printing process, and supports are required to print objects of certain shapes, like arches.
The new printer relies on a viscous liquid that reacts to form a solid when exposed to a certain threshold of light. Projecting carefully crafted patterns of light — essentially “movies” — onto a rotating cylinder of liquid solidifies the desired shape “all at once.”
“Basically, you’ve got an off-the-shelf video projector, which I literally brought in from home, and then you plug it into a laptop and use it to project a series of computed images, while a motor turns a cylinder that has a 3D printing resin in it,” Taylor said. “Obviously there are a lot of subtleties to it — how you formulate the resin, and, above all, how you compute the images that are going to be projected, but the barrier to creating a very simple version of this tool is not that high.”
Taylor and the team used the printer to create a series of objects, from a tiny model of Rodin’s “The Thinker” statue to a customized jawbone model. Currently, they can make objects up to four inches in diameter.
“This is the first case where we don’t need to build up custom 3D parts layer by layer,” said Brett Kelly, co-first author on the paper who completed the work while a graduate student working jointly at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “It makes 3D printing truly three-dimensional.”
The 3D printer works by shining changing patterns of light through a rotating vial of liquid. A computer algorithm calculates the exact patterns of light needed to shape a specific object.
UC Berkeley photo by Hayden Taylor
A CT scan — in reverse
The new printer was inspired by the computed tomography (CT) scans that can help doctors locate tumors and fractures within the body.
CT scans project X-rays or other types of electromagnetic radiation into the body from all different angles. Analyzing the patterns of transmitted energy reveals the geometry of the object.
“Essentially we reversed that principle,” Taylor said. “We are trying to create an object rather than measure an object, but actually a lot of the underlying theory that enables us to do this can be translated from the theory that underlies computed tomography.”
Besides patterning the light, which requires complex calculations to get the exact shapes and intensities right, the other major challenge faced by the researchers was how to formulate a material that stays liquid when exposed to a little bit of light, but reacts to form a solid when exposed to a lot of light.
“The liquid that you don’t want to cure is certainly having rays of light pass through it, so there needs to be a threshold of light exposure for this transition from liquid to solid,” Taylor said.
The researchers formulated a thick, syrupy liquid that hardens into a solid when exposed to a certain threshold of light.
UC Berkeley photo by Stephen McNally
The 3D printing resin is composed of liquid polymers mixed with photosensitive molecules and dissolved oxygen. Light activates the photosensitive compound which depletes the oxygen. Only in those 3D regions where all the oxygen has been used up do the polymers form the “cross-links” that transform the resin from a liquid to a solid. Unused resin can be recycled by heating it up in an oxygen atmosphere, Taylor said.
“Our technique generates almost no material waste and the uncured material is 100 percent reusable,” said Hossein Heidari, a graduate student in Taylor’s lab at UC Berkeley and co-first author of the work. “This is another advantage that comes with support-free 3D printing.”
The objects also don’t have to be transparent. The researchers printed objects that appear to be opaque using a dye that transmits light at the curing wavelength but absorbs most other wavelengths.
“This is particularly satisfying for me, because it creates a new framework of volumetric or ‘all-at-once’ 3D printing that we have begun to establish over the recent years,” said Maxim Shusteff, a staff engineer at the Livermore lab. “We hope this will open the way for many other researchers to explore this exciting technology area.”
Indrasen Bhattacharya of UC Berkeley is co-first author of the work. Other authors include Christopher M. Spadaccini of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
This work was supported by UC Berkeley faculty startup funds and by Laboratory-Directed Research and Development funds from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The team has filed a patent application on the technique.
The history of UFOs and encounters with other-worldly beings includes events from all over the world. Russia — formerly the Soviet Union — has a major part of that history. Its story is dramatic, at times chilling, and always provocative.
Richard Dolan is one of the world’s leading researchers and writers on the subject of UFOs and believes that they constitute the greatest mystery of our time.
He is the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and the National Security State, both ground-breaking works which together provide the most factually complete and accessible narrative of the UFO subject available anywhere.
He also co-authored a speculative book about the future, A.D. After Disclosure, the first-ever analysis not only of how UFO secrecy might end, but of the all-important question: what happens next?
More than 50 years after it happened, The Falcon Lake UFO incident remains one of the most compelling close encounter cases on record, and yet, compared to cases like Roswell or Rendlesham Forest, for example, it has maintained a relatively low profile. This is curious, given the reams of official documentation of the event, physical evidence in the form of strange metals found at the sight, and the fact that the witness suffered almost-fatal injuries as a result of coming into direct contact with a structured craft of unknown origin.
In a new book, published through my August Night imprint, noted UFO researcher Chris Rutkowski opens his vault of documents and images, gathered over several decades of inquiry, and presents a comprehensive picture of the Falcon Lake UFO incident. The book, When They Appeared, is co-authored by Stan Michalak, son of the original witness, who provides his inside perspective of what was happening in the Michalak home immediately following his father’s extraordinary encounter, documenting the daily struggles of his family as they dealt with his father’s injuries and the endless stream of investigators and media. Released after years of planning, When They Appeared is a sober and meticulous deconstruction of an event that presents a serious challenge to any true skeptic. Here, Chris and Stan talk to me about the Falcon Lake case, how it affected the Michalak family, and why it remains so important.
Chris Rutkowski (left), Stan Michalak (right), and the sketch of the craft drawn by Stan’s father, Stefan.
RG [to Chris]: Describe Stefan Michalak’s encounter in a nutshell and what sets it apart from so many other alleged close encounter cases.
CR: In May, 1967, Stefan Michalak was enjoying his hobby as a rockhound in Whiteshell Provincial Park, just north of Falcon Lake, Manitoba, Canada. Shortly after noon, his attention was drawn to two disc-shaped objects high in the sky. They both descended, and one dropped down to land or hover just above a flat rock outcropping not far from Michalak. He crouched behind a boulder and bushes so as not to be seen, and observed the craft for about half an hour. During this time, Michalak sketched the object in detail, noting it was a metallic craft of some kind, about 35 feet in diameter and about 12 feet high, with a domelike section on top from which bright purple light was emanating. Michalak said he could hear a whooshing sound as if air was being expelled or taken in, and there was a smell like burning electrical circuitry.
As he watched, a small door opened in the side of the craft, and light poured out from the opening as well. More importantly, Michalak now heard sounds like high-pitched voices, leading him to believe the craft was occupied. Convinced it was a secret American experimental vehicle that had encountered engine trouble, Michalak stood up and bravely walked towards the UFO, calling out jovially: “Come on out, Yankee boys! I can help fix your broken down flying machine!” By the time Michalak reached the craft, the voices had stopped, but he touched the side of the craft with his rubberized glove, which melted. The door shut, the craft revolved, and facing him was an exhaust vent of some kind. Suddenly, hot gas blasted out of it, knocking Michalak to the ground and setting fire to dry leaves, pine needles, and Michalak himself. He managed to extinguish the flaming result, but he realized he needed medical attention so he headed back home. He was treated in hospital for second degree burns and released, but then told his story to media in an attempt to warn others to stay away from that area or suffer the same fate.
Stefan Michalak following his close encounter with a landed craft at Falcon Lake. The burns on his chest and abdomen are clearly visible, their formation matching his description of what he speculated may have been exhaust vents on the craft, which expelled a blast of hot gas at him at close range, setting his shirt alight.
The incident was investigated by local UFO investigators, but more importantly, by several official agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and even Canada’s own nuclear research facility. The latter was because soil samples collected by the RCAF were found to be radioactive, as were strange pieces of metal found a year later at the site. The case was also investigated by representatives from the Condon Committee and was included in the infamous Condon Report. Besides being a close encounter case with physical evidence, the case is remarkable because many official documents have been available or found by researchers, including medical records, RCMP documents, interview files, and analyses of the soil and metal samples. All in all, there are hundreds of pages of documents detailing the great lengths to which two countries’ investigative agencies went in studying the incident.
A piece of the radioactive metal that was retrieved from the crash site in 1968. It was found in the cracks of the Precambrian rock. (Chris Rutkowski).
RG: [to Stan]: Your father’s experience affected him for the rest of his life, but it affected your family too. How did you cope with it? How did you manage to integrate and assimilate your father’s experience into the relative normality of your everyday existence?
SM: At the beginning, we were most concerned for his health. In a matter of two weeks, he had dropped twenty pounds and was having difficulty keeping food down or eating anything that was solid. It took almost a month before he was able to enjoy real food. His weight gradually returned to about 160 to 170 pounds. His burns had healed, but the spots on the lower abdomen remained for quite a while longer, resolving into round, red welts which healed as scar tissue – so he always had hard nuggets under his skin, even after many years. His nausea and blackouts continued for a time as well.
Chris Rutkowski (left) and Stan Michalak (right) visit the remote site of the Falcon Lake UFO incident in May, 2017.
As a family, we were very aware of what he was experiencing. My sister was so heavily involved in her university education and working most evenings, that she was seldom at home during the day. My brother was also in university, and studying hard, but he became our “gate guardian” to keep away the ever-present media. I did my best to not be underfoot, to respect my father’s quiet time, and not be a bother.
It was my mother who bore the brunt of it, and kept a grip on her family, that is to say on her children, but she was also an excellent nurse while my father recovered. Any investigators who came to our home, like RCMP or RCAF, were looked after by my mother; she always offered refreshments and treats to anyone who was considered an official guest. Outside the home, she maintained an air of self-assurance even though she was constantly watchful of the media, and careful what she said to anyone about what had happened. It’s not as though she was trying to keep a secret, she just preferred not to have to explain all of it to just anyone. Not to mention the fact that her English was poor, and she was self-conscious of that.
Once he was fit to return to work, our family life didn’t actually change too much. There was never a time when we felt like celebrities. This was a difficult story that came with injury and a measure of disbelief, so there was no joy in it, only concern. I was bullied in school for it and, of course, there were constant reminders from those who were skeptical and rather mean about it. It took a few years to calm down to the point where no one seemed to care enough about the story. Only then were we able to resume a relatively normal life without the constant reminder that we were the family of that odd man who was burned by the UFO.
RG: [to Chris]: Was the Falcon Lake encounter an isolated incident, or did it fit into broader UFO activity at the time, regionally or nationally?
CR: In addition to Michalak’s experience, there had been several UFO reports in the Whiteshell area around that time, suggesting it was part of a localized flap or wave. But UFO reports found in the Canadian National Archives show that the Falcon Lake case was pivotal in its influence and connection with other incidents in Canada in 1967, including other unexplained reports investigated by official agencies, not the least of which was the first report of a crop circle that was investigated by no less than the Royal Canadian Air Force itself! And at the time, there were even unexplained radar cases at military installations within a short distance of Falcon Lake.
Falcon Lake.
RG: [to Stan]: What was your father’s opinion on the possible origin of the craft?
SM: Dad had no idea at all what it was that he saw in the woods that day. His first thought was that it was a test craft, something top secret, likely from the United States. He was an industrial mechanic, on his way to becoming a millwright, so he had knowledge of machines, fit and finish, metal construction, and metallurgy. He did not have a good foundation in things like propulsion systems, aero engines, nuclear power, or any of the things one normally associates with aircraft technology. So, he was perplexed when he considered that the two craft he saw did not fit into the basic fundamentals of terrestrial flight – the things that most people take for granted – such as the screeching sounds made by jet engines, the roar of exhaust as planes take off, the powerful whine of turbo engines, or the rumble of piston power. The very idea of Newtonian principles of flight were lost on him. He never researched the possibilities (at a time, remember, when that would have meant looking things up in books at the library, and not online, as we can do today) or tried to rationalize what he saw.
He was, however, a relatively naïve man. He had been a military policeman in Poland before World War II, then went underground to fight with the partisans after the country was defeated by the Nazis. So, he was not an ignorant nor overly fearful man. He had enough experiences in his time in war-torn Europe, and ten years of trying to settle in Canada, to give him some accurate perspective. But when faced with something he truly did not understand, he would often take the word of the first person who professed to know something about it. He had learned early in life to find an expert in something he needed to know to get information that way. Unfortunately, the so-called experts who lined up to talk with him immediately declared that this UFO was extra-terrestrial – and they gave him sound explanations for their theories, so he began to see the possibilities that these craft could not have come from the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. As an example, he claimed the UFOs made no noises that he recognized when they flew – nothing typical of an earth-bound aircraft. Well, argued the experts, if the sound the craft made did not follow any typical examples, they simply had to be from beyond our planet – it was only logical. He would entertain arguments from skeptics who claimed that the blast of air that hit him and caused his injuries was simply too terrestrial in nature, and could not have come from an other-world craft. So, he was confused – which was the correct answer?
When asked what he thought he saw, he would often answer, “You tell me.”
Stefan Michalak’s sketch of the UFO he witnessed.
RG: [to both]: What are your personal thoughts on the nature of the craft that Stefan saw?
CR: This case is one of the last true “nuts and bolts” UFO reports in ufology. There was no suggestion of exotic concepts more popular today, such as dimensional portals, consciousness downloads, telepathy, etc. Michalak was a very pragmatic and “down to earth” man (pun intended), with no interest in paranormal or spiritual aspects of phenomena. He was convinced he had seen and touched a physical craft of some sort. We know that that this time period was the cusp of the American Apollo space program, it makes sense that Michalak would have thought in those terms, especially given his own military background. But since we know that nothing resembling such a saucer-shaped craft had been successfully flown by any country (then or now), we are left with a mystery. Michalak was not one to make up stories or fabricate a hoax, and he had too much respect for fellow military members to lie, especially since he had nothing to gain and did not seek money or notoriety.
SM: I have always been an aviation enthusiast. In my latter years, I became very knowledgeable, and have extensively researched what was happening around the world in aviation technology in the 1950s and 1960s. I have found nothing concrete in our development of air or space craft that explains what he saw that day, yet, not having seen the UFOs for myself, I can’t explain his sighting any more than he could. So, does logic dictate that if I can’t explain it, but I know it was seen and experienced, then it must be other-worldly?
Simply exploring basic physics, something that can be done these days in a matter of a few hours online, provides a lot of insight into what this craft could not be. We know that there was a lot of theoretical research being done into propulsion systems back in the 1960s, and that there are still ongoing studies that speculate on what it would take to power a craft like the one my father saw. So far, nothing has come of it. Once again, it leaves us with the extra-terrestrial explanation as the only logical answer. If we had such technology in 1967, why strap three men into a tiny capsule on the top of a massive rocket in order to get them to the moon, when one could do the job with whatever made the UFOs work – assuming, of course, that they were of American origin?
A grid of dots can be seen on Stefan Michalak’s burned shirt.
I am inclined to believe that what landed on that rocky outcrop was not of this world. We have tried to offer terrestrial explanations for its behaviour because we don’t have any reference for anything other than what we presently know. That doesn’t give us actual answers, just theories based on limited knowledge. The biggest problem with this case, as far as I’m concerned, is that, like my father, I have relied on experts to give me answers when I needed to solve complex problems or understand complicated issues. To date, there really aren’t any experts in this field, just a lot of smart people with theories. I believe the case will remain “unexplained” until it isn’t – and by then, we will have solved bigger issues on this planet than simply who may have paid us a visit 50 years ago.
RG: [to Chris]: What was/is the Canadian government’s official explanation for the Falcon Lake incident?
CR: I will defer to the RCAF, which noted in a report: “Neither the DND nor the RCMP investigation teams were able to provide evidence which could dispute Mr. Michalak’s story. Although the investigation has been completed, a satisfactory explanation or conclusion is still lacking.”
When They Appeared is available now from all good online bookstores.
On March 19, 2019, a strange aerial object that appeared to be falling from the sky while emitting some sort of smoke trail was recorded by a man in Anchorage, Alaska. After he submitted it to a local TV news outlet, the video quickly received national and worldwide attention and tons of speculation as to what it might be. Those suggesting a conventional aircraft were stunned when both the US Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration weighed in with official statements saying they had no idea what the object might be, but it definitely didn’t belong to the US military nor any US commercial airlines. After a full week, there is still no answer nor explanation. What was it?
“What is that?” “I don’t know what that is. I hope it’s not a plane.” “It’s definitely not sky writing, that’s for damn sure. It’s like something …” “It’s going straight down. … Now there’s some fire on the end of it. You see it?” “Uh huh.” “I’m going to get close. It looks like a plane dropping. I hope not.”
That worried conversation between two people comes from the cellphone video taken by one of the voices – Adonus Baugh, an 18-year-old who was just pulling away from his house with his mother, the other voice in the video, when he saw the anomaly in the sky. They were able to pull over and record it for about 40 seconds. When he turned it over to KTVA, the CBS affiliate in Anchorage, he said at first “I thought it was a meteor or something coming into the atmosphere.” Based on his comments, neither he nor his mother were able to identify it. (Watch the video and see the photos here).
There’s plenty to see in the Alaskan sky that’s strange
After reporting on the sighting, KTVA was contacted by a third witness, Bebe Kang, who took two photographs of the smoking object at about the same time (8:23 pm) and posted them briefly on Facebook with a comment:
“It didn’t look like an airplane or one of those jets. It was big, super slow and RED!! I tried to get a video but it got further and smaller. I really just thought it might be an asteroid”
She later took them down because “I didn’t want people to think I was seeing aliens.”
KTVA contacted Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a combined Air Force and Army base in Anchorage that is home to F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, C-130 Hercules and C-17 Globemaster III transports, E-3 Sentry AWACS command jets, Alaskan Command (ALCOM), Alaskan NORAD Region (ANR), Joint Task Force-Alaska (JTF-AK), Eleventh Air Force (11 AF), the 673d Air Base Wing, the 3rd Wing, the 176th Wing and other units. If anyone should know what the object in the video is, it should be them. Right?
“That doesn’t look like any of our planes.”
Base spokesperson Erin Eaton declined to speculate one what or whose it might be and has issued no further reports. Suspicious? A cover-up? KTVA also contacted Federal Aviation Administration officials, who said the object was not an aircraft and they had no reports of any planes reporting problems on the evening of March 19. Despite the Air Force and FAA denials, Peter Davidson, the director of the Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center, told KTVA it was “a high-altitude jet airliner, with a contrail behind it.”
“It is in level flight, but because it is flying away from the camera, it appears to be ‘falling’. It is not, but parallax makes it look that way.”
“Parallax” is the photographic effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions. That could certainly be true and comments on various web sites seem to agree that the object looks more like a plane and contrail illuminated by late-evening reddish sunlight.
Are any of these from UFOs … or all of them?
EXCEPT… the Air Force and the FAA have no records of any planes in that particular spot in the Anchorage sky on March 19. Officially, at least. Since the intial report by KTVA, there seems to have been no further official investigations, speculations or conversations. Perhaps they’re afraid that …
“I didn’t want people to think I was seeing aliens.”
UFO Caught In Photo During Selfie In New Mexico, March 24, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Caught In Photo During Selfie In New Mexico, March 24, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 24, 2019
Location of sighting: Rio Rancho, New Mexico, USA
Source: MUFON #99416
A person was taking photos with friends in New Mexico last week when an metallic object flew past in the back ground. The UFO was caught in just one photo, but it was enough. It looks as if she was taking Instagram photos or photos for some other social sharing network when they accidentally caught this alien craft.
When I made a close up photo of the UFO I didn't see any wings, propellers, windows, to indicate it was a plane or jet. It was in only one photo which means its not a balloon, because it moves too fast. It is possible that a UFO was deliberately flying overhead to scan the these people when they were out taking photos. If this was a alien drone, which can be as small as 1 meter to softball size, then it was there for pure research gathering reasons.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Shiny metal with green violet and blue lights around it and a dark spot on top of it.
How can we get an inkling of what existed before our universe began? Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggest a way.
Artist’s concept showing the patterns of signals generated by primordial standard clocks in different theories of the primordial universe. Top: Big Bounce. Bottom: Inflation.
Can we get an inkling of what existed before our universe began? Some theories suggest that, before the Big Bang, whatever existed was contracting, rather than expanding, as our universe is today. Perhaps what was contracting was an earlier universe, for example. If so, what we perceive as a Big Bang was actually a part of aBig Bounce. But a popular theory of our universe, called theinflation theory, doesn’t call for the idea of a previously contracting universe.
So what if inflation theory could be proven false? If so, the door would open to other theories, some of which do suggest a state of contraction before our universe began. If inflation theory could be proven false, we’d have some potential to probe – via these other theories – the universe before the Big Bang.
Now a team of scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has laid out a method that might be used to falsify inflation experimentally. The study will appear in the physics journal Physical Review Letters as an Editors’ Suggestion.
Let’s start from the beginning here … literally. Inflation is the theory that speaks of a time immediately after the Big Bang. It describes a universe that dramatically expanded in size for a fleeting fraction of a second. Inflation theory solves some important mysteries about the structure and evolution of our universe. But, according to the CfA scientists, other very different theories – including those that do allow for a previously contracting universe and a Big Bounce – can also explain these mysteries. These scientists said in a statement:
To help decide between inflation and these other ideas, the issue of falsifiability – that is, whether a theory can be tested to potentially show it is false – has inevitably arisen.
Some researchers, including Avi Loeb of CfA – who is a part of the new study – had previously raised concerns about inflation, on the grounds that it was difficult, if not impossible, to falsify. Loeb said:
Falsifiability should be a hallmark of any scientific theory. The current situation for inflation is that it’s such a flexible idea, it cannot be falsified experimentally. No matter what value people measure for some observable attribute, there are always some models of inflation that can explain it.
A team of scientists led by the CfA’s Xingang Chen, along with Loeb, and Zhong-Zhi Xianyu of the Physics Department of Harvard University, have applied an idea they call a primordial standard clock to the non-inflationary theories, and laid out a method that may be used to falsify inflation experimentally.
In an effort to find some characteristic that can separate inflation from other theories, the team began by identifying the defining property of the various theories – the evolution of the size of the primordial universe. Xianyu said:
For example, during inflation, the size of the universe grows exponentially. In some alternative theories, the size of the universe contracts. Some do it very slowly, while others do it very fast.
The attributes people have proposed so far to measure usually have trouble distinguishing between the different theories because they are not directly related to the evolution of the size of the primordial universe.
So, we wanted to find what the observable attributes are that can be directly linked to that defining property.
According to these scientists, the signals generated by the primordial standard clock can serve such a purpose. They explained:
That clock is any type of heavy elementary particle in the primordial universe. Such particles should exist in any theory and their positions should oscillate at some regular frequency, much like the ticking of a clock’s pendulum.
The primordial universe was not entirely uniform. There were tiny irregularities in density on minuscule scales that became the seeds of the large-scale structure observed in today’s universe. This is the primary source of information physicists rely on to learn about what happened before the Big Bang.
The ticks of the standard clock generated signals that were imprinted into the structure of those irregularities. Standard clocks in different theories of the primordial universe predict different patterns of signals, because the evolutionary histories of the universe are different.
Chen said:
If we imagine all of the information we learned so far about what happened before the Big Bang is in a roll of film frames, then the standard clock tells us how these frames should be played. Without any clock information, we don’t know if the film should be played forward or backward, fast or slow, just like we are not sure if the primordial universe was inflating or contracting, and how fast it did so. This is where the problem lies. The standard clock put time stamps on each of these frames when the film was shot before the Big Bang, and tells us how to play the film.
The team calculated how these standard clock signals should look in non-inflationary theories, and suggested how they should be searched for in astrophysical observations. Co-author Xianyu said:
If a pattern of signals representing a contracting universe were found, it would falsify the entire inflationary theory.
Chen added that the success of this idea lies with experimentation. He said:
These signals will be very subtle to detect, and so we may have to search in many different places. The cosmic microwave background radiation is one such place, and the distribution of galaxies is another. We have already started to search for these signals and there are some interesting candidates already …
As always, they said, more observational data is needed to bear out these theoretical ideas.
Bottom line: We don’t know what happened before the Big Bang, but some cosmological theories suggest a contraction prior to it. Perhaps an earlier universe was contracting. Unfortunately, the most popular cosmological theory of today – inflation theory – doesn’t call for this idea. Now scientists at CfA have devised a way that inflation theory might be falsified. If it were falsified, the door would be open to some of the other theories that hint at a pre-Big-Bang contraction.
A Strange Harvest (1980): Creepy documentary about aliens and cattle mutilation
A Strange Harvest (1980): Creepy documentary about aliens and cattle mutilation
A Strange Harvest (1980) is a documentary about unexplained cattle mutilations that were widespread in the American West in the 1970s and 1980s. (From a Wikipedia article on cattle mutilation: "A 1979 FBI report indicated that, according to investigations by the New Mexico State Police, there had been an estimated 8,000 mutilations in Colorado, causing approximately $1,000,000 damage.") Many instances of cattle mutilations can be attributed to predation, but others appear to be the result of unexplained human activity.
This well-made documentary, which runs about 1.5 hours, is a masterpiece of low-budget creepiness. The synthesizer soundtrack is ominous and weird, and the cinematography is hallucinatory. I don't buy the argument that space aliens are responsible, but it's still a compelling movie.
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Pre-Columbian Amazon Was Not So Virgin After All
Pre-Columbian Amazon Was Not So Virgin After All
Archaeologists are discovering that the Amazon region was not a pristine place before European contact. In fact, a new study suggests that there was quite a large population living there. What evidence can we see for their villages today? The outlines of their settlements and a few hardy artifacts.
Just over a year ago, large geometric earthworks (geoglyphs) in the southwestern Amazon made international headlines as both an unexpected discovery and for the resemblance of some sites to the famed Stonehenge. They are estimated to be at least 2,000 years old.
Called the Geoglyphs of Acre because most of them are located in the Brazilian State of Acre, nearly 500 locations were identified. They come in various shapes: squares, circles, U-forms, ellipses, and octagons; but researchers believe that they all enhanced the connection between humans and nature. Their very existence shows that humans were in the Amazon much earlier than once believed – although the impact they had certainly is nothing compared to the levels of destruction seen today.
Examples of geoglyphs and mounded ring villages in the Amazon: a. LiDAR digital terrain model of the Jacó Sá site. b. Aerial photo of one of the structures at Jacó Sá site. c. Aerial photo of Fonte Boa site. (CNPq research group Geoglyphs of Western Amazonia/ Denise Schaan )
Now there is mounting evidence that humans ventured into other parts of the Amazon as well. The Chicago Tribune reports that 81 geoglyphs have been found in the upper Tapajós Basin, a “transitional zone” where Brazil borders Bolivia. This area receives less rainfall than lower regions and is also called terra firme. It is a place that rarely floods and a location which archaeologists have largely ignored in favor of more fertile regions closer to large rivers.
Jonas De Souza of the University of Exeter, UK collaborated with other scientists Britain and Brazil to explore a terra firme region which has been forgotten, despite being bordered on the east and west with archaeological sites. According to The Guardian , the new sites were first noted in deforested areas by satellite imagery.
The newly identified earthworks show signs of ditch enclosures, sunken roadways, and earth platforms and vary from small 30 meter (98.43 ft.) wide villages to immense 19-hectare settlements.
The possibility was too exciting to leave at satellite image analysis, so researchers set off to explore 24 of the sites on the ground. De Souza told The Guardian, “Everything that we identified on satellite imagery that we tested was an archeological site.” The results published in Nature Communications shows that the trip was worthwhile. The authors write :
“The results of our predictive model of ditched enclosures show that, despite the enormous distances covered, earthworks are found across areas of notable environmental similarity, with pronounced seasonality in rainfall and temperature […] The seasonal drought of the transitional forests of this region probably facilitated clearance for the construction of earthworks. The easy-to-clear vegetation and the more fertile/less weathered soils of seasonally-dry forests are factors that made them attractive to Pre-Columbian farmers.”
De Souza said that the team found artifacts such as ceramics and polished stone axes, and also dark fertile earth which comes with extended human habitation. No buildings have been detected, but that’s not surprising because they were probably made of wood. Charcoal found near the ceramics at the sites has been carbon dated to 1410 - 1460 AD, in line with sites in the southern part of the Amazon, which were most active between 1250 and 1500.
One of the most startling results of the research is the claim based on models that 500,000 to a million people were living in that part of the Amazon and they may have built some 1,000 to 1,500 enclosures! De Souza clarified , “It's probably the case that some areas of the Amazon were sustaining large populations and others were not. Because there is so little research, we are slowly discovering what was happening in each.”
That large of a population would have certainly meant modification to the rainforest, but de Souza pointed out ,
“The forest is an artifact of modification. It has nothing to do with the kind of practice we are seeing nowadays - large-scale, clearing monoculture. These people were combining small-scale agriculture with management of useful tree species. So it was more a sustainable kind of land use.”
Amazon Rainforest, Brazil. (Ben Sutherland/Darren and Sandy Van Soye/ CC BY NC SA 2.0 )
Although the numbers may appear high at first, they seem to fit with accounts given by the first Europeans who entered the Amazon. Those reports were mostly discredited by historians as fantasy. Now archaeological evidence is giving the early travelers some support.
But the European arrival meant devastation for many of the settlements, as de Souza said , “We know that diseases travelled much faster than people and probably this population was already weakened by diseases brought by Europeans even before the Europeans set foot on the area.”
Top Image: Archaeologists used satellite imagery to find archaeological sites in the Amazon’s upper Tapajós Basin. Source: University of Exeter/PA
The supposed alienUFO was seen on March 6 this year over the German capital city. Popular UFO-hunter Scott C Waring said he came across the UFO photos on the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). The conspiracy theorist, who runs the website UFO Sightings Daily, bizarrely said UFOs have been appearing over airports in great numbers in recent years. He now shared the unusual sighting in a bid to raise awareness of the issue.
UFO sighting: The picture was snapped on March 6 this year in Berlin
(Image: SCOTT WARING)
UFO sighting: Mr Waring believes this was a UFO over Germany
(Image: SCOTT WARING)
“Then this UFO is 30 percent the diameter of the jet, making the UFO 22.89m across.
“Notice how the UFO takes on the colour of the sky behind it?
“The ship’s outer hull reflects the colours around it.”
However, what is more likely is Mr Waring fell for the effects of a peculiar psychological trick known as pareidolia.
Pareidolia causes people to see shapes, faces and patterns where they do not exist, often leading to claims of UFOs and aliens.
Dr Steven Novella explained the phenomenon in his book The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.
He wrote: “Your brain connects the dots. It’s amazing how few details are needed to suggest a face, and even an emotional expression, to our pattern-seeking brains.
“Even as little as a couple dots for eyes and some kind of line for a mouth is enough for our brains to see Elvis or the Pope.”
August 25, 1951 was a quiet summer night in Lubbock, Texas. That evening, a handful of scientists from Texas Technical College were hanging out in the backyard of geology professor Dr. W.I. Robinson, drinking tea and chatting about micrometeorites. It was quite the brain trust: chemical engineering professor Dr. A. G. Oberg, physics professor Dr. George and Dr. W. L. Ducker, head of the petroleum-engineering department.
Which made the story of what they witnessed that night all the more curious.
“If a group had been hand-picked to observe a UFO, we couldn’t have picked a more technically qualified group of people,” wrote U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt later in his definitive 1956 casebook, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.In the early 1950s Ruppelt served as lead investigator for Project Blue Book, the official Air Force investigations into UFO sightings, after working on its precursor effort, Project Grudge.
The Lubbock Lights, photographed by 19-year old Carl Hart, Jr. on August 30, 1951 in Lubbock, Texas.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Sightings of the blue-green lights kept growing
Around 9:20 p.m., the university colleagues saw something otherworldly in the expansive Texas sky: a V-shaped formation of 15 to 30 blueish-green lights passing overhead. Stunned, but still using their trained scientific reasoning, they figured the lights would reappear. And they did, about an hour later, in a more haphazard formation. The scientists were all in agreement: They had witnessed something fantastic—but what was it?
The professors weren’t the only credible witnesses to the mysterious blue-green lights that night. At dusk, in Albuquerque, New Mexico (about 350 miles away from Lubbock), an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission’s top-secret Sandia Corporation—a man with a high-level “Q” security clearance—had been sitting outside with his wife. According to Ruppelt:
They were gazing at the night sky, commenting on how beautiful it was when both of them were startled at the sight of a huge airplane flying swiftly and silently over their home… On the aft edge of the wings, there were six to eight pairs of soft, glowing, bluish lights.
Edward Ruppelt oversaw Project Blue Book for the U.S. Air Force, a program that monitored and investigated UFO reports.
Everett
An hour or so after, according to a retired rancher from Lubbock, his wife had seen something terrifying in the night sky. Ruppelt described it this way:
Just after dark, his wife had gone outdoors to take some sheets off the clothesline. He was inside the house reading the paper. Suddenly his wife had rushed into the house…“as white as the sheets she was carrying.” The reason his wife was so upset was that she had seen a large object glide swiftly and silently over the house. She said it looked like “an airplane without a body.” On the back edge of the wing were pairs of glowing bluish lights.
By the time Ruppelt flew into Lubbock to investigate the sightings in late September, hundreds of residents had seen the lights over a period of two weeks.
But not everyone had waited for the government to start looking into the matter. After alerting local papers like the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the Texas Tech professors started their own informal investigation. In the weeks after their initial August 25sighting, they and their friends observed the lights 12 more times. They measured the lights’ angles, roughly calculated their speed and noted that they always traveled from north to south. Armed with walkie-talkies, the scientist-sleuths and their friends formed two teams and attempted to measure the UFO’s altitude, with little success.
As the days went on, more and more Lubbock residents claimed to have seen the lights. And when the professors cross-checked these reports against what they themselves had seen and recorded, many of the facts lined up, Ruppelt wrote. Of course, few if any had recorded the phenomena with the same level of detail as the professors.
But while many observers offered incomplete or poorly expressed recollections, there’s little doubt that whatever people were seeing was something real. UFO sightings are usually one-off events, but these blue-green lights were observed multiple times, by hundreds of people.
Plus, for many, there was physical proof: black-and-white photos taken by a Texas Tech freshman named Carl Hart, Jr. On August 31—the same night an Air Force wife and her daughter claimed to have seen a UFO while driving northwest from Matador, Texas, to Lubbock—Hart was keeping vigil in his bedroom, looking out for the infamous lights. According to Ruppelt:
It was a warm night and his bed was pushed over next to an open window. He was looking out at the clear night sky, and had been in bed about a half hour, when he saw a formation of the lights appear in the north… cross an open patch of sky, and disappear over his house. Knowing that the lights might reappear as they had done in the past, he grabbed his loaded Kodak 35, set the lens and shutter at f 3.5 and one-tenth of a second, and went out into the middle of the backyard. Before long, his vigil was rewarded when the lights made a second pass. He got two pictures. A third formation went over a few minutes later, and he got three more pictures.
These hotly debated images, which show a cluster of dim lights in a V-formation moving through the night sky, are the only visual representation of what hundreds were now claiming they saw.
Captain Edward Ruppelt, standing between the two seated men, with other officers of the U.S. Air Force at a 1952 news conference where they announced the installment of more than 200 cameras in attempts to obtain data on the unidentified flying objects reported from various parts of the nation.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Was it birds? Or planes? The government's investigator goes coy
As Ruppelt began his formal investigation, he found that the lights had affected all who saw them, including a hardened old man from Lamesa, who had witnessed them with his wife. “He broke off his story of the lights and launched into his background as a native Texan, with range wars, Indians and stagecoaches under his belt,” Ruppelt recalled of their interview session. “What he was trying to point out was that despite the range wars, Indians and stagecoaches, he had been scared. His wife had been scared, too.”
The old Lamesa man had suggested that the lights were actually plover birds, a theory to which Ruppelt would lend some credence. But just like many people Ruppelt interviewed, the old man admitted he and his wife had been looking for the lights after reading about them in the paper. This was a common thread tying together many of the witnesses. “One point of interest was that very few claimed to have seen the lights before reading the professors’ story in the paper,” Ruppelt wrote. “But this could get back to the old question, ‘Do people look up if they have no reason to do so?’”
So, what exactly did all these people witness? In The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt—by all accounts an honorable and fair man who oversaw what many describe as the “golden age” of the government’s official UFO investigations—offers a strangely evasive explanation:
I thought that the professors’ lights might have been some kind of birds reflecting the light from mercury-vapor street lights, but I was wrong. They weren’t birds, they weren’t refracted light, but they weren’t spaceships. The lights that the professors saw…have been positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon…I can’t divulge exactly the way the answer was found because it is an interesting story of how a scientist set up complete instrumentation to track down the lights. Telling the story would lead to his identity and, in exchange for his story, I promised the man complete anonymity... With the most important phase of the Lubbock Lights “solved”—the sightings by the professors—the other phases become only good UFO reports.
And so, the mystery of the Lubbock Lights remains unsolved.
“The Lubbock Lights incident persists in the memory of many older citizens, and to this day captivates researchers from across the country,” Dr. Monte L. Monroe, Southwest collection archivist at Texas Tech University told Texas Highways Magazine. “Mention the event, and everyone has an opinion. Some believe the bright, semicircular, so-called ‘string of beads’ crossed the sky at great speed, high in the stratosphere. Few agree with the streetlight-illuminated, migratory duck-bellies theory ventured at the time by skeptics or in the Air Force report.”
According to Monroe, the professors and other witnesses—tired of explaining themselves and what they saw—almost totally ceased giving interviews by the 1970s. In a rare informal interview, more than 40 years after the sightings, Carl Hart, Jr. reportedly told author and UFO researcher Kevin D. Randle he still had no idea what he had photographed that pleasant August night many moons ago. But like hundreds of others witnesses in and around Lubbock that strange Texas summer, he saw something he would never forget.
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NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge that kicked off in 2015 has challenged teams around the U.S. to render, prove the structural integrity, and construct a model of a habitat that could one day shelter humans on the surface of the Moon or even Mars.
And yesterday, NASA crowned the top three winners of the Challenge’s latest round, challenging the participating teams to “complete a virtual construction level.” The top three teams, which split a prize of $100,000, hail from New York, Arkansas, and New Haven — and their designs are bold visions of off-world habitation.
First Place
The winner of this round of the Challenge is team SEArch+/Apis Cor for a vertical habitat design that can be continuously reinforced with additional 3D printing. Light enters through circular ports around the outside and the top.
Second Place
Second place goes to Team Zopherus for a design that would be constructed by a roving 3D printer.
Third Place
Team Mars Incubator was awarded third place. Its pods are made out of hexagonal pieces of 3D printed plates consisting of polyethylene, fibers, and locally sourced regolith, could one day house a team of astronauts.
It’s a fascinating competition that paints an incredibly detailed picture of what the future of Moon or even Mars exploration could look like one day — and we’ve never been closer to that future.
Mission to Europa Gets New Instrument to Look for Signs of Habitability
Mission to Europa Gets New Instrument to Look for Signs of Habitability
Amid technical and political hurdles, a veteran planetary scientist takes charge of a key part of Europa Clipper, a spacecraft targeted at the solar system’s most intriguing moon
NASA is changing one of the key scientific instruments on Europa Clipper, its next major mission to the outer planets of the solar system, and has brought in a scientific luminary to lead it, project leaders announced today. Clipper is set to orbit Jupiter and study Europa, the icy Jovian moon, across multiple flybys. Earlier this month, NASA headquarters terminated the mission’s ICEMAG magnetometer instrument, citing overruns in its estimated budget. The move left the spacecraft without an essential tool to study Europa’s interior ocean, where astrobiologists hope extraterrestrial organisms might be found.
Margaret Kivelson, a professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, will lead the effort to develop a simplified magnetometer to replace ICEMAG. The instrument will measure Europa’s magnetic field and gather data on the ocean’s depth and salinity. Kivelson previously ledthe magnetometer team on the spacecraft Galileo, which orbited Jupiter in the 1990s. She is credited with discovering the ocean beneath Europa’s ice shell.
ICEMAG’s estimated cost had grown to $45 million—nearly three times its proposed price—according to NASA headquarters. Sophisticated internal sensors had vexed the ICEMAG science team and led to much of the extra expense. The new magnetometer will do away with those sensors, using simplified components instead. The downside is that the new sensors will likely lose calibration over time and drift in response to temperature variations. The team is now devising strategies to compensate for these effects.
Robert Pappalardo, the project scientist of the Europa Clipper mission, made the announcement earlier today at the spring meeting of the Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science in Washington, D.C. “I recommended to NASA that we immediately stand up a team leader from within the team, and with established magnetometry expertise,” Pappalardo said. “I have the pleasure of announcing that Dr. Margaret Kivelson has accepted that role.”
PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER
NASA headquarters officially signed on to the Clipper mission in 2015. The spacecraft is due to launch in 2023, and upon entering Jupiter’s orbit, will collect data on Europa by making multiple close encounters with the icy moon. Today, Clipper is in the middle of perhaps the most critical part of its development. By the end of the year, decades of dreams by hundreds of people should finally begin manifesting as physical realities, in the form of instrument and spacecraft components. Next year, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., which is leading the spacecraft’s design and construction, will begin putting the pieces together.
Everyone who has ever held a science textbook is familiar with some of the results of famous space missions—big, beautiful images of Saturnfrom the Cassini orbiter, for instance, or the famous Pale Blue Dot portrait of Earth by the Voyager 1 probe. But the long road to launch is less understood. Todd May, the former director of Marshall Space Flight Center, noted in a talk several years ago that journalists tend to describe the “real work” as beginning once the spacecraft has left Earth. But, he asserted, getting through development—bringing a spacecraft from PowerPoint to the launchpad—is the real challenge. “The first inch off the ground is the hardest part,” he said. The Clipper science and engineering teams have for years honed and tested every aspect of design, implementation and operation of the spacecraft. The only thing they have not done is build the thing.
Europa presents unique challenges and potential rewards. The moon is located in Jupiter’s radiation belts, a punishing environment similar to the aftermath of a nuclear bomb detonation. Moreover, the spacecraft’s energy source—its solar panels—requires scientists to carefully map its trajectory to collect every available photon so far from the sun. When it reaches the far side of Jupiter, the spacecraft must be able to survive sunless, cryogenic temperatures. The prize for overcoming these challenges is a global saltwater ocean beneath its ice shell hypothesized to have the chemistry and energy necessary to sustain life. If there is non-Earth life anywhere in the solar system, it is there, experts say.
“We are gearing up for one last review needed for confirmation of the mission by NASA,” Pappalardo says. “That is where NASA says that you are ready and cleared to go build the instruments and spacecraft.” In April, the project will go through its “delta preliminary design review” (PDR)—a reevaluation of certain elements of the spacecraft that had given NASA pause. An independent board will assess whether the spacecraft’s designs match up with the mission’s requirements, and that cost, risk and schedule correspond to reality. Once completed successfully, the project will go through another review at NASA headquarters called “key decision point C.” The agency will commit to the calendar and cost determined during the PDR, and the process of finalizing design and fabricating the hardware can begin. “It’s a really fascinating part of the process seeing how everything fits together,” says Zibi Turtle, principal investigator of the Europa Imaging System investigation. “Everybody builds their own instrument, and when they stick them all on the spacecraft, you have to make sure there aren’t any unexpected interactions.”
One of the issues troubling NASA has been the marriage of Clipper’s solar panels with its ice-penetrating radar, called REASON. Originally, the massive radar antennas—used to study the structure of the ice shell, locate lakes within it and find interfaces between the ice and the ocean—was to be mounted on the spacecraft like any instrument. But the radar team and JPL engineers determined that building the radar into the solar array would prevent interference between the two components, while taking up less physical space. This was a fairly radical design in a business where “heritage”—the use of proven technologies—customarily carries the day. In January, REASON passed its “integrated wing review”—an evaluation of its integration with the solar arrays, following separate preliminary design reviews of each. “They showed me off the steps of the scaffolding,” says Don Blankenship, REASON principal investigator, joking that he avoided execution.
But perhaps the greatest unknown for the mission is its ride to space. According to the law funding the spacecraft, Europa Clipper must launch in 2023 on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket currently under development. It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that this rocket will not be ready in time, which means Clipper might have to ride on a smaller commercial rocket. Such a change would require altering the law—something easier said than done—and would also add a delay, as the heavy-lift SLS would be able to send the spacecraft on a direct, 28-month flight to Jupiter. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, a backup commercial option, is not powerful enough for such a trajectory and would require a six-year tour of the solar system to deliver Clipper to its target.
THE BENEFACTOR
Another challenge for Clipper is the recent loss of its benefactor in Congress. As chair of the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations subcommittee of the House of Representatives, John Culberson, the former Texas Republican representative, proved to be Europa’s protector. Unlike every other mission in NASA’s portfolio, he put Clipper not in “report language” that accompanies an appropriations bill (but is not legally binding), but rather, for several years now, into the actual bill. Accordingly, he has been known to boast, by federal law Clipper and Europa Lander (a follow-on mission that would use Clipper data to touch down on the surface and dig around for evidence of life) are the only two missions that it is illegal for NASA not to fly.
When Culberson was defeated for reelection last year, things looked grim. He still had a few tricks up his sleeve, however. “Before I left,” he says, “I won the support of a number of my House colleagues to be sure that they would protect those missions.” And tying Clipper to SLS should help. The rocket is being built in Alabama, home of the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, as well as the ranking member of the House appropriations subcommittee responsible for NASA. Those representatives have a vested interest in keeping SLS alive and giving it something to do. Clipper will be ready to launch long before any other payloads for the rocket, such as major missions to the moon or Mars.
In the fiscal year 2019 budget that passed Congress, Culberson directed $545 million to Clipper—enough to get the project over its peak funding year, keeping the team on track for an on-time launch. Moreover, because Congress in recent years has passed continuing resolutions in lieu of full budgets, the record $2.8 billion planetary science allocation will likely remain in force beyond 2019.
After the April design review, Clipper will likely enter the final design and fabrication phase in August. If all goes well, it will lift its first inch from the launchpad in 2023.
When marine biologist Steve Barbeaux first saw the data in late 2017, he thought it was the result of a computer glitch. How else could more than 100 million Pacific cod suddenly vanish from the waters off of southern Alaska?
Within hours, however, Barbeaux's colleagues at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle, Washington, had confirmed the numbers. No glitch. The data, collected by research trawlers, indicated cod numbers had plunged by 70% in 2 years, essentially erasing a fishery worth $100 million annually. There was no evidence that the fish had simply moved elsewhere. And as the vast scale of the disappearance became clear, a prime suspect emerged: "The Blob."
In late 2013, a huge patch of unusually warm ocean water, roughly one-third the size of the contiguous United States, formed in the Gulf of Alaska and began to spread. A few months later, Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, dubbed it The Blob. The name, with its echo of a 1958 horror film about an alien life form that keeps growing as it consumes everything in its path, quickly caught on. By the summer of 2015, The Blob had more than doubled in size, stretching across more than 4 million square kilometers of ocean, from Mexico's Baja California Peninsula to Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Water temperatures reached 2.5°C above normal in many places.
By late 2016, the marine heat wave had crashed across ecosystems all along North America's western coast, reshuffling food chains and wreaking havoc. Unusual blooms of toxic algae appeared, as did sea creatures typically found closer to the tropics (see sidebar). Small fish and crustaceans hunted by larger animals vanished. The carcasses of tens of thousands of seabirds littered beaches. Whales failed to arrive in their usual summer waters. Then the cod disappeared.
The fish "basically ran out of food," Barbeaux now believes. Once, he didn't think a food shortage would have much effect on adult cod, which, like camels, can harbor energy and go months without eating. But now, it is "something we look at and go: ‘Huh, that can happen.’"
Today, 5 years after The Blob appeared, the waters it once gripped have cooled, although fish, bird, and whale numbers have yet to recover. Climate scientists and marine biologists, meanwhile, are still putting together the story of what triggered the event, and how it reverberated through ecosystems. Their interest is not just historical.
Around the world, shifting climate and ocean circulation patterns are causing huge patches of unusually warm water to become more common, researchers have found. Already, ominous new warm patches are emerging in the North Pacific Ocean and elsewhere, and researchers are applying what they've learned from The Blob to help guide predictions of how future marine heat waves might unfold. If global warming isn't curbed, scientists warn that the heat waves will become more frequent, larger, more intense, and longerlasting. By the end of the century, Bond says, "The ocean is going to be a much different place."
The Blob begins
Even as ominous headlines warned of what National Geographic dubbed "The blob that cooked the Pacific," researchers scrambled to decipher what was happening. They consulted satellite readings; crisscrossed the Pacific on research ships, sometimes dredging the depths with nets; picked through the carcasses of birds and whales; and huddled over microscopes and lab aquariums.
The Blob was spawned, experts say, by a long-lasting atmospheric ridge of high pressure that formed over the Gulf of Alaska in the fall of 2013. The ridge helped squelch fierce winter storms that typically sweep the gulf. That dampened the churning winds that usually bring colder, deeper water to the surface, as well as transfer heat from the ocean to the atmosphere—much like a bowl of hot soup cooling as a diner blows across it. As a result, the gulf remained unusually warm through the following year.
But it took a convergence of other forces to transform The Blob into a monster. In the winter of 2014–15, winds from the south brought warmer air into the gulf, keeping sea temperatures high. Those winds also pushed warm water closer to the coasts of Oregon and Washington. Then, later in 2015 and in 2016, the periodic warming of the central Pacific known as El Niño added more warmth, fueling The Blob's growth. The heat wave finally broke when La Niña—El Niño's cool opposite number—arrived at the end of 2016, bringing storms that stirred and cooled the ocean.
Satellites and instrumented buoys made it relatively easy for scientists to track The Blob's bloom and fade. But the vast sweep of its ecological impact was harder to see.
That story starts with some of the ocean's tiniest inhabitants, which sit at the base of the marine food chain. In the Gulf of Alaska, phytoplankton blooms shrank during the warm years, a trend scientists trace to a lack of the nutrients that the winds usually churn to the surface with colder, deeper water. The decline in phytoplankton appears to have rippled out to copepods—fat-rich crustaceans the size of a sesame seed—that feed on the algae, says Russell Hopcroft, a zooplankton ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. During Blob years, the copepods grew leaner at the same time as phytoplankton ebbed and water temperatures climbed, he says. When warmer water moved north to Alaska, it also carried in different, less nutritious copepod species.
By early 2015, the unusually warm water known as The Blob covered a vast swath of the Pacific Ocean.
GENTEMANN, C., ET AL. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS 44.1, 312, (2017)
Krill—tiny shrimp that, like copepods, are a key food for many fish—felt the heat, too. In 2015 and 2016, as The Blob engulfed the coasts of Washington and Oregon, the heat-sensitive creatures vanished from biologists' nets.
As the base of the food chain crumbled, the effects propagated upward. One link higher, swarms of small fish that dine on copepods and krill—and in turn become food for larger animals—also became scarce as warm waters spread. On a remote island in the northern gulf, where scientists have tracked seabird diets for decades, they noticed that capelin and sand lance, staples for many bird species, nearly vanished from the birds' meals. In 2015, by one estimate, the populations of most key forage fish in the gulf fell to less than 50% of the average over the previous 9 years.
Of the fish that remained, some offered little nourishment. Sand lance caught in 2016 were so stunted that Yumi Arimitsu, a fisheries ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Juneau, thought she was holding fish that had recently hatched. But a check of their ear bones showed they were a year old. The fish had so little fat that each one provided just a tenth of the energy content of one average fish from other years.
Finger-length juvenile cod that spend their first summer feeding in the gulf 's shallow waters also disappeared. In 2014, when NOAA researchers on an annual survey cast their nets into two bays off Kodiak Island in Alaska, they came up almost empty. There were "no fish around," recalls Ben Laurel, a NOAA fisheries ecologist based at the agency's lab in Newport, Oregon. "There's just this big hole."
Even as these food stocks declined, the warmer water delivered a second blow to the cold-blooded creatures there, from copepods to adult cod. The heat dialed up the metabolism of the animals, forcing them to eat more to keep their bodies fueled—just as prey became scarcer.
Barbeaux thinks that one-two punch is what did in Pacific cod, gray-flanked fish that can grow to more than a meter. After his initial shock at discovering the 2017 cod crash, he started to assemble a picture of a creeping underwater famine. Looking back, researchers noticed adult cod caught in 2015 and 2016 were skinnier than normal. The stomachs of cod caught in 2015 were half-empty compared with boom years, and contained few energy-rich capelin and tanner crabs.
Despite their ability to go months without eating, the cod could not withstand this double whammy. Computer simulations developed by federal scientists suggest that, as warm waters lingered, the fish ran a deep caloric deficit. Barbeaux suspects the weakened fish became more vulnerable to disease and predators, such as salmon sharks.
A wave of death
The cod's demise wasn't easily observed. But other changes occurring in the ocean's depths became visible in sudden, morbid convulsions on beaches and in bays. In late 2014, thousands of starved Cassin's auklet seabirds began to wash ashore in Washington and Oregon. On New Year's Day 2016, a retired bird biologist in Whittier, Alaska, stumbled across the white and gray bodies of 8000 common murres lining a beach, like so many abandoned buoys. In the following days, people found the normally hardy seabirds—known for their ability to fly hundreds of kilometers in a day to find fish—dead and dying across much of southern Alaska. They piled up on beaches and staggered along highways like little zombies. As many as half a million died, scientists estimate.
Then there were the disappearing whales. In the summer of 2015, 2 years into The Blob, just 166 humpback whales returned to Alaska's Glacier Bay from their winter calving grounds near Hawaii and Mexico, a 30% drop from 2013. All the humpback calves seen in Glacier Bay that year disappeared later and are presumed dead. And the bodies of 28 humpback and 17 finback whales washed up on beaches in Alaska and British Columbia in Canada.
It’s getting warm in here
The portion of the world’s oceans experiencing moderate to extreme marine heat waves has been growing since the 1980s.
(GRAPHIC) V. ALTOUNIAN/SCIENCE; (DATA) HOBDAY ET AL., OCEANOGRAPHY, 31 (2), 2018
Toxic algae blooms that stretched along much of the west coast in 2015 might have played a role in the seabird and whale deaths. But some of the animals might have simply starved because competing predators had vacuumed up available forage fish. The seabird die-off, for example, peaked in the winter of 2015–16, just as warmer waters would have revved up the appetites of fish like cod, notes John Piatt, a USGS marine ecologist based in Port Townsend, Washington. "If murres and whales are dying en masse everywhere, what does it tell you?" Piatt asks. "That there's no food anywhere."
Researchers are still puzzling over many Blob mysteries. Even as common murres suffered, for example, tufted puffins that feed on the same fish showed few problems, notes Heather Renner, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Homer, Alaska. And although the cod story seems to fit together neatly, there are still unknowns, such as exactly how warmer water temperatures affected baby cod. Laurel hopes some answers will emerge from ongoing laboratory experiments that involve raising young cod in aquariums with different water temperatures. The findings could help illuminate how tiny temperature shifts influence growth and survival, particularly during crucial winter months when the fish live largely on fat reserves.
Other clues could come from the bodies of baby cod that researchers have collected from Kodiak Island beaches every year since 2006, then packed into lab freezers. Laurel has long wanted to study the collection to see how climate, ocean conditions, and diet shape development. Now, the urgency of understanding The Blob has unlocked money for that work.
Lingering signs
Although the blob has dissipated, its impact lingers. Of five common murre colonies in the gulf surveyed in 2018, only two seem to be breeding at normal levels. Just 99 humpback whales returned to Glacier Bay last year, with only one new calf in tow, far below the 3-decade average of more than eight calves per year. Cod numbers this year are projected to be even lower than they were last year. That means more tough times for cod fishers. Federal officials cut the allowable catch by 80% after the 2017 collapse, and the 2019 limits are even lower.
But a recovery may be in the offing. With cooler waters, tiny cod filled the bays at Kodiak Island in the summer of 2018. Larger, high-fat copepods showed an uptick, as did forage fish. Seabirds have resumed breeding in some places. Krill have rebounded off the west coast. "It indicates that to some extent the ecosystem is able to restabilize once [more typical] conditions return," says Janet Duffy-Anderson, a NOAA fisheries ecologist based in Seattle.
Now, scientists are ramping up efforts to study similar firestorms that are gathering strength in other corners of the ocean. Warmer temperatures are threatening corals in the Red Sea, kelp forests in southern Australia, and fisheries off the coasts of New England and eastern Canada. Rising temperatures are also affecting ecosystems near New Zealand, the Mediterranean, and the coast of Argentina. In northern Australia, record air temperatures late last year sparked warnings of more damage to the Great Barrier Reef. Back-to-back marine heat waves in 2016 and 2017 are estimated to have killed half the reefs there.
"Marine heat wave" became a common part of scientific parlance in just the past decade. Now, research on the waves "is kind of taking off," says Eric Oliver, a physical oceanographer and marine heat wave expert at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. In 2016, he and a group of Australian, U.K., and U.S. scientists moved to give the field some common metrics by proposing that a marine heat wave be defined as a string of five or more days in which ocean water temperatures are in the top 10% compared with the previous 3 decades. Last year, recognizing that ocean warming might soon get public attention like other natural disasters, some of the same scientists suggested ranking their severity much like hurricanes, ranging from Category I to Category IV. They also proposed naming marine heat waves based on their location and year—so The Blob might have been called Northeast Pacific 2013.
Each heat wave has its own constellation of causes. But there is one common and increasingly potent factor, researchers say. As oceans soak up more heat from a warming planet, heat waves are becoming more common and more intense. The number of days with a marine heat wave somewhere on the globe has doubled since 1982, according to a 2018 study by Swiss scientists published in Nature. Those researchers warned that, if warming continues on the current trajectory, marine heat waves will become 41 times more frequent by the end of the century. They will also be longer and bigger. Heat waves would typically last more than 100 days, with maximum temperatures 2.5°C above average. The western tropical Pacific and Arctic oceans would be the hardest hit. The changes, the authors wrote, would probably push "marine organisms and ecosystems to the limits of their resilience."
That scenario fits with what Bond foresees for the northeast Pacific. The climate and ocean models he uses produce sobering scenarios. By 2050, without major curbs on planetary warming, average ocean temperatures in that region will likely be between 1°C and 2°C above historic levels—meaning Blob-like temperatures will become typical. As a result, Bond says, "When we have a marine heat wave in 2050, it's going to be way out there—in the uncharted territory."
Other tastes of that future might be just around the corner. Even as researchers close the book on The Blob, they are keeping a close watch on new heat waves off Alaska. In the winter of 2017–18 the northern Bering Sea was devoid of ice for the first time on record. And last summer, a warming trend that started in 2014 turned feverish. Water temperatures in the Bering Sea, where walleye pollock support one of the world's biggest fisheries, hit 4°C above normal in some regions. Already, the heat appears to be having an impact. Late last year, researchers found that numbers of fatty copepods—a favorite of young pollock—were 90% below average. The big question is what impact the copepod shortage will have on fish trying to survive their first winter, Duffy-Anderson says. That won't be known until later this year.
Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Alaska, calm, warm weather this past fall has spawned a new patch of unusually warm water, one that is eerily like the baby Blob. In October 2018, Barbeaux logged into Facebook to share a news story warning The Blob might have a sequel. His comment succinctly captured what many scientists are thinking as they probe the effects of the last heat wave: "Oh, crap."
*Correction, 11 February, 3:05 p.m.:The credit for the image of Earth’s temperatures has bee updated.
Onderwaterhittegolven: ook de oceaan kreunt onder toename tropische dagen
Onderwaterhittegolven: ook de oceaan kreunt onder toename tropische dagen
Onderwaterhittegolven? Wij hadden de term zelf nog nooit gehoord, terwijl het natuurlijk de logica zelf is. Want waarom zou de opwarming van de aarde zich ook niet manifesteren onder de zeespiegel? Misschien zelfs nog significanter dan aan land, geven twee recente studies aan.
Onderwater is er sprake van een hittegolf wanneer, vergelijkbaar met op het vasteland, de maximumtemperatuur vijf dagen op een rij significant hoger ligt dan normaal. ‘Normaal’ varieert dan, ook net zoals aan land, van watermassa tot watermassa.
Eerst wees een onderzoek onder leiding van kwantitatief ecoloog Christopher M. Free (Rutgers University) in Science op een afname van het visbestand met 4% tussen 1930 en 2010, als gevolg van de klimaatopwarming. Kort daarna stelde de meest uitgebreide studie van maritieme hittegolven tot nu toe een forse toename vast van zowel het aantal consistente temperatuurpieken als hun heftigheid.
Het meest indicatieve cijfer uit de publicatie in Nature Climate Change: het aantal hittedagen onder de oceaanspiegels lag tussen 1987 en 2016 maar liefst 54% hoger dan in de periode 1925-1954. Het meest sprekende voorbeeld dat onderzoeksleider en benthisch bioloog Dan Smale (Marine Biological Association) aanhaalt, is ‘The Blob’.
Die ‘Klodder’ is een gigantische massa veel te warm water voor de Amerikaanse Westkust die zich op haar voorlopige hoogtepunt in de periode 2014-2016 uitstrekte over zo’n 5,6 miljoen vierkante kilometer. Van Mexico tot Alaska, om dat op zich misschien abstract grote cijfer hallucinant tastbaar te maken.
NASAEen meanderende bedding van een oude rivier op Mars. De foto werd ingekleurd om hoogteverschillen aan te duiden: blauw is laag, geel is hoog.
WETENSCHAP Mars is vandaag koud en droog, met een ijle atmosfeer. Maar ooit - en minder lang geleden dan gedacht - stroomden er grote, woeste rivieren op de rode planeet. Ze waren dubbel zo breed als de rivieren op aarde, ontdekten wetenschappers van de universiteit van Chicago.
De conclusies maken het niet makkelijker voor onderzoekers die Mars’ drastische transitie van de natte naar de droge periode bestuderen. Die zou tot later in de geschiedenis van de planeet hebben geduurd dan tot nu toe gedacht. Met andere woorden: er was tot minder lang geleden dan gedacht water op Mars, tot het allerlaatste moment van de natte periode. Tussen 3,6 en 1 miljard jaar geleden stroomde dagelijks 3 tot 20 kg water per vierkante meter door de rivierbeddingen over de hele planeet verspreid. De nieuwe studie schat het nu op 1 miljard jaar geleden en zelfs nog later. Of: minstens 1 miljard jaar recenter dan vorige berekeningen.
Edwin Kite en zijn team onderzochten meer dan 200 oude, al lang opgedroogde rivierbeddingen op Mars aan de hand van foto’s gemaakt met NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), die rond de planeet cirkelt. De diepe geulen op de foto’s bevatten informatie over het water dat er ooit doorstroomde en over de klimatologische omstandigheden waarin dat gebeurde. De grootte van de beddingen wijst op een continue eerder dan op een tijdelijke waterstroom enkel ’s middags.
AP
De gemiddelde dagtemperaturen lagen dus boven het vriespunt, wat dan weer een sterk broeikaseffect suggereert. “Maar dat wordt niet gestaafd door de bestaande modellen van Mars’ klimaatveranderingen”, zegt de studie. De atmosfeer van Mars was vroeger zo dik dat er maar een derde van zonnestralen die wij nu op de aarde ontvangen doorkwam. Onvoldoende voor vloeibaar water.
Als de vooropgestelde periodes van stromende rivieren op Mars kloppen, dan zou dat kunnen betekenen dat de atmosfeer van de rode planeet sneller verdween dan eerder werd gedacht. Uit vorige studies bleek dat de verdunning 4 miljard jaar geleden zou zijn ingezet en zo zou hebben geleid tot het geleidelijk uitdrogen van de rivieren. De nieuwe studie plaatst dat uitdunnen van de Martiaanse atmosfeer nu miljarden jaren later.
Kite schuift nog een andere optie naar voren: mogelijk versprong het klimaat op Mars herhaaldelijk als een op/aan-knop van droge naar natte periodes.
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Poolse oud-president Walesa zorgt voor verrassing met uitspraken over aliens. Zijn er andere intelligente beschavingen geweest op aarde?
Foto: Sicherlich Wikimedia Commons
Poolse oud-president Walesa zorgt voor verrassing met uitspraken over aliens. Zijn er andere intelligente beschavingen geweest op aarde?
De Poolse oud-president Lech Walesa heeft voor verrassing gezorgd door in het openbaar te spreken over UFO’s en buitenaardsen.
Walesa, die tussen 1990 en 1995 president was, deed zijn uitspraken tijdens een bijeenkomst in de stad Krosno.
De gepensioneerde politicus, die eerder voor de geheime dienst werkte, zei te geloven dat intelligente buitenaardsen bestaan en een bedreiging kunnen vormen voor de aarde, schrijft website NaTemat.pl.
Drie verschillende niveaus
Walesa zei dat er drie verschillende niveaus van intellectuele ontwikkeling zijn in sterrenstelsels en dat de mens zich op het laagste niveau bevindt.
“Als we ingaan tegen de buitenaardsen hakken ze ons in de pan. De aarde zal vergaan,” zei hij, toevoegende dat we dan weer van voren af aan moeten beginnen.
Vier of vijf keer
Walesa suggereerde dat dergelijke scenario’s zich al eens hebben afgespeeld op aarde. “Men zegt dat er vier of vijf keer een beschaving was zoals de onze en dat zij dezelfde fouten hebben gemaakt die wij nu maken – ze konden niet communiceren,” klonk het.
Hij wees op verschillende archeologische mysteries, waaronder de piramides, als mogelijk bewijs voor hoogontwikkelde menselijke rassen die in een ver verleden zijn uitgeroeid.
YouTube
“We hebben geen idee waar ze vandaan komen!” zei hij over de piramides.
De voormalige president zegt zijn informatie vooral van YouTube te halen.
“Volkomen glad omhulsel van een schip.” Beroemdste UFO-hacker aller tijden geeft voor het eerst in jaren een interview: bekijk het hier
“Volkomen glad omhulsel van een schip.” Beroemdste UFO-hacker aller tijden geeft voor het eerst in jaren een interview: bekijk het hier
De Brit Gary McKinnon is de beroemdste UFO-hacker aller tijden. Hij werd in 2002 gearresteerd en dreigde uitgeleverd te worden aan de Verenigde Staten.
McKinnon stuitte op bewijs voor een geheim ruimteprogramma en verwijzingen naar ‘niet-aardse officieren’.
Hij ontdekte ook dat er schepen werden bevoorraad die officieel niet bestonden.
Majestic 12
De schepen die onderdeel uitmaakten van de vloot waren voorzien van namen, maar op internet kon de hacker daar niets over vinden.
Enkele namen van de schepen hadden betrekking op leden van Majestic 12, een verondersteld geheim genootschap.
Ongefilterd
Hij opende daarnaast een foto van een glad, sigaarvormig schip die in de ruimte was gemaakt.
De foto stond op een computer van de NASA en was opgeslagen in een map genaamd ‘ongefilterd’.
Straf
Gary praat met onderzoeker Richard Dolan over de straf die de Amerikaanse overheid hem wilde opleggen, zijn depressie, suïcidale gedachten en nog veel meer.
Reptilians on Earth: The Secret 70,000 Year Old History
Reptilians on Earth: The Secret 70,000 Year Old History
There is evidence from as far back as 70000 BC, in Africa, of a serpent race living on Earth. There is an inter-dimensional aspect to this phenomena, considering space is very quiet, they must be getting here another way, maybe through portals.
There are certain ways these doorways can be opened, humans were the ones opening these doorways 7000 years ago. Are the pyramids a portal?
What were our ancestors doing and what about the reptilians connection to gold? What is the value of this gold, as Barry Fitzgerald explains, its more to do with mono-atomic elements.
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New Insider Reveals His Incredible Experience Within the Secret Space Program
New Insider Reveals His Incredible Experiences Within the Secret Space Program
This refers to an existing organization known as the “Secret Space Program”. Jason Rice, has provided a disclosure of that program, what he revealed means that the Secret Space Program is not a secret any more.
Jason Rice was a member of a Secret Space Program. He has stated that he is coming forward now to disclose that there are thousands of other people who are also involved with this program that is known as “20 and Back”.
He feels that the stories of some who gave their lives for humanity and have not come back need to be told.
A small asteroid has been caught in the process of spinning so fast it’s throwing off material, according to new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories.
Images from Hubble show two narrow, comet-like tails of dusty debris streaming from the asteroid (6478) Gault. Each tail represents an episode in which the asteroid gently shed its material — key evidence that Gault is beginning to come apart.
The asteroid 6478 Gault is seen with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, showing two narrow, comet-like tails of debris that tell us that the asteroid is slowly undergoing self-destruction. The bright streaks surrounding the asteroid are background stars. The Gault asteroid is located 214 million miles from the Sun, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Meech and J. Kleyna (University of Hawaii), O. Hainaut
(European Southern Observatory)
Discovered in 1988, the 2.5-mile-wide (4-kilometer-wide) asteroid has been observed repeatedly, but the debris tails are the first evidence of disintegration. Gault is located 214 million miles (344 million kilometers) from the Sun. Of the roughly 800,000 known asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers estimate that this type of event in the asteroid belt is rare, occurring roughly once a year.
Watching an asteroid become unglued gives astronomers the opportunity to study the makeup of these space rocks without sending a spacecraft to sample them.
This Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the gradual self-destruction of an asteroid, whose ejected dusty material has formed two long, thin, comet-like tails. The longer tail stretches more than 500,000 miles (800,000 kilometers) and is roughly 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide. The shorter tail is about a quarter as long. The streamers will eventually disperse into space.
Credits: NASA, ESA, K. Meech and J. Kleyna (University of Hawaii), and O. Hainaut (European Southern Observatory)
“We didn’t have to go to Gault,” explained Olivier Hainaut of the European Southern Observatory in Germany, a member of the Gault observing team. “We just had to look at the image of the streamers, and we can see all of the dust grains well-sorted by size. All the large grains (about the size of sand particles) are close to the object and the smallest grains (about the size of flour grains) are the farthest away because they are being pushed fastest by pressure from sunlight.”
Gault is only the second asteroid whose disintegration has been strongly linked to a process known as a YORP effect. (YORP stands for “Yarkovsky–O’Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack,” the names of four scientists who contributed to the concept.) When sunlight heats an asteroid, infrared radiation escaping from its warmed surface carries off angular momentum as well as heat. This process creates a tiny torque that can cause the asteroid to continually spin faster. When the resulting centrifugal force starts to overcome gravity, the asteroid’s surface becomes unstable, and landslides may send dust and rubble drifting into space at a couple miles per hour, or the speed of a strolling human. The researchers estimate that Gault could have been slowly spinning up for more than 100 million years.
Piecing together Gault’s recent activity is an astronomical forensics investigation involving telescopes and astronomers around the world. All-sky surveys, ground-based telescopes, and space-based facilities like the Hubble Space Telescope pooled their efforts to make this discovery possible.
The initial clue was the fortuitous detection of the first debris tail, observed on Jan. 5, 2019, by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Hawaii. The tail also turned up in archival data from December 2018 from ATLAS and the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) telescopes in Hawaii. In mid-January, a second shorter tail was spied by the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and the Isaac Newton Telescope in Spain, as well as by other observers. An analysis of both tails suggests the two dust events occurred around Oct. 28 and Dec. 30, 2018.
Follow-up observations with the William Herschel Telescope and ESA’s (European Space Agency) Optical Ground Station in La Palma and Tenerife, Spain, and the Himalayan Chandra Telescope in India measured a two-hour rotation period for the object, close to the critical speed at which a loose “rubble-pile” asteroid begins to break up.
“Gault is the best ‘smoking gun’ example of a fast rotator right at the two-hour limit,” said team member Jan Kleyna of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
An analysis of the asteroid’s surrounding environment by Hubble revealed no signs of more widely distributed debris, which rules out the possibility of a collision with another asteroid causing the outbursts.
The asteroid’s narrow streamers suggest that the dust was released in short bursts, lasting anywhere from a few hours to a few days. These sudden events puffed away enough debris to make a “dirt ball” approximately 500 feet (150 meters) across if compacted together. The tails will begin fading away in a few months as the dust disperses into interplanetary space.
Based on observations by the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope, the astronomers estimate that the longer tail stretches over half a million miles (800,000 kilometers) and is roughly 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide. The shorter tail is about a quarter as long.
Only a couple of dozen active asteroids have been found so far. Astronomers may now have the capability to detect many more of them because of the enhanced survey capabilities of observatories such as Pan-STARRS and ATLAS, which scan the entire sky. “Asteroids such as Gault cannot escape detection anymore,” Hainaut said. “That means that all these asteroids that start misbehaving get caught.”
The researchers hope to monitor Gault for more dust events.
The team’s results have been accepted for publication by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
Contacts and sources:
Donna Weaver / Ray Villard Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
When a current or former world leader professes a belief in UFOs, the public ponders about their sanity and about what they might really know concerning the cause of unidentified flying objects. When that world leader also warns about potentially catastrophic extraterrestrial invasions, ears and antennas both go up. That was the case last week in Poland, when former Polish president and head of the Solidarity movement Lech Walesa pontificated on UFOs, aliens and their role in the potential demise of Earth as we know it.
Lech Walesa
“There are three levels of intellectual development on other galaxies. We are the lowest. And the higher civilization comes as a UFO and others, and looks at what they are doing here. If we threaten to destabilize here with Macron, Putin there, they will interrupt us, cut us in half, the Earth will collapse, everyone will crush.”
Multiple Polishmedia sources reported on a speech Walesa made to a civic club in Krosno, an ancient city in southwestern Poland. While not there to talk about UFOs, Lech wandered off the script (as world leaders seem to do a lot these days) and worked UFOs and “higher civilizations” into the conversation. While he doesn’t seem to have spoken publicly about his belief in UFOs and aliens, his comments suggest he’s of the opinion that they’re the type that’s observing us without interference (the ‘zoo’ theory) but will move in if they feel the need. Then he warns that actions by current politicians (French president Emmanuel Macron and Russian president Vladimir Putin) could trigger just such a decision by a higher civilization of watchers. Walesa believes their interference would not be benevolent and the consequences would be long-lasting. (If you understand Polish, you can watch the entire speech here. The UFO comments begin at 1h 04m 56 sec.)
“(The higher civilization (can hold us that way for five thousand years. They will send Adam and Eve and we will build the world again.”
It also appears from his comments that Walesa at least considers the possibility that an alien civilization has interfered with humans before.
“People find things, dig in stones, these pyramids … no answer, where did it come from?”
Why didn’t the higher civilization interfere with this?
Does Lech Walesa know something we don’t? While there’s no indication that he himself has had a UFO or alien encounter, Poland has had a number of them. The most famous is the so-called Emilcin incident in 1978 when a farmer from that eastern Polish town allegedly met olive-skinned aliens who took him onboard their ship. Polish UFO researcher and author Piotr Cielebiaś says there were plenty of reports of alien encounters by military pilots until Poland joined NATO in 1999. Walesa was president from December 1990 to December 1995 so he undoubtedly was aware of these reports.
Why did Lech Walesa feel the need to talk about UFOs and extraterrestrial invasions now? What does he REALLY know?
Another month has passed, and the mystery boom phenomenon continues without a definitive explanation. Throughout March, several incidents of unexplained explosion noises have added to the already large and still growing body of evidence suggesting either an unknown natural occurrence or some type of unidentified man made activity is leading to these loud, powerful, and anomalous noises. I’ve collectedhundreds of reports of these mystery boomsover the past few years in an attempt to discover what may be behind the phenomenon, but so far an explanation remains elusive. Are these separate events actually related? And why aren’t they receiving more attention?
On March 7, residents of Block Island in the U.S. state of Rhode Island were rattled by what was described as an “unexplained boom” early in the morning of Friday, March 1. Sound familiar? Some Block Islanders reported the noise was so loud that they thought something could have exploded inside of their own homes. While scores of residents reported being terrified by the noise, The Block Island Times reports that theories put forth on local social media sites “were mostly whimsical,” with most eyewitnesses choosing to crack jokes about the sky-splitting noise. As has been noted throughout ufology circles for years, joking about something being “aliens” is a great way to discredit those who take the phenomenon seriously. Could someone be leveraging social media to actively discourage serious research into mystery booms?
A few days later on March 6, another eerily familiar boom shook the northern Outer Banks off the coast of North Carolina. The U.S. Geographical Survey said the event was not an earthquake, while meteorologists with the National Weather Service reported that there were no weather conditions that could explain the boom. According to the Coastal Review Online, the boom was heard over a broad area, making it unlikely that a singular sonic boom from an aircraft overhead could have caused it. As in many other cases, some type of unknown atmospheric temperature inversion was cited as a possible cause, although there is little hard evidence to support that speculation.
The next day on March 8, another mysterious boom described as a “loud explosion” was heard throughout Liberty, Ohio. “You could feel it like a shock wave,” one Liberty resident told emergency dispatchers after calling 911. “It knocked me out of bed.” Fire crews at the Liberty Fire Station also felt the boom, reporting that the entire fire station shook. So far, the cause of the boom has not been found.
No further booms were reported until March 22, when several cities near Birmingham, Alabama were rattled by a massive explosion in the sky. Like in North Carolina, the U.S. Geological Survey and National Weather Service were baffled. The typical hypotheses were put forward, after which the story was buried by the news cycle as in so many other cases.
In Sacracmento, California, residents of Fair Oaks reportthey’ve have been shaken from their beds at night in recent months by powerful, unexplained booms strong enough to set off car alarms. With no official explanation, people are throwing around all sorts of theories including weather phenomena and secret SpaceX launches. Meanwhile, local police believe the booms are being caused by illegal fireworks.
On March 26, a loud boom shook southern Idaho, the latest in a recent spate of similar booms. According to local radio station KEZJ, the booms are being caused by munitions testing at the nearby Mountain Home Air Force Base.
Also on March 26, North Carolina experienced another mysterious event, but this time whatever happened was powerful enough to register on seismographs. Several counties in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina were rattled by an eerily familiar boom. “I’ll tell you right now, that was the loudest — it shook the whole damn house partner,” one frightened caller told police dispatchers as emergency services in the area were inundated with calls about the boom.
Shortly thereafter, the USGS reported recording two separate 2.6-magnitude earthquakes throughout the state, one of which was not far from the site of several other mysterious booms heard throughout 2018 for which conflicting explanations were offered. While this most recent boom could possibly be explained by seismic activity, there is always the possibility that whatever caused the boom wasn’t an earthquake per se but was powerful enough to rattle the ground and register on seismographs.
Many aerospace agencies and military branches have been researching hypersonic craft and weapons over the last several years. Could they have anything to do with the phenomenon?
While I normally wouldn’t jump to conclusions without evidence, the spate of other similar events in recent weeks makes this earthquake explanation seem incomplete to me. Then again, sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy, seeing things in the cracks between seemingly disparate news stories and trends which may not really be there. Whatever the case may be, I and other Mysterious Universe writers have been tracking these reports week after week for years, and we’re not alone. Many readers have reached out to me in recent months with their own experiences with mystery booms or their own theories on the phenomenon. Are these incidents in fact related, or could many separate phenomena or forces be causing these booms? If that’s the case, why are so many reports so similar, and why are they occurring with such frequency lately?
So many questions. Are unknown seismic events violently rattling the Earth, or could unknown aircraft be wantonly breaking the sound barrier over residential areas? Is an unknown atmospheric or meteorological forces causing ‘skyquakes’ or other anomalous disturbances, or could industrial operations be to blame? Meteors? Psychological warfare? Aliens? Anybody’s guess is as good as anyone else’s at this point (but it’s likely not aliens).
Although it’s great news that these species have been rediscovered, the question still remains: why are these supposedly “extinct” animals suddenly reappearing? Were they even extinct in the first place? According to the IUCN Red List, a species is only listed as extinct when “…there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died.” It’s also required that “…exhaustive surveys in known and/or expected habitat, at appropriate times… throughout its historic range [which] have failed to record an individual. Surveys should be over a time frame appropriate to the taxon’s life cycle and life form.”
Galápagos giant tortoise
The last time that people see a certain species is often calculated in the decision on whether it is in fact extinct or not, and that’s not entirely correct, as many species are very elusive and prefer to stay away from populated areas and people in general. So, just because they haven’t been seen in several years, doesn’t mean that they are extinct. Sightings can come in many forms, from actually seeing the species face-to-face, or capturing a picture of it, t more indirect evidence like footprints or people retelling stories of their encounters.
What’s even more confusing is the fact that the word “rediscovered” means that someone or something was lost or forgotten about, but we also interpret it as returning from the dead. As for the Fernandina Island Galápagos tortoise, although it hadn’t been spotted since the early 1900s, footprints, bite marks on pear cacti, and tortoise faeces had been discovered as recently as 2013. In 2015, it was declared “Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct), and apparently species are presumed extinct until it is proven that they are still living.
And while Wallace’s giant bee hadn’t been seen in 38 years, it was listed as “Data Deficient” and more recently as “Vulnerable”, but never as an extinct species. One of the species, however, that was listed as Extinct was the Formosan clouded leopard, as many hunters said they hadn’t seen the animal and no footage was ever captured from the several cameras in the area.
Clouded leopard
The giant tortoise and bee were declared alive after living specimens were discovered, but the clouded leopard’s existence is still uncertain as there have only been eyewitness testimonies so far and no solid proof.
I believe it’s only a matter of time before several more “extinct” species are suddenly “rediscovered”. Since pretty much everyone nowadays has a cell phone with video/photo options, and many others fly drones in wooded areas, it’s very possible that more eyewitnesses will come forward with video and/or photographic proof. And maybe not, since some species just want to be left alone in their secret locations, safely hidden away from humans.
On December 9, 2014, in Capilla del Monte Argentina, a woman named Cele who was on vacation near a site called the clods 9 km from the chapel of the Argentine mountain when she captured with her cell phone a sphere of light following the car in the back.
Although the amazing video was shot in 2014, this phenomenon is still something that is not understood.
The video comes from the well known UFO researcher Maussan and is subtitled in English.
Now I wanted to check an old discovery of mine back from 2013-14 to see if it was still there. You see, NASA has deleted about 50% of my discoveries from their archives. Google Map has deleted about 80% of my discoveries from their maps. So I try hard to keep up and keep the public aware. This is really an incredible structure. The round dome is the main part, but there are three other connecting structures that just make this one of the most important pieces of evidence to date. You may have seen others reporting this long ago, they got it from me. I do share my info freely. Only by sharing wholeheartedly can the UFO community unite and grow. Feel free to use my videos on your own channel. I do not have Adsense on my Youtube or my UFO Sightings Daily site. I probably would've made hundreds of thousands of US dollars by now, but I would have been manipulated by money instead of passion. I have seen others doing it only for the money, reporting fake sightings, even making their own sightings and videos. Money creates power and power corrupts. That I cannot have. Knowledge is true power...and meant to be free for all. Scott C. Waring
Some researchers became more convinced that the foo fighters had then simply been hallucinations.
The name “foo fighters” has become synonymous with Dave Grohl’s rock band of that name, but prior to the late 1990s, when the band Foo Fighters achieved worldwide fame, the name “foo fighter” was primarily known only in conspiracy theory circles or UFO research groups.
It refers to mysterious flying objects sighted by pilots in the last few years of the Second World War – objects variously described as glowing red, orange, yellow or white balls of light, or balls of fire – that seemed to appear out of nowhere, flew with aircraft in formation, and conducted aerial maneuvers that no aircraft could have performed.
Sometimes they were described as orbs, sometimes as cigar-shaped. Sightings of foo fighters were primarily reported by Allied pilots flying over Western Europe, but similar sightings were also reported by German and Japanese pilots. To this day, nobody knows exactly what they were.
Photograph of “an unusual atmospheric occurrence observed over Sri Lanka”, forwarded to the UK Ministry of Defence by RAF Fylingdales
The first sightings of foo fighters were reported in November 1944 by American pilots of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. The first plane to report a foo fighter sighting was piloted by Lieutenant Edward Schlueter. Lieutenant Donald Meiers was the radar observer and Lieutenant Fred Ringwald was the intelligence officer onboard.
They were flying over the French-German border when Ringwald spotted a row of eight to ten lights, glowing orange. He called ground radar to see if they were enemy aircraft, but they couldn’t pick anything up. Suspecting that the lights were some sort of new German weapon, they prepared to engage them – but then the lights vanished.
415th Night Fighter Squadron Northrop P-61 Black Widow
The strange lights were given a name by Meiers: foo fighters. The term “foo” was taken from a popular comic strip of the time, called Smokey Stover. In the comic strip, the character Smokey (a firefighter) used to say “where there’s foo there’s fire.” Meier’s use of the name “foo fighters” stuck, and after this, that was the term used to describe these strange phenomena.
Over the next few months, reports continued to pour in of foo fighter sightings, many of which were seen by pilots of the 415th.
While the description of what they looked like sometimes varied, what was always consistent about the sightings was that the foo fighters seemed to be under some sort of intelligent control, were spectacularly maneuverable, impossible to shoot down or outmaneuver, not hostile (they never once attacked or made any attempt to attack or damage the aircraft that sighted them), and that they both appeared out of nowhere and then vanished into thin air.
Sightings were not only reported by the 415th, of course. The foo fighters were also observed by members of the Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force.
An Associated Press war correspondent spoke to airmen of the 415th toward the end of 1944, and soon the story he penned about foo fighter sightings was appearing in newspapers across America.
A number of explanations were put forth to explain the phenomenon – they ranged from the more prosaic, such as the suggestion that the pilots had simply seen weather balloons or were suffering from battle fatigue and thus having hallucinations, to the more outlandish, such as suggestions that the foo fighters were visitors from outer space.
Diorama of a Nazi Foo-Fighter by G. W. Dodson, Roswell UFO Museum, Roswell, New Mexico, USA.
Photo: mr_t_77 CC BY-SA 2.0
Suggestions were made that it was some sort of electrical discharge stimulated by atmospheric conditions, similar to St Elmo’s fire, but given the nature of how the foo fighters moved and conducted aerial maneuvers, this was ruled out.
It was also suspected, of course, that the foo fighters were some sort of hitherto-unseen secret German weapons, but this seemed rather unlikely, given that they never attacked the Allied aircraft or did any damage to them.
St. Elmo’s fire on a ship at sea
These foo fighter sightings eventually became so widespread that the US Army Air Command put together a panel of officers to conduct an official investigation into the phenomenon. The report which detailed the panel’s eventual findings, however, was lost after the war.
The sightings also contributed to the US Navy investigating in 1945 the degree of visual hallucinations experienced by aviators operating at night, for which they conducted a number of experiments.
Some researchers became more convinced that the foo fighters had then simply been hallucinations, even though the airmen who had sighted them were known to have been utterly sound of mind and not under any kind of extreme stress at the time they reported the sightings.
Photograph of an alleged UFO in Passaic, New Jersey, taken on July 31, 1952.
While the frequency of foo fighter sightings died out toward the end of the war, sightings of “flying saucers” and UFOs by civilians throughout the continental US (and the rest of the world) soon became a widespread cultural phenomenon in the decades following WWII.
As for the foo fighters of the Second World War, they remain an unexplained mystery, and we are no closer to understanding what they really were now than were the airmen who saw them in 1944 and 1945.
Are we alone? The question is worthy of serious scientific study
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, “You have absolutely no idea what is out there!” The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
Cover of the October 1957 issue of pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. This was a special edition devoted to ‘flying saucers,’ which became a national obsession after airline pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted a saucer-shaped flying objects in 1947.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there’s plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The Fermi paradox
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought provoking questions. In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?” He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets. Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilizations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy. Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilizations? This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilizations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
This photograph was taken in Wallonia, Belgium.
J.S. Henrardi
Carl Sagan correctly summarized the situation by saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered upand classifiedinformation aboutsuch encounters. But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
UFOs, taboo for professional scientists
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified. UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. And no aliens have visited Earth. Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy. A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can’t possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, “Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?” The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope’s field of view. Further sightings are documented in the book “Wonders in the Sky,” in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Evidence from government and military officers
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organization Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs. Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
Declassified document describing a sighting of a UFO in December 1977, in Bahia, a state in northern Brazil.Arquivo Nacional Collection
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call “CIA drones” which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere. Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs. Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support. Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defense and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel. In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets. While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: “Disclosure has happened. … I’ve got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who’ve come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?”
A topic worthy of serious study
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology. While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigor, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful. This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief. If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent. Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
Dr. Kevin Knuth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University at Albany (SUNY), and is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Entropy (MDPI). He is a former NASA research scientist having worked for four years at NASA Ames Research Center in the Intelligent Systems Division designing artificial intelligence algorithms for astrophysical data analysis. His current research interests include the foundations of physics, quantum information, inference and inquiry, autonomous robotics, and the search for and characterization of extrasolar planets. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications and has been invited to give over 80 presentations in 14 countries.
Kevin was also a recent presenter at the Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena Conference (AAPC) hosted by the Scientific Coalition for Ufology (SCU) held near the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Kevin’s talk was titled, “Constraints on Societies Engaged in Relativistic Interstellar Travel,” and covered the odd spacetime effects this sort of travel would entail. In this episode, Kevin discusses the effects individuals traveling in this manner would experience, and the odd effects and problems that would occur with a group traveling in this manner interacting with others. We also discuss Kevin’s experience and thoughts on how the scientific community views the UFO topic.
Scientists are trying to bottle solar energy and turn it into liquid fuel
"A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity you put sunlight in and get heat out."
Professor Kasper Moth-Poulsen holding a tube containing the catalyst in front of the ultra-high-vacuum setup that was used to measure the heat release gradient in the molecular solar thermal energy storage system.
Johan Bodell
By Wayt Gibbs
What if we couldbottle solar energyso it could be used to power our homes and factories even when the sun doesn't shine?
Scientists have spent decades looking for a way do just that, and now researchers in Sweden are reporting significant progress. They've developed aspecialized fluid that absorbs a bit of sunlight's energy, holds it for months or even years and then releases it when needed. If this so-called solar thermal fuel can be perfected, it mightdrive another nail in the coffin of fossil fuels — and help solve our global-warming crisis.
Unlike oil, coal and natural gas, solar thermal fuels are reusable and environmentally friendly. They release energy without spewing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
"A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity, you put sunlight in and get heat out, triggered on demand," says Jeffrey Grossman, who leads a lab at MIT that works on such materials.
A MOLECULAR JEKYLL AND HYDE
On the roof of the physics building at Chalmers University of Technology in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, Kasper Moth-Poulsen has built a prototype system to test the new solar thermal fuels his research group has created.
As a pump cycles the fluid through transparent tubes, ultraviolet light from the sun excites its molecules into an energized state, a bit like Dr. Jekyll transforming into Mr. Hyde. The light rearranges bonds among the carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen atoms in the fuel, converting a compound known as norbornadiene into another called quadricyclane — the energetic Mr. Hyde version. Because the energy is trapped in strong chemical bonds, the quadricyclane retains the captured solar power even when it cools down.
The energy system works in a circular manner. First, the liquid captures energy from sunlight, in a solar thermal collector on the roof of a building. Then it is stored at room temperature. When the energy is needed, it can be drawn through the catalyst so that the liquid heats up.Yen Strandqvist
To extract that stored energy, Moth-Poulsen passes the activated fuel over a cobalt-based catalyst. The Hyde-like quadricyclane molecules then shapeshift back into their Jekyll form, norbornadiene. The transformation releases copious amounts of heat — enough to raise the fuel's temperature by 63 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit).
If the fuel starts at room temperature (about 21 degrees C, or 70 degrees F), it quickly warms to around 84 degrees C (183 degrees F) — easily hot enough to heat a house or office.
"You could use that thermal energy for your water heater, your dishwasher or your clothes dryer," Grossman says. "There could be lots of industrial applications as well." Low-temperature heat used for cooking, sterilization, bleaching, distillation and other commercial operations accounts for 7 percent of all energy consumption in the European Union, Moth-Poulsen says.
A- solar thermal fuel could be stored in uninsulated tanks inside houses or factories — or perhaps piped or trucked between solar farms and cities. Very little of the fuel or the catalyst is damaged by the reactions, so the system can operate in a closed loop, picking up solar energy and dropping off heat again and again. "We've run it though 125 cycles without any significant degradation," Moth-Poulsen says.
HEAT WITHOUT FIRE
Moth-Poulsen has calculated that the best variant of his fuel can store up to 250 watt-hours of energy per kilogram. Pound for pound, that's roughly twice the energy capacity of the Tesla Powerwall batteries that some homeowners and utilities now use to store electricity generated by solar panels.
"I'm very excited by what Kasper is doing," Grossman says of the research. After a burst of work on norbornadiene fuels in the 1970s, he says, chemists were stymied. The fuels kept breaking down after a few cycles. They didn't hold their energy very long, and they had to be mixed with toxic solvents that diluted the energy-grabbing fuel. Moth-Poulsen "has gone back to that molecule and is using state-of-the-art tools to fix it," Grossman says.
The new results, published in a series of scientific papers over the past year, have caught the attention of investors. Moth-Poulsen says numerous companies have contacted him to discuss the potential for commercialization.
FROM PROTOTYPE TO PRODUCT
For all the promise of solar thermal fuels, years of development lie ahead. "We've made a lot of progress," Moth-Poulsen says, "but there is still a lot to figure out."
A crucial next step will be to develop a single fuel that combines the best characteristics of the many fuel variants the Chalmers team has developed — including long shelf life, high energy density and good recyclability.
Wei Feng, who leads a research group working on solar thermal fuels at China's Tianjin University, points to solvent-free operation as another "big challenge for future commercialization."
Moth-Poulsen's prototype fuels are made via common industrial processes and from widely available industrial agents, including derivatives of acetylene. But it's unclear how much a commercial version of the fuel would cost.
One important factor in the cost will be the fuel's efficiency, which currently is quite low. The prototype fuels respond only to the shortest wavelengths of sunlight, including ultraviolet and blue, which account for just 5 percent of the solar energy available. Moth-Poulsen says he's working to extend the fuel's sensitivity to include more of the spectrum.
He's also aiming to break his own record of a 63-degree C temperature increase. When that heat is added to water that has been preheated to 40 degrees C or more by conventional solar collectors, he says, "That's just enough to boil water into steam." The steam could then drive turbines to make electricity. But with more tweaks to the chemical structure, he says, "I think we could push [the temperature increase] to 80 degrees C or higher." For electricity generation, hotter is better.
"When I started, there was really only one research group working on these kinds of systems," the 40-year-old Moth-Poulsen recalls. But progress has drawn others to the challenge. "Now there are teams in the U.S., in China, in Germany — about 15 around the world," he says.
A UFOseen plummeting towards Earth has left US Air Force bosses baffled.
Footage, filmed in Anchorage in the US state of Alaska, shows what looks like two plumes of black smoke trailing a mysterious object, which appears to have a light guiding its way.
A variety of military aircraft operate out of the nearby Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, but spokeswoman Erin Eaton said the sighting was nothing to do with them.
"That doesn't look like any of our planes," she said.
Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration added that the object in the video was not an aircraft, and that it hadn't received any reports of aviation issues at the time.
The bizarre object was spotted in the sky above Alaska, USA(Image: Pen News)
But some experts still think a plane is the likeliest explanation.
Peter Davidson, director of the Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center, said that the video showed "a high-altitude jet airliner, with a contrail behind it".
"It is in level flight, but because it is flying away from the camera, it appears to be falling," he said.
"It is not, but parallax makes it look that way."
Adonus Baugh, who shot the video, was not convinced.
The 18-year-old said the object looked like something coming into the atmosphere.
Eyewitnesses say it looked like it was a meteor or something coming into the atmosphere(Image: Pen News)
"Me and my mom were just coming in to the parking lot of our house and that's when I noticed that something was falling from the sky," he said.
"I thought it was a meteor or something coming into the atmosphere.
"I actually never saw something like this before."
Another witness, Bebe Kang, agreed: "It didn't look like an airplane or one of those jets. It was big, super slow and red.
"I really just thought it might be an asteroid."
Aircraft operating out of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson include F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, C-130 Hercules and C-17 Globemaster III transports, and E-3 Sentry AWACS command jets.
USS Nimitz UFO incident took place during November of 2004 when U.S. fighter pilots encountered an unidentified flying object, which later become known as “tic-tac”. In 2017 the footage of the occurrence was released to the public and became one of the most hotly discussed topics among ufologists.
The video itself does not offer a clear image, due to the nature of radar systems. However, there are several factors that make this case one of the most fascinating studies in the field. Firstly, the existence of an audio recording of pilots experiencing the visual contact the object. Secondly, Interview given by one of the pilots. Thirdly, a report was done by Washington post about Department of Defense’s operations to analyze the sighting and was later confirmed by the Pentagon itself, giving the sighting more legitimacy.
David Fravor, a Navy Pilot with decades of experience, is the centerpiece of USS Nimitz UFO incident. His skepticism in the subject quickly evaporated, when the training mission encountered something that could not be explained. Skeptics often explain such events by a secretive technology being tested, weather balloons, or unreliability of the witnesses. None of them applies to this eye witness.
Not only would he be aware of something that could be explained by our current technologic capabilities, but also the routine nature of their training operations would make the area unsuitable for any testing by different military branches. This also makes him immune to the claims of him not being able to differentiate something as mundane as a weather balloon, natural occurrence or mechanical dysfunction from UFO.
One of the main reasons that cause the USS Nimitz UFO incident to be a fascinating study is its continuous nature. The encounter with “tic-tac” was not a one-off incident. US Navy was following the unknown object for almost two weeks. At one point over 8 objects were seen on the radar. This was not some sort of the glitch on a radar system of the single ship. This was an organized operation by a fleet of ships to track down an unknown intruder.
The occurrence, in which David Fravor took part in when he and several other pilots directly encountered the UFO was a culmination of the chase. However, even after that event, several anomalies on the ocean surface where seen. Some point looked disturbed as if something has been hovering over them, however, no further visual contact was made. What truly transpired during USS Nimitz UFO incident is debated till this day. Several things are known for certain, the U.S. Navy fleet deemed the occurrence noteworthy enough to initiate the chase, which lasted for two weeks. No one who took the part in it can give an explanation of what happened.
David Fravor, a veteran Navy pilot was shaken by the incident and after 2 years retired from the navy. He said that after his jet returned to the carrier, his description of the events were ridiculed by his colleagues. What showed up on U.S. fleets radars for two weeks and what managed to evade most sophisticated military in the world, remains a mystery till this day.
Un gigantesque “Vaisseau Mère bloque le soleil’ dans une vidéo de SpaceX
Un gigantesque “Vaisseau Mère bloque le soleil’ dans une vidéo de SpaceX
Un astronome aux yeux de faucon a repéré un objet mystérieux bloquant une partie du soleil lors du feed en direct de SpaceX.
Les images montrent ce qui semble être un grand objet sombre qui bloque une grande partie du soleil.
Le chaîne complotiste The Grimreefar a trouvé le point noir en regardant en direct le satellite Es’hail-2, qui a été lancé à bord de la SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket la semaine dernière.
En parlant de l’objet, ils ont dit : “À mon avis, si c’était un objet bloquant le soleil, il serait trop grand pour être compris.”
La vidéo a été visionnée des centaines de fois depuis qu’elle a été publiée hier, et des théoriciens ont affirmé que l’objet pourrait être extraterrestre.
Une personne a écrit : “c’est un vaisseau mère extraterrestre. Si énorme.”
Un autre a fait des commentaires : “C’est un objet massif ! Dieu seul le sait !”
“Peut-être que certains fanatiques religieux ont raison ? Peut-être qu’il y a une guerre dans les cieux.”
Un troisième s’étonne : “C’est beaucoup trop grand pour être une tache solaire, alors qu’est-ce que c’est ? Ça ne peut pas être un astéroïde massif, c’est si bizarre.”
C’est la deuxième observation étrange depuis le lancement de la fusée Falcon 9 dans l’espace le 15 novembre.
Juste après le lancement, les téléspectateurs ont affirmé avoir vu le tristement célèbre satellite Black Knight se déplacer sur leurs écrans.
Pas plus tard que la semaine dernière, les autorités américaines ont autorisé SpaceX d’Elon Musk à mettre en orbite une constellation de 12 000 satellites.
À ce sujet, Musk a dit : “Le diable est dans les détails, et SpaceX semble repousser les limites de ce qui a déjà été fait sur plusieurs fronts simultanément.”
Russia's military-industrial complex has developed the Avangard strategic intercontinental ballistic missile system equipped with a gliding hypersonic maneuvering warhead. Credit: Getty Images
Both the United States and Russia last monthpulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty(INF), a Cold War–era pact that prohibited land-based ballistic or cruise missiles with ranges between 311 and 3,420 miles. That agreement limited just one class of weapons, but it is not the only accord poised to end: The much-broader New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) will expire on February 5 next year, unless both parties agree to extend it—whichthey may not do.
New START limits the number of missiles the U.S. and Russia deploy, with an eye toward reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world. Without it, for the first time since 1972 there would be no limit on how many warheads either nation can build and deploy. As tensions rise, both countries are looking to modernize their nuclear weapons, and Russia in particular is teasing terrifying new missiles that—if they work—could bypass the U.S.’s elaborate system of ground- and satellite-based defenses.
“The Russians really hate missile defense,” says Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear policy expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. “They really don’t like the possibility that they might be outmatched technologically. So there’s a whole battery of Russian programs—from the doomsday torpedoes, to nuclear-powered cruise missiles, to hypersonic reentry vehicles, to anti-satellite weapons.”
Last year Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled six new weaponsduring a governmental address. The most impressive, according to nuclear experts, were the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, the nuclear-powered cruise missile Skyfall and the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). These three are the crown jewels in Russia’s aggressive new nuclear policy, capable—according to Putin—of circumventing U.S. missile defense systems. Currently, American defenses are designed to knock an incoming nuke out of the air before it can hit its target—but this was already a complicated and difficult task before the development of hypersonics.
Although Russia’s new weapons sound frightening, none has actually been deployed yet. They may be ready in the next year or two, but “none of them are fully operational,” says Philip Coyle, a board member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Coyle (who has also served as U.S. assistant secretary of defense), explains that some have been tested, but “none of them have been so successful that they can claim to have operational capability.”
But that doesn’t mean Coyle is not worried, especially about hypersonic threats. “Some of those would be impossible for United States missile defense systems [to counter],” he says, “especially the hypersonic air-to-ground-system and the hypersonic glide system, both of which [Putin] said had been successfully tested.” The current crop of weapons that defense experts label as hypersonic reach speeds greater than 3,000 mph.
INSIDE THE NUCLEAR ARSENAL
Other countries, including the United States and China, have also tested hypersonic weapons—but it is Russia’s hypersonic glide vehicle, the Avangard, that has garnered the defense community’s most intense attention. Glide vehicles could theoretically combine the maneuverability of a cruise missile with the speed of an ICBM. On a traditional nuclear launch involving an ICBM, a powerful rocket sends the warhead on a trajectory similar to a space launch (long-range ICBMs even go suborbital) before it turns around and plummets to Earth at hypersonic speeds. Glide vehicles like the Avangard would ride an ICBM into the sky, but they would then be released and soar along at the top of the atmosphere—above sensor range—before heading to their targets.
However, not everyone is fretting about high-speed glide vehicles. “I’m not so impressed by those,” Lewis says. He says the vehicles themselves, once released, will no longer be traveling at hypersonic speeds (although other experts disagree with this assessment). “The missile is gliding, so it actually slows down quite a bit and makes a much better target [than traditional ICBMs] for missiles defenses,” Lewis says. The vehicle could supposedly move to evade a defense system, but Lewis remains unconvinced. “It’s great that it can maneuver so that it doesn’t come into the range of missile defenses. But if it does, it’s going to be a much brighter target because it’s moving more slowly and it’ll be superhot,” he says. “The hypersonic gliders people are talking about actually represent slower reentry than what currently exists.”
Instead Lewis worries more about the Skyfall, the nuclear-powered cruise missile carrying a nuclear warhead. “I’m a little bothered by the menagerie of science fiction ideas that the Russians are working on,” he says. “We don’t know much about the technology behind that one (Skyfall), but certainly when the U.S. investigated the idea it was pretty nasty in terms of radiation released just to power it.” According to Putin, the Skyfall is a superpowered Tomahawk cruise missile launched via ground or air. The best Tomahawks can travel 1,550 miles—but with a nuclear reactor powering it, the Skyfall effectively has an unlimited range. Russian military sources reported the country had successfully tested the cruise missile in January 2019; however, U.S. intelligence suggests that it has yet to demonstrate a range greater than 22 miles, and may not reach its full potential for another 10 years.
Still, a radiation-spewing cruise missile with unlimited range is not Russia’s only frightening new weapon. It is also testing the RS-28 Sarmat, a liquid-fueled ICBM designed to brute-force its way through U.S. missile defense systems. The missile is fast, huge—119 feet tall with a weight of more than 220 tons—and full of weapons: It carries a 10-ton payload, big enough to include 24 separate nuclear-tipped Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles.
And the Sarmat is dangerous for reasons beyond its size. According to Coyle it also has a shorter-than-usual boost phase (the period of an ICBM’s launch when it is rocketing into the atmosphere), which gives U.S. missile defenses less time to shoot it down. If a brief launch window is not enough to protect the missile, Coyle says, “[Putin] also said that Sarmat would carry countermeasures designed to confuse U.S. anti-missiles systems.”
The Sarmat’s short boost phase exemplifies what really makes these missiles so terrifying: time. Nuclear warheads are always dangerous, but the U.S. has long relied on its ability to create lead time between launch, detection and response. Essentially, the longer the commander-in-chief has to decide how to react to the news of an ICBM launch, the better. The abilities of these new weapons—short boost times, hypersonic speeds and unlimited range—all eat into those precious minutes. “It’s going to tighten the noose around our necks,” Lewis says. “These systems add complexity and reduce decision time. That’s the kind of change that can really threaten stability.”
Meanwhile, the most recent U.S. Nuclear Posture Review and Missile Defense Review promised to develop America’s own hypersonic weapons. The reviews also teased the creation of new sensors, floated the idea of turning the F-35—the new U.S. fighter jet—into an ICBM killer, and suggested developing space-based sensors to augment American missile defense systems. But both reviews were long on theory and short on details. In particular, Coyle says, “The Missile Defense Review is unclear about what it is we would deploy in space.”
However, these protections are still theoretical. At the moment, no one has a concrete solution to the threat—and Russia continues to build and test new and potentially devastating nuclear weapons.
A Physicist Claims He’s Figured Out Why We Haven’t Met Aliens Yet, And It’s Pretty Worrying
A Physicist Claims He’s Figured Out Why We Haven’t Met Aliens Yet, And It’s Pretty Worrying
The question “where is everyone?” is the crux of theFermi Paradox. If life on Earth is not particularly special and unique, where are all the alien civilizations? Many explanations have been proposed to explain why we seem to be alone in the vast universe. None have been 100 percent convincing, and people continue to puzzle over a solution.
According to one scientist, any civilisation that is capable of colonising beyond its own planet 'necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion'
(Stock Image)
Russian physicist Alexander Berezin, from the National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET), has another idea. He calls it the “First in, last out” solution of the Fermi Paradox. He suggests that once a civilization reaches the capabilities of spreading across the stars, it will inevitably wipe out all other civilizations.
The grim solution doesn’t hypothesize a necessarily evil alien race. Simply, they might not notice us, and their exponential expansion across the galaxy might be more important to them than what would happen to us.
“They simply won’t notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it,” he writes in the paper, which is available on pre-print and yet to be peer-reviewed.
While the picture he paints is quite grim, there’s an even less cheery aspect. He suggests that the reason we are still here is that we are not likely to be the ants. We are the future destroyers of countless civilizations.
“Assuming the hypothesis above is correct, what does it mean for our future? The only explanation is the invocation of the anthropic principle. We are the first to arrive at the [interstellar] stage. And, most likely, will be the last to leave,” Berezin explained.
Berezin’s solution for the paradox comes from several simplifications of assumptions. For example, our definition of life depends on seven parameters, but for Berezin, there’s only one that matters: growth. Growth is the push for expanding beyond the planet of origin, and if the push to expansion becomes the dominant force, it will trample any other existing life in the universe. Colonialism and capitalism are two historical example of such forces.
So, is this it? We need to either go out there and conquer or be destroyed? Well, Berezin hopes that he’s wrong. One other requirement of his solution is that life can only be found when very close rather than at a distance. So finding alien life before we are on the destruction path might just make us a decent civilization.
WHAT IS THE FERMI PARADOX?
The Fermi Paradox questions why, given the estimated 200bn-400bn stars and at least 100bn planets in our galaxy, there have been no signs of alien life.
The contradiction is named after its creator, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
He first posed the question back in 1950.
Fermi believed it was too extraordinary that a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has yet to be detected in the universe — despite its immense vastness.
Fermi concluded there must a barrier that limits the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced space-colonising civilisations.
This barrier is sometimes referred to as the 'Great Filter'.
If the main obstacle preventing the colonisation of other planets is not in our past, then the barrier that will stop humanity's prospects of reaching other worlds must lie in our future, scientists have theorised.
Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by a civilisation to start conquering the stars ultimately lead to its destruction.
He said: 'One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that.
‘It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.'
Other possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox include that no other intelligent species have arisen in the universe, intelligent alien species are out there — but lack the necessary technology to communicate with Earth.
Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilsations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication.
If two worlds are separated by several thousand light-years, it's possible that one or both civilisation will be extinct before a dialogue can be established.
The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution.
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi devised the so-called Fermi Paradox in the 1950s. It explores why there is no sign of alien life, despite the 100 billions planets in our galaxy
A.A. Berezin cautions that rogue AIs that rebelled against their creators could pose a threat to humanity if it does not begin colonising the stars first
These rocks are a good indicator that water once flowed on Mars.
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm, on March 24, 2019, Sol (day) 2356 of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission.
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
The images that Curiosity and the otherMars Roverssent back to Earth have been nothing short of amazing. They’ve offered us a breathtaking window into a planet which shares bothstriking similaritiesanddramatic differences to our Earth. But generally, these pictures have one thing in common: they’re clearly from Mars. The image above, in contrast, looks like it could have been snapped from most rivers on Earth.
A few things are intriguing in this image. For starters, the rocks seem a bit paler than the usual rust-red we’re used to seeing on Mars. Secondly, the rocks are rounded off as if they are river rocks — and to top it all off, there’s a couple of strangely-looking spherical white-ish rocks which you just wouldn’t imagine on Mars.
While NASA says these are almost certainly not river rocks, they still hint at Mars having a wet past.
These rounded rocks are formed through a phenomenon called concretion. Concretionary rocks are quite common on Earth: they form in water-rich environments, hardening over time. A concretion is formed by the precipitation of mineral cement within the spaces between particles and is found in sedimentary rock or soil. Concretions are often ovoid or spherical in shape, although irregular shapes also occur.
This type of rocks are very susceptible to erosion (not necessarily water erosion), and the outer layers erode faster than the inner ones, leaving behind the rounded shapes we see here.
It’s a fantastic reminder that the geological processes we are so familiar with here on Earth are also often present on other bodies — and at least in some ways, Mars is very much like the Earth.
A self-portrait of the Curiosity Mars rover on Vera Rubin Ridge, which it’s been investigating for the past several months. Directly behind the rover is a clay-rich slope scientists are eager to begin exploring.
Indian authorities claim to have successfully tested an anti-satellite missile.
“India is now a major space power,” said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to local news. “India has achieved a big feat today.”
Election Season
The destroyed satellite was one of India’s own, orbiting the Earth at 186 miles (300 km). The Independent reports that it may have been a mini-satellite launched into orbit a month ago for this purpose. The interceptor missile was launched from a launch complex on the East coast of India on Wednesday morning.
“India has always maintained that space should not be an arena for warfare and that remains unchanged in spite of this,” Mohdi said, according to local media. “India has always been a nation of peace, but we also defend ourselves. It is with that intention that we achieved this capability.”
The news comes in the midst of election season in India, with polls opening in several weeks. The move could be a bid to bolster Modi’s chances at re-election, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Space Arms Race
India isn’t the only world nation that has carried out such a test. China claims to have carried out a successful test in 2007, the U.S. in 1985. The Pentagon has recently warned of both China and Russia developing anti-satellite technology, including jammers and even lasers capable of disrupting or damaging satellites in orbit.
Whether India’s test will fuel the race to become the dominant nation in low-Earth orbit and beyond, or, as India claims, “secure and further peace” is still uncertain.
Why hasn't Earth received any messages from extraterrestrials yet? Perhaps because we're already unwitting inhabitants in a so-called galactic zoo.
This was one of the scenarios a group of international researchers explored on March 18 at a meeting organized by the nonprofit organization Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). The gathering, which took place at the City of Science and Industry museum in Paris (Cité), brought together about 60 scientists who research the possibility of communication with hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrials.
There, they debated "The Great Silence" — why aliens haven't contacted us — exploring one possibility known as the "zoo hypothesis." First proposed in the 1970s, it describes Earth as a planet that is already under observation by "galactic zookeepers" who are deliberately concealing themselves from human detection, Forbes reported. [9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for Why Humans Haven't Found Aliens Yet]
"When we try to better understand the universe, the question of whether we are alone is unavoidable," meeting attendee Florence Raulin-Cerceau, an associate professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, told Paris-Match.
That Earth would be the lone planet to evolve and host intelligent life among potentially billions of planets in our galaxy alone seems very unlikely. But if there are intelligent extraterrestrials out there, where are they, and why haven't we found them yet? This conundrum, posed in 1950 by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, is known as Fermi's Paradox, and it still stymies experts today.
Fermi didn't live to see evidence of the first exoplanets, which were discovered decades after his death. Since 2014, NASA's Kepler space telescope has confirmed the existence of hundreds of distant worlds, and its findings have hinted at potentially 2,300 more. And yet, despite these exciting exoplanet discoveries, contact with extraterrestrials seems no closer now than it did in Fermi's day.
Under alien observation?
One explanation that scientists explored at the METI meeting, is that aliens are aware of Earth and are observing us as we would observe animals kept in a zoo, METI President Douglas Vakoch said in a workshop. If this is the case, humans should increase their efforts to create messages capable of reaching our "keepers," to demonstrate our intelligence, Vakoch explained.
For example, if a captive zebra were to suddenly tap out a pattern of prime numbers, humans would be required to re-evaluate their understanding of zebra cognition, "and we would be compelled to respond," according to EarthSky.
But what if we're not part of a vast alien zoo — what if, instead, humanity has been evaluated by alien civilizations, and subsequently "quarantined" from our galactic neighbors?
It's possible that extraterrestrials are actively isolating us from contact for our own good, because interacting with aliens would be "culturally disruptive" for Earth, meeting co-chair Jean-Pierre Rospars, honorary research director at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), said in a workshop.
Of course, it's also likely that we haven't heard from aliens because they're locked under a layer of ice in subsurface oceans; trapped on massive "super-Earth" worlds by gravity's intense pull; or dead because their advanced civilizations have already destroyed themselves — as humanity might — through runaway consumption of their planet's natural resources.
Though, maybe if we want to hear from aliens we just need to relax and be patient. After all, Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years, while extraterrestrial research is less than 100 years old, Paris-Match reported.
WETENSCHAPOnderzoekers zijn er voor de eerste keer in geslaagd om directe observaties te doen van een planeet buiten ons zonnestelsel. Ze gebruikten daarvoor een compleet nieuwe techniek. HR8799e draait rond een ster in het sterrenbeeld Pegasus en blijkt een soort super-Jupiter te zijn.
HR8799e werd voor het eerst gespot in 2010 en bevindt zich op 129 lichtjaar van onze Aarde, dat is 1.220.434.230.962.923 kilometer van ons verwijderd. Nooit eerder slaagden wetenschappers erin om rechtstreekse observaties te doen van een planeet buiten ons zonnestelsel. Dat komt door het verblindende licht van de sterren waarrond ze draaien.
Deze keer lukte het wél, met een techniek die het licht van verscheidene telescopen combineerde. Via zogenaamde ‘optische interferometrie’ konden de vier telescopen van de Very Large Telescope (VLT) – een geavanceerd astronomisch observatorium in de Atacamawoestijn in Chili – gecombineerd worden tot één super-telescoop: Gravity. Dat beeldvormingssysteem was zó gevoelig en precies dat het in staat was om het licht van de planeet en het licht van zijn ster uit elkaar te halen.
Wat de wetenschappers zagen, was iets wat ze nooit eerder hadden gezien. HR8799e bleek groter en jonger te zijn dan de planeten in ons eigen zonnestelsel. Het was een bal van gas en in zijn atmosfeer woedde een gigantische en krachtige storm. De oppervlakte werd gedomineerd werd door wolken van ijzer en silicaten (de grondstof van glas). (lees hieronder verder)
RV
De Very Large Telescope (VLT) in de woestijn van Chili.
ESO/P. Horálek
“Onze observaties suggereren dat het om een bal gas gaat die van binnenuit verlicht wordt”, aldus teamleider Sylvestre Lacour van het Observatoire de Paris in Frankrijk en het Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. “Stralen warm licht wervelen door stormachtige donkere wolken.”
Volgens de man zou de heel jonge planeet een “dynamische atmosfeer” hebben en complexe fysische en chemische processen ondergaan. Hij zou nog ‘maar’ 30 miljoen jaar oud zijn en de wetenschap een kijk geven op hoe planeten en planetaire systemen gevormd worden.
Niet bewoonbaar
Voor alle duidelijkheid: de planeet is nog in de verste verten niet bewoonbaar. Door de energie die vrijkwam bij zijn ontstaan en een krachtig broeikaseffect loopt de temperatuur er op tot ongeveer 1.000 graden Celcius. De atmosfeer zit bovendien vol koolstofmonoxide.
WETENSCHAPDe Indiase premier Narendra Modi zegt dat India een satelliet heeft neergehaald met een antisatellietwapen, en omschrijft de test als een grote doorbraak in het ruimteprogramma van zijn land.
Modi deed de aankondiging in een televisietoespraak. “Onze wetenschappers hebben een satelliet in een lage baan om de aarde op een afstand van 300 kilometer neergehaald”, zei de hindoeïstische nationalistische leider.
Hij benadrukte dat niemand zich bedreigd hoefde te voelen door de test. “Ons doel is om vrede te brengen en niet om een oorlogssfeer te creëren, dit is niet gericht tegen welk land dan ook”, zei hij.
Volgens de premier is India nog maar het vierde land dat zo’n antisatellietwapen gebruikt, na de Verenigde Staten, Rusland en China. “India heeft een ongeziene prestatie geleverd geleverd vandaag”, zei Modi. “India heeft zijn naam geregistreerd als ruimtevaartmacht.”
Volgende maand vinden in India parlementsverkiezingen plaats.
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Massive Greenland glacier said to be one of the main contributors to global sea level rise is GROWING again due to cooling local temperatures - but NASA warns it’s only temporary
Massive Greenland glacier said to be one of the main contributors to global sea level rise is GROWING again due to cooling local temperatures - but NASA warns it’s only temporary
In 2012, Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier was retreating about 1.8 miles annually
A new study found it started growing again at about same rate in past two years
Natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic water likely caused it to reverse course
Scientists say it's only temporary, as surrounding waters will soon be warming
A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds.
The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually.
But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday's Nature Geoscience.
Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.
Scroll down for video
Patches of bare land at the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland are shown. The major glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds
'That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,' said Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box.
'The good news is that it's a reminder that it's not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.'
Box, who wasn't part of the study, said Jakobshavn is 'arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king.'
A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project.
Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation - a natural and temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean that is like a distant cousin to El Nino in the Pacific.
The water in Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn hits the ocean, is about 3.6 degrees cooler (2 degrees Celsius) than a few years ago, study authors said.
While this is 'good news' on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author.
Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.
'In the long run we'll probably have to raise our predictions of sea level rise again,' Willis said.
Think of the ocean temperatures near Greenland like an escalator that's rising slowly from global warming, Khazendar said. But the natural North Atlantic Oscillation sometimes is like jumping down a few steps or jumping up a few steps.
HOW IS GLOBAL WARMING AFFECTING GLACIAL RETREAT?
Global warming is causing the temperatures all around the world to increase.
This is particularly prominent at latitudes nearer the poles.
Rising temperatures, permafrost, glaciers and ice sheets are all struggling to stay in tact in the face of the warmer climate.
As temperatures have risen to more than a degree above pre-industrial levels, ice continues melt.
For example, melting ice on the Greenland ice sheet is producing 'meltwater lakes', which then contribute further to the melting.
This positive feedback loop is also found on glaciers atop mountains.
Many of these have been frozen since the last ice age and researchers are seeing considerable retreat.
Some animal and plant species rely heavily on the cold conditions that the glaciers provide and are migrating to higher altitudes to find suitable habitat.
This is putting severe strain on the ecosystems as more animals and more species are living in an ever-shrinking region.
On top of the environmental pressure, the lack of ice on mountains is vastly increasing the risks of landslides and volcanic eruptions.
The phenomena is found in several mountain ranges around the world.
It has also been seen in regions of Antarctica.
The water can get cooler and have effects, but in the long run it is getting warmer and the melting will be worse, he said.
Four outside scientists said the study and results make sense.
University of Washington ice scientist Ian Joughin, who wasn't part of the study and predicted such a change seven years ago, said it would be a 'grave mistake' to interpret the latest data as contradicting climate change science.
What's happening, Joughin said, is 'to a large extent, a temporary blip. Downturns do occur in the stock market, but overall the long term trajectory is up. This is really the same thing.'
Big U-turn: Key melting Greenland glacier is growing again
Big U-turn: Key melting Greenland glacier is growing again
BY SETH BORENSTEIN
This 2016 photo provided by NASA shows patches of bare land at the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland. The major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds. The Jakobshavn glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually. But the last two years it started growing again at about the same rate, according to a study released on Monday, March 25, 2019, in Nature Geoscience. Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.
(NASA via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds.
The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually. But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Geoscience . Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.
“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box. “The good news is that it’s a reminder that it’s not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.”
Box, who wasn’t part of the study, said Jakobshavn is “arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king.”
A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project. Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation — a natural and temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean that is like a distant cousin to El Nino in the Pacific.
The water in Disko Bay, where Jakobshavn hits the ocean, is about 3.6 degrees cooler (2 degrees Celsius) than a few years ago, study authors said.
While this is “good news” on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author. Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.
“In the long run we’ll probably have to raise our predictions of sea level rise again,” Willis said.
Think of the ocean temperatures near Greenland like an escalator that’s rising slowly from global warming, Khazendar said. But the natural North Atlantic Oscillation sometimes is like jumping down a few steps or jumping up a few steps. The water can get cooler and have effects, but in the long run it is getting warmer and the melting will be worse, he said.
Four outside scientists said the study and results make sense.
University of Washington ice scientist Ian Joughin, who wasn’t part of the study and predicted such a change seven years ago, said it would be a “grave mistake” to interpret the latest data as contradicting climate change science.
What’s happening, Joughin said, is “to a large extent, a temporary blip. Downturns do occur in the stock market, but overall the long term trajectory is up. This is really the same thing.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Grote ommekeer: gletsjer op Groenland weigert te smelten en groeit zelfs. Wetenschappers staan voor verrassing
Grote ommekeer: gletsjer op Groenland weigert te smelten en groeit zelfs. Wetenschappers staan voor verrassing
Een grote gletsjer op Groenland, tot voor kort één van de snelst krimpende ijsmassa’s op aarde, groeit weer. Dat blijkt uit een nieuwe studie van de NASA.
Rond 2012 verloor de Jakobshavn-gletsjer zo’n 40 meter aan ijs per jaar. Daarnaast trok hij zich met drie kilometer per jaar terug.
Maar de afgelopen twee jaar groeide de gletsjer weer ongeveer net zoveel aan, blijkt uit de studie die is gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift Nature Geoscience.
Natuurlijke cyclus
“Dit kwam voor ons als een verrassing,” zei klimaatwetenschapper Jason Box tegen persbureau AP. “We waren eraan gewend dat de gletsjer in omvang afnam.”
De gletsjer is waarschijnlijk gegroeid als gevolg van een natuurlijke cyclus waarbij de Atlantische Oceaan afkoelt, aldus hoofdonderzoeker Ala Khazendar van de NASA.
Het water in Disko Bay, waar de gletsjer uitkomt bij de oceaan, is ongeveer twee graden Celsius kouder dan twee jaar geleden, zeggen de onderzoekers.
Warmte
Vorig jaar toonden wetenschappers voor het eerst aan dat gletsjers op Groenland smelten als gevolg van warmte die uit het binnenste van de aarde ontsnapt.
“In het noordoosten van Groenland bevinden zich verschillende geisers waar het water temperaturen van 60 graden Celsius bereikt,” zei hoofdonderzoeker Soren Rysgaard van de Universiteit van Aarhus in Denemarken.
“Er is geen twijfel over mogelijk dat de warmte uit het binnenste van de aarde de verplaatsing van het ijs beïnvloedt,” voegde hij toe.
CRIMINELE OVERHEDEN HOUDEN BUITENAARDSE ZEGENINGEN VOOR ONS VERBORGEN ( VIDEO )
CRIMINELE OVERHEDEN HOUDEN BUITENAARDSE ZEGENINGEN VOOR ONS VERBORGEN ( VIDEO )
De wereld zou al lang een veel betere plaats kunnen zijn als overheden en dan met name de Amerikaanse, de kennis van buitenaardsen met het volk zouden delen.
Er zou dan gratis schone energie zijn, water en voedsel voor de hele wereldbevolking en enge ziektes konden worden genezen.
Eigenlijk de enige manier waarop wij dingen te weten kunnen komen over geheimzinnige projecten zoals die van bijvoorbeeld de Amerikaanse overheid, is via klokkenluiders.
Mensen die zelf dingen hebben gezien en meegemaakt en vinden dat ze hun mond open moeten doen en hun kennis delen met de wereld.
Eén van die mensen is Emery Smith, de man die jarenlang heeft gewerkt bij en voor de Amerikaanse luchtmacht.
Smith heeft een opleiding genoten tot operatie assistent en volgde talloze andere paramedische opleidingen. Maar zijn specialiteit was naast bovengenoemde zaken, het voorbereiden van weefselonderzoek,
Zo kreeg hij delen van lichamen en moest daar bepaalde zaken van ontleden en voor onderzoek opsturen naar een andere afdeling zonder dat hij in het begin zelf ook maar enig idee had van wie die lichaamsdelen waren of wat er onderzocht zou worden.
Tijdens dat soort activiteiten die veelal werden uitgevoerd in ondergrondse laboratoria van de luchtmacht, kwam Smith ook in aanraking met andere dingen die tot op de dag van vandaag geheim zijn, zoals nulpunt energie, antizwaartekracht en holografische technieken.
Het meeste van de technologie die hij zag was afkomstig van reverse engineering. Techniek, nagebouwd van buitenaardsen en veelal afkomstig uit neergestorte ufo’s.
Het gemene is natuurlijk zoals altijd, dat overheden dit soort dingen voor zichzelf houden en niet delen met de bevolking. Wanneer ze dit wel zouden doen, volgens Smith, dan hadden wij de mogelijkheid om allerlei nare ziektes te genezen, gratis energie en genoeg water en voedsel om de gehele wereldbevolking te voorzien.
Door de jaren heen is Emery Smith precies te weten gekomen hoe alles in elkaar steekt met betrekking tot de buitenaardsen. Dit alles vertelt hij in onderstaand interview dat absoluut de moeite van het bekijken waard is.
Het neemt je mee naar een andere wereld en ineens zijn andere dimensie en teleporatie geen vreemde begrippen meer. Het is er allemaal, om ons heen en dichterbij dan we denken.
En ook hier komt ter sprake waar wij al heel lang over schrijven en dat is de geheime ruimtevloot. Waar wij als publiek kijken naar een ruimteprogramma waar raketten nog steeds met donderend geraas en voorzien van fossiele brandstoffen de ruimte in worden gestuurd, terwijl de geheime ruimtevloot over de meest moderne buitenaardse technieken beschikt.
Wat Smith zegt is dat we eigenlijk geen moeite hoeven doen voor Disclosure, want dat door de veranderingen van het weer op aarde het ijs in poolstreken bijvoorbeeld zal smelten, waardoor enorme ruimteschepen tevoorschijn zullen komen, waar op een gegeven moment voor de autoriteiten geen ontkennen meer aan zal zijn omdat de hele wereld hiervan getuige is.
Het is natuurlijk altijd lastig om te beoordelen of iemand de waarheid vertelt of niet.
In het geval van Emery Smith volgt hierna een recente verklaring van David Wilcock waarin deze uitlegt dat hij Smith al tien jaar kent en dat hij ervan overtuigd is dat de verhalen zoals Smith die vertelt, op waarheid berusten. Gedurende 10 jaar is de man niet afgeweken van zijn getuigenverslagen.
De naam Smith valt vaak samen met die van Corey Goode, ook een goede bekende van Wilcox, waar wel de nodige twijfel over bestaat, zoals wij in een eerder artikel schreven.
Russian Strange Ray of Light Emerges From The Sky Captured on Camera
Russian Strange Ray of Light Emerges From The Sky Captured on Camera
Russian photographer Zhiganov, who initially planned to photograph some of his friends lounging in a hot tub with the aurora overhead in the city of Aptity, Russia quickly changed when he noticed a strange phenomenon, explained as a vertical aurora, in the sky upon he started to film it.
“It was the first time I ever saw an aurora in such a rarified form” Zhiganov said but I wonder whether it was an aurora or some sort of a laser/plasma beam since it turned into an enormous bright sphere that moved across the surface until it disappeared.
Here is the amazing video and please decide for yourself whether it is a rare vertical aurora or not.
The Secret Space Program Gary McKinnon 1st Interview in Years by Richard Dolan
The Secret Space Program Gary McKinnon 1st Interview in Years by Richard Dolan
UK citizen Gary McKinnon is the most famous UFO “hacker” of all time. Arrested in 2002, he was in danger of extradition to the US for ten years.
What he found was apparent evidence of a secret space program, including references to “non-terrestrial officers” and ship to ship transfers of vessels not in the U.S. military inventory.
Moreover, a high-resolution photograph, taken from space, of a smooth, cigar-shaped craft. Gary also talks about the repercussions of being sought by the U.S. government, his depression, suicidal thoughts, and more.
Richard Dolan who interviews Gary is one of the world’s leading researchers and writers on the subject of UFOs and believes that they constitute the greatest mystery of our time.
UFO Disclosure: They’re Here! And They've Crashed on Earth Many Times!
UFO Disclosure: They’re Here! And They've Crashed on Earth Many Times!
Whoever or whatever is watching us is looking to see what we are doing with our own technology. There have been many UFO Crashes, did they just crash or did we take them down?
So what triggered project blue book, was it pilot sightings or did something happen? There are many cases from project blue book that defy rational explanation.
Because of her international perspective on extraterrestrial related phenomena, Paola Harris has consulted with many researchers, including J Allen Hynek and Col. Philip Corso about the best avenues for planetary disclosure with emphasis on the “big picture” and stressing the historical connection.
What do anthropology and UFOs have in common? In his new book, a noted anthropologist looks at the physical descriptions of the bodies and behaviors of extraterrestrials and theorizes that the reason they resemble us so much is that they’re our descendants from a future time and UFOs are actually time machines transporting them back for some kind of strange family reunion. Is this the future version of genealogical DNA tests?
“The phenomenon may be our own distant descendants coming back through time to study us in their own evolutionary past. The extra-tempestrial are ubiquitously reported as being bipedal, upright-walking, five fingers on each hand and foot, bi-lateral symmetry that they have two eyes, a mouth a nose, they can communicate with us in our own languages.”
In a recent appearance on KXLF (“Montana’s News Leader”) and in previous interviews like this one by Darkness Radio and on his website, Montana Tech professor of anthropology Dr. Michael P. Masters summarizes his new book, “Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon,” and his quest to “begin a new and more informed discussion among believers and skeptics alike.” That quest is to use the analytical techniques of an anthropologist who normally looks at human ancestors who partially resemble us and apply them to a study of other human-like species we know only through eyewitness accounts of alleged encounters – extraterrestrials. The end result is that Masters’ analysis suggests we should stop using the description “extraterrestrials” and instead start calling at least some of these future visitors extra-tempestrials.
“As an anthropologist who has worked on and directed numerous archaeological digs in Africa, France, and throughout the United States, it is easy to conceptualize just how much more could be learned about our own evolutionary history, if we currently possessed the technology to visit past periods of time.”
Dr. Masters sees the accounts of alien sightings and particularly alien abductions and the subsequent probings and analyses as indications that the visitors are anthropologists like himself, studying their ancestors with a tool he would love to have – a time machine. Imagine how much more we would know of ourselves, our planet and our universe if we could physically travel back millions of years to observe and possibly (let’s not ignore the “butterfly effect”) examine them.
“Many changes characterize human evolution, but it is primarily tenacious shifts toward habitual upright walking, changes in brain size and shape, facial reduction, reduced body hair, higher intelligence, and the development of increasingly complex tools and culture that most define our lineage. These changes occurred throughout hominin evolution, and have persisted in spite of marked modification to our subsistence strategy, climate, ecology, environment, and system of social, economic, and political organization.”
The is Dr. Masters’ ‘If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck’ line of abductive reasoning. Through millions of years of evolution and sometimes catastrophic environmental events, humans haven’t changed much physically. It’s the subtle changes that translate into leaps in intelligence and behavior. It makes sense that future humans would want more information on their lesser-developed ancestors too (there goes our self-esteem and superiority complex). In a similar manner, we obviously would like to find out what we’re going to become. Masters warns that this would be difficult.
“Modern and past human groups would only be capable of comprehending the biology, culture, and technology of these extratempestrials in a limited capacity, as we represent a far more primitive stage of their remote ancestral past.”
See the resemblance?
This theory of extratempestrials obviously adds a twist to the the idea of ancient astronauts, with the ‘aliens’ being future humans helping their primitive ancestors build pyramids in return for remembering them with statues and paintings and not destroying the Earth and ruining their future lives. That sounds like the positive conclusion Masters draws from his theory.
“Coupled with a thorough understanding of the past and modern human condition, these accounts point to the continuation of established biological and cultural trends here on Earth, long into the distant future.”
We’ll still be here, we’ll still be walking upright, we’ll become smart enough to invent time machines and we won’t turn out too badly.
Next time you meet an ‘alien’, tell them “You’re welcome.”
Ryan Sprague is a lead investigator and co-host of the CW television series,Roswell: Mysteries Decodedand the author ofSomewhere in the Skies: A Human Approach to an Alien Phenomenon. He is also the creator and host of theSomewhere in the Skiespodcast on the eOne Podcast network. As a UFO journalist, Ryan has interviewed witnesses from all walks of life about UFO sightings and encounters. He has also interviewed military and intelligence officials about UFOs, writing for such news sites as Open Minds Magazine, Rogue Planet, Omni Reboot, andFuturism. Speaking on the UFO topic, he has been featured on ABC News, Fox News, Science Channel, and is a regular on Travel Channel’s series, Mysteries at the Museum. He is currently working on his second book.
Here, Ryan talks to me about what he has and hasn’t learned from his years in a field that can be inspiring and maddening in equal measure…
RG: Your podcast recently celebrated its 100th episode. Is it a challenge to deliver quality content every week? How do you select your topics?
It’s definitely challenging, but the reward far outweighs the challenge. I get messages from listeners from all over the world almost on a daily basis. Some good, some bad, but almost always constructive. I value my listeners’ opinions because, ultimately, the show is for them and not for me. My goal was to shake things up with the show; ask new questions of the UFO phenomenon. So, I wanted to bring unique voices to the UFO discourse. I’ve met so many new people and have learned so much from simply stepping outside the echo chamber.
RG: What inspires you most about UFOlogy?
The staggering amount of people who have witnessed the phenomena firsthand. Also, the attention that “Ufology” has gotten these past few years (yes, no matter what anyone says, To the Stars Academy has played a huge part in that). The topic is certainly seeing a resurgence, and even mainstream scientists and academics are taking it more seriously. I need not look further than at least three college/university-level professors who now teach UFOs in their curriculum. The conversation is growing both in terms of how many people are interested and even in the complexity of the phenomena.
Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Arts and sciences is spending big money to position itself in the public eye as the go-to organisation for UFO truth.
RG: What annoys you most about UFOlogy?
The divide. There’s room for everyone at the saucer-shaped table, so instead of talking down to one another, in terms of research, approaches, or beliefs, we should engage in healthy debate, take what we want from one another’s work, and build off of it. I’ve personally gleaned something from every person I’ve talked to about UFOs, even if it involved me learning that someone was straight up lying to my face, hoaxing, or simply a fantasist. At least I learned to move on from them and focus on the work at hand.
RG: Who are your top three UFOlogical heroes or role models, and why?
The first would have to be my mentor, both in UFO research and my other passion in life, theater. And that is Peter Robbins. He welcomed me with open arms into a world I never knew existed. He is a man of many words and those words pack a punch. We spend hours at our favorite diner in Manhattan, chatting about UFOs, the theater world, and everything in between. They’ve been some of my most memorable moments of living in New York City for the last decade or so, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Left to right: Stanton Friedman, Cheryl Costa, and Peter Robbins.
My second UFO hero would have to be Cheryl Costa. Her dedication and resilience continue to marvel me. She created the most comprehensive reference book on UFOs ever written, and I know her work has only just begun. While I focus my research on individuals and stories, she enhances witness testimony with hard data. It’s a task that not many could wrap their head around, let alone put in to such a comprehensive format for the public at large. Lest we forget, she had a very credible and serious interview about UFOs in the New York Times prior to the Secret Pentagon UFO Program story broke. Costa remains one of the most important researchers this field has ever had.
Stanton T. Friedman would be my final choice. The time he has dedicated to unraveling the UFO mystery is beyond commendable. He has paved the way for so many of us. His contributions to individual cases, to the field, and to the topic overall, are undeniable, and he remains one of the most level-headed, eloquent, and damn nicest people this field has ever produced.
RG: What is your own personal goal in this field? Do you have a vision for what you’d like to accomplish?
My goal is and always has been the same: to make the topic of UFOs accessible to younger people and to legitimize it in any way I can. If I find answers along the way, that’s great. But I’m more interested in the journey than the destination. And that journey has opened my eyes, my mind, and my perspective on this mystery, and so many others. It’s a very personal journey, but I also really enjoy picking up hitchhikers along the way!
Ryan Sprague in the CW’s ‘Roswell: Mysteries Decoded’ (2019), with co-host Jennifer Marshall.
RG: Some scholars have suggested that UFOlogy, or the UFO subculture, has clear religious aspects. Do you see any parallels between the pursuit of UFOs and the pursuit of God?
Absolutely. I often look at the work of Carl Jung when it comes to this intersectionality. He once stated, “By ‘self,’ we mean psychic wholeness, but what realities underlie this concept we do not know… in religious experience man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other.” To me, this means that belief strengthens faith and vice versa. And a huge part of the UFO phenomenon also involves belief. But when it comes to staring up at that UFO, we each bring something truly unique and powerful to the interpretation of what we’re experiencing. In religion, we perceive a divine being as something all powerful and we give it meaning beyond that which we know to be true. We often do this with UFOs as well. We do not know what they are or what they represent entirely, but we give it meaning according to our own life experiences. They are so intrinsically linked, that perhaps we are, as many have contemplated, looking at a modern myth—a technological AND spiritual modern-day religion. I strongly urge all those interested in UFOs to read the recent offering by Diana Walsh Pasulka. After interviewing her on the podcast and reading her book, American Cosmic, I think she’s on to something groundbreaking and revelatory.
RG: There are many hypotheses to account for the UFO enigma, including man-made secret technologies, exotic natural phenomena, mass hallucination and delusion, and, of course, extraterrestrial intelligences. Which theory do you feel is most credible, and why?
This may sound non-committal, but I honestly believe it to be all of these and none of these. The more I look in to UFO phenomena, the more I’m convinced we are not dealing with simple nuts-and-bolts saucers from another planet. The phenomenon is deeply malleable and it is ever-evolving. Some UFOs are most definitely man-made and natural phenomena. Some “UFO flaps” could easily be mass hysteria while some could have been an invasion on a miniature scale. Each of the theories has some merit in my eyes because I’m still stumbling my way through all this, just like everyone else. The one thing I can say to anyone out there who may just be dipping their toes in the UFO waters is this: if anyone claims to have a single definitive answer to the UFO phenomena, run. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back. Look forward to those who are still theorizing. We are on the timetable of the phenomena. Always have been. Probably always will be.
RG: You’ve been studying UFOs for a significant portion of your life; do you feel you’re any closer to understanding the phenomena today than you were, say, 10 years ago? Where do you see the UFO field 10 years from now?
My sobering answer is no. I don’t think I’m any closer, but I do think I’ve personally made great strides in understanding certain cases, incidents, and how to conduct my own research. If I could go back ten years, I’d tell myself to be more patient and more empathetic. I think my lack of knowledge early on led me to cast judgment very quickly on certain cases. And now, almost a decade later, I am realizing that things aren’t always as they seem. Some cases have become more credible for me and some have unfortunately been cast in to bowels of hoaxes, fabrications, or misidentifications. I was extremely skeptical when I first started out. I’ve definitely become more open to the phenomena and those experiencing it. In ten years’ time, I hope we have a convergence of science and witness testimony, where both can be satisfied with some semblance of an answer to all this.
RG: What’s next for you? What other projects are in the pipeline?
Right now, I’m working on some television projects with the wonderful people I worked with on Roswell: Mysteries Decoded. Let’s just say that our investigation into this seventy-two year old case isn’t over. And there are plenty of more mysteries we hope to decode in the very near future. Other than that, the podcast continues weekly, along with my Youtube channel. And I am working on a follow-up book that takes me places I’ve never been before, both with UFOs and possibly interconnected phenomena. It’s a challenge and a journey I’ve set for myself, and one I hope people will want to join me in along the way. Expect my book some time in 2020. I also have some speaking engagements coming up, including Alien Con in Los Angeles! More info on all of my projects and the podcast and book can be found at www.somewhereintheskies.com
“Is there evidence of life on Mars? An international team of research scientists, in a just published monograph titled “Evidence of Life on Mars? –consisting of a scholarly review of nearly 200 peer reviewed scientific studies– answer this age old question with a resounding “yes.” And they’ve included pictures of Martian specimens, photographed by NASA, which they say support their claims.”
What would you say if a team of legitimate scientists released a research paper claiming they have analyzed numerous photographs of Mars taken by the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers and concluded that there are mushrooms, algae, lichens and fungi growing not just on the surface of the planet but also on the surface of the rovers themselves? As the cry of “Pareidolia!” (assigning human-related characteristics to objects) rises from the skeptical and educated masses, study co-author and research team member Dr. Regina Dass of the Department of Microbiology at the School of Life Sciences in India responds in a press release with:
Experts think the white specimens in this Nasa image from Mars are fungi
“There are no geological or other abiogenic forces on Earth which can produce sedimentary structures, by the hundreds, which have mushroom shapes, stems, stalks, and shed what looks like spores on the surrounding surface. In fact, fifteen specimens were photographed by NASA growing out of the ground in just three days!”
With an exclamation point yet! That press release is referring to “Evidence of Life on Mars?”, a study published in the Journal of Astrobiology and Space Science Reviews which includes the images taken by the rovers which show the life forms. (Read the study and view the images here.) This isn’t one of those pay-for-publishing-without-peer-review journals either. The editors were so concerned about “negative blow back” that they gave the study to fourteen experts (eight Senior Editors and six independent scientists) for review, and eleven recommended publication.
NASA has made no comments so far on this controversial paper. That doesn’t surprise co-author Dr. Giorgio Bianciardi of the Department of Medical Science at Siena University. He recalls the equally controversial findings from the 1976 Mars Viking landings.
“Biological activity on Mars was first detected in 1976. NASA dismissed that evidence then inexplicably refused to equip any subsequent mission with life detection technology. As we detail in our review, there is now considerable evidence supporting Viking’s original findings of life on Mars.”
NASA generally attribute strange anomalies in Martian photographs to shadows and eroded rocks and says that the methane detected on the planet could have come from other sources besides decaying life forms. The authors agree, saying: “Similarities in morphology are not proof of life.” However, co-author, Dr. Nicolo Cantasano, a geobiologist at Italy’s National Research Council in Rome, reveals the thig however spotted in at least two of the photographs.
“However, wind would not account for what appears to be masses of black fungi growing on the rovers, and what appears to be white fungi, or bio-corrosion within a sheltered compartment atop the rover Curiosity.”
The study uses those photos to point out what astronauts on the International Space Station already know … there’s no way to completely sterilize spacecrafts and the fungi could very well have been brought there on the rovers. However Number 2 – if this is the case, it at least confirms that mushrooms and fungi can grow in the harsh Martian environment. It could also reveal where the ground mushrooms came from – chucks of fungi-loaded Earth hurled into space when it was hit by massive asteroids.
The researchers admit that the only way to prove their speculations is to bring Martian soil back to Earth and urge NASA to pursue this more vigorously. They also admit the obvious:
“In many respects the observations presented here could be described as circumstantial and do not rise to the level of “extraordinary evidence” thus precluding “extraordinary claims.” Although, collectively, the evidence, in total, weighs in favor of biology, we can only conclude that the question of life on Mars remains unanswered.””
Does the evidence – photographs that look like mushrooms – really weigh in favor of biology?
Will the possibility of ‘shrooms on Mars entice more people to apply for the trip?
Will you?
NASA
The study states that some experts believe this image shows lichens growing on Mars
Anthropology Expert Claims UFOs are Time Machines Of Our Distant Descendants
Anthropology Expert Claims UFOs are Time Machines Of Our Distant Descendants
Most people think UFOs visit Earth from other planets way too far than we could imagine. However, a professor at Montana Tech believes otherwise.
Michael P. Masters says UFOs are much closer to home. He explains the phenomenon may be our race coming from the future and traveling through time to study their evolutionary past.
Masters reveals this theory in his newly released book “Identified Flying Objects.” Masters says he uses the science of his explanation about the reason people who report close encounters with aliens always describe these ETs the same way.
Masters states the alleged aliens are reported as having five fingers on each hand and foot, bi-lateral symmetry with two eyes, a mouth, a nose, as being bipedal, upright-walking and they can communicate with us using our languages.
Masters, who has a doctorate in anthropology from Ohio State University, understands this study may be called fringe science. However, in the book, he defends the research.
Maters stresses he stands by the product and happy to talk about it with anyone. He explains the study is written for his academic peers much as it is for anyone in the UFO community.
Most people make flippant comments about little green men to show they don’t take it seriously, but the American Defense Department spent $22 million investigating the UFO phenomenon. Dr. Masters believes it is the right time scientists take a serious approach to the study of the phenomenon.
Would Aliens Save or Destroy Us? Seven Possile Scenarios for Extraterrestrial Contact
Would Aliens Save or Destroy Us? Seven Possible Scenarios for Extraterrestrial Contact
Janey Tracey
Would aliens want to help us or hurt us? In a paper by researchers Seth D. Bauma and Jacob D. Haqq-Misra of Pennsylvania State University and NASA's Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman, the prospect of extraterrestrial contact is analyzed from every conceivable angle.
[Credit: Seth D. Baum, Jacob D. Haqq-Misra, & Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman]
Here are seven of the most interesting possibilities:
1) Detection without any direct contact
While this seems to be the least exciting option, detection of extraterrestrial intelligence alone would actually have a complex impact on humanity. In the realm of philosophy and psychology, knowing that we are not alone in the universe would change the way we view humanity and our place in the universe. The authors of the paper argue that the impact would be primarily positive, as humans are generally eager for answers to these curious, and sometimes existential, questions. They acknowledge, however, that some would argue that there would be negative consequences as well, particularly in the discovery's effects on religion, particularly Christianity. SETI astrobiologist Paul Davies claimed that, since certain religions are predicated on the notion that humans are uniquely "saved" by a Messiah, religion can only be reconciled with the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrials by acknowledging the existence of other iterations of Messiahs on other planets, or explaining why humans are worthy of being saved while the aliens are not. Similarly, creationist Ken Ham recently stated that intelligent aliens most likely do not exist, but if they do, then they are going to Hell, as Jesus is specifically the savior of humanity. This is a common belief within the Christian religion, but not a universal one. Outer Places interviewed a pastor in Roswell, New Mexico who disagreed with this view: "We don't know the story of other life forms... ours is a story of sin and salvation... but certainly we would believe that God is capable of writing... any story that God wants."
But even if the discovery of extraterrestrial life seemed to have a negative impact on those who subscribed to certain religions, the authors of the paper argue that blaming this crisis directly on the discovery is the result of a "philosophical mistake," as the extraterrestrials exist whether we discover them or not. Either way, the comfortable notion of our uniqueness in the universe is false, this discovery would only make the pious aware of that fact: "It is the existence of ETI that challenges such worldviews and not the act of detection. If ETI do in fact exist, then the harm has already been done in the sense that such worldviews are already invalid. Detection simply alerts us to this invalidity."
2) They help us with literally everything
If the extraterrestrials are more advanced than us, and they are interested in helping us, then they would open our civilization to a whole host of possibilities. They could teach us more about math and science, provide solutions for seemingly intractable problems like hunger, poverty, disease, etc. While this option may seem like wishful thinking, it is consistent with the Sustainability solution to the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox essentially asks: if there are intelligent aliens in the universe, where are they? If there are technologically advanced beings who have achieved interstellar travel, why haven't they tried to colonize Earth yet? The Sustainability solution asserts that it is in the nature of intelligent beings to expand exponentially, and as a result they do not last very long as this rate of expansion is unsustainable. The inverse states that, if there are intelligent beings that have been in existence long enough to overlap with us, then they would likely follow certain habits of sustainable populations. They would see value in and protect their ecosystem, and therefore would be unlikely to colonize for resources. They would also be less likely to expand for expansion's sake, and instead only explore out of curiosity. If they have no need or desire to colonize or conquer us, then it is more likely that they would be cooperative and helpful.
3) The aliens try to colonize or destroy us, but we turn the tables on them
This option is fairly self-explanatory; like in the book/movie/television show War of the Worlds, the film Independence Day, and countless other works of science fiction, the aliens attempt to harm us but are thwarted, either by our human pluckiness or sheer luck. For example, they could be unprepared for the microbial infections found on Earth, like in War of the Worlds. This would mostly be beneficial as a moral victory, although there is also a possibility that we could benefit in other ways, such as reverse engineering their advanced technology.
4) They kill us with the extraterrestrial equivalent of smallpox blankets
While we often think of alien invasion as a deliberate destruction of humanity, there is a chance that they could hurt us completely unintentionally by bringing unknown diseases to our planet for which our immune systems have no defense. Similarly, they could destroy our ecosystem even further by bringing invasive species, or destabilize society in a more subtle manner by bringing us advanced technology that we're simply not ready for.
5) Aliens are just like us, in the worst possible way
It's possible that at some point in a species' evolution, they become more moral and less selfish. But if that happens, we haven't seen it yet. As a result, it seems likely that selfishness is an inherent quality to intelligent beings. Geographer Jared Diamond discussed the reasons he believes that optimistic scenarios for extraterrestrial contact are unlikely: "The astronomers and others hope that the extraterrestrials, delighted to discover fellow intelligent beings, will sit down for a friendly chat. Perhaps the astronomers are right; that's the best-case scenario. A less pleasant prospect is that the extraterrestrials might behave the way we intelligent beings have behaved whenever we have discovered other previously unknown intelligent beings on earth, like unfamiliar humans or chimpanzees and gorillas. Just as we did to those beings, the extraterrestrials might proceed to kill, infect, dissect, conquer, displace or enslave us, stuff us as specimens for their museums or pickle our skulls and use us for medical research. My own view is that those astronomers now preparing again to beam radio signals out to hoped-for extraterrestrials are naïve, even dangerous."
The authors of the paper concede that some astronomers believe that aliens would be friendly, but go on to say that just as many believe that aliens may attempt to colonize or enslave us, use us as a source of food, harm us in an attempt to evangelize, or even keep us for entertainment purposes, such as in zoos or gladiator arenas.
6) They destroy us for the most random of reasons
This scenario involves aliens that are universalist in their ethics, or beings that have certain principles that have inherent value in themselves, and are not dependent on whether they are beneficial to their particular species (humans do not generally fall in this category). We associate universalism with benevolent, peaceful beings, as they would have no particular reason to harm us simply for being "other" to them. However, whether they intend to harm us or not would be completely dependent on their specific value system. The authors use the example of the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which aliens are attempting to destroy Earth simply because they value infrastructure, and our planet is in the way of a hyperspace bypass.
7) They destroy us because they think we're kind of terrible
This one is also relatively self-explanatory. Whether they believe we are a threat to their species or not, if they are universalist then they may destroy us if they believe that we are a threat to other civilizations as a result of our tendency to step on any civilization that is less technologically advanced than we are, or a liability to the universe in general as a result of our tendency to destroy ecosystems.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Would Aliens Save or Destroy Us? Seven Possile Scenarios for Extraterrestrial Contact
Would Aliens Save or Destroy Us? Seven Possible Scenarios for Extraterrestrial Contact
Janey Tracey
Would aliens want to help us or hurt us? In a paper by researchers Seth D. Bauma and Jacob D. Haqq-Misra of Pennsylvania State University and NASA's Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman, the prospect of extraterrestrial contact is analyzed from every conceivable angle.
[Credit: Seth D. Baum, Jacob D. Haqq-Misra, & Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman]
Here are seven of the most interesting possibilities:
1) Detection without any direct contact
While this seems to be the least exciting option, detection of extraterrestrial intelligence alone would actually have a complex impact on humanity. In the realm of philosophy and psychology, knowing that we are not alone in the universe would change the way we view humanity and our place in the universe. The authors of the paper argue that the impact would be primarily positive, as humans are generally eager for answers to these curious, and sometimes existential, questions. They acknowledge, however, that some would argue that there would be negative consequences as well, particularly in the discovery's effects on religion, particularly Christianity. SETI astrobiologist Paul Davies claimed that, since certain religions are predicated on the notion that humans are uniquely "saved" by a Messiah, religion can only be reconciled with the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrials by acknowledging the existence of other iterations of Messiahs on other planets, or explaining why humans are worthy of being saved while the aliens are not. Similarly, creationist Ken Ham recently stated that intelligent aliens most likely do not exist, but if they do, then they are going to Hell, as Jesus is specifically the savior of humanity. This is a common belief within the Christian religion, but not a universal one. Outer Places interviewed a pastor in Roswell, New Mexico who disagreed with this view: "We don't know the story of other life forms... ours is a story of sin and salvation... but certainly we would believe that God is capable of writing... any story that God wants."
But even if the discovery of extraterrestrial life seemed to have a negative impact on those who subscribed to certain religions, the authors of the paper argue that blaming this crisis directly on the discovery is the result of a "philosophical mistake," as the extraterrestrials exist whether we discover them or not. Either way, the comfortable notion of our uniqueness in the universe is false, this discovery would only make the pious aware of that fact: "It is the existence of ETI that challenges such worldviews and not the act of detection. If ETI do in fact exist, then the harm has already been done in the sense that such worldviews are already invalid. Detection simply alerts us to this invalidity."
2) They help us with literally everything
If the extraterrestrials are more advanced than us, and they are interested in helping us, then they would open our civilization to a whole host of possibilities. They could teach us more about math and science, provide solutions for seemingly intractable problems like hunger, poverty, disease, etc. While this option may seem like wishful thinking, it is consistent with the Sustainability solution to the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox essentially asks: if there are intelligent aliens in the universe, where are they? If there are technologically advanced beings who have achieved interstellar travel, why haven't they tried to colonize Earth yet? The Sustainability solution asserts that it is in the nature of intelligent beings to expand exponentially, and as a result they do not last very long as this rate of expansion is unsustainable. The inverse states that, if there are intelligent beings that have been in existence long enough to overlap with us, then they would likely follow certain habits of sustainable populations. They would see value in and protect their ecosystem, and therefore would be unlikely to colonize for resources. They would also be less likely to expand for expansion's sake, and instead only explore out of curiosity. If they have no need or desire to colonize or conquer us, then it is more likely that they would be cooperative and helpful.
3) The aliens try to colonize or destroy us, but we turn the tables on them
This option is fairly self-explanatory; like in the book/movie/television show War of the Worlds, the film Independence Day, and countless other works of science fiction, the aliens attempt to harm us but are thwarted, either by our human pluckiness or sheer luck. For example, they could be unprepared for the microbial infections found on Earth, like in War of the Worlds. This would mostly be beneficial as a moral victory, although there is also a possibility that we could benefit in other ways, such as reverse engineering their advanced technology.
4) They kill us with the extraterrestrial equivalent of smallpox blankets
While we often think of alien invasion as a deliberate destruction of humanity, there is a chance that they could hurt us completely unintentionally by bringing unknown diseases to our planet for which our immune systems have no defense. Similarly, they could destroy our ecosystem even further by bringing invasive species, or destabilize society in a more subtle manner by bringing us advanced technology that we're simply not ready for.
5) Aliens are just like us, in the worst possible way
It's possible that at some point in a species' evolution, they become more moral and less selfish. But if that happens, we haven't seen it yet. As a result, it seems likely that selfishness is an inherent quality to intelligent beings. Geographer Jared Diamond discussed the reasons he believes that optimistic scenarios for extraterrestrial contact are unlikely: "The astronomers and others hope that the extraterrestrials, delighted to discover fellow intelligent beings, will sit down for a friendly chat. Perhaps the astronomers are right; that's the best-case scenario. A less pleasant prospect is that the extraterrestrials might behave the way we intelligent beings have behaved whenever we have discovered other previously unknown intelligent beings on earth, like unfamiliar humans or chimpanzees and gorillas. Just as we did to those beings, the extraterrestrials might proceed to kill, infect, dissect, conquer, displace or enslave us, stuff us as specimens for their museums or pickle our skulls and use us for medical research. My own view is that those astronomers now preparing again to beam radio signals out to hoped-for extraterrestrials are naïve, even dangerous."
The authors of the paper concede that some astronomers believe that aliens would be friendly, but go on to say that just as many believe that aliens may attempt to colonize or enslave us, use us as a source of food, harm us in an attempt to evangelize, or even keep us for entertainment purposes, such as in zoos or gladiator arenas.
6) They destroy us for the most random of reasons
This scenario involves aliens that are universalist in their ethics, or beings that have certain principles that have inherent value in themselves, and are not dependent on whether they are beneficial to their particular species (humans do not generally fall in this category). We associate universalism with benevolent, peaceful beings, as they would have no particular reason to harm us simply for being "other" to them. However, whether they intend to harm us or not would be completely dependent on their specific value system. The authors use the example of the novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which aliens are attempting to destroy Earth simply because they value infrastructure, and our planet is in the way of a hyperspace bypass.
7) They destroy us because they think we're kind of terrible
This one is also relatively self-explanatory. Whether they believe we are a threat to their species or not, if they are universalist then they may destroy us if they believe that we are a threat to other civilizations as a result of our tendency to step on any civilization that is less technologically advanced than we are, or a liability to the universe in general as a result of our tendency to destroy ecosystems.
Considered to be the Roswell of the UK, it is safe to say something extremely strange happened on the early morning following Christmas day in Rendlesham Forest, just outside the RAF Bentwaters / Woodbridge complex in England. The book UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On The Record documents Sergeant James Penniston account of what happened, who at the time, held a top-secret U.S. and NATO security clearance. Shortly after midnight on December 26th, Penniston was briefed that some lights had been seen in Rendlesham Forest. He then ordered Airman First Class Edward Cabansag and Airman First Class John F. Burroughs to respond with him.
“When we arrived near the suspected crash site it quickly became apparent that we were not dealing with a plane crash or anything else we’d ever responded to… As we approached on foot, a silhouetted triangular craft about 9 feet long by 6.5 feet high came into view… there were blue and yellow lights swirling around the exterior as though part of the surface and the air around us were electrically charged.”
After determining the object did not appear to present a threat, Penniston was able to complete a thorough on-site investigation, including photos and notebook entries. He was even able to touch the craft.
“I put my hand on the craft, and it was warm to the touch. The surface was smooth, like glass, but it had the quality of metal… After roughly forty-five minutes, the light from the craft began to intensify. Burroughs and I then took a defensive position away from the craft as it lifted off the ground without any noise or air disturbance. It maneuvered through the trees and shot off at an unbelievable rate of speed. It was gone in the blink of an eye.”
To the great surprise of Colonel Charles Halt, deputy base commander of RAF Bentwaters, the object returned on December 27th, allowing himself and four other military personnel to observe and record the object. A formal report was filed of the incident but an official explanation was never provided.
“I have confirmation that (Bentwaters radar operators)… saw the object go across the scope of their 60 mile (96Km) scope in two or three seconds, thousands of miles an hour, he came back across their scope again, stopped near the water tower, they watched it and observed it go into the forest where we were,” said Col Halt.
2. Japan Air Lines Flight #1628 – 1986
John Callahan was the division chief of the Accidents, Evaluations, and Investigations Division of the FAA in Washington from 1981 to 1988. In his own words
“… I was involved with an investigation of an extraordinary event but was asked not to talk about it. Since retiring, I decided that the public had a right to this information, and that they could handle it.”
On November 7th, 1986, a Japanese 747 cargo jet with a pilot, copilot, and flight engineer were flying from Iceland to Anchorage just after 5 pm when they all saw a gigantic, round object, much larger than their cargo jet with colored lights flashing around it. Captain Kenju Terauchi, a pilot for 29 years, also saw two smaller objects but described the largest “spaceship” — as he called it — to be at least the size of an aircraft carrier because he had it on his radar which provided range marks. The object proceeded to fly level with the 747 until it suddenly approached very close. Following the directives of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Terachi dropped his jet 4,000 feet and even made a 360-degree turn to avoid the objects, but they continued to follow, even appearing in front of his cockpit.
Over the next half-hour, the UFO could appear eight miles in front of him, and in one radar sweep ten seconds later, it could be seven miles behind him. Captain Terauchi said the technology was “unthinkable… because the UFOs appeared to have control over both inertia and gravity.”
John Callahan, who was involved in the investigation of this incident, was called to FAA headquarters to provide a briefing to scientists of President Reagan and CIA officials. In Callahan’s words, after reviewing the information, including radar trackings, a CIA official told him,
“This event never happened; we were never here. We’re confiscating all this data, and you are all sworn to secrecy.” Like any sane person would, Callahan asked what the CIA officers thought it was, and he was told it was a UFO, and that “If we were to tell the American public there are UFOs, they would panic”.
It all started when two federal policemen were patrolling a road between Eupen and the German border on November 29th, 1989, where they reported seeing a field lit with such intense light that they could read a newspaper in their car. They also observed a triangular object with a red light in the center and three major spotlights on the corners which hovered silently.
Over the next two hours, the policemen observed two more craft of similar description around the town of Eupen and witnessed red light beams emitting from a craft and retracting. Hundreds of civilians also reported seeing the same objects and radar registrations from that night were analyzed by Major General Wilfried De Brouwer, which implied that “the reported objects committed an infraction against the existing aviation rules.” 13 total policemen saw the objects and seventy official reports were fully investigated — none of which could be explained by conventional flight technology. The U.S. embassy also confirmed that they were not flying any experimental aircraft in the area that night.
Surprisingly, the reports didn’t stop that night either. After this event on November 29th, four more sightings of similar craft were reported on December 1st and on December 11th, twenty-one witnesses reported seeing a triangular craft, one of which was captured on color slides and analyzed by two members of the French national space research center CNES, and a former senior scientist with NASA. The slides were determined to be untampered with and showed a craft moving slowly with what appeared to be a magnetic field around it.
Imagine its November 7th, 1990, and you’re swimming in a rooftop pool at the Montreal Hotel. You look up and see a round, metallic object projecting bright light beams. Naturally, you might tell the lifeguard — as a woman in this particular situation did. The lifeguard then called the hotel security guard, who called the police and a journalist from La Presse newspaper.
After they arrived to observe the object, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the military, and even NASA were called to record this sighting that lasted almost three hours, from 7:20 pm to 10:10 pm, making this UFO event one of the most remarkable and well documented. Although some skeptics say it was the Northern Lights, Montreal UFO researcher Bernard Guenette and former NASA scientist Richard Haines produced a 25-page report on the incidentwhich concluded that “the evidence for the existence of a highly unusual, hovering, silent, large object is indisputable.” The object that caused the lights was estimated to be around 540 meters wide (1770 feet) but no official explanation has ever been provided.
On March 13th, 1997, what is considered to be one of the largest — if not the largest — UFO sightings ever recorded, occurred over Phoenix, Arizona. “Hundreds of people reported an enormous object, or objects, in the night sky”, reported USA Today, in June of 1997. A little after 8 pm on that night in March, the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, Washington received a call from a retired police officer in Paulden, 60 miles north of Phoenix, to report a cluster of 5 red lights in the sky heading south. A couple of minutes later, another call came in from the city of Prescott, 15 miles south of Paulden. Only a minute later, phones rang off the hook with calls from Phoenix and surrounding cities, with reports of an enormous V-shaped object with 7 lights.
Of the hundreds, if not thousands of eyewitnesses, (some of which captured video), there is general agreement on three major points: one, the object was massive, some saying several football fields long; second, it was silent, and third; it was moving very slowly, about 30 miles per hour or sometimes not moving at all. Air traffic controllers in the region stated that they could see the lights, but did not return anything on radar. During the time of the sighting, the governor of Arizona, Fife Symington, also saw the object. In his own words, he stated,
“In 1997, during my second term as governor of Arizona, I saw something that defied logic and challenged my reality. I witnessed a massive delta-shaped, craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix, Arizona. It was truly breathtaking. I was absolutely stunned because I was turning to the west looking for the distant Phoenix Lights.
To my astonishment this apparition appeared; this dramatically large, very distinctive leading edge with some enormous lights was traveling through the Arizona sky. As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I’d ever seen. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don’t fly in formation.”
Symington was referring to the official explanation the air force provided of military flares but concluded that “I was never happy with the Air Force’s silly explanation. There might very well have been military flares in the sky that evening, but what I and hundreds of others saw, had nothing to do with that.”
6. Highland Illinois UFO — 2000
Not too long after calendars entered a new millennium, the town of Highland, Illinois was quickly distracted by a UFO that was seen in three different counties by residents as well as police officers.
One of the first people to see the object was local business owner Melvin Noll, who was standing outside of his miniature golf-course in Highland around 4 am on January 5th, when he saw a curious light in the sky that he originally thought was a bright star. It then descended from the sky and that is when he realized it was definitely something else.
“It was two different floors. It had big windows — three on the lower deck and three on the top deck. Way up on top, there was like a penthouse with a dim light in it. Underneath, it had red lights in a diamond shape,” Noll said.
Noll mentioned that it flew so close to him that “if somebody had looked out one of the windows, I could have seen it.” No one did, however, Noll did not see any wings or engine on the craft and noted that it moved silently. Once the craft came to a halt in the air, “that is when it scared me,” Noll said. It then continued slowly to the Southwest toward Lebanon, Illinois, at which point Noll went straight to Highland Police Department to file a report.
Although Noll was concerned that the police wouldn’t take him seriously; they did, and his sighting was quickly confirmed by Craig Stevens of the Millstadt Police Department who was tracking the object that morning and described it as “kind of V-shaped”. Soon, area police officers in Lebanon, Shiloh, Millstadt, and Dupo saw the object too.
Police radio calls to dispatch were recorded, including Lebanon Police Officer Ed Barton who stated, “Be advised. There’s a very bright, white light east of town… and it keeps changing colors. I’ll go over there and see if maybe it’s an aircraft. Doesn’t look like an aircraft though.” … “That’s affirmative. It’s not the moon and it’s not a star.” … “Would you contact Scott Air Force Base and see if they have anything flying in this area please?”
Ultimately, police dispatch did contact Scott Air Force Base that night about the object, but officials said they knew nothing about it and no official investigation was ever conducted.
When the objects were spotted again a few days later, an officer on thePrinceton contacted two U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets from theUSS Nimitz that were flying a combat exercise at the time. The pilots were instructed to change their course to investigate the unidentified radar spots. When the pilots arrived at the target site, they did not see anything or observe anything on radar, at which point the Princeton’s radar observed that the objects dropped from 28,000 ft to near sea level in less than a second. The pilots then looked down and observed churning water and frothy waves as if the waves were breaking over an object below the surface. A few seconds later, they observed an unusual object with erratic movements above the churning water.
Lead Super Hornet pilot, Commander David Fravor, described the object as a large, bright, white, Tic Tac, 30 to 46 feet long with no windshield, no wings, and no visible engine or exhaust. After he began a circular descent toward the object, it began to ascend almost as if to meet him half-way. Commander Fravor then plunged toward the object in an aggressive maneuver, at which point the UFO accelerated out of sight in less than two seconds, leaving the pilots feeling “pretty weirded out”.
On November 7th, 2006, a disc-shaped object was seen hovering over the United Airlines terminal at the Chicago O’Hare airport for about five minutes before rocketing into the sky leaving a hole in the clouds. A United Airlines ramp worker was one of the first to notice the object around 4:30 pm and a pilot quickly made a call over in-bound ground radio for all grounded planes once he observed the object hovering at around 1,500 feet above the ground. Some witnesses believed it was rotating while others didn’t, but one thing they did agree on was that the object was silent and it was definitely there.
A mechanic told the Chicago Tribune “But I know what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out clearly, and it definitely was not an (Earth) aircraft.”
Pilots waiting for takeoff could also see the object from their windows which looked roughly the size of a quarter or half-dollar at arm’s length — making it roughly 20 to 80 feet in diameter. The FAA and United Airlines first denied having any information about the incident, until a tape of the United supervisor’s call to the air traffic control tower was released after a Freedom of Information Request.
This story broke on the front page of The Chicago Tribune on January 1st, 2007, two months after the event, and quickly became the Tribune’s most read piece in the entire history of the newspaper’s website with over a million hits. Since the UFO wasn’t captured on radar, the FAA decided it was a weather phenomenon and declined to investigate. One of the original news reports on the event can be watched on YouTube.
9. The Stephenville Texas Sightings — 2008
In early January of 2008, just after 6 pm, over thirty people in the Stephenville, Texas area were taken aback when around sunset, they witnessed an object a mile long and half-mile wide, flying low and fast with very intense bright lights, but making no sound.
One particular witness was Claudette Odom, who was clearing brush near her house with her husband and two friends. Being on top of a hill, they had visibility of twenty miles in every direction. Claudette described watching the object in wonder as it approached Stephenville and then silently hovered outside of town. She then watched the lights shape into a massive arch, before forming a bright vertical line that split into two. As they were watching the object, they were startled by the explosive sound of two F-16s flying directly above them at low altitude toward the UFO.
Meanwhile 50-year-old pilot Steve Allen was at a campfire with some friends when he saw the object which he stated was a mile long and a half mile wide. Allen said the object traveled at amazing speed and made no sound.
Allen told ABC News. He also described the same arch shape which transformed into a vertical shape before the lights “turned into just fire and it was gone”.
Adding more mystery to the situation, after the local Air Force base at Carswell Field near Fort Worth was contacted about the situation, they originally claimed they definitely did not have any fighter jets over Stephensville that night and suggested that the UFO witnesses may have just seen an optical illusion or two commercial airliners.
It should be noted that the videos released by TTSA include pilots that are some of the most credible observers of aircraft in the world. The Department of Defense declined to comment on the video.
Sounds heard from deep space could be evidence of advanced alien technology
Sounds heard from deep space could be evidence of advanced alien technology
Some experts believe the fast radio bursts could be evidence of alien technology
Supernova remnants, one of the suggested sources for 13 FRBs discovered by a Canadian-led team.
File photograph: Nasa via The New York Times
Mysterious repeating energy bursts from deep space that some experts have suggested could be evidence of advanced aliens have been detected for the second time.
The repeating bursts are an example of what are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), millisecond-long flashes of radio waves whose origin is unknown.
Most scientists believe they are generated by powerful astrophysical phenomena such as black holes or super-dense neutron stars. But a few scientists have suggested more outlandish theories.
Prof Avid Loeb, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in the US, argues that they could be evidence of incredibly advanced alien technology.
FRBs were first detected accidentally in 2007, when a burst signal was spotted in radio astronomy data collected in 2001.
The new discovery, reported in the journal Nature, was made by a Canadian-led team of astronomers on the hunt for FRBs.
Over a period of three weeks last summer, the team detected 13 FRBs using a new type of radio telescope, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (Chime).
One of the FRBs was repeating. Of the more than 60 FRBs detected to date, such repeating bursts have only been picked up once before, by the Areciboradio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2015.
Where the FRBs come from is not known, although they are thought to emanate from sources billions of light years away outside our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Chime astrophysicist Dr Ingrid Stairs, from the University of British Columbia, Canada, said: “Until now, there was only one known repeating FRB.
“Knowing that there is another suggests that there could be more out there. And with more repeaters and more sources available for study, we may be able to understand these cosmic puzzles – where they’re from and what causes them.”
‘Scattering’
Most of the 13 FRBs showed signs of “scattering”, suggesting their sources could be powerful astrophysical objects in locations with special characteristics, the scientists said.
Team member Dr Cherry Ng, from the University of Toronto, Canada, said: “That could mean in some sort of dense clump like a supernova remnant. Or near the central black hole in a galaxy. But it has to be in some special place to give us all the scattering that we see.”
In 2017 Prof Loeb and Harvard colleague Manasvi Lingham proposed that FRBs could be leakage from planet-sized alien transmitters.
Rather than being designed for communication, they would more likely be used to propel giant spaceships powered by light sails.
Prof Loeb, who discusses the idea in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, said: “An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking.” – PA
The Hubble Space Telescope saw the formation of a 'Great Dark Spot' last year.
This composite picture shows images of storms on Neptune from the Hubble Space Telescope (left) and the Voyager 2 spacecraft (right). The Hubble image of Neptune, taken in September and November of 2018, shows a new dark storm (top center). In the Voyager image, a storm known as the Great Dark Spot is seen at the center. It is about 8,000 miles by 4,100 miles (13,000 by 6,600 kilometers) in size. The white clouds seen hovering in the vicinity of the storms are higher in altitude than the dark material.
For the first time ever, astronomers have witnessed the birth of one of Neptune's enormous "Great Dark Spot" storms.
Astronomers were studying Hubble Space Telescope images of a relatively smallNeptunemaelstrom that formed in 2015 when they noticed bright white clouds forming in a different locale on the ice giant. By 2018, a dark storm as wide as Earth had boiled up in that region, the researchers announced in a study published today (March 25) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
"We were so busy tracking this smaller storm from 2015 that we weren't necessarily expecting to see another big one so soon," study lead author Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.
The find brings the total tally of observed Great Dark Spots on Neptune to six. The first two such disturbances were detected by NASA's Voyager 2 probe during its Neptune flyby in August 1989, which provided the first up-close look at the mysterious blue planet. Hubble discovered the other four spots.
Indeed, Hubble imagery has been key in characterizing these dramatic, otherworldly storms. For example, photos captured by the space telescope in 1994 revealed that the two tempests seen by Voyager 2 had dissipated, revealing that Great Dark Spots don't last very long, at least by giant-planet standards.
"It was certainly a surprise," Simon said. "We were used to looking at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which presumably had been there for more than 100 years."
The Great Red Spot, which has been observed continuously since at least 1830, is confined to a narrow latitude range by Jupiter's jet streams. But Neptune's Great Dark Spots wander around the planet much more freely before they're finally ripped apart by high-altitude winds, the researchers said.
Witnessing the birth of a Great Dark Spot sheds additional light on these mysterious features. For example, the association between the newborn storm and those bright white clouds, which are composed of frozen methane, suggests that the spots take shape deeper in Neptune's atmosphere than previously thought. The methane clouds likely float above Great Dark Spots the way "lenticular" clouds hover over tall mountains here on Earth, study team members said.
Simon conducted the new study with Michael Wong and Andrew Hsu, both of whom are at the University of California, Berkeley. In a second study — also published today, in the Astronomical Journal — the researchers used Hubble observations to estimate the frequency of Great Dark Spot formation on Neptune.
The cyclic motion of the Great Red Spot imaged by the Cassini spacecraft. Unlike on Neptune, Thin jet streams on Jupiter keep the Great Red Spot from breaking apart and from changing latitude; it rotates around Jupiter but doesn’t move north or south.
Credit: NASA.
Such storms likely crop up every four to six years, the scientists found. And each Great Dark Spot probably lives for just two years or so, though some may reach the ripe old age of six.
There's still a lot to learn about Great Dark Spots, however, such as their wind speeds. Further Hubble observations and analyses could help unlock these and other mysteries, study team members said.
A view of the first Great Dark Spot scientists observed on Neptune.
Credit: NASA.
"We have never directly measured winds within Neptune’s dark vortices, but we estimate the wind speeds are in the ballpark of 328 feet (100 meters) per second [223 mph, or 359 km/h], quite similar to wind speeds within Jupiter’s Great Red Spot," Wong said in the same statement.
Not content to purely rove on Mars, NASA is also taking to the air. The Mars 2020 Rover(which is scheduled to land on the Red Planet in early 2021) will include a helicopter — the first heavier-than-air vehicle to fly in the thin Martian atmosphere.
Animation of Mars helicopter and Mars 2020 rover. Image credits: NASA / JPL / CalTech
The helicopter will be deployed from the rover. The rover then will be driven away from the helicopter to a safe distance from which it will relay commands. After its batteries are charged and a myriad of tests are performed, the helicopter will begin the first autonomous flight on an extraterrestrial body in history. The helicopter offers a new way of exploring Mars, one which offers a novel way of exploring places such as Mars.
“The Mars Helicopter’s initial flight will represent that planet’s version of the Wright Brothers’ achievement at Kitty Hawk and the opening of a new era,” said Susan Gorton, NASA’s manager for the Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technology (RVLT) project. “For those of us whose research revolves around all things related to flight, that would be a remarkable, historic moment.”
The body of the helicopter will be about as big as a softball. It will weigh just under four pounds (1.8 kilograms) and have two sets of rotor blades — each measuring four-feet long — spinning at 2,400 RPMs. That’s about 10 times faster than any helicopter you might find on Earth. A solar array on the top of the vehicle will recharge the batteries, which will be used to both rotate the blades and keep it warm during Mars’ cold nights (Insight recorded a balmy high of 4 degrees Fahrenheit [-15 Celsius] on March 24).
The helicopter will only fly some 15 feet above the Martian surface, but don’t dismiss that distance. The intended landing point for the 2020 Rover is the equivalent to 100,000 feet (30,000 meters) above the surface of our home planet, which is almost 19 miles up. No helicopter has reached even half that height here.
NASA plans to attempt up to five flights, from 330 feet to 3,300 feet (100 to 1,000 meters) away from the lander, each lasting 90 seconds. While it won’t have any scientific instruments on it, the helicopter will have a small high-resolution color imager.
“We envision helicopters opening doors to new types of exploration on Mars,” said Håvard Grip, flight-control and aerodynamics lead for the Mars Helicopter. “In the future, we could imagine doing things like (engaging in) regional exploration using multiple helicopters or going to inaccessible areas or biologically sensitive areas using small helicopters.”
This isn’t NASA’s only rotor-flight machine in the works. A mission aptly-named Dragonflywill hope to introduce a quadcopter lander to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, in 2020.
The Very Strong Connection Between UFOs and Nuclear Weapons Storage Facilities
The photo you see above is a real picture taken in August of 1952, it’s a photograph of multiple UFOs taken by the Coast Guard photographer at the time above a US military installation, a common place for UFO sightings. The photo was classified by the US government, and then later approved for release. It was witnessed by multiple ‘professional’ people. (source) (source)
There is no shortage of pictures and videos when it comes to UFOs, here'sanother ‘official’ example you can read about from the Canadian military. Here is another one the Pentagon recently released.
“It seems to me that the Bentwaters incident is a classic case where an apparent intrusion into our airspace and indeed a landing in our country was witnessed by serious minded people in the military, responsible people doing a responsible job…Bentwaters is in a sense, a benchmark of how not to deal with these matters in the future…I know a good bit about the bentwaters incident…There are only two explanations for what happened that night…The first is that what the people concerned…they claimed that something from outside the Earth’s atmosphere landed at their Air Force base, they went and stood by it, they inspected it, they photographed it, the following day they took tests on the ground where it had been and found radioactive traces. They reported this…and sent it to our ministry of defense.”
The quote above comes from Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, and Chairman of the NATO military committee regarding what’s known as the Bentwaters incident. It’s an incident that took place in Rendlesham Forest, and remains a very important event and one of the most controversial UFO cases ever – because it’s supported by military testimony as well as military documentation. The area houses nuclear weapons, a fact that was denied for years by authorities, but then admitted to be true.
Norton is one of several hundred (and more than 1000 worldwide) military witnesses coming forward to testify to the reality of extraterrestrial visitation. He later went on to say that:
“There are objects in our atmosphere which are technically miles in advance of anything we can deploy, that we have no means of stopping them coming here … [and] that there is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations. That it behooves us, in case some of these people in the future or now should turn hostile, to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.”
The incident at Bentwaters, according to the UK ministry of defence, was described as having “no defence significance.” This didn’t make much sense – how can you tell people that after a Colonel of a nuclear weapons facility and his many men either experienced what they experienced, or all suffered a giant hallucination together, is of no defence significance? Doesn’t make sense, does it?
There are examples from all over the world. The same thing has been happening in Russia, with even Wikileaks articles titled, “Unidentified Flying Objects Over Algeria,” providing details regarding the Secretary General of The Ministry of Defense, Colonel Abdelhamid Latrech, and his interest in “strange machines which had been maneuvering over Algerian airspace in recent weeks.”
The document outlines how these strange objects had “been seen near military installations by responsible people.” The “responsible people” list is blocked out and states “Limited Official Use,” because the people in question are military personnel. Hundreds of these people have come forward publicly, however, and here is one example.
Professor Robert Jacobs (first officer ever awarded with the Air Force guided missile insignia), who was the officer in charge of optical instrumentation at Vandernburg Air Force Base, was responsible for supervising the instrumentation photography of every missile that went down the test range. In those days, the nuclear missiles were called “inter country ballistic missiles” (ICBM’s) because most of them blew up on launch. Their job was also to provide data on why they blew up, so they could provide the engineers good enough engineering sequential photography so that they could see what was wrong with the missile as it took off in flight.
“What we photographed up there affected me for the rest of my life, and made a huge impact on my understanding of the universe, and of, governmental manipulation of our minds.” (source)
In the video below you can also see a recreation of the event.
Another incident occurred at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, and is one of the most remarkable events in this history of UFO encounters with the military. This occurred in March of 1967 at a base that was responsible for a large amount of nuclear weapons. Witnesses here saw a red, glowing UFO hovering just outside the front gate. After that happened, all of the nuclear missiles shut down, and went completely dead.
Below is a clip of Captain Robert Salas, one of the men involved in the incident, giving his testimony at the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure that took place a few years ago, where a number of academics, politicians, and ex-military gathered in front of several congresspeople to discuss the matter and what happened there.
So, Why Is This Happening?
There are many theories out there. When military witnesses gathered at the national press club in 2010, the feeling among them was that these UFOs and whoever they are operated by, are sending a message that we are “playing with fire.” But testimony from another high ranking officer who spent his life working in and around nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons facilities offers up a different explanation based on the information he’s been privy to.
His name is Colonel Ross Dedrickson, and he said that he and his team constantly received “reports of visits by UFOs over the storage facilities and even some of the manufacturing facilities, and that went on continuously.” He went on to say that they “found that the reports were few and far between, but the security people were reluctant to report many of them because the protocol and the bureaucracy involved in reporting them, they just avoided reporting.”
“We observed the UFOs were very much interested in the facilities (nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities) that were visiting…A couple of nuclear weapons that were sent out into space were destroyed by the extraterrestrials.”
After stating the above, he goes on to use the Vandenburg incident (mentioned earlier in the article) as an example, where they photographed the missile and the UFO as the missile climbed into space.
He goes on to state:
“And that is their (extraterrestrials) major concern, to preserve the integrity of the Earth because it affects their own system…There was one incident when we exploded a nuclear weapon over the pacific…and the disturbance that it caused because it shut out communications entirely over the pacific base for a number of hours in which no radio transmission was available at any time…This was one of the things that the extraterrestrials later I learned were highly concerned about because it affected our ionosphere and, in fact, space-craft were unable to operate because of the pollution in the magnetic field, which they depended upon. At the very end of the 70s and early 80s, we attempted to put a nuclear weapon on the moon and explode it for scientific measurements and other things (assess scientific data, reaction and so forth..), which was not acceptable to the extraterrestrials…They destroyed the weapon before it got to the moon….The idea of any explosion in space by any Earth government was not acceptable to the extraterrestrials, and that has been demonstrated by extraterrestrials over and over.”
Watch the full interview where these quotes were taken, HERE.
So, from all of this information we have a few theories. Extraterrestrials are warning us to stop playing with fire and building nuclear weapons, that it’s not in our best interest and we should stop. Secondly, a nuclear explosion is huge, and the energy travels far beyond the physical blast radius and not only affects our solar system, but others as well. Also, as mentioned above, nuclear explosions pollute the magnetic field, something that they rely on to operate their craft.
One things for certain, the deactivation of these weapons, along with our willingness to not use our intelligence to create deadly weapons is a must if the human race wants to move forward. Human consciousness is changing, and it is us who must be that change. It is the person working to develop these weapons, seeing through the lies of the justification of making these weapons, and more.
Humanity must wake up, and realize that this is a big no no, and, year after year we get closer and closer to more people having that realization.
Definitely some interesting things to think about. What are your thoughts?
Two ‘Alien’ Beings Can Be Seen Inside A UFO – From Footage Verified By The Turkish Government
Two ‘Alien’ Beings Can Be Seen Inside A UFO – From Footage Verified By The Turkish Government
I know, reading the title would instantly have a ‘non believer’ click the X button on the top righthand corner of the screen, and that’s fine, but the truth remains. And that truth is the fact that “there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.” Those are the words of Luis Elizondo, who is one member of the To The StarsAcademy, a manwith a long career within the U.S. Department of Defense, who recently retired from the Pentagon, and was a director of the “Ariel Threats Identification Program.”
Does it mean the footage below is real? No, but the source is interesting and myself as well as many other UFO researchers in the field, would tell you that it might be one of the few authentic ones out there where occupants of these ‘UFOs’ are seen. The US government has now released UFO footage, more on that below.
Through To The Stars, the U.S. government has been, and will continue to release footage they’ve collected over many years of UFOs that perform maneuvers which defy, as Elizondo states, our understanding of aerodynamics. They’ve released some pretty amazing ones so far that come with actual electrooptical data and radar tracking reports. Keep in mind, as stressed by Elizondo and various documents that’ve been released prior to this disclosure, that military encounters with UFOs have occurred many times. There are many examples and reports to choose from and I recently wrote an article about an incident which occurred with the Chilean Air Force.
What’s interesting about the recent mainstream coverage is that they released actual video footage and to be honest, it’s quite discouraging that UFO footage has to be released by the U.S. government in order for it to be considered ‘real.’ Sure, there are still many out here who are going to call it fake, which means one thing, there are a group of defense officials making fake videos, putting them out in the public, and saying they’re real or, it’s actual authentic footage.
To contemplate the first one is just as intriguing to contemplate the second, but in my mind, there is no doubt that these are indeed real, and we don’t need these videos to come out to prove that.
The story as to what they are, however, will most likely be controlled by some ‘powerful people’ who oversee governments. Who knows what spin they will put on it via mainstream media, but right now we are currently seeing ‘official disclosure.’
This is the first time we’ve seen media ‘owned by the establishment’ present the UFO topic in a credible way, which is peculiar for multiple reasons. They told the truth, yet there still seems to be some misinformation with regards to the materials that have been collected in association with these UFOs, as pointed out by the New York Times. You can read more about that here where I go into a deeper discussion and provide details about what the New York Times did not elaborate on.
This is why the footage below is also intriguing. Elizondo admitted that this type of thing has happened thousands of times and the ‘unofficial’ reports and sightings from citizens of the world have never been considered credible, when some of them very well could be. But we didn’t need Elizondo, again, we’ve had evidence, and even physical evidence of these crafts for a long time.
Whether or not they are alien is a completely different question and discussion.
The footage below comes from Dr. Roger Leir, a Doctor of Podiatric medicine, and arguably the best known individual with regards to extracting alleged alien implants. He has performed more than fifteen surgeries that removed sixteen separate distinct objects. These objects have been investigated by several prestigious laboratories, including Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico Tech, and many others. Unfortunately, he passed away in March 2014, but his legacy lives on.You can watch a video of him at the Citizens hearing on disclosure in 2013, here.
In the film below, you will see what appears to be two beings inside of a UFO. Filmed by multiple film crews in Turkey, it made headlines there. It’s known as the Kumburgaz, Turkey UFO incident, and involves several witnesses who live in the local village. The video was analyzed by the Scientific and Technology Research Board of Turkey(which is sponsored by the government). They concluded and vouched for its authenticity.
In conclusion, even though a detailed analysis of the footage is conducted, it might still remain unidentified. Hence, other reference objects need to be recorded in the same frame with the disputable object and further shootings need to be done by ourselves with special equipment in the same location and conditions.
Accordingly, the term “UFO” (Unidentified Flying Object) which has been used for these sort of dubious objects can also be used for these objects. But, this definition does not mean that these objects are from extraterrestrial (flying saucer etc.) origin.
The incidents were dramatic. Apparently, for several days disc, metallic spheres, round, and oval shaped unknown craft visited the Sea of Marmara just off the coast of Kumburgaz, Turkey.
It also so happens that Dr. Lier was there as well and had a powerful camera on hand. Below is a snippet from one of many interviews he’s given describing the experience,
“We’re standing on an elevated deck, which has nothing between us and the water. It was a rather warm night and there was a very very bright full moon. The camera we were using had a 300 mm lens and an electronic doubler. In other words we were able to push or close in on the object 600 times magnification. We started by looking at the moon… the moon was very bright and under these circumstances it’s just the absolute worst time to look for UFOs because the light from the moon pollutes the surrounding sky it’s like, you know, trying to film something at night in the sky in the middle of the city…But anyway…We saw a little bright dot to the left and below the moon and then after getting our focus on the moon we moved the camera over to this little bright light and then started to zoom in on it… and when we got probably 3 quarters of the way from magnification and we’re looking through the view finder and we’re also recording this on the monitor, we see that this light is not a plane. It’s not from a star, it’s not a helicopter, it has a shape to it, which was cylindrical in the front, and then it would turn time to time and you could see that it was probably crescent shaped…And as we pushed on what we considered the front of the object, now that’s when we were so startled by…we just couldn’t believe what we were seeing…This was a craft that had, whatever you choose to call it…Viewing ports, windows, whatever, three, one big one in the front and one towards each side and the craft externally was being lit by the moon…So you could see that it was a shiny… sort of metallic material. What you could see through these ports was light that was emanating from the internal portion of the craft and standing there in these portals were some of these beings….They knew we were there filming them it, was like “oh hello, go ahead film away.” (Interview with Dr. lier)
Whether it be a former Chairman of the Royal Navy telling us that “there is a serious possibility that we are being visited, and have been visited by people from outer space,” a former Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Barry Goldwater telling us that “I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified,” or an Apollo 14 astronaut saying that“there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered,” we have no shortage of high-ranking insiders attesting to the reality of this phenomenon.
General Carlos Cavero told the world in 1979, “everything” has been “in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world.” On a global scale, “the nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon” and there is “an international exchange of data.” (source)
Global Paradigm Shifts & The Human Psyche
The thing about global paradigm shifts and human beliefs is that there seems to be a general accepted version of reality. Many people are happy, raising families, enjoying life, and not really worrying about the planet. And that’s ok, as long as it doesn’t turn into a hatred for activists because that seems to be common. The point is, it can be terrifying, belief destroying, and destructive for some to even consider the possibility that this type of thing is real. Our first response, that I believe has been programmed into us, is fear.
It’s natural to fear the unknown, but where is the line drawn between not being concerned and completely denying a reality?
At what point does something become a reality? What is ‘reality’ is often what’s presented to us by a small group of people, and that’s far from a conspiracy theory.
Why don’t we question what’s happening in our world? Perhaps the planet is more important than we are, Earth has been extremely patient with us and is calling for us to change our ways!
What does this have to do with ET’s? I don’t know, but it’s not all scary stories out there. Just take a look at this one with regards to UFOs and their relationship with nuclear weapons, where the objects deactivated nuclear missiles. This has happened multiple times worldwide, and it’s quite mainstream knowledge. You can read more about it here.
Based on my research, it seems ‘they’ have been here for a very long time, if there was any real ‘invasion threat’ type of scenario in the works, it would have already happened.
However, a fake alien invasion scenario could be in the works too, who knows? You can read more about that in detail here.
The UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon forces us to expand our minds, think outside the box, perhaps show a little more intelligence and come up with more educated guesses with regards to why ‘they’ might be visiting us, and have been. Alien invasion is one of countless possible explanations. Use your imagination 🙂 I don’t feel there is any type of sinister intentions with the majority of races that could be out there, but with some, there most probably is as well. Who knows.
The topic leaves no area of humanity untouched, and in the greater scheme of reality, it’s probably one very small tiny truth, that doesn’t even represent the tip of the ice berg 🙂
1952 was the year America caught flying-saucer fever.
So when a rash of strange sightings was reported in the skies over Washington D.C. that summer, the press and the public demanded answers. Were these unexplained radar blips, crafts that in some cases outran jets, part of a nuclear-armed Soviet invasion—a very real threat at the height of the Red Scare? Or were they evidence of something far more mysterious?
The Washington, D.C. sightings of July 1952, also known as “the Big Flap,” hold a special place in the history of unidentified flying objects. Major American newspapers were reporting multiple credible sightings by civilian and military radar operators and pilots—so many that a special intelligence unit of the U.S. Air Force was sent in to investigate. What they found—or didn’t find—along with the Air Force’s official explanation, fueled some of the earliest conspiracy theories about a government plot to hide evidence of alien life.
UFO mania takes hold
It all started in 1947, when a search-and-rescue pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported nine "saucer-like things...flying like geese in a diagonal chainlike line" at speeds exceeding 1,000 m.p.h. near Mount Rainier in Washington State. Within weeks, “flying saucer” sightings had been reported in 40 other states.
In the name of national security, Air Force General Nathan Twining launched Project SIGN (originally named Project SAUCER) in 1948, the first official military-intelligence program to collect information on UFO sightings. Its investigators dismissed the vast majority as hoaxes or misidentifications of known aircraft or natural phenomena.
But a few cases remained “unexplained.”
By 1952, the UFO-investigation unit was called Project Blue Book, led by Captain Edward Ruppelt at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Ruppelt and his team would probably have continued to investigate a couple dozen sightings a month if not for the April 1952 issue of LIFEmagazine. Just above its knockout cover shot of Marilyn Monroe ran an equally eye-catching headline: “There is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”
The article, written with Ruppelt’s full cooperation, explained the Air Force’s national-security interest in UFOs. And it made a convincing case—through the colorful retelling of 10 unexplained UFO “incidents”—that these unidentified objects were extraterrestrial in origin. As one rocket scientist working on “secret” projects for the U.S. told LIFE: "I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis."
According to The Washington Post, the number of UFO sightings reported to the Air Force jumped more than sixfold, from 23 in March 1952 to 148 in June. By July, the precise conditions were in place for a wildfire of UFO mania: widespread Cold War anxiety, mainstream press coverage of unexplained UFO incidents and a healthy dose of “midsummer madness.” All that was needed was a spark.
The Washington National Airport, 1953.
PhotoQuest/Getty Images
Mysterious radar blips buzzing over the White House
Shortly before midnight on Saturday, July 19, 1952, air-traffic controller Edward Nugent at Washington National Airport spotted seven slow-moving objects on his radar screen far from any known civilian or military flight paths. He called over his supervisor and joked about a “fleet of flying saucers.” At the same time, two more air-traffic controllers at National spotted a strange bright light hovering in the distance that suddenly zipped away at incredible speed.
At nearby Andrews Air Force Base, radar operators were getting the same unidentified blips—slow and clustered at first, then racing away at speeds exceeding 7,000 mph. Looking out his tower window, one Andrews controller saw what he described as an “orange ball of fire trailing a tail.” A commercial pilot, cruising over the Virginia and Washington, D.C. area, reported six streaking bright lights, “like falling stars without tails.”
When radar operators at National watched the objects buzz past the White House and Capitol building, the UFO jokes stopped. Two F-94 interceptor jets were scrambled, but each time they approached the locations appearing on the radar screens, the mysterious blips would disappear. By dawn of July 20, the objects were gone.
Nobody bothered to tell Ruppelt, the Air Force’s lead Project Blue Book investigator, about the sightings. He found out a few days later when he flew into Washington, D.C. and read news reports. Ruppelt tried to get out to National and Andrews to interview radar operators and air-traffic controllers, but was denied a government-issued car or even cab fare. Frustrated, he flew back to Ohio with nothing.
The very next Saturday, the UFOs were back over the nation’s capital. Again, Ruppelt found out through a phone call from a reporter, and immediately called on two Air Force colleagues to check out the situation at National. The same radar blips were back, and radar operators wondered out loud if the dozen or so objects on their screens couldn’t be caused by a temperature inversion, a common phenomenon in D.C.’s hot, muggy summer months.
A temperature inversion occurs when a layer of warm air forms in the low atmosphere, trapping cooler air beneath. Radar signals can bounce off this layer at shallow angles and mistakenly show near-ground objects as appearing in the sky. Ruppelt’s Air Force colleagues, however, were convinced that the objects on the radar screen weren’t mirages, but solid aircraft.
To be safe, two more F-94 jets were scrambled to chase down the unidentified targets appearing on radar screens at both National and Andrews. A game of high-speed Whack-a-Mole ensued, where the jets would race to a location targeted by radar, only for the blips to vanish. Finally, one of the jet pilots caught sight of a bright light in the distance and gave chase.
“I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet,” the pilot later told reporters. “I saw several bright lights. I was at maximum speed, but even then I had no closing speed. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them.”
Captain Edward Ruppelt, standing, and General John Samford, seated to the right of him, discussing the reports of unidentified flying objects with other Air Force officers at a 1952 news conference.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Averting mass panic with a disputed theory
The next day, newspaper headlines across America screamed “Saucers Swarm Over Capital” and “Jets Chase D.C. Sky Ghosts.” The publicity and public panic over the sightings were so great that President Harry Truman himself asked aides to get answers. When they called Ruppelt, he said it could have been caused by a temperature inversion, but more investigation was needed to fully explain both the radar images and credible eyewitness accounts.
But before such an in-depth investigation could take place, the Air Force called a press conference, the longest such news event since World War II. The Air Force brass had decided, without consulting Ruppelt or the Project Blue Book team, that the best response to the sightings was to feed the press and the public an easy-to-swallow explanation.
Dodging specific questions about what pilots and radar operators had seen in the skies over the Capitol, Major General John Samford came back again and again to the temperature-inversion theory. Never mind that Ruppelt had since come to the opposite conclusion.
“The investigators had ruled out the inversion,” says Alejandro Rojas, editor of the UFO news site OpenMinds. “They had examined that situation. The radar operators said, ‘Inversions happen. We know what inversions look like. This is not an inversion. This is not the same thing at all.’”
To Ruppelt’s disappointment, the Air Force’s press conference worked exactly as planned. The papers reported the temperature-inversion story and the public largely seemed to accept it. In his 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt reports that after the press conference, UFO sightings dropped from 50 a day to 10.
Skeptics, however, weren’t satisfied with the pat government response. Many accused Air Force and Project Blue Book investigators of devious behavior and secret knowledge. It wasn’t until Project Blue Book documents were made public in 1985 that UFO sleuths could see that the closest thing to a government cover-up of UFO sightings in the nation’s capital was actually a conspiracy of ignorance.
“The Washington UFO flap perfectly illustrates the real government 'cover-up',” says Nick Pope, a UFO journalist who used to run UFO-investigations unit for the British Ministry of Defense. “It’s not a situation where the authorities conspired to keep some terrible truth about UFOs from the people, but rather, the government doing its best to keep people from realizing that they didn't have all the answers.”
VIDEO TRAILER: Project Blue BookWatch an exclusive clip of the new seriesProject Blue Book, premiering Tuesday, January 8 at 10/9c on HISTORY.
Lost for Over 10,000 Years, but This Man Found It!
Lost for Over 10,000 Years, but This Man Found It!
They said it didn’t exist. Lost For Over 10,000 Years, But This Man Found It! Was it worth it?
Today modern archaeology often works with digital technology. Geophysics has allowed thousands of ancient sites to be located – a huge gain for science.
Namaste Matrix Wisdom. One of the best video-docu’s I’ve seen on this subject especially w/Edgar Cayce aka The Sleeping Prophet. How you tied him & all the others into a phenomenal stream was brilliant. Thank you so much for your time, efforts & loving sistah’s n brutha’s all over the world…wanting them to know the True Truths….be Set Free & above all…Be Empowered…! 5 Star Rating on a 5 Star Rating System….Bravo…!!! HigherWaysWoman
Is this proof of LIFE on Mars? NASA's Curiosity rover snaps photos of Martian mushrooms that prove the red planet is home to organic lifeforms, scientists claim in controversial study
Is this proof of LIFE on Mars? NASA's Curiosity rover snaps photos of Martian mushrooms that prove the red planet is home to organic lifeforms, scientists claim in controversial study
Images from NASA's Mars Curiosity show pictures of mushrooms and funghi
Some scientists claim these NASA images show the red surface is not barren
The claims from the researchers have yet to be confirmed or refuted by NASA
Images from the surface of Mars reveal the presence of mushrooms, a group of scientists claim in a controversial new study.
It states some images captured byNASA's Curiosity show fungi is growing on the surface of the supposedly barren planet.
The claims have yet to be confirmed or refuted by NASA.
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A study claims some objects captured by NASA's Curiosity show fungi is growing on the surface of the supposedly barren planet (pictured)
The research lists 15 images as evidence of algae, lichens and 'Martian mushrooms'.
Photographic evidence of such flourishing lifeforms, should the discovery be confirmed, would likely revolutionise our understanding of Mars and life outside of Earth.
Dr Regina Dass, of the department of microbiology at the school of life sciences, India, the study's co-author said: 'There are no geological or other abiogenic forces on Earth which can produce sedimentary structures, by the hundreds, which have mushroom shapes, stems, stalks, and shed what looks like spores on the surrounding surface,' the Express reports.
'In fact, fifteen specimens were photographed by NASA growing out of the ground in just three days.'
It remains unknown why life may have sprouted on Mars but it is possible conditions are more suitable for cultivating life underground than on the surface.
A controversial piece of research such as this is subjected to extensive vetting by peers within the scientific community.
The research states 15 images include evidence of algae, lichens and 'Martian mushrooms' (pictured). The claims have been published in Journal of Astrobiology and Space Science Reviews
Photographic evidence of such flourishing lifeforms, should the discovery be confirmed, would revolutionise our understanding of Mars. Images from the rover include purported evidence of 'life' on martian rocks
Editors of the journal say six independent scientists and eight senior editors were recruited to scrutinise the study.
Eleven recommended publication on the grounds certain revisions were implemented and three rejected the results.
Other academics proposed an alternative explanation and say it is more feasible the specimens are hematite, a form of iron oxide.
The journal stated: 'Evidence is not proof and there is no proof of life on Mars.
'Abiogenic explanations for this evidence can't be ruled out.'
WHAT EVIDENCE DO SCIENTISTS HAVE FOR LIFE ON MARS?
The search for life on other planets has captivated mankind for decades.
But the reality could be a little less like the Hollywood blockbusters, scientists have revealed.
They say if there was life on the red planet, it probably will present itself as fossilized bacteria - and have proposed a new way to look for it.
Here are the most promising signs of life so far -
Water
When looking for life on Mars, experts agree that water is key.
Although the planet is now rocky and barren with water locked up in polar ice caps there could have been water in the past.
In 2000, scientists first spotted evidence for the existence of water on Mars.
The Nasa Mars Global Surveyor found gullies that could have been created by flowing water.
The debate is ongoing as to whether these recurring slope lineae (RSL) could have been formed from water flow.
Meteorites
Earth has been hit by 34 meteorites from Mars, three of which are believed to have the potential to carry evidence of past life on the planet, writes Space.com.
In 1996, experts found a meteorite in Antarctica known as ALH 84001 that contained fossilised bacteria-like formations.
However, in 2012, experts concluded that this organic material had been formed by volcanic activity without the involvement of life.
Signs of Life
The first close-ups of the planet were taken by the 1964 Mariner 4 mission.
These initial images showed that Mars has landforms that could have been formed when the climate was much wetter and therefore home to life.
In 1975, the first Viking orbiter was launched and although inconclusive it paved the way for other landers.
Many rovers, orbiters and landers have now revealed evidence of water beneath the crust and even occasional precipitation.
Earlier this year, Nasa's Curiosity rover found potential building blocks of life in an ancient Martian lakebed.
The organic molecules preserved in 3.5 billion-year-old bedrock in Gale Crater — believed to have once contained a shallow lake the size of Florida's Lake Okeechobee — suggest conditions back then may have been conducive to life.
Future missions to Mars plan on bringing samples back to Earth to test them more thoroughly.
Methane
In 2018, Curiosity also confirmed sharp seasonal increases of methane in the Martian atmosphere.
Experts said the methane observations provide 'one of the most compelling' cases for present-day life.
Curiosity's methane measurements occurred over four-and-a-half Earth years, covering parts of three Martian years.
Seasonal peaks were detected in late summer in the northern hemisphere and late winter in the southern hemisphere.
The magnitude of these seasonal peaks – by a factor of three – was far more than scientists expected.
R. Gabriel Joseph1, Regina S. Dass2, V. Rizzo3, N. Cantasano4, G. Bianciardi5 1Astrobiology Associates, Emeritus, Brain Research Neuroscience Laboratory, Northern California, USA, 2Molecular Fungal Genetics and Mycotoxicology Laboratory, Department of Microbiology, School of Life Sciences, Pondicherry University, Kalapet, India 3Emeritus, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, I.S.A.FO.M. U.O.S.,Cosenza, Italy 4Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, I.S.A.FO.M. U.O.S., Cosenza, Italy 5Department of Medical Biotechnology, Siena University, Italy
Abstract
Evidence is reviewed which supports the hypothesis that prokaryotes and eukaryotes may have colonized Mars. One source of Martian life, is Earth. A variety of species remain viable after long term exposure to the radiation intense environment of space, and may survive ejection from Earth following meteor strikes, ejection from the stratosphere and mesosphere via solar winds, and sterilization of Mars-bound spacecraft; whereas simulations studies have shown that prokaryotes, fungi and lichens survive in simulated Martian environments--findings which support the hypothesis life may have been repeatedly transferred from Earth to Mars. Four independent investigators have reported what appears to be fungi and lichens on the Martian surface, whereas a fifth investigator reported what may be cyanobacteria. In another study, a statistically significant majority of 70 experts, after examining Martian specimens photographed by NASA, identified and agreed fungi, basidiomycota ("puffballs"), and lichens may have colonized Mars. Fifteen specimens resembling and identified as "puffballs" were photographed emerging from the ground over a three day period. It is possible these latter specimens are hematite and what appears to be "growth" is due to a strong wind which uncovered these specimens--an explanation which cannot account for before and after photos of what appears to be masses of fungi growing atop and within the Mars rovers. Terrestrial hematite is in part fashioned and cemented together by prokaryotes and fungi, and thus Martian hematite may also be evidence of biology. Three independent research teams have identified sediments on Mars resembling stromatolites and outcroppings having micro meso and macro characteristics typical of terrestrial microbialites constructed by cyanobacteria. Quantitative morphological analysis determined these latter specimens are statistically and physically similar to terrestrial stromatolites. Reports of water, biological residue discovered in Martian meteor ALH84001, the seasonal waning and waxing of atmospheric and ground level Martian methane which on Earth is 90% due to biology and plant growth and decay, and results from the 1976 Mars Viking Labeled Release Experiments indicating biological activity, also support the hypothesis that Mars was, and is, a living planet. Nevertheless, much of the evidence remains circumstantial and unverified, and the possibility of life on Mars remains an open question.
1. Overview: The Evidence
Presented here is a body of evidence and observations which do not prove but supports the hypothesis Mars was, and is, a living planet hosting prokaryotes, lichens, and fungi. This evidence includes: 1) Results from simulation studies demonstrating a variety of species can survive in a Mars-like environment (Cockell et al. 2005; Osman et al. 2008; Mahaney & Dohm, 2010; Pacelli et al. 2016; Sanchez et al. 2012; Schuerger et al., 2017; Selbman et al. 2015), particularly if shielded by soil and stone and provided water for which there is now evidence (Malin & Edgett 1999, 2000; Perron et al. 2007; Renno et al. 2009; Villanueva et al. 2015); 2) NASA's Mars Viking Labeled Release experiments (Klein et al. 1976; Levin & Straat 1976, 1979a,b, 2016) which detected evidence which met the criteria established by pre-mission field-tests for biological activity; 3) Observation of specimens which resemble fungi, "puffballs," algae and lichens (Dass 2017; Joseph 2014; Kupa 2017; Rabb 2015; Small 2015); 4) Seasonal waxing, waning, and continual replenishment of Martian methane (Formisano et al. 2004; Mumma et al. 2009; Webster et al. 2018) and which has no obvious purely geological source and 90% of which on Earth is due to biological activity including seasonal plant growth; 5) Observations of digitate silica structures that closely resemble complex sedimentary formations produced by a combination of abiotic and biotic processes (Ruffi & Farmer 2016) as well what appears to be microbial mats (stromatolites) which may have been built by water-dwelling cyanobacteria, possibly between 3.2 to 3.7 billion years ago (Bianciardi et al. 2014, 2015; Noffke 2015; Rizzo & Cantasano 2009, 2011, 2016); 6) Specimens identified as "hematite" which were likely produced in thermal ("hot") springs (NASA 2009; Squyres et al. 2004) and which, on Earth, have been cemented together, via water-dwelling prokaryotes and fungi (Ayupova et al 2016; Bosea et al. 2009; Claeys 2006; Fredrickson et al., 2008; Gralnick & Hau 2007; Owocki et al. 2916); 7) Detection of carbonates and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in Martian meteorite ALH84001 which has been dated to 4 billion years ago and which were also generated in the presence of water (Clement et al. 1998; McKay et al. 2009; Thomas-Keprta et al. 2009).
2. The Transfer of Life from Earth To Mars
One obvious source of life on Mars would be Earth. It is probable that solar winds striking, ejecting and propelling microbe-laden dust and debris in the stratosphere and mesosphere, deep into space (cf Arrhenius, 1908), and microbes dwelling in rock ricocheted into space from Earth by meteor strikes, have repeatedly contaminated Mars and other planets (Davies, 2007; Fajardo-Cavazosa et al. 2007; Hara et al. 2010; Melosh 2003; Mileikowsky et al. 2000; Schulze‐Makuch, et al. 2005) and vice-versa.
Space craft which landed or crashed on Mars may have also transferred life from Earth to Mars. For example, immediately after sterilization, between 300 to 540 distinct colonies (on average) consisting of millions of organisms, including fungi, vegetative microorganisms, Bacillus, and grampositive cocci (Staphylococcus spp. and Micrococcus spp.) and numerous microorganisms belonging to the genus Streptococcus and the Corynebacterium Brevibacterium group, were found per square meter on the outer surfaces of the Mars Vikings Landers and other space craft (La Duc et al. 2014; Venkateswaran et al. 2012; Puleo et al. 1977). As to species which were not or could not be cultured, and those masses of bacteria and fungi still growing within the interior of this equipment, the number of survivors is unknown.
Bacillus not only survive dry heat sterilization but tolerate long duration exposure to the radiation intense environment of space (Horneck 1993; Nicholson et al. 2000; Vaishampayan et al. 2012) and in simulated Mars-like environments (Moeller et al. (2012). Various species of Micrococcus also escaped death by sterilization (Puleo et al. 1977) and survive in low Earth orbit, whereas various strains of staphylococcus and Corynebacterium, tolerate simulated space-like conditions (McLean & McLean 2010) and (Corynebacterium) simulated Martian environments (Nicholson et al. (2012) and, as noted, could not be eradicated from space craft. Streptococcus is yet another species which resisted NASA's sterilization attempts, and (although disputed) remained viable after direct exposure to space, including up to 30 months on the moon (Mitchell & Ellis, 1971). Hence, everything sent to Mars may have carried fungi and microorganisms as part of their cargo.
3. Solar Winds vs Microbes in the Stratosphere and Mesosphere
Over 1,800 different types of bacteria as well as fungi and algae thrive and flourish within the troposphere, the first layer of Earth's atmosphere (Brodie et al. 2007). Air is an ideal transport mechanism and serves as a major pathway for the dispersal of bacteria, virus particles, algae, protozoa, lichens, and fungi including those which dwell in soil and water. Viable microorganisms and spores have been recovered at heights of 40 km (Soffen 1965), 61 km (Wainwright et al., 2010) and up to 77 km within the mesosphere (Imshenetsky, 1978). These include Mycobacterium, Micrococcus, and fungi Aspergillus niger, Circinella muscae, and Penicillium notatumm 77 km above Earth (Imshenetsky, 1978).
In one study designed to disprove the possibility NASA might contaminate Mars, samples of Bacillus pumilus were launched via a high-altitude NASA balloon to an altitude of 31 km above sea level (Khodad et al. 2017). Nevertheless, a large number of Bacillus pumilus remained viable; and it only takes one bacterium to produce billions of bacterial offspring.
Moreover, due to tropical storms, monsoons, and even seasonal upwellings of columns of air (Randel et al., 1998), microbes, spores, fungi, (along with water, methane, and other gases) may be transported to the stratosphere and mesosphere where they may remain viable (Imshenetsky, 1978; Soffen 1965; Wainwright et al., 2010). As first formally proposed by Nobel Laureate Dr. Svante Arrhenius (1908) solar winds and photons could disperse space-borne organisms throughout the cosmos.
Hence, it can be readily assumed that microbes not only flourish in the troposphere, but when lofted into the stratosphere and mesosphere many remain viable and may then be blown into space by powerful solar winds (Arrhenius 1908; Joseph & Schild, 2010) where, as shown experimentally, they can easily survive (Horneck, et al. 1994, 2002, Nicholson et al. 2000; Novikova et al. 2016; Onofri et al. 2012; Raggio et al. 2011; Sancho et al. 2007; Setlow 2006).
For example, between September 22-25, 1998, and as detected and measured by NASA's Ultraviolet Imager aboard the Polar spacecraft, a series of coronal mass ejections (CME) and a powerful solar wind created a shock wave which struck the magnetosphere and the polar regions with sufficient force to cause oxygen, helium, hydrogen, and other gases (Moore & Horwitz, 1998), as well as water molecules and surface dust (Schroder & Smith, 2008), to gush from Earth's upper atmosphere into space. Normally the pressure is around two or three nanopascals. However, when the CME struck on September 24, 1998, the pressure jumped to ten nanopascals. Such events may have occurred repeatedly throughout Earth's history.
Thus, it could be predicted that some airborne microbes, fungi, lichens, and algae, as well as water and dust, have been repeatedly lofted into the upper atmosphere; that a significant number remained viable, and were then swept into space and propelled by solar winds throughout the solar system (Arrhenius 1908); some of which may have landed on Mars only to go forth and multiply.
4. Meteorites, Microbes and Ejecta from Earth to Mars
Although innumerable meteorites disintegrate upon striking Earth's upper atmosphere, those at least ten kilometers across will punch a hole in the atmosphere and continue their descent (Van Den Bergh, 1989). When meteors this size or larger strike the surface, tons of dust, rocks, and other debris may be propelled over 100 km above the planet (Covey et al. 1994; Hara et al. 2010) and ejected into space, some possibly passing through that atmospheric hole before air can rush back in to completely fill the gap (Van Den Bergh, 1989).
Asteroids and meteors striking Earth may have repeatedly sheared away masses of earth and rock, and blasted this material (and presumably any adhering microbes, fungi, algae, and lichens) into space (Davies, 2007; Fajardo-Cavazosa et al. 2007; Hara et al. 2010; Melosh 2003; Schulze‐Makuch, et al. 2005), where they can easily survive (Horneck, et al. 2002, Mclean & McLean, 2010; Nicholson et al. 2000; Novikova 2009; Onofri et al. 2012; Raggio et al. 2011; Sancho et al. 2007; Setlow 2006). Some of this microbe-laden debris may have later crashed on Mars (Davies, 2007; Fajardo-Cavazosa et al. 2007; Hara et al. 2010; Schulze‐Makuch, et al. 2005) where, as demonstrated by simulation studies, a variety of organisms can also survive (Cockell et al. 2005; Osman et al. 2008; Mahaney & Dohm, 2010; Pacelli et al. 2016; Sanchez et al. 2012; Selbman et al. 2015).
Experiments have shown that microbes can resist the shock of a violent impact casting them into space (Mastrapaa et al. 2001; Burchell et al. 2001, 2004). Further, a substantial number could easily survive the descent to the surface of a planet (Burchell et al. 2001; Horneck et al. 2002; McLean & McLean 2010), even following high atmospheric explosions, i.e. the Columbia space shuttle explosion (Szewczyk et al., 2005), and despite reentry speeds of up 9700 km h-1 (McLean et al., 2006).
When meteors strike Earth's atmosphere, they are subjected to extremely high temperatures for only a few seconds. If of sufficient size, the interior of the meteor will stay relatively cool, with the surface material acting as a heat shield. Heat does not affect the material uniformly. The interior may never be heated above 100°C whereas spores can survive post shock temperatures of over 250°C (Burchell et al. 2004; Horneck et al. 2002). Mars has a very thin atmosphere.
Thus, many species of microbe have evolved the ability to survive a violent hypervelocity impact and extreme acceleration and ejection into space, including extreme shock pressures of 100 GPa; the frigid temperatures and vacuum of an interstellar environment; the UV rays, cosmic rays, gamma rays, and ionizing radiation they would encounter; and the descent through the atmosphere and the crash landing onto the surface of a planet.
Certainly, surviving organisms dwelling within ejecta from Earth might land on Mars (Davies, 2007; Fajardo-Cavazosa et al. 2007; Hara et al. 2010; Melosh 2003; Mileikowsky et al. 2000; Schulze‐Makuch, et al. 2005). And those which can adapt, would likely go forth and multiply.
5. Simulation Studies of Life on Mars
Numerous investigators have found that a variety of species, including bacteria, algae, fungi and lichens, can survive a simulated Mars-like environment, and that survival rates dramatically increase if provided water or shielded by rock, sand, or soil (Cockell et al. 2005; Osman et al. 2008; Mahaney & Dohm, 2010; Pacelli et al. 2016; Sanchez et al. 2012; Selbman et al. 2015; Villanueva et al. 2015). These simulated environments have included those which imitate Martian radiation, temperature extremes and variations, the low surface pressures, atmospheric gas pressures, the distance between Mars and the sun, the Martian summer/winter solstices and spring/fall equinoxes, environmental parameters analogues to the 24 hours 39 minutes circadian cycle of the Red Planet, effects of shielding and aqueous vs desert vs arctic vs subsurface conditions, and in a CO2-enriched anoxic atmosphere.
For example, Moeller et al. (2012) found that spores of Bacillus subtilis survived simulated Martian atmospheric and UV irradiation conditions, whereas de Vera and colleagues (2014) reported that cyanobacteria collected from cold and hot deserts survived "Mars-like conditions such as atmospheric composition, pressure, variable humidity (saturated and dry conditions) and strong UV irradiation." Nicholson et al. (2012) reported that six subspecies of the genus Carnobacterium collected from a permafrost borehole in northeastern Siberia--considered to be analogs of the subsurface environment of Mars--and nine additional species of Carnobacterium were all capable of flourishing and growing under Mars-like conditions. In yet another study, four methanogen species (Methanosarcina barkeri, Methanococcus maripaludis, Methanothermobacter wolfeii, Methanobacterium formicicum) survived exposure to low pressure conditions similar to Martian surface pressure (Tarasashvili et al., 2013).
Cyanobacteria also tolerate Mars-like conditions (de Vera et al. 2014). Olsson-Francis and colleagues (2009) exposed akinetes (dormant cells formed by filamentous cyanobacteria) to extraterrestrial conditions, including periods of desiccation, temperature extremes (-80 to 80°C), and UV radiation (325-400 nm), and which displayed high levels of viability in these environments similar to Mars.
Eukaryotes (fungi, lichens) are also survivors (Armstrong 2017; de Vera 2012; Sanchez et al. 2012; Zakharova et al. 2014). Zakharova et al. (2014) report that microcolonial fungi, Knufia perforans and Cryomyces antarcticus, as well as Exophiala jeanselmei (a species of black yeasts), not only survived but adapted and showed no evidence of stress after long term exposure to thermo-physical Mars-like conditions. Likewise, Onofri et al. (2018), after growing dried colonies of the Antarctic cryptoendolithic black fungus Cryomyces antarcticus and exposing them for 16 months to simulated Mars-like conditions on the International Space Station, found that "C. antarcticus was able to tolerate the combined stress of different extraterrestrial substrates, space, and simulated Mars-like conditions in terms of survival, DNA, and ultrastructural stability."
Lichens are a symbiotic organism which have been classified as both a prokaryote and eukaryote and are comprised of cyanobacteria and fungi or a eukaryotic algae and fungus (Armstrong 2017; Brodo et al. 2001; Tehler & Wedin, 2008)--species which remain viable when exposed to Mars-like stimulated environments (Olsson-Francis et al 2009; Zakharova et al. 2014). Likewise, lichens easily survive environmental extremes, lack of water, desiccation, temperatures as low as -196°C (Armstrong 2017; Becket et al. 2009), as well as high levels of UV radiation and direct exposure to the radiation intense environment of space (Raggio et al. 2011; Sancho, et al. 2007). Hence, perhaps not surprisingly, studies have demonstrated that lichens remain viable and maintain photosynthetic activity when exposed to simulated Martian temperatures, atmosphere, humidity, and UV radiation (de Vera 2012; De la Torre Noetzel, 2017; Sanchez et al. 2012).
For example, De la Torre Noetzel et al. (2017) exposed lichens to real space outside the ISS and to a Mars simulated environment for 18 months. The samples remained viable and these investigators reported normal metabolic activity of those exposed to the Mars-like environment.
Simulation studies performed by numerous teams of independent investigators have thus demonstrated that a variety of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, including cyanobacteria, methanogens, fungi and lichens, could survive and even flourish on Mars, especially if dwelling beneath the soil or rock shelters and provided water--for which there is now evidence (Malin & Edgett 1999, 2000; Perron et al. 2007; Renno et al. 2009; Villanueva et al. 2015). Although controversial, the results from NASA's Mars Viking Labeled Release experiments also suggests that prokaryotes and simple eukaryotes not only survive on Mars but are engaging in biological activity (Klein et al. 1976; Levin & Straat 1976, 2016).
6. Radiation and Martian Life
Martian ground level radiation has been estimated to equal "0.67 millisieverts per day" (Hassler et al. 2013). This is significantly and profoundly below the radiation tolerance levels of a variety of prokaryotes (Moseley & Mattingly 1971; Ito et al. 1983) and simple eukaryotes, including fungi which can withstand radiation doses up to 1.7×104 Gy (Saleh et al. 1988).
Moreover, fungi, lichens and numerous species of microbe are attracted to and thrive in highly radioactive environments (Becket et al. 2008; Dadachova et al. 2007; Tugay et al. 2006; Wember & Zhdanova 2001), even in space. Novikova et al. (2016; Novikova 2009) and Vesper et al. (2008) reported that fungi are invigorated and grow rapidly within the International Space Station as a consequence of the heightened radiation levels. These space-fungi are also impossible to eradicate. Moreover, fungi flourish on the outskirts and along the walls of the damaged and highly radioactive Chernobyl nuclear power plant (Dighton et al. 2008; Zhdanova et al. 2004). Fungi, lichens, and prokaryotes also survive long-term direct exposure to space, gamma, and solar UV radiation and remain viable (Horneck et al. 2002; McLean & McLean 2010; Nicholson et al. 2000; Novikova et al 2016; Onofri et al. 2012; Sato et al. 2011; Tugay et al. 2006; Sancho et al. 2007; Raggio et al. 2011).
Moreover, fungi (Wember & Zhdanova 2001; Zhdanova et al. 2004) and radiation-tolerant bacteria (Moseley and Mattingly 1971; Ito et al. 1983) will seek out and grow towards sources of radiation which serve as an energy source for metabolism (Dighton et al. 2008; Tugay et al. 2006). Even if their DNA is damaged by radiation levels above their tolerance levels, they can easily repair these genes due to a redundancy of genes with repair functions (White et al. 1999).
These and other species may also develop adaptive features--a property described as "radiostimulation," "radiation hormesis," and "adiotropism" (Levin 2003; Tugay et al. 2006; Zhdanova et al 2004)--and which also occurs in animals and plants living with increasing levels of background radiation (Adey 1993; Alshits et al 1981; Calabrese & Baldwin 1999, 2000; Zhuravskaya et al 1995). These radiation-induced adaptations include tissue and cellular regeneration and growth (Basset 1993; Becker 1984; Becker & Sparado 1972; Occhipinti et al. 2014; Levin 2003; Maffei 2014; Moment, 1949).
Tugay and colleagues (2006; Zhdanova et al. 1991, 2004) exposed micro-fungi and fungi to pure or mixed radiation (137 Cs, 123 Te, 109 Cd, 121 Sn), gamma irradiation (121 Sn) 200-400 Gy, and mixed gamma and beta radiation (137 Cs) (100-150 Gy (equivalent to an electron dose of 300-500 Gy), and found that 60% of fungal strains exhibited positive radiotropism, significant growth, and enhanced spoor production.
The varying levels of radiation on Mars would not be a hinderance to fungi, lichens, and numerous other species.
7. Evidence of Lichens and Fungi on Mars?
Four independent investigators, after examining photos taken by NASA's Mars Rovers Opportunity and Curiosity, have observed hundreds of specimens resembling fungi, mushrooms, and lichens on the surface (Dass 2017; Joseph 2014; Rabb 2018; Small 2015). In 2016, Joseph devised a computerized system coded and programmed to quantify, validate, and statistically analyze expert judgments and developed a research-study website which was quantitatively coded and programmed to enable experts to link their computers to that website and examine and rate 25 separate photos of Martian specimens, type in the names of the specimens, and determine the probability these are living organisms. This methodology has been demonstrated to yield scientifically valid and reliable results (Dommeyer et al. 2004; Hewson & Stewart, 2016; Richardson 2005; Watt et al. 2002). The study website was also programmed to link all 25 ratings and responses of each individual expert, to that expert's computer IP address.
Next, Joseph and his research assistants searched the faculty rosters of every university in the English-speaking world and located over 1000 scientists who had been identified by their universities as experts in fungi, algae and lichens, and over 1000 experts identified as experts in geomorphology and mineralogy, all of whom were invited to participate. Therefore, the "life on Mars" study was based on the judgments of two homogeneous "closed populations" of exerts in subfields of biology and geology (Joseph 2016). Samples from "closed populations" have a high degree of reliability and validity and accurately represent the views of other scientists belonging to those homogenous populations (Dommeyer et al. 2004; Hewson & Stewart, 2016; Richardson 2005; Watt et al. 2002).
Seventy scientists--40 biologists and 30 geologists--completed the invitation-only, computerized-study which enabled each expert to view; examine; type in the name of each specimen; and to judge, utilizing a computerized four-point probability scale, the likelihood each of these specimens photographed by NASA on Mars, are living organisms:
Each of the participants were informed these specimens were photographed on Mars. Examination of the raw data indicated geologists and biologists agreed on five of their top seven choices and this data was analyzed. Chi-square analyses indicated a significant difference between scientists choosing "1" vs "2" but no difference between those choosing "2" vs "3" and "4," meaning that a significant majority of experts believe there is a high probability these are living organisms.
A Fisher's exact statistical test was performed and demonstrated that a majority geologists and biologists agreed there is a high probability (vs no probability) of life on Mars, as based on the comparisons of the top five specimens chosen by biologists (p = <0.0008) and geologists (p = <0.0004); and the same is true of the top seven specimens, biologists (p = <0.0001) and geologists (p = <0.0001). Dozens of experts also identified these specimens as "puff balls," "Basidiomycota," "mushrooms," and "lichens." Therefore, a statistically significant majority of experts agree there is a high probability fungi and lichens may have colonized the Red Planet (Joseph 2016). Similarity in morphology, however, is not proof.
8. Evidence of Lichens on Mars?
Lichens are composite life forms comprised and consisting of a symbiotic relationship involving algae/cyanobacteria (photobiont) and fungi (mycobiont), the latter of which is largely responsible for the lichens' thallus, mushroom shape, and fruiting bodies (Armstrong 2017; Brodo et al. 2001). The specimens observed on Mars and identified by experts as lichens (Dass 2017; Joseph 2016) closely resemble Dibaeis baeomyces, a fruticose lichen belonging to the Icmadophilaceae family--characterized by stalks which may grow to 6 mm topped by a bulbous apothecia, 1-4 mm in diameter and a crustose granular thallus attached to a substrate (Brodo, et al. 2001; Seminara et al. 2018). Dibaeis baeomyces have been found growing on rocks, in desert sand, dry clay, and in the arctic (Brodo et al. 2001; Jonsson et al. 2008; Platt & Spatafora 2000; Ryan et al. 2002; U.S. Department of the Interior 2010).
The Martian specimens depicted in Figures 1 and 2 resemble Dibaeis baeomyces in morphology, shape, growth patterns, and size. All were photographed by Opportunity's Panoramic Camera, which, according to NASA's website, has a 1024 x 1024 pixel array and the following specs: The camera's "right eye" specializes in infrared wavelengths and the "left eye" in visible colors, thereby enabling NASA to colorize images. Both "eyes" are mounted at a height of about five feet (1.5 meters), with 11.8 inches (30 centimeters) between them. Image resolution is ~0.04 inch (1 millimeter) per pixel at a distance of 9.8 feet (3 meters), whereas focal length is capable of close ups at ~1.5 inches (39 millimeters), with optimal focus from five feet (1.5 meters). Unfortunately, NASA does not provide any specifications as to the exact distance from the camera, or the precise size of the images. Hence, the estimated size of specimens is based on bore hole size and pixel dimension.
According to parameters provided by NASA, drill holes are 45 mm in diameter, five mm deep. Based on drill hole comparative parameters, specimens resembling lichens are approximately two mm to seven mm in size/length. Therefore, the Opportunity images of what appear to be lichens (Figures 1, 2) are similar to terrestrial lichens (Dibaeis baeomyces) in growth patterns, morphology, and size. By contrast, these specimens (Figures 1, 2) have little resemblance to terrestrial hematite (Figure 4), NASA's (2007) favored hypothesis. Hematite does not have a thallus or a fruiting-body mushroom shape, or a stalk/stem attached to rocks, or jut-out from rocks at varying angles. These are characteristics of lichens (Figure 3), not hematite (Figure 4). These observations support the Martian-lichens-hypothesis.
Figure 1. Sol 88, photographed by Opportunity's "left" Panoramic Camera "eye." A significant majority of experts in fungi, lichens, geomorphology, and minerology agreed these may be lichens (Joseph 2016). These lichen-like specimens are estimated to be approximately 2 mm to 6 mm in size/length (based on bore hole specs) and are similar to terrestrial lichens (see text for details). Although there is no known geological process which commonly produces mushroom shaped rocks with stems, it is unknown if these are in fact living organisms. Similarities in morphology are not proof.
Figure 2. Sol 37, photographed by Opportunity's "left" Panoramic "eye." A majority of experts agreed these may be lichens (Joseph 2016). The average size of these lichen-like specimens are estimated to be 2 mm to 7 mm, and are similar to terrestrial lichens (see Figure 3). However, if these are living organisms, or unusual sediments fashioned by the alien environment of Mars is unknown.
Figure 3. Terrestrial Lichens / Dibaeis baeomyces. Ranging from 2 mm to 6 mm in size. Photos reproduced by permission: Courtesy of Dragisa Savic (left) and Stephen and Sylvia Sharnoff (right).
Figure 4. Hematite concretions the size of "pebbles" "marbles" and "golf balls" (the largest five cm) from Utah's national parks. Reproduced with permission, courtesy of Fantasia Mining and Ashley Rouech.
9. Evidence of Fungi on Mars?
Lichens are comprised of algae and fungi, and four different investigators (Dass 2017; Joseph 2014; Rabb 2015, 2018; Small 2015) and a significant majority of experts in fungi, lichens, geomorphology, and mineralogy (Joseph 2016) have identified what appears to be fungi on the Martian surface and beneath Martian rock shelters (Figures 5, 6, 13). Fifteen specimens were photographed by the Rover Opportunity increasing in size and emerging from the ground over a three day period (Figure 8).
Puffballs (phylum Basidiomycota) are round-shaped fruiting bodies that contain trillions of spores which are released as dry powdery "puffs" and which can resemble flakes of dry paint. They sit directly on and are usually attached by short stalks to the ground (Petersen 2013; Roberts & Evans 2011). Thus, the specimens in Figure 5 and 6 resemble puffballs (Figure 7). What appears to be spores may be littering the surrounding Martian surface (Figure 6). By contrast, NASA's favored hypothesis is these specimens are hematite produced in hot-springs (NASA 2009; Squyres et al. 2004).
Figure 5. Sol 257 photographed by NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity. Martian specimens resembling Puffballs (Basidiomycota), some with stalks and shedding what appears to be spores and the outer cap, lower cup, and universal veil that covers embryonic fungi. To speculate further, the thick coats of white material being shed from the sides of some specimens may consist of crustose, and the white powder-spore-like material may consist of leprose. It is impossible, however, to determine with a high level of confidence if these are in fact living organisms. Similarities in morphology do not constitute proof.
Figure 6. Sol 182 photographed by NASA Rover Opportunity. A majority of experts identified these specimens as "fungi" and "puffballs" (Joseph 2016). Note what appears to be spores littering the surface. NASA favors a hematite hypothesis. These specimens, however, also resemble hematite.
Figure 7. Comparing terrestrial fungi (left) with Martian specimens (right, Sol 221 photographed by the Rover Opportunity at Meridian Planum, Mars). Credits: terrestrial puffballs, photo reproduced from myko.cz, Czech Mycological Society.
Specimens depicted in Figures 5 and 6 were photographed by the "microscopic imager" attached to the rover Opportunity. According to specs provided on NASA's website, the microscopic imager has a focal length ranging from 0.8 inch (21 millimeters) an optimal focus distance of 2.67 inches (68 millimeters) and can resolve features as small at 0.004 inches (0.1 mm). The original image's size of Figures 6 and 7 was 1024 x 1024 pixels (0.001 inch or 0.031 millimeter per pixel). Based on these stats, the estimated size of the specimens in Figures 5 and 6 range from 1 mm to 50 mm (1 cm to 5 cm). Mature terrestrial puffballs, on average, are approximately 4.267 cm in size (Petersen 2013; Roberts & Evans 2011). In size and morphology several of these specimens resemble puffballs (Joseph 2016).
The specimens depicted in Figures 5, 6, 8, also clearly resemble spherical hematite (Figure 4) in size, shape, morphology. However, hematite does consist of and does not shed sheaths of what appears to be a thick veil of material coating its outer-surface. Then there is the white fluffy-powdery spore-like material which appears to litter the ground. If not biological, perhaps these thick flakes and powdery substances are clumps of minerals, patina or salt and products of a sedimentological process in reaction to water or the Martian atmosphere that adhered to the contours of Martian hematite and surface features.
Evidence favoring the fungal/puffball hypothesis is what appears to be the growth and emergence of 15 specimens, over a three day period (Figure 8). Specifically, five appear to increase in size whereas ten emerge from the ground. If they are immature and still growing, this would explain the absence of spores. If they are not growing, and are in fact hematite, then the only other reasonable explanation is that a powerful wind uncovered these specimens by blowing away dust, dirt, and sand.
Figure 8. Sol 1145-left v Sol 1148-right). Comparing Sol 1145-left vs Sol 1148-right. Growth of fifteen Martian specimens over three days. Specimens labeled 1-5 and marked with red circles have increased in size. Those specified by arrows--Sol 1148-right--demarcate the emergence of ten new specimens which were not visible in Sol 1145-left photographed three days earlier by NASA/JPL. Differences in photo quality are secondary to changes in camera-closeup-focus by NASA. The majority of experts in fungi, lichens, geomorphology, and mineralogy agreed these are likely living specimens, i.e. fungi, puffballs. An alternate explanation is a strong wind uncovered hematite which had been buried beneath sand and dirt.
10. Wind or Fungal Growth?
The Opportunity was not equipped to measure wind. However, Opportunity has been subject to extremely dusty conditions. For example, in December of 2013 the average dust factor was estimated by NASA to be .467 (very dusty); 0.964 (mildly dusty) in May of 2014; and 0.725 (moderately dusty) in June of 2016 (NASA 2018). In fact, rather than strong Martian winds blowing away dust, sand, and dirt, they have instead blanketed the Opportunity and its solar panels with so much debris that Opportunity has been subject to repeated episodes of reduced power (e.g. from 700 watt hours to 400), thereby severely limiting its activities. Furthermore, because of dust, Opportunity twice stopped functioning for long periods, including in July of 2007 when solar-panel output dropped to 128 watt hours (NASA 2007) and in June of 2018 when Opportunity finally ceased to function (NASA 2018) and has yet to recover as of February 14, 2019.
Given these dusty conditions, what is the likelihood that a strong wind would have uncovered the specimens in Figure 8, and not covered them up (and the Opportunity's solar panels) with dust, sand, and dirt? The answer is unknown and a cleansing wind remains a distinct and reasonable possibility.
Figure 9. Mars Sol 2718 vs Sol 2813-- The exact cause or identity of this specimen (right) is unknown but may represent possible growth of what appears to be a mass of bacteria and fungi on the Mars Rover, Opportunity, after 95 (Martian) days. Photo, NASA/JPL.
The wind explanation cannot explain why before and after photos, taken by NASA, depict what appears to be large masses of bacteria and fungi growing on the rovers Opportunity and Curiosity (Figures 9, 10, 11, 12). Moreover, what experts identified as fungi growing beneath a Martian rock shelter (Figure 14) is very similar to what appears to be fungi (and biocorrosion) within the shelter of the Curiosity's upper deck (Figures 12, 14). Wind is not a likely explanation for what appears to be biological growth on the rovers. Instead the evidence supports the hypothesis that fungi (and lichens) may have colonized and are growing on Mars.
Figure 10. Mars Sol 51 vs Sol 1089--Growth of what appears to be a mass of bacteria and fungi on the Mars Rover Curiosity after 1038 Martian days. An alternate explanation is dust and dirt accumulated selectively in this area of the rover. Photo NASA/JPL.
Figure 11. Sol 51. Mastcam photo of the interior, flooring and shelter of an exposed enclosed compartment in the rover Curiosity's chem cam deck after 51 Martian days. Photo by NASA/JPL.
Figure 12. Sol 1089. Possible Fungal contamination or bio-corrosion of the interior, walls, flooring, and shelter of an enclosed compartment in the rover Curiosity's chem cam deck after 1089 Martian days? (Compare with Figure 11). Another possibility: chemical contamination or sand and salt which adhered only to the interior surface? Photo Mastcam, by NASA/JPL.
Figure 13. Sol 1162, Rover Curiosity. Experts identified the white specimens as fungi (Joseph 2016).
Figure 14. Comparison of an exposed compartment in Curiosity's Chem Cam Deck (Sol 1089 / Left, Figure 12) with Sol 1162 (Right, Figure 13). If this represents coincidence or contamination is unknown.
11. The Biology of Hematite?
Four independent investigators and a majority of experts in fungi, lichens, geomorphology, and mineralogy favor a biological explanation for Martian specimens resembling fungi/puffballs as depicted in Figures 5, 6, and 8. NASA (2009) and Squyres and colleagues (2004) argue in favor of hematite and have provided evidence in support of this hypothesis. Hematite, however, is not evidence against biology, but might be further proof of biology. There is evidence that prokaryotes and fungi may play a role in the formation and cementing together of this mineral (Ayupova et al. 2016; Claeys 2006; Owocki et al. 2016).
NASA has identified what may be "hematite" on the Martian surface as based on photographs utilizing color filters taken from space by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft's infrared spectrometer (NASA 2009). Chemical (but non-biological) studies at ground level--via the Rovers "Opportunity" and "Spirit"--also detected the presence of hematite (Squyres et al. 2004).
Hematite is a mineralized iron oxide which, over thousands of years, slowly forms in hot springs (Anthony et al. 2005; Morel 2013), as well as in volcanoes when temperatures rise above 950 C (1740 F). NASA (2009) and Squyres et al. (2004) have argued that Martian hematite was most likely created in boiling hot springs and hydrothermal vents billions of years ago.
Likewise, numerous species of bacteria and archaea flourish in hot springs and hydrothermal vents including anaerobic hyperthermophiles, sulfate reducing bacteria (Desulfovibrio desulfuricans), and microbes such as thermophilic archaebacteria Thermus aquaticus (Gerday & Glansdorff 2007; Durvasula & Rao 2018; Robb et al. 2007). And, as noted, there is evidence hematite may be formed in association with biological activity (Ayupova et al 2016; Bosea et al. 2009; Claeys 2006; Fredrickson et al., 2008; Gralnick & Hau 2007; Owocki et al. 2016).
On Earth, hematite filaments and tubes are similar to structures produced by iron-oxidizing bacteria which suggests the former are fashioned by the latter (Ayupova et al 2016; Claeys 2006; Rajendrana et al. 2017). Moreover, there is evidence that a variety of bacteria help form (by cementing together) or feed upon hematite by extracting energy from iron which precipitates hematite formation (Bosea et al. 2009; Fredrickson et al. 2008; Gralnick & Hau 2007). Oolitic hematite, for example, is fashioned when sediment particles (ooids) on the seafloor accumulate thin layers of lime. Bacteria replace the lime thus assisting in the fashioning of hematite (Claeys 2006; Lowy et al. 2006). Likewise, anaerobes such as Shewanella--a gram-negative, proteobacteria--grows and feeds on hematite and respires on a variety of organic electron acceptors found in hematite (Bosea et al. 2009; Fredrickson et al. 2008, Gralnick & Hau 2007; Lowy et al. 2006).
Fungi may also play a major role in hematite formation (Ayupova et al. 2016, Claeys 2006; Owocki et al. 2016), the mineral substrates of which have been found "attached to fungal filaments, embedded in the fungal mycelium" (Claeys 2006). As determined by Clayes (2006) fungal interactions with hematite also produce "significant biomechanical and biochemical bioweathering features: strong pitting of the mineral surfaces, exfoliation, tunnelling, dissolution, honeycomb-alveolar structures, perforations, fragmentation, and cementation." There is a strong attachment of fungal hyphae to these minerals, such that "fungi engulf whole blocks of minerals in the hyphal network, irrespective of mineral surface topography" (Claeys 2006). Spherical hematite contains numerous filaments with structures similar to fungal hyphae (Ayupova et al. 2016; Claeys 2006).
Hematite fashioned in hot springs or large bodies of water, therefore, may be cemented together and then shaped and fashioned via the assistance of fungal and bacterial activity (Ayupova et al. 2016; Claeys 2006, Owocki et al. 2016; Lowy et al. 2006; Morel 2013). Therefore, like the hematite of Earth, the Martian hematite identified by NASA (2009) and Squyres et al. (2004) could be, at least in part, a byproduct of biological activity and is further evidence that Mars may have been (and may still be) a living planet which was long ago colonized by fungi and prokaryotes including those typically dwelling in water.
12. Martian Meteorite ALH 84001
Claims of "nanobacteria" in Martian meteorite ALH 84001 have been vigorously disputed and are not an issue here. As summed up by Martel and colleagues (2012), "...structures resembling terrestrial life forms known as nanobacteria--can be deemed ambiguous at best."
Likewise, there is controversy over evidence of biological residue, carbonates, and fossilized polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)--a byproduct of cellular decay--discovered in ALH 84001, and other Martian meteorites (see Treiman, 2003 vs Thomas-Keprta et al. 2009). Steele et al. (2012), after examining 11 Martian meteorites, report that 10 contain a ubiquitous distribution of carbon found in association with oxide grains and magmatic minerals and which indicate an abiotic origin, perhaps secondary to Martian magmas. Treiman and Essen (2011) also favor an abiogenic explanation.
Thomas-Keprta et al. (2009) agrees that much of what appears to be biological residue is probably abiogenic in origin. However, her team also argued that at least 25% is biological (McKay et al. 2009; Thomas-Keprta et al. 2009). Martel et al (2012), who argues against nanobacteria, also admits that "the presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, magnetite crystals, carbonate globules... are compatible with living processes."
In fact, the highest concentration of Martian PAHs was embedded in or found alongside those areas of the meteor rich in carbonates (Clemett et al. 1998). Moreover, the magnetotactic residue is not random, but has the characteristic chain-like organization associated with biological activity (Clemett et al. 1998; McKay et al. 1996, 2009). Hence, as based on evidence marshalled by Thomas-Keprta and colleagues (McKay et al. 1996, 2009; Thomas-Keprta et al. 2002), at least 25% of the Martian PAHs found within this ejected sediment may have been produced by carbonate and iron-eating bacteria, magnetotactic bacteria, algae, or fungi around 4 billion years ago (Thomas-Keprta et al. 2009).
Moreover, the carbonates and biological residue appear to have been produced in an aqueous environment (Halevy et al. 2011; McKay et al. 1996, 2009; Thomas-Keprta et al. 2009). For example, Shaheen et al. (2015), upon measuring carbonate phases and distinct oxygen isotope compositions with ALH 84001, found several episodes of aqueous activity. Halevy et al (2011) have come to similar conclusions which they attribute to "a gradually evaporating, subsurface water body--likely a shallow aquifer (meters to tens of meters below the surface)."
13. Biology and Martian Stromatolites?
A detailed analysis of Martian meteorite ALH 84001 revealed high concentrations of carbon compounds, including elongated spheroids and rounded carbonate globs and which had been recycled through water (McKay et al. 1996, 2009; Thomas-Keprta et al. 2002, 2009). Carbonates are typically found in fossil beds of dead sea life. The Martian ALH 84001 carbonate globules also contain cores rich in calcium coupled with dissolved carbonates and magnetite and iron-sulfides which were most likely produced biologically (McKay et al. 1996, 2009; Thomas-Keprta et al. 2002, 2009); i.e. carbonate- and iron-metabolizing bacteria, including cyanobacteria. The outer rims were also oxidized in a pattern typically associated with biological activity; that is reducing and rusting, secondary, perhaps, to photosynthesis, which is also a characteristic of cyanobacteria.
In 2009, Rizzo and Cantasano reported observations of segmented sedimentary structures bordered by lamina and which they interpreted to be evidence of stromatolites, i.e. microbialites (Rizzo & Cantasano 2009, 2011, 2016), most likely created by photosynthesizing, carbonate metabolizing cyanobacteria living in water (Noffke 2015).
In 2014, Bianciardi, Rizzo and Cantasano, conducted an extensive observational analysis of sedimentary microstructures coupled with a quantitative, objective, image analysis and compared what appears to be Martian stromatolites photographed by the Mars rover Opportunity, with terrestrial stromatolites and microbialites, so as to evaluate the geometric textural complexity vs "randomness." Bianciardi and colleagues (2014) reported that "the morphometric analysis reveals that both textures, from microbialites (Earth) and from selected MI images (Mars), present a multifractal aspect" and that "Martian and terrestrial textures were extremely similar to each other." Moreover, they found a "textural pattern that is also present in living microbialites as well in recent and fossil stromatolites... characteristic of microbial communities of cyanobacteria." Other investigators have reached similar conclusions (Ruffi & Farmer, 2016; Noffke 2015).
Ruffi and Farmer (2016), upon examining sediments photographed by the rover Spirit, detected silica structures which closely resemble "microbially mediated micro-stromatolites" as well what could be biofilms with filaments and sheaths. In addition, morphological analyses of sedimentary specimens--photographed by the rover Spirit, at Gusev crater--revealed microstructures organized as intertwined microspherule filaments and which are also observed in Earthly microbialites (Bianciardi et al. 2014).
Noffke (2015) reported that rocks in the < 3.7 Ga Gillespie Lake region of Mars display sedimentary characteristics which mirror ecological changes over time typical of terrestrial microbiological mats and produced by biological interactions with the environment in regressive bodies of water. Based on an analysis of photographs made by Curiosity's Mastcam camera of Martian outcrops, Noffke (2015) observed macroscopic morphologies and spatial relationships associated with a temporal change in the stratigraphic succession typically produced secondary to colonization by microbial mats; i.e. "centimeter- to meter-scale structures similar in macroscopic morphology"… that include "'erosional remnants and pockets,' 'mat chips,' 'roll-ups,' 'desiccation cracks,' and 'gas domes' which do not have a random distribution but were arranged in spatial associations and temporal successions similar to the "growth of a microbially dominated ecosystem that thrived in pools that later dried completely."
In a further examination of bio-mineralization processes it was found that Martian sediments are characterized by highly organized microspherules similar to terrestrial stromatolites which consist of voids, gas domes, and layer deformations due to microbial activity and gas excretions (Rizzo & Cantasano 2016). Moreover, a quantitative image statistical analysis comparing 45 microbialites samplings with 50 photographed by the rover also determined the specimens from Mars are statistically and morphologically similar to terrestrial samples with a probability of this occurring by chance being less than 1/28, p<0.004 bianciardi="" et="" al="" 2014="" these="" findings="" therefore="" supports="" the="" hypothesis="" that="" algae="" cyanobacteria="" may="" have="" colonized="" mars="" over="" 3="" billion="" years="" ago="" in="" presence="" of="" water="" span="">
Figure 15. Sol 820. Green algae, stromatolites, microbial mats, or unusual abiotic sediments? Photographed by the Rover Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory Mars Hand Lens Imager which takes color images of features as small as 12.5 micrometers and at distances between 20 mm and infinity and having a depth of field of 1.6 mm to 2 mm. Note: specimen "A" at bottom center (also depicted in Figure 16). Photograph: NASA/JPL.
Figure 16. Sol 820. Specimen A (from Figure 15). Evidence of bacterial mat or an unusual abiotic sedimentary formation? Photographed by the Rover Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory Mars Hand Lens Imager.
Figure 17. Microanalyses of a Martian stromatolite (top) photographed by the Rover Curiosity (Sol 506) compared with a terrestrial stromatolite from Lagoa Salgada, Brazil (bottom). Highly organized microspherules and thrombolytic microfacies are common to both. Earthly Cyanobacteria typically form voids, intertwined filaments, and layer deformation within stromatolites. It is possible these formations were produced geologically in the absence of any biological influences.
R. Gabriel Joseph1, Regina S. Dass2, V. Rizzo3, N. Cantasano4, G. Bianciardi5
14.Evidence of Martian Algae/Cyanobacteria
Several investigators, based on an examination of photos of Martian specimens, have suggested that what appears to be algae may be present on Mars (Joseph 2014; Krupa 2018 Levin, Straat, & Benton, 1978). Levin et al (1978) upon closely examining photos from the 1976 Viking mission, observed what appeared to be green patches on Mars rocks which, over time, changed in size. Levin, Straat and Benton (1978) argued that changes in the green patches could represent biological activity and evidence of life (e.g. algae), or alternatively, green-colored dirt and dust.
In 2017, T. A. Krupa presented evidence at the Lunar and Planetary Society of what may be green photosynthetic organisms, e.g. algae. Krupa performed a detailed analysis of low albedo, "anomalous" images from Columbia Hills in Gusev Crater, and those photographed by the Spirit Rover's Pan Cam in an area of Mars dubbed "Larry's Outcrop/Larry's Lookout." These photos were initially analyzed by employing "red," "blue," and "green" filters, which were "radiometrically corrected with the radiance correction parameters found in the image file header." These images were analyzed next with a computer Geographic Information System, SAGA.
Krupa (2017) reported the analysis revealed what appears to be water pathways which may intermittently fill with water and that "the hillside at Larry's outcrop is covered by a very thin layer of green material" and "green spherules" which clearly resembles algae in the soil. Krupa (2017) concluded "that these spherules are a life form supported by that water.... and their green color suggests that the spherules contain a photosynthetic compound similar to green chlorophyll...The distribution of these spherules in a single layer...is also consistent with the hypothesis that the spherules are photosynthetic life forms," e.g., algae/cyanobacteria.
Krupa's (2017) computerized analyses which revealed possible water pathways that may intermittently fill with water, is, of course an unproven hypothesis, but which is nevertheless consistent with findings of Martian water by Renno et al., (2009) and other investigators. Specifically, in 2004 the European Space Agencies' Mars orbiter found evidence of water ice and detected vapors of water molecules via an infrared camera aboard the Mars Express spacecraft which was circling the Red Planet's south pole whereas additional "water" "anomalies" were reported in 2015 (Villanueva et al. 2015).
15. Biology of Seasonal Fluctuations in Martian Methane
If prokaryotes and fungi contributed to the formation of Martian sedimentary structures billions of years in the past, the accumulation of these decaying organisms should also be a source of sedimentary and atmospheric methane. As based on simulation studies (Tarasashvili et al., 2013), methanogens can flourish in a Mars-like environment. If methanogens have colonized Mars, they too would be a source of methane. In fact, high levels of methane have been detected at ground level and in the atmosphere of Mars and which varies in concentration depending on the season and which is continually replenished (Formisano et al. 2004; Mumma et al. 2004, 2009; Webster et al. 2013, 2015, 2018).
Specifically, it has been determined that Martian atmospheric methane levels are punctuated by major spikes in concentration which later decline, only to later increase again (Formisano et al. 2004; Mumma et al. 2004, 2009; Webster et al. 2018). Three separate methane plumes consisting of 19,000 metric tons of methane gas were detected in the Martian atmosphere by Europe's Mars Express spacecraft in 2003 (Formisano et al. 2004). Employing infrared spectrometers on three Earth-based telescopes several possible methane emission sources were found in the vicinity of Syrtis Major, Arabia Terra, and Nili Fossae in the southern and northern hemispheres (Formisano et al. 2004; Mumma et al. 2004).
In July of 2013, "an upper limit of 2.7 parts per billion of methane" was detected in the vicinity of the Gale Crater fluctuating between a value of 0.18 ppbv to 1.3 ppbv as measured on September of 2013 (Webster et al. 2013). A "tenfold spike" in methane levels followed with increases in late 2013 and early 2014, averaging "7 parts of methane per billion in the atmosphere" (Webster et al. 2015).
In 2018, Webster and colleagues reported that "in situ measurements at Gale crater made over a five-year period by the Tunable Laser Spectrometer on the Curiosity rover "revealed a strong, repeatable seasonal variation...which is greater than that predicted from either ultraviolet degradation of impact-delivered organics on the surface or from the annual surface pressure cycle." According to Webster et al (2018), the findings "are consistent with small localized sources of methane released from Martian surface or subsurface reservoirs."
On Earth, 90% of methane is produced biologically by living and decaying organisms (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2017; U.S. Department of Energy, 2017) and released as a waste product by prokaryotes (Bruhn et al. 2012; Kepler et al. 2006) and certain species of fungi (Lenhart et al. 2012; Liu et al 2015; Mukhin & Voronin, 2007). Terrestrial atmospheric methane levels also vary with the seasons and are directly attributed to biological activity.
For example, Rasmussen and Khalil (1981) found "stable seasonal cycles with peak concentrations in October and minimum concentrations in July." In 1983 these investigators reported that in the southern hemisphere the lowest concentrations are found during the late Australian summer and fall; likewise, there is less atmospheric methane in the northern hemisphere during summer. These seasonal variations have as their source biological activity in wetlands (Chen et al. 2008; Whalen 2005) and on farms and in rice paddies, just prior to harvest (Chen et al. 2008; Cicerone et al. 1983).
Chen et al. (2008) report a direct correlation between atmospheric methane and the growing seasons (14.45 mg CH4 m-2 h-1 [0.17 to 86.78 mg CH4 m-2 h-1) vs non-growing seasons (0.556 mg CH4 m-2 h-1 (0.002 to 6.722 mg CH4 m-2 h-1). Major contributing factors include surface temperatures, standing water depths, and the degree of plant growth, whereas in anerobic environments the absence of oxygen and the amount of degradable material are controlling influences.
Based on a thorough review of the evidence, Whalen (2005) determined that "emission from wetlands is also a significant component of the atmospheric CH4 budget...about 25% of total emissions from all anthropogenic and natural sources." Much of "this methane is produced by subsurface, anaerobic methanogenic bacteria and surficial oxidation by methanotrophic bacteria."
As documented in this report, methanogens, cyanobacteria, fungi, and lichens can easily survive in a Mars-like environment. Further there is evidence that these same species of prokaryote and eukaryotes have colonized Mars and that there is water beneath and above the surface.
Although considered controversial, NASA's 1976 Viking Labeled Release (VLR) studies, at two landing sites 4,000 miles apart on Mars, detected evidence of surface biological activity that could be attributed to fungi, lichens, algae, and a variety of prokaryotes (Levin & Straat, 1976, 1977, 1979a,b, 2016). In 2009 Levin and Straat also argued that perhaps 25% of the gasses released during the experiments could have been methane attributed to methanogens.
It is also well established that fungi and stromatolite-building cyanobacteria (algae) produce and are sources of methane (Hansson 1983; Klassen et al. 2017; Lenhart et al. 2012). Fungi and other eukaryotes generate methane via interactions with methanogenic archaea (see Olsson et al. 2017).
Algae and Saprotrophic fungi also produce methane independently of archaea (Hansson 1983; Klassen et al. 2017; Lenhart, et al. 2012) whereas fungal (and archaea) methane production is inhibited by the presence of oxygen and increases with increased levels of carbon dioxide (Lenhart, et al. 2012)--a finding which is true for most methane-producing species. Therefore, Mars is an ideal habitat for methanogens as there are minimal levels of free oxygen and the atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide (Mahaffy et al. 2013), whereas the electron acceptor in methanogenesis is carbon dioxide.
Martian radiation may also promote the biological production of methane. It has been established that saprotrophic micro-fungi biologically decompose carbon-based radioactive debris from the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor (Zhdanova et al., 1991). Saprotrophic fungi are even adapted for accumulation and uptake of radiocesium fallout (Dighton et al. 1991) and, as noted, are a source of methane (Lenhart, et al. 2012). As indicated by Figures 8, 9, 10, 12, there is evidence of Martian fungal growth. Hence, it would be expected that the growth and biological activity of any Martian organisms might wax and wane, thereby resulting in a waxing and waning of Martian methane and contributing to seasonal variations.
Using Earth as an example, the most probable contributors to seasonal variations in Martian methane emissions are variations in water availability, temperature, degradable and methanogen biomass and the growth and decay of various organisms. As there no evidence of any significant abiotic methane production on Mars (Khayat et al. 2017; Roos-Serote et al. 2016; Webster et al. 2018), and given that 90% of terrestrial methane is biological in origin, it is reasonable to assume biological activity is the primary source of fluctuating levels of and seasonal variations in Martian methane.
16. Geology of Martian Methane?
Certainly, and as most investigators insist, it is possible that Martian methane is produced geologically and through abiogenic processes. Perhaps Martian methane is vented periodically and naturally released via gas permeable fissures; faults and fractures in rocks; sandstone and sediment; and the leakage of deep gas reservoirs through geothermal activity, and especially through vents leading deep beneath the surface from inactive mud-volcanoes as these are the source of abiogenic methane on Earth (U.S. Department of Energy, 2017; Etiope & Klusman 2002; Vanneste et al. 2001).
Khayat and colleagues (2017), however, searching for geological sources found none. Khayat et al. (2017) examined two volcanic districts via a high resolution spectrometer at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility and using the high resolution heterodyne receiver at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope facility, and "no active release of such gasses was detected."
Organic molecules are also a source of terrestrial methane (U.S. Department of Energy, 2017) and several investigators have reported what may be trace amounts of organic molecules on the surface of Mars (Ming et al. 2009; Sutter et al. 2016) which has been attributed to material deposited by meteors and dust drifting down from space (Frantseva et al. 2018; Moores & Schuerberg 2012; Schuerger et al. 2012). Therefore, it's been argued, Martian methane is produced by comets and meteors and via the UV photolysis of the minimal amounts of organic carbon drifting down upon the surface (Fries et al. 2015; Keppler et al. 2012).
However, as determined by Webster et al. (2018) these scenarios cannot account for the variations, levels and amount of methane so far detected which are far "greater than that predicted from either ultraviolet degradation of impact-delivered organics on the surface or from the annual surface pressure cycle." Furthermore and as summed by Roos-Serote, Atreva, Webster and colleagues (2016), "We find no compelling evidence for any correlation between atmospheric methane and predicted meteor events."
Moreover, UV photolysis of Martian organic carbon is carbon-limited and constrained by the accretion rate of IDP organics (Moores & Schuerberg 2012). There is insufficient carbon on the surface (Bieman et al. 1976; Ming et al. 2009) to account for the varying and large concentrations of methane which are periodically pumped into the Martian atmosphere (Moores & Schuerberg 2012). And, organics buried one to two mm below ground would not be subject to UV photolysis, and any methane could only be liberated biologically (U.S. Department of Energy, 2017; U.S. Department of Agriculture 2017).
Certainly there is a likely abiogenic contribution to Martian methane. However, as on Earth, that contribution appears to be minimal. By contrast, there is evidence of biological activity, including the growth of what appears to be fungi, algae and lichens, on the Martian surface; and on Earth 90% of methane is biological in origin. Thus, the most logical, scientific explanation for the replenishment of and seasonal fluctuations in Martian methane is biological activity--the first evidence of which may have been discovered by the Viking Labeled Release experiments (Klein et al. 1976; Levin 2010; Levin & Straat 1976, 2009, 2016).
17. The Viking Labeled Release Experiment Detects Biological Activity on Mars?
As summarized by Levin (2010; Levin & Straat 2016), the Viking Labeled Release (LR) experiments were designed to detect biological activity on Mars. Thousands of field tests were performed and it was proved the LR experiment was capable of accurately detecting a very wide range of microorganisms including aerobic, anaerobic, and facultative bacteria, as well as lichens, fungi, and algae.
Once on Mars a nutrient containing radioactive carbon was added to a Martian soil sample and the presence of radioactivity in the gasses released served as evidence of active metabolism. A control experiment heat-treated a second sample to kill microorganisms. Positive results including evidence of biological metabolism were obtained from the raw sample which was not subject to extreme heat-sterilization. By contrast, when soil samples were heated to 50°C, biological activity decreased by 65%. When Martian soil was pre-heated to 160°C there was no evidence of biology. When two samples of Martian soil were stored at approximately 10°C for long time periods there was a 90% and 100% reduction in activity. When not subject to sterilization, robust evidence of biological metabolism and increases in activity were obtained (Klein et al. 1976). As described by Levin and Straat (2016), the LR instruments operated flawlessly on Mars. Both Viking landing sites, some 4,000 miles apart, produced strong responses and met the pre-mission criteria for the detection of life.
To distinguish between non-biological and biological agents, additional experiments were executed via commands from Earth. Each such ad hoc series of tests again demonstrated on-going Martian metabolism. Four different LR experiments were conducted, each of which yielded positive results, and five controls, all of which supported the positive results as biological.
Levin concluded that the "amplitudes and kinetics of the Mars LR results were similar to those of terrestrial results, especially close to those of soils in, or from, frigid areas," and that the LR experiment had found evidence of biological activity on Mars (Levin 2010; Levin & Straat 1976, 1979a,b, 2016).
The results, however, were rejected by NASA administrators who argued that since the addition of more nutrients into the soil temporarily decreased the level of biological activity "the LR therefore had not detected life on Mars, but had detected a chemical or physical agent that had produced false positive results" (Levin 2010). NASA's arguments (detailed on the NASA/Mars website), though interesting, are not based on factual evidence, but post-hoc theorizing and the interested reader is encouraged to review NASA's claims to arrive at their own conclusions. In fact, according to Levin (2010) "NASA-bonded Antarctic soil 664 had reacted to its second injection as had the Martian soils" and "the decline in gas level was caused by re-adsorption of the evolved gas into the dampened soil." That only trace amounts of carbon and organic molecules have been detected on Mars (Bieman et al. 1976, 1977; Ming et al. 2009; Sutter et al. 2016) also does not support NASA's physical-chemical-false-positive hypothesis.
Subsequently, Bianciardi, Miller, Straat, and Levin (2012) performed a mathematical complexity deep analysis of the Viking LR data, employing seven complexity variables. It was determined that the Viking LR positive responses demonstrated a different pattern from control responses which resembled near-random noise. By contrast, the active experiments exhibited highly organized responses typical of biology.
18. Caveats and Conclusions
We have presented a body of observations and evidence which supports the hypothesis Mars may have been, and may still be, a living planet. Although disagreements and differing interpretations and hypotheses abound, there is no factual, scientific evidence proving or even strongly supporting a purely abiotic explanation for the data and observations presented here which we believe favors biology. Thus, the null hypothesis is rejected.
Admittedly, abiogenic factors can't be ruled out. Conversely, at present, there is no microscopic evidence depicting cells or intra-cellular structure and thus no definitive proof of Martian life. Moreover, although organisms can survive in space or in simulated Mars-like environments, there is no proof they can flourish on Mars. It is also very difficult to distinguish, with a high level of confidence, between what may be living organisms vs sedimentary structures. Similarities in morphology are not proof. In many respects the observations presented here could be described as circumstantial and do not rise to the level of "extraordinary evidence" thus precluding "extraordinary claims." Although, collectively, the evidence, in total, weighs in favor of biology, we can only conclude that the question of life on Mars remains unanswered.
Peer Review and Recommendations
Fourteen qualified experts (eight Senior Editors and six independent scientists) refereed and peer reviewed "Evidence of Life on Mars?" Eleven experts in total recommended publication and of the eight Editors three rejected the article. The experts have a publication history in the following areas of science: Microbiology, Biochemistry, Biogeology, Mars Viking Experiments, Fungi, Lichens, Methanogens, Extremophiles, Mars-Simulated Environments, Martian Atmosphere, Martian Meteors, Radiation Biology. TOTAL: 11 Yes / 3 No Supervised and Verified by the Managing Editor D. Anderson February 28, 2019 Journal of Astrobiology and Space Science Reviews http//JournalofAstrobiology.com
R. Gabriel Joseph1, Regina S. Dass2, V. Rizzo3, N. Cantasano4, G. Bianciardi5
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Leven op Mars? Volgens deze wetenschappers bewijzen NASA-foto’s dat er paddenstoelen groeien op de rode planeet
Leven op Mars? Volgens deze wetenschappers bewijzen NASA-foto’s dat er paddenstoelen groeien op de rode planeet
Op foto’s van het oppervlak van Mars zijn paddenstoelen te zien, zo beweren wetenschappers.
Zij stellen ineen nieuwe studiedat er schimmels groeien op de rode planeet. De Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA heeft nog niet gereageerd op het onderzoek.
De onderzoekers laten 15 foto’s zien die volgens hen bewijzen dat er algen, mossen en paddenstoelen groeien op Mars.
15 soorten
“Er zijn geen geologische of andere abiogene krachten op aarde die honderden van dit soort structuren kunnen voortbrengen,” zei coauteur Regina Dass.
“Ze hebben de vorm van paddenstoelen, stelen, stengels en sporen,” vervolgde dr. Dass. “Er zijn 15 soorten gefotografeerd door de NASA die in drie dagen tijd uit de grond groeiden.”
Het is onbekend hoe het kan dat er mogelijk opeens leven is ontstaan op Mars, schrijft de Daily Mail.
Power outages are nothing new in Venezuela – they seem to be happening weekly and often occur cross multiple states. UFO sightings over Venezuela are infrequent but happening more often, but it still seems improbable that a recent one recorded on video by a motorist in the state of Trujillo is related to the blackout he was driving through, yet that’s one of the explanations given by a reporter who investigated it. Is there really a connection? Are Venezuelans and leaders around the world pointing their fingers at the wrong cause for that country’s problems – at least its electrical power ones? And why are there so many recent UFO sightings there … including one with a crop circle?
“At first I did not pay much attention because I thought it was a reflection of the sun, but suddenly I realize that the sun was to the left, and much lower. (Immediately) the light began to move in a zigzag pattern. I called my cousin who was sleeping and I told him: record, and he started recording while I took the pictures.”
That video (watch it here) was given Friman Rodríguez to reporter Hector Escalante, a loca UFO investigator. Rodríguez saw and recorded the video with his cousin on February 16, 2019, as they were driving back to Cabimas on the Pan American Highway (Troncal 1) at about 5 pm after finding out their destination was blacked out. He apparently stopped the vehicle on the highway and recorded the UFO zigzagging across the sky, descended and then stopped. Although it’s not apparent from the video, Rodríguez claimed they were close to where the UFO hovered and possibly landed, but he didn’t want to get out and pursue it since it appears they just stopped in the middle of the highway and needed to move.
“I felt happy to record it and continue. I was not confident to return and stay to see something I do not know what could end.”
Does Friman or his DNA attract UFOs? He admits this is his first sighting but reveals his father has seen a similar object twice. Also, both he and his cousin say they were unusually exhausted and sleepy after the encounter, and the cousin had a headache that needed medical attention. While it was hot, Friman says they were in a new truck that kept them cool. Coincidences?
At this point, Escalante brings in another recent UFO sighting in La Lorena Venezuela on March 7 which also occurred during a blackout. A video (watch it here and here in a video that also incudes the possible UFO) taken in La Lorena shows people inspecting what appears to be a crop circle that the uploader says matches the shape of the UFO that reportedly hovered over it.
“Large circular signs on the vegetation left two presumed UFOs on the night of March 7, 2019. I was in the scene and it is amazing as you can see the circular shape of two alleged ships that locals say they saw the night before the video . They report that two large circular lights perched on the vegetation of the lagoon for a few minutes, then climbed the stars at an unspeakable speed. As a curious fact I must tell you that under that straw there is water … people walked on the straw that was molded by the UFOs on the water.”
Another journalist, Nelsored González, confirmed on Twitter that there was a blackout in Lake Lorraine (this appears to be a Google translation of La Lorena), and then added a couple of political dots in an attempt to connect everything to Russia!
“For those who are not aware, the day of the national blackout at 4:55 pm, on March 7, reported an alleged sighting and extraterrestrial landing on Lake Lorraine City Bolivar presumably was the cause of the blackout that Maduro does not know how to explain and for which he blames the USA. The Russians who arrived yesterday are a unit of communications, scientists and the Russian Federal Space Agency, confirms a colleague in Ciudad Bolivar who is already part of the Russian team there, created a perimeter in Lake Lorraine, where the alleged landing occurred UFO.”
Which brings us back to the current state of affairs — paranormal, normal and abnormal — in Venezuela. The sighting in Trujillo is unusual enough that it can’t easily be written off as a refection or lens flare. The crop circle doesn’t look like the typical British countryside variety of geometric shapes and no one seems to have a logical or natural explanation. Government problems can definitely be blamed for the blackouts and military operations for at least some of the UFOs. But not all … at least not yet.
Could it be that extraterrestrials are more concerned about Venezuelans than the rest of the world? Wouldn’t that be nice? Keep an eye on the skies and the ground for more clues.
In late 2018, geologists and seismologists were baffled by amysterious seismic event unlike anything seen before. Some type of massive event literally shook the entire Earth, and scientists still aren’t quite sure what it could have been. A team of French researcherspublished a studyof the seismic anomaly this week which offers a few clues about its origins, but the study ultimately poses more questions than it answers. What’s happening deep within the Earth?
The epicenter for the 2018 seismic anomaly was just off of the coast of Mayotte, a small archipelago in the Indian Ocean presided over by France. The event consisted of long pulses of extremely low frequency waves far below the threshold of human perception but quite powerful enough to register on seismological instruments. The pulses did not appear to be caused by earthquakes – at least any type of earthquake we know of – yet also did not appear to be man made.
Petite-Terre, Mayotte.
To add to the mystery of the 2018 seismic anomaly, geologists have found that Mayotte is sinking by as much as 9 mm or .35 inches a month as well as drifting eastward at twice that rate. That observation seems to support the new hypothesis that the 2018 event was caused by an underwater volcanic event the likes of which we’ve never seen. In the new study of the event, researchers write that this event could be “the offshore eruption with the largest volume ever documented.”
The event is thought to have been caused over a cubic kilometer of magma 28 km (17 miles) below the ocean surface somehow flowed outward into surrounding sedimentary layers as opposed to flowing upward, hence why nothing was observed on the surface. If that’s true, though, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions about the event. In the months since the seismic anomaly, large fish kills have been observed; if all of the magma remained underground, what’s killing the fish? What is causing the high frequency pulses which were recorded alongside the low frequency rumbles? And could this activity be related to the island’s eastward and downward migration?
Map of recent cracks forming in eastern Africa.
The 2018 seismic anomaly is only one example of recent disquieting developments in eastern Africa which suggest something big may be happening below the Earth’s surface. Last year, a massive crack was found to have formed in eastern Africa running through Kenya and Somalia, a crack which is pulling away from the rest of the continent at 2.5 cm or 1 inch per year. A few months earlier, scientists published a study of the so-called “South Atlantic Anomaly,” a strange and unexplained disturbance in the Earth’s magnetic field which suggests “there’s something unusual about the core-mantle boundary under Africa that could be having an important impact on the global magnetic field.”
The South Atlantic Anomaly
Could all of these events and phenomena be related? What exactly is happening deep within the Earth under Africa? Do we really want to know, or is it better to be surprised in the middle of your breakfast burrito by the massive wall of magma rushing to engulf you and everyone you know? At least it wasn’t a good breakfast burrito. That new girl on the taco truck always puts the cheese in a big clump right in the middle instead of spreading it out evenly throughout the whole burrito.
Life is just a series of disappointing burritos. Bring it on, magma. End it already.
If there’s one thing humans aren’t prepared for, it’s new curveballs thrown at us by the angry Earth.
Symbolism of the Mythical Phoenix Bird: Renewal, Rebirth and Destruction
Symbolism of the Mythical Phoenix Bird: Renewal, Rebirth and Destruction
In ancient mythology, the symbolism of the majestic Phoenix bird, which is most often connected with the Sun, dies and is reborn across cultures and throughout time.
Ancient legend paints a picture of a magical bird, radiant and shimmering, which lives for several hundred years before it dies by bursting into flames. It is then reborn from the ashes, to start a new, long life. So powerful is the symbolism that it is a motif and image that is still used commonly today in popular culture and folklore.
The legendary phoenix is a large, grand bird, much like an eagle or peacock. It is brilliantly coloured in reds, purples, and yellows, as it is associated with the rising sun and fire. Sometimes a nimbus will surround it, illuminating it in the sky. Its eyes are blue and shine like sapphires. It builds its own funeral pyre or nest, and ignites it with a single clap of its wings. After death it rises gloriously from the ashes and flies away.
Image: Phoenix rising from the ashes in Book of Mythological Creatures by Friedrich Johann Justin Bertuch (1747-1822)
Phoenix Bird Symbolizes Renewal and Resurrection
The phoenix symbolizes renewal and resurrection, and represents many themes, such as “the sun, time, the empire, metempsychosis, consecration, resurrection, life in the heavenly Paradise, Christ, Mary, virginity, the exceptional man”.
Astronautsaboard the International Space Stationhave to exercise and alter their diet to endure extended stays in microgravity, but NASA and the ESA hope to find a better way. They'reabout to starta study that will explore how artificial gravity might keep astronauts in good shape. Volunteers at the German Aerospace Center will spend 60 days in bed starting on March 25th at an incline that will send blood away from their heads. Once a day, a "selection" of the subjects will take a spin in the Center's short-arm centrifuge in a bid to send blood back toward their legs.
The scientists can tweak the intensity of the centrifugal force as well as decide whether to spin around a person's head or chest, but it's not clear just what will work. That's partly what the experiment is for -- they'll have a better sense of what gravitational effects would be necessary to prevent muscles from weakening.
Whatever the conclusions, you probably won't see 2001-style rotating habitats any time soon. You're likely to see something resulting from studies like this, however. If humanity is going to embark on trips to Marsor send more than a handful of people into orbit for extended periods, it will likely want some kind of simulated gravity to maintain the fitness of future spacefarers.
The Great Red Spot, a storm larger than the Earth and powerful enough to tear apart smaller storms that get drawn into it, is one of the most recognizable features in Jupiter’s atmosphere and the entire solar system. The counterclockwise-moving storm, an anticyclone, boasts wind speedsas high as 300 miles (483 km) per hour. This prominent feature, observed since 1830,and possibly as far back as the 1660s, has long been a source of great fascination and scientific study.
Much about the Great Red Spot is still unknown, including exactly when and how it formed, what gives it its striking red color and why it has persisted for so much longer than other storms that have been observed in the atmosphere of Jupiter. However, astronomers think that its position in latitude, consistently observed to be 22 degrees south of Jupiter’s equator, is connected to the prominent cloud bands in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
As a planetary astronomer who studies the atmospheres of comets, I’m normally not investigating massive storms. But I still want to know about the features seen in the atmosphere of other bodies in the solar system, including Jupiter. Studying atmospheres of all kinds deepens our understanding of how they form and work.
Unlike Jupiter, the Earth has land masses that cause major storms to lose energy due to friction with a solid surface. Without this feature, Jupiter’s storms are more long-lasting. However, the Great Red Spot is long-lived, even by Jupiter standards. Researchers don’t quite understand why, but we do know that Jupiter’s storms that are located in cloud bands with the same direction of rotation tend to be longer lasting.
The planets of the solar system to size scale. Jupiter is 5 times further from the sun than the Earth.
These colorful alternating bands, called belts (dark bands) and zones (light bands), run parallel to Jupiter’s equator. Researchers aren’t sure what causes the coloration of the bands and zones, but differences in their chemical composition, temperature and transparency of the atmosphere to light have all been suggested as contributing factors. These bands are also counter-rotating, meaning that they move in opposite directions with respect to their neighbors. The boundaries between the bands and zones are marked by strong winds called zonal jets.
The Great Red Spot is confined by an eastward jet to its north and a westward jet to its south, confining the storm to a constant latitude. However, the Great Red Spot has undergone considerable changes in longitudeover time, and recent evidence suggests that its rate of westward longitudinal motion is increasing.
Like the Great Red Spot, the bands have undergone little change in latitude over the time during which they have been observed. Researchers don’t entirely understand the banded structure, but we do have evidence suggesting that the light colored zones are regions of rising material, and the dark belts are regions of material sinking into the atmosphere.
On Earth, there is a well-defined boundary between the atmosphere and the surface of the planet, which is largely covered by liquid water. However, there are no known large oceans of water under Jupiter’s clouds. Based on what researchers do know, the atmosphere smoothly transitions to a liquid hydrogen interior within the planet. There may be a solid core to Jupiter, but it is most likely buried very deep under a thick layer of liquid metallic hydrogen, a form of hydrogen that acts as an electrical conductor.
What else do we know about the Great Red Spot that is changing dramatically? Its size, shape and color. An analysis of historical and recently obtained data on the Great Red Spot has shown that it is shrinking and becoming both rounder and taller, and its color has also varied over time. What is driving these changes, and what do they mean for the future of the Great Red Spot? Researchers aren’t sure.
However, NASA’s Juno spacecraft, currently orbiting Jupiter, is gathering more data on the cloud bands and the Great Red Spot. These new data will likely provide insights into many of the features in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
It shows the existence of a two-tier scientific culture, of which the upper tier would be a domain for clandestine R&D, unknown to democratically elected authorities.
Many investigators and whistleblowers in the United States have, over the last 40 years, called attention upon unacknowledged scientific and technical programmes being carried out in various publicly and privately funded laboratories and research centres, affiliated to military and intelligence agencies, in “exotic” areas that are officially not regarded as deserving of serious attention in civilian institutions such as universities. The existence of such programmes, now being proven, would demonstrate the existence of a two-tier scientific culture in the US at least, if not in the rest of the world, of which the upper tier would be a domain for clandestine R&D, unsupervised by, and unknown to, democratically elected authorities. If only for this reason, finding out the truth about the situation is of great value to society.
What do we know about the long suspected “special access” programmes hiding within the American military-industrial-intelligence complex and what is backed by material evidence?
Among the first whistleblowers, who emerged in the 1980s (1989 in his case), Bob Lazar is noteworthy because of the extensive information he provided in videotaped talks about research he had carried out in Area S-4 close to the since notorious Area 51 in the Nevada desert’s atomic testing range, around the dry Groom lake riverbed.
Lazar claimed to have being recruited by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), through defence contractor EG&G, to work as part of a team on a highly classified project which involved examining and reverse engineering a 52 feet wide saucer-shaped craft that he quickly realised was not built by humans. He further explained that it was made of some unknown ceramic-like material, could sit three small sized (3 feet tall) crew members and was powered by a hitherto undiscovered super-heavy element, eventually identified as number 115 on the periodic table, which generated its own gravitational field and enabled the craft to reach fantastic speeds. Lazar further explained that the retrieved space vehicle was being test flown in Area 51/S-4 although neither its materials nor its propulsion systems could be figured out or reproduced. However, he warned that the US military had somehow gotten hold of a substantial quantity of Element 115, stored at Los Alamos and intended for weaponisation. His report was supported by well connected investigators, including John Lear, son of the Learjet inventor and a veteran CIA operative who testified that he was also exposed to covert research into “alien” technologies.
Lazar’s testimony (retraced and updated in a recent documentary by Jeremy Corbell entitled Bob Lazar, Area 51 and Flying Saucers) was one of many that were more or less publicised in the following decades despite stubborn denials from official quarters. In 1997, former Pentagon intelligence officer (foreign technology desk) and White House staffer Colonel Philip Corso’s bestselling book, The Day After Roswell, purported to lift the veil on much of the clandestine research pursued since 1947 by various branches of the federal government and compartmentally outsourced to defence contractors such as Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Martin Marietta, Northrop, Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics and others. However, the results of those advanced investigations remained largely undisclosed, although Corso alleged that major technical breakthroughs such as microtransistors, superconductors, fibre optics, Kevlar and night vision goggles had been developed through reverse engineering of alien materials. Since then aeronautics engineer Edgar Fouché, who reports having worked for the Aurora Project at Area 51 which built the secret Tr3-B triangular mercury plasma fuelled spacecraft, Dr Robert Wood from McDonnell Douglas, Corey Goode, Wlliam Tompkins also formerly at McDonnell Douglas and the more controversial Dan Burisch, are among the alleged “insiders” who have blown the whistle on various “black” programmes. Some like Goode claim to have served on an SSF (Secret Space Fleet), a branch of the US Navy which began operating in the 1960s or 1970s under the Solar Warden code name. Their accounts have been extensively reported and analysed by veteran researchers such as Linda Moulton Howe as part of her Earthfiles series, Paola Harris, Dr Steven Greer (in his widely publicized Disclosure Project) and Dr Michael Salla, co-founder of the Exopolitics Institute.
Additionally, in June 2017, a 47-page top secret briefing document was leaked and analysed by various experts. It appears to be a briefing dictated by a member of the clandestine MJ-12 agency (set up to deal with UFO related issues in 1954) for Dr Philip Morrison, an eminent MIT physicist. It contains detailed descriptions of alien craft and their recovery, transcripts of communications with alien beings and spells out the measures taken by concerned agencies to keep the entire subject secret, even to the highest elected authorities.
Back in 2007, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, in which Area 51 is located, and who then chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, set up a new study group with the support of fellow Senators, Inouye and Stevens, under the name of AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program) at the suggestion of his friend, billionaire Robert Bigelow, chairman of Bigelow Aerospace, a contractor to NASA which conducted research on UFOs and collected substantial evidence of the extraterrestrial presence.
Senator Reid wished to gather information on the secret work being carried out outside the purview of Congressional authorities and got an appropriation of $22 million for a five-year budget. The investigations were entrusted to Bigelow’s aerospace research division and coordinated by Earthtech of Austin, Texas, an R&D centre in frontier areas of science headed by Dr Harold Puthoff, formerly at Stanford Research Institute. AATIP under the stewardship of high-ranking intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, commissioned a still unissued 490-page report and collected 38 classified papers from a number of universities and research centres reflecting some of the goals pursued at the behest of the DIA (as Defense Intelligence Research Documents or DIRD) and other military intelligence bodies.
AATIP remained unknown to the public until both the New York Times and the Washington Post on 16 December 2017 published articles about it with the mandatory sceptical rumblings. They both, however, provided online links to a film taken in 2004 by Super Hornet jet pilots from the USS Nimitz, off the coast of Southern California, of a fleet of extremely fast flying objects, exhibiting performances far beyond the abilities of the most advanced aircraft, whose shapes suggested “tictacs” which became their moniker.
Physicist Jack Sarfatti, formerly at San Diego State University, has gone on record to say he is doing research on the propulsion system of the “tictac” by studying “alien” recovered metamaterials in the custody of Dr Puthoff’s Earthtech. The existence of those materials of non-earthly origin has been officially confirmed.
In January of this year a Freedom Of Information Act request from Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists against Government Secrecy, led to the release by the DIA of the list of titles of above mentioned 38 government-funded research reports gathered by AATIP as part of the process to “read in” on a need-to-know basis, officials in the military and civilian administrations. They include two papers leaked earlier by Corey Goode, respectively entitled Traversable Wormholes, Stargates and Negative Energy (number 8 in the list) and Warp Drive, Dark Energy and the Manipulation of Extra-Dimensions (number 19). Others are dedicated to invisibility cloaking technologies, propulsion systems from space vacuum, anti-gravity, space communication based on Quantum Entanglement and Non-Locality, programmable matter, negative mass propulsion and other such topics not publicly recognised as being within the realm of realistic possibilities.
Cynics who alleged that all this is speculative mumbo-jumbo amounting to a waste of public money did not consider that the disclosure from AATIP seems to be what the CIA calls a “limited hangout”: i.e. a superficial glimpse of a much larger secret cloaked in “plausible deniability”.
Since the alleged closure of AATIP in 2012, a private initiative called TTSA (To the Stars Academy) has been set up with the participation of some of the staffers of AATIP, including its former director Luis Elizondo. TTSA is working with retired military and civilian officials to further disclose the extensive and long-standing secret military R&D pursued between government agencies and private contractors involved in what is commonly called the Deep State. Its executive director Tom DeLonge has produced a new documentary series for the History Channel relying on military insider testimonies and entitled Unidentified.
How much more time and effort will it take for certain agencies in the US government to confess to the many ominous or mind-boggling secrets they have kept from the public, often in violation of constitutional principles and legal norms and procedures?
A Physicist Says He's Found the Solution to the Fermi Paradox—And It's Terrifying
A Physicist Says He's Found the Solution to the Fermi Paradox—And It's Terrifying
Image credit: Pixabay
Since Fermi's first conversationwith fellow scientists in 1950, the Fermi Paradox has haunted astrobiologists and astronomers with its giant, looming question mark: Where is everybody?
Now, however, a physicist named Alexander Berezin has proposed the grimmest, most Twilight Zone-esque twist yet to the Paradox: "First in, last out."
But just what does that mean?
The idea is that the first civilization to attain interstellar travel would start gobbling up as many resources as it could to drive its own expansion and ensure a future for itself. This would eventually cause it to start stripping worlds that already have life on them, leading it to destroy alien civilizations as it went.
"I am not suggesting that a highly developed civilization would consciously wipe out other lifeforms," Berezin says.
"Most likely, they simply won't notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it. ...This problem is similar to the infamous 'Tragedy of the commons'. The incentive to grab all available resources is strong, and it only takes one bad actor to ruin the equilibrium, with no possibility to prevent them from appearing at interstellar scale.
All right, so this is pretty much the 'Big Bad Alien Civilization' hypothesis, but with some economic reasoning behind it, right?
No, actually—it's the Big Bad Human Civilization hypothesis.
Berezin believes the answer to the Fermi Paradox, the reason we haven't picked up on alien signals or observed evidence of this steamroller alien civilization, is because we're the first ones to have made it this far.
With Berezin's logic in mind, we're also going to be the first civilization to attain interstellar space travel, and our expansion beyond the solar system is going to inevitably wipe out alien life on other plants.
And this, Berezin admits, "would be hard to accept, as it predicts a future for our own civilization that is even worse than extinction."
Electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, interact around a neutron star in this visualization. Why is there so much more matter than antimatter in the universe we can see?
So there's this stuff called "antimatter." You may have heard of it. It's just like normal matter, with all the same properties and all the same abilities to make up atoms and molecules, except for one crucial difference: It has an opposite charge. Take the humble electron, for example. Mass of 9.11 x 10^-31 kg. Quantum spin of 1/2. Charge of 1.6 x 10^-9 coulombs.
It has an antimatter evil twin, the positron. The positron has a mass of 9.11 x 10^-31 kg. Quantum spin of 1/2. Charge of … -1.6 x 10^-9 coulombs.
It's the same for every other particle out there. There's a dark-side twin for the top quark, the neutrino, the muon and on and on and on. All the fundamental particles that make up our daily lives have a partner, living just on the other side of the charge fence.
That's all well and dandy and no big deal at all, except for one thing, which is a tiny bit of a big deal. As far as we can understand the theory and see in the observations, not only are matter and antimatter paired up like this, they're symmetric. Every particle of normal matter produced in a reaction comes paired with its antimatter sibling.
The only conclusion: Our universe ought to be swimming with antimatter, existing in equal parts with normal matter. Whole planets, stars and galaxies made of antimatter! Or at the very least, loads of antimatter particles just floating around in space, minding their own business.
But when matter and antimatter meet, it's bad news. Just as the pairs are produced in perfect symmetry in fundamental interactions, they are destroyed in symmetry as well. When a particle finally gets to meet and shake hands with its antiparticle best friend, they end up like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: going down in a blaze of glory.
All their combined matter is converted into energy, usually in the form of high-energy gamma-ray radiation.
A disturbance in the force
We don't see signs of abundant free-floating carefree antimatter, because we don't see the aftermath of its inevitable destruction upon meeting regular matter. The universe is filled with constantly-interacting stuff. High-energy particles zipping across light-years. Fountains of material escaping from galaxies and new junk drifting in. Stars colliding. In our universe, stuff mixes with stuff all the time. If some decent proportion of that was antimatter, the universe ought to be a lot more … energetic … than it is.
So if the antimatter isn't here anymore, where the heck did it go?
One possibility is that our universe was simply born this way, with an abundance of matter and a severe lack of antimatter. While that's certainly an excuse, it isn't much of an explanation. "That's just the way it is, folks" isn't the most compelling argument in scientific circles. So while you could always say that, let's move on to other, more productive lines of inquiry.
Perhaps something in the early universe caused an imbalance between matter and antimatter.
It's not that crazy of an idea. The early, early, early days of the universe were pretty funky times, with all sorts of crazy physics and exotic interactions at play that are now, thankfully, merely a cosmic memory. So maybe something happened. Maybe the universe was rolling along just fine, with each particle met with an equal and opposite antiparticle.
And then … a shift. An imbalance. A strange process that produced more matter than antimatter. Most of the pairs would be annihilated, but a few normal particles would remain. It wouldn't have to be much: Just one particle in a billion would be enough to lay the foundations for all the stars and galaxies that we see today.
It would indeed have to be a very peculiar set of conditions to cause such an imbalance. Our universe is governed by rules of how particles and forces should interact and behave. It's these rules that lay the framework for all the wonderful interactions that make up the richness of everyday life.
But sometimes rules need to be broken, as in the case of the early universe. After all, it's those same rules that say that the divergence between matter and antimatter ought not to be in the first place.
Whatever interaction, whatever process, led to matter's ultimate victory had to be strange indeed. It had to start with producing not just an excess quantity of regular matter, but also an excess quantity of charge to counterbalance it. Otherwise, because total charges must stay the same throughout a process, that matter-loving route would've been perfectly balanced by a twin antimatter-loving road.
Plus, this process had to happen during a sharp boundary, when the infant cosmos was transforming rapidly from one state to another. It's only there that the physics would permit such a rule-breaking violation to take place; otherwise a universe in equilibrium would just end up balancing all interactions out anyway.
Is there anything in all of known physics that could make the antimatter go away? Well, maybe. There are some hints and suggestions buried in rare particle interactions involving the weak nuclear force. We understand these interactions only dimly, especially the way they would occur in the early universe, but even there our best guess for its matter-favoring ability put it far, far below the minimum needed to explain our present situation.
The origins of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter is an outstanding problem in physics. A problem that pushes the boundaries of current knowledge and pushes our understanding of the universe into some of its earliest moments. A problem that, you could say, really matters.
The first 3-D–printed pedestrian bridge sits in a park in Alcobendas, Spain. Credit: Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC)
Since Spain opened the first 3-D–printed pedestrian bridge in 2016, the push for printed architecture seems to be accelerating. Shanghai inaugurated theworld’slongestprinted concrete bridge in January, and thefirst-ever printed steel span is set to cross a canal in Amsterdam this year. Beyond bridges, the first 3-D–printed homes available to rent—five bulbous buildingsin the Dutch city of Eindhoven—should hit the market by this summer.
Some of the artsy, even zany, designs seem like architectural fantasy. But some experts believe these novel prototypes could herald a major shift in the construction sector. “The building industry is very stubborn” when it comes to change, says Capt. Matthew Friedell, who leads the U.S. Marine Corps’ 3-D printing operations. But “once we prove 3-D printing’s advantages for construction at scale, its adoption will increase rapidly.”
In usual bridge construction, skilled workers mix concrete and pour it into plywood molds called forms. Large-scale 3-D printers, by contrast, pump out quick-setting concrete slurry from a nozzle on a crane or gantry arm that moves on rails, guided by a computer, to create entire structures layer by layer. Instead of making new forms for every piece, builders can reuse one printer to create a variety of projects. Without requiring forms—or skilled workers to construct them—a printer can get to work faster, with fewer materials and less labor.
In 2018, Marines used a concrete 3-D printer to construct a 500-square-foot barracks in Champaign, Illinois. Credit: Marine Corps Systems Command
Designing and building things like bridges fast and on the go is of obvious interest to the military, which often debuts new technology that eventually spreads into the commercial mainstream. It was the Marines who created the first 3-D– bridge in the U.S., a flat 32-foot span at California’s Camp Pendleton, late last year. They made it in a fifth of the time of traditional methods, Friedell says.
Typically soldiers transport cantilever-style mobile bridges, about $750,000 apiece, that they can later assemble to span water or rough terrain. A 3-D printer would cost about the same as one of those units, and the military would still have to carry its components to assemble on-site. But once it arrived, one printer could produce multiple bridges, buildings, walls and water storage tanks—anything the troops might need while deployed. For example, the Marines have also printed a concrete barracks large enough to accommodate eight soldiers, which they could use instead of shipping-container housing units.
In addition to providing greater flexibility, this option would cut costs and labor. The ingredients for concrete are cheap, and soldiers could source these raw materials locally, Friedell says. After that, their 3-D printer could run with minimal human input. “The ultimate goal,” Friedell says, “is to have one person stand there and hit ‘print’.” In fact, one report by the Associated General Contractors of America says some companies are looking at 3-D printing to help ease labor shortages.
Testing a 3-D printer that architects are using to build five concrete houses in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Credit: Technical University of Eindhoven
Some believe these lower costs could be a game changer for affordable housing. Austin-based construction technology startup Icon recently unveiled a 3-D printer that the company claims can make a 2,000-square-foot family home in three days for about half the cost of traditional building methods. Icon says it plans to build affordable housing communities at sites in Austin and Latin America. “The idea that we can bring this cheap machine to make houses is pretty exciting, especially for humanitarian relief missions,” Friedell says. “And I see a direct correlation for the housing market.”
Although the home construction industry does not have the same needs that a military or relief mission does—assembling bridges or barracks quickly in remote places—it could still benefit from a building method that saves time, labor and building material. On top of that, printing can enable complex designs that are much harder to make with traditional methods. For example, according to Friedell, the sinuous walls of the Marines’ printed barracks are 2.5 times stronger than typical straight ones, but building those curvy walls the usual way (from individual concrete blocks) would have been much more difficult and time-consuming than printing them, he says.
Such complex designs can allow architects to use fewer materials. Take the first printed bridge in Spain, which resembles tangled vines: That pattern offers the highest strength possible using the least amount of cement. “By putting material exactly where you want it, you reduce consumption and wastage,” says Leroy Gardner, professor of structural engineering at Imperial College London. A study by researchers at Brunel University suggests 3-D printing could create up to 30 percent less material waste than typical construction techniques, as well as using less energy and generating fewer carbon dioxide emissions.
“Clearly this is an interesting technology with enormous potential,” says Timothy Gutowski, who leads the Environmentally Benign Manufacturing research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But, he says, there is a need for more systematic studies to compare the environmental impacts of 3-D printing technology and conventional techniques over the entire life cycle of a structure, from its raw materials to the end of its life.
Most 3-D printers today, for instance, build with concrete—a material blamed for 7 percent of Earth’s carbon dioxide emissions, per the International Energy Agency. To combat this, some developers are working on more sustainable alternatives: In 2016 a Dutch architecture firm printed a tiny 86-square-foot cabin from a sustainable bioplastic, and in 2017 the University of Hong Kong demonstrated 3-D–printed terra-cotta bricks.
Gutowski also warns that the supposed reduction in cost and material use could fall prey to the rebound effect, a term used in economics: If something runs on less energy, for example, people will run it more, quashing energy savings. 3-D–printed homes might cut material use in theory—but that could encourage builders to go bigger. The benefits get diluted, Gutowski says, when “affluent people start putting on additions to their homes or making vacation homes.”
Despite the obstacles, architectural projects that rely on 3-D printing have continued to increase in number over the past five years. The explosion of interest is a sign of “an ongoing digital transition in the construction industry,” says Theo Salet, a concrete technology professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, who is directing the Dutch project to print homes for rent.
The technology is still young, though, and requires more development to gain wider use. Printing a giant bridge or skyscraper will not truly be as easy as hitting a button in the foreseeable future, says Skylar Tibbits, a computational architect at MIT. Printers that work at this scale are still slow and expensive. And for now they only produce one kind of material at a time, so builders still have to manually integrate doors, windows, wiring and plumbing. In fact, aside from the Marines’ projects, which aimed for speedy on-site construction, most of the existing bridges and homes have been printed in parts that humans later assembled.
For now, Tibbits says, the construction industry will likely use 3-D printing to mass-produce modular components that still require human labor to put together. Printers might also be used to build structures with unique designs or to decorate them with intricate architectural details. “Printing,” Tibbits says, “is one of many tools you can utilize in harmony to create buildings and products.”
AFPScotty, de grootste tyrannosaurus rex ter wereld.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Canadese onderzoekers ontdekten de grootste tyrannosaurus rex ter wereld. De reusachtige dino met een lengte van dertien meter kreeg de naam Scotty. Dat staat in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift ‘The Anatomical Record’.
Paleontologen ontdekten resten van de grootste tyrannosaurus rex ooit in de Canadese provincie Saskatchewan. Dinosaurus Scotty, die ongeveer 66 miljoen jaar geleden leefde, was ongeveer 13 meter lang en woog maar liefst 8.800 kilogram.
“Dit is de rex der rexen,” aldus de Canadese onderzoeker Scott Persons. “Er zijn aanzienlijke verschillen tussen tyrannosaurussen. Sommige individuen waren forser dan anderen. Scotty is een voorbeeld van zo’n fors exemplaar. Zorgvuldige metingen van de benen, heupen en zelfs schouders wijzen uit dat Scotty langer was dan elke andere tyrannosaurus rex (die tot op heden is teruggevonden, red.).”
De vorige recordhouder was Sue, een tyrannosaurus rex met een lengte van 12,3 meter. Deze dino woog zo’n 5.654 kilogram.
AFPScotty was maar liefst dertien meter lang.
Scotty is niet alleen de grootste tyrannosaurus rex ter wereld. “Hij is ook de oudst bekende”, aldus de Canadese wetenschapper. “Je kunt een idee krijgen van hoe oud een dinosaurus is door in de beenderen te zagen en de groeipatronen te bestuderen”. Uit de onderzoeksresultaten bleek dat Scotty ongeveer dertig jaar oud was toen hij 66 miljoen jaar geleden stierf. “Dat is uitzonderlijk lang”, aldus Persons.
De grootste dino ter wereld wordt bewaard in het Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada.
AFPOnderzoeker Scott Persons meet een deel van Scotty’s skelet.
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Archeologen stoten op schat in Mexico en denken dat ze allereerste graftombe Azteekse keizer op spoor zijn - HLN.be
Archeologen stoten op schat in Mexico en denken dat ze allereerste graftombe Azteekse keizer op spoor zijn - HLN.be
Getty Images/iStockphoto/REUTERS
WETENSCHAPHet is zo een beetje de heilige graal voor iedereen die zich bezighoudt met de studie van de Azteken: het vinden van een koninklijke graftombe. Al tientallen jaren wordt er gegraven, maar nog nooit werd er een ontdekt. Daar zou nu verandering in kunnen komen, want archeologen hebben in Mexico-Stad een veelbelovende vondst gedaan.
De ontdekking gebeurde niet in een afgelegen of onontgonnen gebied, maar midden in het centrum van het drukke Mexico-Stad. Meer bepaald aan de voet van de bekende Templo Mayor. Dat was 500 jaar geleden de belangrijkste tempel van de Azteekse hoofdstad Tenochtitlan, in de periode dat de machtigste heerser van het rijk aan de macht was.
De tempel was een gigantisch complex van 60 meter hoog, dat beschouwd werd als het middelpunt van de aarde. Bovenaan stonden twee heiligdommen: een voor de oorlogsgod Huitzilopochtli en een voor de regengod Tlaloc. Bij een van de vele uitbreidingen van de tempel - in 1487 - zou een van de grootste massaoffers plaatsgevonden hebben uit de geschiedenis van de beschaving, waarbij naar schatting 4.000 mensen het leven lieten. De tempel werd uiteindelijk verwoest tijdens de verovering van Mexico door Hernán Cortés in 1521.
De resten kwamen in 1978 tevoorschijn tijdens een verbouwing op het centrale plein van Mexico-Stad. En het is aan de voet van de tempel dat archeologen nu hun ongeziene vondst hebben gedaan: rijkelijke offergaven die zouden kunnen wijzen op een koninklijke begraafplaats. (lees hieronder verder)
RVEen simulatie van hoe de Templo Mayor er ooit uit moet hebben gezien.
Het gaat onder meer om de resten van een luxueus versierde jaguar, verkleed als krijger, een kleine jongen van een jaar of negen die gekleed is als Azteekse oorlogs- en zonnegod - met een jaden ketting en vleugels van havikbeenderen - en een set vuursteenmessen die versierd zijn met parelmoer en edelstenen. De offergaven werden vijf eeuwen geleden neergelegd door Azteekse priesters op een cirkelvormig platform voor de tempel, een plek waar zich volgens de vroegste overleveringen de rustplaats zou bevinden van Azteekse keizers.
“We hebben nu enorme verwachtingen”, zegt het hoofd van de groep archeologen die er aan het werk is - Leonardo Lopez Lujan - aan persbureau Reuters. “Naarmate we dieper graven, zullen we vermoedelijk nog veel meer rijkelijke objecten vinden.” (lees hieronder verder)
REUTERS
Op dit beeld is de jaguar te zien, met het cirkelvormige embleem van oorlogsgod Huitzilopochtli. Er zijn ook resten van koraal en zeesterren achtergebleven.
REUTERS
Leonardo Lopez Lujan.
Vooral de vondst van de jaguar blijkt opwindend. Die zat in een grote stenen doos, waarvan nog maar een tiende is opgegraven en die nu al een ware schatkist blijkt te zijn. Het dier draagt een houten gravure op de rug met het embleem van de god Huitzilopochtli. Bovenop liggen offergaven uit de zee, zoals schelpen, zeesterren en koraal. Die kunnen verwijzen naar de onderwaterwereld waar de zon volgende de Azteken ’s nachts doorheen reisde. De rode lepelaar – een vogel uit de familie van de flamingo’s – die gevonden is, wordt dan weer geassocieerd met heersers en krijgers en zou hun geest voorstellen in hun tocht naar de onderwereld.
Broers
Tientallen jaren na de verovering van Mexico, brachten enkele geschiedschrijvers verslag uit van de begrafenisrites van drie Azteekse heersers: drie broers die heersten van 1469 tot 1502. Volgens die verslagen werden hun gecremeerde resten neergelegd op of vlakbij het cirkelvormige platform aan de tempel, voorzien van rijkelijke offergaven en de harten van geofferde slaven.
13 jaar geleden werd vlakbij het platform een gigantische monoliet gevonden van een aardgodin. Daarop stond een inscriptie die overeenkwam met het jaar 1502, het jaar waarin de jongste broer en machtigste heerser die de Azteken ooit kenden – Ahuitzotl – stierf. (lees hieronder verder)
REUTERS
De kleine jongen die aangekleed werd als Azteekse oorlogs- en zonnegod, met een jaden ketting en vleugels van havikbeenderen.
REUTERS
De schedel van de geofferde jongen.
Volgens Elizabeth Boone – een expert in het oude Mexico aan Tulane University in New Orleans – zou de dood van Ahuitzotl gepaard gegaan zijn met een grootse begrafenis en zou de jaguar de koning kunnen voorstellen als onbevreesd krijger. “Hij kan goed in die stenen kist begraven liggen”, klinkt het.
De offergaven werpen ook een blik op hoe mobiel de Azteken waren. Ze zouden een beschaving van krijgers geweest zijn die naburige koninkrijken binnenvielen en onderwierpen, een beetje zoals de Spartanen in het oude Griekenland. Zo kwamen de zeesterren bijvoorbeeld uit de Stille Oceaan, terwijl het jade van Centraal-Amerika afkomstig was, ter hoogte van het huidige Honduras.
Budget
Verwacht wordt dat de opgravingen nog zeker enkele maanden zullen duren. De wetenschappers zullen het daarbij niet makkelijk krijgen, want de nieuwe regering van Mexico heeft het budget van het project met 20 procent verminderd voor dit jaar, dixit de archeologen. Bijna iedereen van het 25-koppige team is al niet meer betaald sinds december.
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DE LIJST MET BUITENAARDSE OFFICIEREN ( VIDEO )
DE LIJST MET BUITENAARDSE OFFICIEREN ( VIDEO )
Hoeveel bewijs is er nog nodig, voordat men in mainstream land gaat toegeven dat er buitenaards leven is (geweest) op Mars en andere locaties.
De lijst met buitenaardse officieren van NASA met bijbehorende ruimteschepen bewijst dat wij maar met een fractie bekend zijn met wat er werkelijk in de ruimte gebeurt.
Het beste bewijsmateriaal voor leven op Mars is nog altijd afkomstig van NASA.
Soms is het even gemakkelijk te ontdekken, omdat een gecrasht ruimteschip meestal niet altijd mooi aan de oppervlakte ligt, maar gedeeltelijk begraven.
Maar, voor ervaren ufologen zoals Scott Waring, is het mogelijk om deze objecten op te sporen op de foto’s van NASA en het object op de foto voor een deel scherper zichtbaar te maken.
Het begint met een foto van één van de Rovers die er als volgt uit ziet.
Het bekende Mars landschap, met in de verte iets dat uitsteekt boven de heuvelrand.
Wanneer we dat object wat dichterbij halen, dan krijgt het een bekende vorm.
En als Scott klaar is met het verbeteren van de foto, dan ziet het er uiteindelijk als volgt uit en zien we dat we hier te maken hebben met een klassieke of retro ufo.
En als dit nu het enige gecrashte ruimteschip op Mars zou zijn, dan zou je misschien nog kunnen twijfelen, maar er zijn in de loop der jaren meer objecten waargenomen op de rode planeet die niet anders uitgelegd kunnen worden dan als gecrashte ruimteschepen.
Beelden die later viraal gingen en werden opgepikt door de wereldpers.
Een jaar later, in 2017, duikt er weer een NASA foto op waarop duidelijk een soort gecrasht ruimteschip op Mars is te zien.
Het wordt zo langzamerhand een onhoudbare zaak voor NASA om nog langer te ontkennen dat er geen tekenen van leven worden gevonden op Mars. Zoals wij eerder deze week een artikel publiceerden met daarop een object, gevonden op Mars, dat onmogelijk natuurlijk kan zijn waarmee door NASA eigenlijk al is toegegeven dat buitenaards leven bestaat.
Bij dat alles komt natuurlijk ook ander soort bewijs zoals dat geleverd is door de Engelse hacker Gary McKinnon. We hebben eerder al uitgebreid geschreven over deze man en de zaken die hij ontdekte.
Eén van de meest opmerkelijke dingen die Gary ontdekte was een lijst met buitenaardse officieren en schepen met namen die nergens op aarde zijn te traceren. En dat ze onvindbaar zijn is omdat het namen zijn van ruimteschepen van degeheime ruimtevloot.
Naast bovengenoemde lijsten kwam Gary ook afbeeldingen tegen. Echter, omdat dit alles plaatsvond een kleine 20 jaar geleden toen wij nog geen snel internet hadden en Gary verbinding had via een 56k modem, was het niet mogelijk om afbeeldingen van 2 mb of groter te downloaden.
De oplossing die Gary toen bedacht is om controle te nemen over een computer in de NASA gebouwen en daar op een scherm een afbeelding te downoaden. Hij was een heel eind op weg en zag wat er op stond toen iemand bij NASA in de gaten kreeg dat er iets vreemds met die computer aan de hand was omdat de muis vanzelf over het scherm bewoog en werd de verbinding verbroken.
Maar, wat Gary zag was een groot cilinder-/sigaarvormig schip dat er ongeveer uit zag als op de volgende afbeelding die is gemaakt op basis van de beschrijvingen van Gary. Deze vorm ruimteschepen komen we ook vaak tegen op aarde.
Tegenwoordig hoor je weinig meer van Gary McKinnon en daarom is het volgende interview wat Gary enkele dagen geleden deed met Richard Dolan heel bijzonder en hier is precies te horen hoe Gary te werk ging om de lijst met buitenaardse officieren te bemachtigen.
The recent spate of anomalous noises heard worldwide continues this month as residents of a small town in Michigan report hearing and even feeling a strange, unexplained hum. The hum or vibration is reportedly strong enough to rattle homes, cause glasses of water to ripple Jurassic Park-style, and even crumble the foundations of homes. What could be causing such a powerful vibration throughout Michigan?
Hopefully not a wayward Tyrannosaur.
For now, there are very few theories as to what could be causing the mysterious vibration which seems to be centered around the township of Canton, just west of the former post-apocalyptic dystopia and current mid-gentrification dystopia of Detroit. The U.S. Geological Survey has verified that there has been no seismic activity in the area which could explain the vibration or hum, leaving city officials in Canton to guess the mysterious tremor and noises could be related to either utilities, a nearby landfill, or even traffic on local highway I-275. However, Canton residents don’t buy any of those explanations and say the mysterious vibration sounds different from usual industrial noises and has been increasing in frequency and prevalence lately.
The Canton township municipal complex which includes town hall.
Longtime Canton resident Mackey Howell says in his twenty years in the township, he’s heard and felt the vibrations from local transportation arteries for years but this latest hum somehow seems different:
I’m familiar with all those sounds – the airport, the train, and (the sound) I-275 makes – this is something is very different. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it during the daytime. Its disturbing. We’ve had pictures actually fall off the wall.
The hum has been reported since the 1970s, but many Canton residents agree with Howell that this latest iteration is anomalous and seems to be getting louder in recent weeks. Some people have even reported feeling pressure changes in their inner ears at the same time they hear and feel the mysterious vibration. Oddly enough, some North Carolina residents reported the same sensation in conjunction with good ol’ fashioned mystery booms in the area just a few weeks prior.
I’ve been tracking and researching these anomalous, Earth-rattling noises for over two years now, and like city officials and public safety agencies everywhere, I’m at a complete loss to explain what forces or phenomena may be behind these events. Are these unknown natural occurrences, or are they caused by some man made activity? Reports of anomalous noises and mysterious booms date back centuries, but the unbelievably high number of reports lately suggests either that the phenomenon is increasing or intensity or that a new cause is afoot. What’s behind all of these anomalous noises? Is the Canton hum related in any way to more well-known hums like the Taos hum or Windsor hum?
During the Television Critics Association winter press tour, it was confirmed History renewed Project Blue Book for a second season with 10 episodes. The UFO drama was considered as one of the most-watched shows on the channel to date, and while there were only a few details about the second installment, here are some of the details revealed regarding Project Blue Book season 2 so far.
Project Blue Book follows the story of astrophysics professor Dr. J. Allen Hynek (Aidan Gillen) who teamed up with Air Force Captain Michael Quinn (Michael Malarkey). The History series focuses on top-secret investigations about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) and other related phenomenon covered by the United States Air Force back in the 1950s and 60s. The series is reportedly based on real events.
At the moment, the release date of Project Blue Book season 2 hasn't been announced. But, many speculated the second installment will likely arrive in January 2020, since the preceding season premiered on the same month. The trailer of the first season was also released in July of last year, so it's possible the trailer of the season 2 will be revealed on the same month as well.
The final episode of Project Blue Book season 1 titled "The Washington Merry-Go-Round" showed the Washington, D.C. UFO incident occurred in 1952, wherein different sightings were recorded from July 12 to July 29. Based on the ending of the first season, Dr. Hynek has likely adopted a ufologist frame of mind and Gillen indeed confirmed this concept, as per the report from IGN.
Thus, the second season will not only focus on actual events, but it will also use a creative license for dramatic purposes. So, the life of Dr. Hyneks will be more complicated while looking beyond perceived truths just to understand the larger picture. The plot of Project Blue Book season 2 will be more expansive, as well as focusing on Dr. Hynek's evolving character arc.
Aside from Gillen and Malarkey, other cast members expected to return on the second season include Robert John Burke as William Fairchild, Neal McDonough as General James Harding, Ksenia Solo as Susie Miller, Michael Harney as General Hugh Valentine, as well as Laura Mennell as Mimi Hynek.
Meanwhile, the renewal of the second season arrived amid strong ratings of the show, with an average of 3.4 million viewers per episode - making Project Blue Book the most-watched new cable show of the 2018-19 season to date. Produced by A+E Studios along with Compari Entertainment, the series' executive producers are Robert Zemeckis, Jack Rapke, and Jackie Levine. Sean Jablonski serves as the showrunner, executive producer, and writer, while David O'Leary is the creator, executive producer, and writer.
Is science fiction the cause of mysterious lights seen at night in Delamere Forest?
Is science fiction the cause of mysterious lights seen at night in Delamere Forest?
Is science fiction is the cause of mysterious lights seen at night in Delamere Forest?
PEOPLE living in and around Delamere Forest have been puzzled by the appearance of strange, eerie lights among the trees.
They could be forgiven for think that the forest was the sight of a UFO encounter - and they would not be far wrong.
The forest is increasingly being used as a location for films and television - including a BBC adaptation of War of the Worlds and a new Netflix series called The Stranger.
Photo: Lee Cartwright
The dense forest has recently been used as a backdrop for dramatic scenes of an alien invasion for the latest adaptation of H G Wells classic War of the Worlds.
The Peter Harness' three-part adaptation the sci-fi classic will be screened on BBC One later this year.
And more recently, a car chase was filmed for The Stranger, a series due to be shown on Netflix later this year starring Hannibal and The Hobbit actor Richard Armitage.
Few details are available about the eight-episode series, based on Harlan Coben’s novel, but the synopsis from Netflix reads: “ A secret destroys a man’s perfect life and sends him on a collision course with a deadly conspiracy in this shocking thriller.
“Adam Price has a good life, two wonderful sons, and a watertight marriage - until one night a stranger sits next to him in a bar and tells him a devastating secret about his wife, Corinne.
“Soon Adam finds himself tangled in something far darker than even Corinne’s deception, and realises that if he doesn’t make exactly the right moves, the conspiracy he’s stumbled into will not only ruin lives — it will end them.”
One resident of Station Road said weird sightings were becoming more common in the forest.
He said: There's a weird chunky looking prop with bright lights attached to it, suspended from a really high crane arm, above white gate car park and its mega bright. It lit up my house through the windows yesterday. I've not heard any noises or anything though."
The lights certainly piqued residents' curiosity.
Posting in the Delamere and Oakmere Facebook group, Jacqui Brooks asked: "What are the giant lights on the skyline over far side of the forest for?"
Sarah Evans said: "We have wondered every morning/evening...query aliens abduction of locals, building, concerts..can tell kids the truth now?"
Ellen Piercy replied: "Nah, stick with the aliens story, MUCH more exciting."
Others described the filming as "exciting" and "very, very bright".
The forest has become popular with television and film producers, with episodes of ITV drama Cold Feet filmed there recently.
Residents have been told filming is permitted until 1am.
UFO Over Berlin Airport Moves Out Of Way Of Jet, March 6, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Over Berlin Airport Moves Out Of Way Of Jet, March 6, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 6, 2019
Location of sighting: Berlin, Germany
Source: MUFON #99333
Here is an interesting report from MUFON today. A person took some photos and noticed a UFO two of the photos. What looks like a ring UFO may be one solid craft with the top center having a dark tinted dome window area on it. The UFO moves it position when it notices the passenger jet approaching it. This makes me think there is a possibility of the UFO having shown up on airport radar. The UFO itself was probably hovering over Berlin Brandenburg Airport for a few minutes before it was forced to move out of the path of a jet.
When you compare the size of the jet, lets say for comparisons sake its a 747 which is 76.3 meters long. Then this UFO is 30% the diameter of the jet, making the UFO 22.89 meters across. Notice how the UFO takes on the color of the sky behind it? Its tying to go unnoticed. The ships outer hull reflects the colors around it.
A lot of UFOs have been recorded over Airports over the years. I guess anything that flies has the newest and highest tech for safety reasons and that makes it worth investigating by aliens.
Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
Round object found in the sky after taking photo from the TV tower in Berlin.
Sure some of you have heard about my discovery of the Yoda face on Earths moon a few years ago, (Click here to see Yoda post) but did you know there is so much more there? Its true, but to see the structures there, you must follow my instructions below.
1. Go to URL and lift photo from site to desktop. 2. Open photo on desktop. 3. Goto tools bar at top (IOS mac). Then hit size. 4. Change size, enlarge until photo is 10MB. Then close photo. 5. Now Open photo in any photo program and add contrast like its going out of style...that means a lot. 6. Now save photo and start searching it for structures, you will have to use zoom and have to look carefully.
You need to do this because NASA added too much light to the photo on purpose in order to cause many of the ares of the photo to appear as white/grey and unclear. Thus bring it back into the proper light and focus creates the original photo as it was first taken. You will notice that the aliens built the structures square partitions. Much like remaking a house and moving the parts to the location to create it. This may be proof that the structures were created somewhere else, then brought to the moon to put together. Do not do this if you are sensitive. It might be overwhelming to suddenly go from believing to knowing. I do not mean to frighten anyone, but only to bring the truth to light. I actually found this several weeks ago, but hesitated till now to publish it. I was worried some people may panic. The biggest fear is not aliens attacking earth, its that they exist when science says they should not. It causes the person to call into question everything they ever learned in school, church, TV, from friends...and how aliens must have already influenced the direction humanity is currently traveling without anyone ever knowing. Its a bit deep of a plunge, but it must be taken. I did, I remember that day well. Thats why I never say I believe in aliens...it sounds like I have doubt, but I don't. I know they exist. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
The U.S. Navy plans to put a laser weapon on a warship by 2021. The High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system, or HELIOS, is a defensive weapon system designed to burn boats and shoot down unmanned drones. The weapon will go to sea with a guided missile destroyer assigned to the Pacific Fleet in two years' time, the Navy says.
The service placed an order for HELIOS in January 2019. The $150 million contract, awarded to Lockheed Martin, calls for the company to deliver two systems. According to a company press release, one will go to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico for testing. USNI News says the Navy will install the other on a Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer.
HELIOS is a 60-kilowatt laser system, meaning it has twice the power of the AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System, or LaWS installed on the USS Ponce in 2014. HELIOS is billed as a weapon that can burn small speed boats of the type Iran deploys in armed swarms, and can torch unmanned aerial vehicles out of the sky. Alternately—and perhaps to avoid an international incident—HELIOS can simply “dazzle” a UAV’s electro-optical sensors, damaging them and preventing them from performing their mission.
Here’s a simple example of this theory, in which a laser used during tattoo removal damages a digital camera sensor:
HELIOS has a long-range intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability. While LockMart doesn’t spell out the details, we can surmise that the aiming system for the laser weapon/dazzle is probably capable of high-definition, high-powered digital magnification, allowing a ship fitted with it to closely watch nearby threats.
Many weapons already deployed on U.S. Navy warships, including the Phalanx close-in weapon system and the Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM), have a similar capability against small boats and drones as HELIOS while also being capable of taking on larger, faster aircraft and missiles. Range is also comparable.
Where a laser weapon like HELIOS shines, literally, is its ability to fire a theoretically unlimited number of shots using the destroyer’s onboard electrical generation systems. Phalanx, on the other hand, is limited to 20 to 30 seconds of continuous firing, while RAM is limited to 21 missiles aboard the Mk. 49 Guided Missile Launching System.
HELIOS is not a quantum leap above existing systems, but then again, early guns like the matchlock were in some ways inferior to the bow and arrow. Eventually, as firearms technology progressed, the gunpowder gun progressed to the point where it was clearly superior. As laser weapons become more powerful, they could quickly become much more effective than conventional gun and missile weapons.
Archaeologist debunks alien influence, other conspiracy theories in archaeology
Archaeologist debunks alien influence, other conspiracy theories in archaeology
Credit: Pixabay
Have you heard the one about the aliens and the pyramids? Or what about the technologically advanced but tragically lost city of Atlantis?
Chances are that most of us have encountered at least one such story—a tale that tries to explain the past in a way that can sound scientific, but in doing so ignores the evidence and methods of science.
Why is this alternative archaeology so popular? And how do we tell fact from fiction?
Assistant Professor Matthew Peeples, co-director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change's Center for Archaeology and Society and an archaeologist of the Southwest U.S., is no stranger to the weirder side of his field. He has investigated false claims and has even been accused of covering up the truth.
For Arizona Archaeology and Heritage Awareness Month, he sat down to discuss the background on these conspiracy theories, including one surrounding a petroglyph at the nearby Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve.
Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What are some examples of outrageous archaeological narratives in pop culture?
Answer: Probably the biggest out there involves the notion that intelligent alien life visited human populations in the ancient past and either influenced or directed the development of human cultures. This idea is pervasive in science fiction going back to early 20th-century authors like H.P. Lovecraft, but has gained popularity in more recent years through a deluge of books and TV shows like "Ancient Aliens."
These ideas are not supported by scientific evidence, but they've become so prevalent that many people believe there must be something to them. To use the Great Pyramids in Egypt as an example, archeologists have clearly shown how these structures fit in a broader tradition of smaller stone structures and earlier attempts at pyramid construction. The building technology is impressive, but we don't need to invoke aliens to explain it.
Another popular notion is that professional archaeologists themselves are actively hiding the truth about the past. I've personally had people accuse me of being part of a widespread cover-up or conspiracy. This trope shows up again and again in pop culture through shows like "The X-Files" or "Stargate." In reality, archaeologists love to test and retest each others' ideas about the past using new data and discoveries, which is what pushes the science forward.
Peeples and his students photographed the petroglyph in question during the analysis of the supposed European-boat image. Credit: Matthew Peeples
Q: What are the myths surrounding the Deer Valley petroglyphs?
A: I wasn't aware of this until visitors at the preserve asked about it, but there was a mention of Deer Valley in a book published in the 1970s claiming to show evidence of Europeans visiting North America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus or the Viking colonization of Newfoundland.
The book featured drawings of rock art from throughout North America supposedly depicting boats from various places in ancient Europe and the Near East. One, from the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve, was said to depict a Punic sailing vessel along with the words "the ship" in Iberian Punic.
I worked with a group of honors students in my "Frauds, Myths and Mysteries" class to track down this claim and assess it. It took us quite a while to locate the petroglyph in question, largely because the drawing bore little resemblance to the actual petroglyph. We took high-resolution photos and made a 3-D model of the petroglyph, and we were able to show that the features that made both the supposed inscription and ship "convincing" were either exaggerated or were absent in the actual petroglyph (which archaeologists had previously suggested may have been a butterfly).
Q: When did conspiracy theories like these first come about? And why are they still popular today?
A: False archaeological claims like these have a really long history. There are accounts of a supposed discovery of the tomb of King Arthur and Guinevere by monks at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191, shortly after the abbey was burned in a massive fire. The story attracted a lot of pilgrims who funded the reconstruction of the church, but more recent archaeological work has shown that the pre-Christian cemetery dated many centuries later than would be expected were there truth to this story. Most historians now chalk this up to a publicity stunt by the abbey. There are even similar references to such claims going back to at least the second century A.D.
I think these claims are still popular today for a number of reasons. First, there is a lot of money to be made from selling pseudoscientific ideas to the public, as is evidenced by the numerous books and TV shows that keep popping up. A lot of these ideas are also tied to nationalism and various other kinds of group identities. People have a desire to claim that their ancestors were the first to arrive in a new land or develop some advanced technology, claims that have even been used to justify war and invasion.
Q: How do archaeologists separate plausible arguments from pseudoscience? What are the challenges in that?
A: Archaeology is all about the systematic and scientific study of human societies based on the stuff they leave behind in context. A lot of pseudoscientific ideas attempt to put on the trappings of science by using the jargon but completely ignore the scientific process of formal observation and evaluation. Plausible arguments need to be supported by evidence rather than simply asserted, and the methods and data used should be made available for scrutiny.
Be suspicious if someone is making conspiratorial claims that scientists' lack of acceptance for their ideas is about suppression of the truth. Relying on high-quality, peer-reviewed sources will also ensure that people with the relevant expertise have had a chance to vet the work. I'm a fan of a set of tools Carl Sagan published as a "baloney detection kit," which are a series of questions you can ask yourself about a given claim to help you fortify yourself against falling for pseudoscientific claims.
Q: Where can the public look for accurate archaeological information?
A: If you're interested in archaeology here in Arizona, there are a lot of excellent groups and organizations you could get involved with. The Arizona Archaeological Society has chapters throughout the state that offer talks, tours and even opportunities to work on archaeological projects. There are also nonprofits like Archaeology Southwest in Tucson that provide high-quality information for non-specialists on the archaeology of the region.
A few brief hops in the Martian air two years from now could help open alien worlds to an entirely new kind of exploration.
An autonomous mini-helicopter will fly with NASA'sMars 2020 rover mission, which is scheduled to launch in July of that year and land on the Red Planet in February 2021.
The bantam chopper is a stripped-down technology demonstration, and it will make a maximum of five short sorties in the Martian atmosphere. Success in this pioneering work would be a big deal, extending the reach of humanity's robotic explorers, which are currently restricted to the surfaces of alien worlds or the dark realms far above them.
"We envision helicopters opening doors to new types of exploration on Mars," Håvard Grip, flight-control and aerodynamics lead for the Mars Helicopter, said Wednesday (March 20) during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations (FISO) working group.
One day, more-advanced versions could serve as scouts for rovers or explore the Red Planet on their own, added Grip, who's based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, which are both in Pasadena.
"In the future, we could imagine doing things like [engaging in] regional exploration using multiple helicopters or going to inaccessible areas or biologically sensitive areas using small helicopters," he said.
The Mars Helicopter weighs 4 lbs. (1.8 kilograms) and has a body about the size of a softball. It carries a range of avionics and communications gear, a small solar panel, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, "survival heaters" to keep its electronics warm through the frigid Martian night, and a navigation camera.
The helicopter doesn't have any science instruments, but it is outfitted with a high-resolution color imager.
"That's, so to speak, the payload," Grip said. "That's what we [use to] take pretty pictures and send them back to Earth."
The helicopter will travel to Mars attached to the belly of the car-size 2020 rover, which will hunt for signs of ancient Red Planet life and collect and store samples to return to Earth in the future, among other tasks.
A month or two after the rover lands on the Red Planet, the chopper will drop down and hit the dirt itself. The little vehicle will then make a series of short flights, each of which will last about 90 seconds and reach a maximum altitude of 16.5 feet (5 meters) or so, Grip said.
These sorties will be made between 330 feet and 3,300 feet (100 to 1,000 m) away from the rover — far enough away to pose no collision danger, but close enough to be in communications range. (The helicopter will talk to its handlers on Earth via the rover.)
Success would be quite an achievement, considering that the Martian atmosphere is just 1 percent as dense as that of Earth at sea level. Cruising just above the Martian surface is equivalent to flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet (30,000 m) here on Earth, more than twice as high as any helicopter has ever gotten. (The handicap imposed by the thin air is only partially offset by the Red Planet's lower gravity, which is 38 percent that of Earth, Grip said.)
To generate enough lift, the Mars Helicopter sports two stiff rotors that measure 3.9 feet (1.2 m) long — pretty much as big as the team could make them, Grip said. And the rotors will spin at 2,400 revolutions per minute, about 10 times faster than the blades of a chopper on Earth, mission team members have said.
The team has put this design through its paces many times in Mars-like conditions here on Earth, Grip said. Indeed, the little craft is pretty much ready to go.
"The flight model is built and more or less tested," Grip said.
The ultimate test, of course, will come on Mars.
"The Mars Helicopter's initial flight will represent that planet's version of the Wright brothers' achievement at Kitty Hawk and the opening of a new era," Susan Gorton, manager of NASA's Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technology project, which has been working with the Mars Helicopter team, said in a statement last week.
"For those of us whose research revolves around all things related to flight, that would be a remarkable, historic moment," Gorton added.
Such historic moments may not be limited to Mars' skies. NASA is considering launching a quadcopter lander to Titan, Saturn's huge, haze-enshrouded moon. This mission, called Dragonfly, would fly from spot to spot on Titan, investigating the complex chemistry occurring on the potentially life-supporting moon.
Dragonfly is one of two finalists for a mid-2020s launch slot under NASA's New Frontiers program of medium-cost missions. The other contender is a comet sample-return mission called CAESAR. NASA is expected to announce its selection later this year.
The Mars Helicopter and Dragonfly teams have not collaborated to date, Grip said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
The Mutual Unidentified Flying Objects Network is a nationwide organization, founded 50 years ago, and has thousands of cases reported about UFO.
In the entire United States, MUFON groups are gathering every month to discuss cases from everywhere around the States. The Space Coast group consist of former NASA employees and engineers. It has 118 members and 3.500 members around the U.S.
Gone are the days when the believers of the UFO theories were alone. Now, scientists, politicians, and professionals are touching the taboo subject and give them some credence.
New York Times published in 2017 a news that U.S is funding a secret $22 million project for the study of the UFO. After this news, researchers from the chairman of Harvard University, and NASA scientist have come with theories about the study of the phenomena of extraterrestrials.
But the problem with the UFO and aliens is the lack of evidence. On the other hand, a psychologist is explaining the fact that a lot of persons are projecting an unconscious desire onto something. From there comes the need of believing and seeking a reaffirmation of that belief.
In 2007 from a request by the Senate majority leader Harry Reid, a military intelligence program was run by Luis Elizondo in partnership with the businessman Robert Bigelow. The program ran from 2007 to 2012 and studied, observed unknown objects through American military personnel.
In 2004, a case was declassified when a video showing a craft with no propulsion was moving very fast in the sky. The video was filmed by two Navy F/A – 18 F fighters on the coast of San Diego.
After this episode, Avi Leob from Harvard, alongside with Shmuel Bialy, wrote in Astrophysical Journal, that an interstellar object had been seen passing through our solar system. They called it Oumuamua, and that it can be a fully operational lead sent to Earth by an alien civilization.
Scientist Silvano Colombano, is affirming that the space agency had looked for all the explanations. But indeed, NASA did not pay much attention and after that opened a Center of Life Detection Science for finding biosignatures.
In 2018, Colombano argued with the scientific community about the UFO phenomenon and its worth for study. Also, he suggests that it is time that NASA should be more open-minded.
Last December 18, a big “fireball” or bright meteor exploded above the Bering Sea with more than 10 times the energy of the atomic blast over Hiroshima. Satellites saw it all.
A NASA instrument aboard theTerra satellitecaptured images of a fireball – or extremely bright meteor – over the Bering Sea on December 18, 2018. The images shows the fireball as well as the meteoroid’s path, marked by a dark trail of smoke over thick, white clouds. NASA said the meteor exploded about 16 miles (26 km) above the Bering Sea. The explosion unleashed an estimated 173 kilotons of energy, or more than 10 times the energy of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima during World War II.
In describing the animated image above, and the still image below, NASA said:
Two NASA instruments aboard the Terra satellite captured images of the remnants of the large meteor. The image sequence shows views from five of nine cameras on the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument taken at 23:55 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), a few minutes after the event. The shadow of the meteor’s trail through Earth’s atmosphere, cast on the cloud tops and elongated by the low sun angle, is to the northwest. The orange-tinted cloud that the fireball left behind by super-heating the air it passed through can be seen below and to the right of the GIF’s center.
The still image, captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MODIS) instrument, is a true-color image showing the remnants of the meteor’s passage, seen as a dark shadow cast on thick, white clouds. MODIS captured the image at 23:50 UTC.
View larger. | True-color image of a fireball over the Bering Sea on December 18, 2018, via NASA.
NASA also said:
… the December 18 fireball was the most powerful meteor to be observed since 2013; however, given its altitude and the remote area over which it occurred, the object posed no threat to anyone on the ground.
Fireball events are actually fairly common and are recorded in the NASA Center for Near Earth Object Studies database.
These individual images taken 10 minutes apart by the Himawari 8 satellite show the evolution and somewhat mysterious color visible in different part of the bolide train. The satellite captured the first image at 23:50 UTC (11:50 a.m. local time; translate to your time), a minute or two after the meteor’s peak brightness at 23:48:20 UTC. Image via Japan Meteorological Agency/ Skyandtelescope.com.
Bottom line: On December 18, 2018, satellite instruments captured images of a big “fireball” – or bright meteor – exploding above the Bering Sea with more than 10 times the energy of the atomic blast over Hiroshima.
IT’S OFFICIAL. HUMANS ARE GOING TO MARS. NASA HAS UNVEILED THEIR MISSION.
IT’S OFFICIAL. HUMANS ARE GOING TO MARS. NASA HAS UNVEILED THEIR MISSION.
Humanity has been fascinated by Mars since long before we stepped foot on the Moon. Our planetary neighbor has been the subject ofinnumerable works of sci-fiand inspired countless dreams of adventure and exploration. Now, after decades of determination, research, and scientific breakthroughs, we’re finally ready to do it: humans are going to Mars. Really.
We’re in Phase 0 now, conducting tests at the International Space Station (ISS) and developing partnerships with private space companies. Phase I will span 2018 to 2025 and will include the launch and testing of six SLS rockets. Those rockets will deliver components of the Deep Space Gateway (DSG), a new space station to be built near the Moon to serve astronauts en route to Mars. After that, Phase II will launch the Deep Space Transport (DST) tube toward the lunar station in 2027, and in 2028 or 2029, astronauts will inhabit the tube for more than 400 days.
In 2030, Phase III will see the DST restocked with supplies and the Mars crew via SLS rocket. Phase IV, of course, will be the trip itself in 2033. That means we’re just a scant 16 years away from reaching a goal that has eluded every generation that came before us.
Completing the mission within their budget will be a challenge for NASA. That budget is currently about .5 percent of the total U.S. budget. For comparison, it was more than four percent during the Apollo Moon missions.
The mission to Mars includes obstacles beyond budget — keeping astronauts healthy and reasonably happy on the journey is chief among them. Without stopovers between Earth and Mars, astronauts will need to port everything they need with them, including air, food, and water, for a round-trip duration of two or three years.
Mental health is likely to be a concern for Mars astronauts, too, as they will essentially be sealed into the space tube for years at a time, with no ability for an emergency return once they leave Cislunar space. NASA’s HI-SEAS isolation experiment has shown promising results, but it is likely that the journey won’t be possible for everyone.
NASA also has competition in the race to get to Mars. Both Boeing and SpaceX hope to get there first, with SpaceX setting the lofty goal of arriving in 2022.
Ultimately, though, we all benefit from the friendly competition in the race toward Mars and the creative solutions it will almost certainly generate. If private companies work out some of these human challenges before NASA can, the agency can build on their experiences and spend its budget and efforts on other problems. In the end, the goal of putting humans on Mars will have been reached, irrespective of which organization crosses the finish line first.
Pallas, our solar system’s third largest and wholly unexplored asteroid, is the target for a potential SmallSat NASA flyby mission for possible launch in 2022.
An image of the asteroid Pallas captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.
ESO/Vernazza et al.
Pallas,third largest asteroid in the asteroid beltand the second such object to be discovered, by the German astronomer and physician Wilhelm Olbers on March 28, 1802. The asteroid was named after Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom.
Pallas is 512 kilometers (318 miles) in diameter, somewhat smaller than 4 Vesta. It is likely a remnant protoplanet. The asteroid's orbit is unusually high in inclination to the plane of the asteroid belt, and its eccentric orbit is nearly as large as that of Pluto, making Pallas almost inaccessible to spacecraft.
NASA won't make the final decision on funding this mission until mid-April. The so-called Athena mission will be competing with 11 other SmallSat and CubeSat mission proposals, according to Arizona State University planetary scientist Joseph O’Rourke, Athena’s principal investigator, reports Forbes.
If the mission is approved, it will follow in the path of the Dawn Mission that explored two other giant objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. The Dawn Mission ended last year.
Shadowy outlines of the terrain in Vesta's northern region are visible in this image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. The image comes from the last sequence of images Dawn obtained of the giant asteroid Vesta as it departed the giant asteroid. The view looks down at Vesta's north pole, which is in the middle of the image.
NASA
"Pallas is really the only other object in the main asteroid belt that's like Vesta and Ceres … not just an asteroid, but a protoplanet, a real world," said O'Rourke, reports Space.com. "I see this as a way to go do a lot of the same science that Dawn did, but at a dramatically cheaper price, and Pallas is the sort of place that might be worth sending a much bigger mission to someday."
Athena would hitch a ride with Psyche Mission
If selected, Athena would launch in August 2022, riding piggyback along with the NASA Psyche Mission. Psyche is a very interesting mission in its own right. It will explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid,16 Psyche. 16 Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid and is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet.
This artist's-concept illustration depicts the spacecraft of NASA's Psyche mission near the mission's target, the metal asteroid Psyche. The artwork was created in May 2017 to show the five-panel solar arrays planned for the spacecraft. Photo ID: PIA21499.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State Univ./Space Systems Loral/Peter Rubin
"We would race Psyche to Mars, use Mars as a gravity assist, and then catch Pallas," O'Rourke said. The Pallas flyby would come about a year after the launch.
Psyche is one of the ten most massive asteroids in the asteroid belt. It is over 200 kilometers (120 miles) in diameter and contains a little less than 1 percent of the mass of the entire asteroid belt.
A protoplanet is a large planetary embryo that originated within a protoplanetary disc and has undergone internal melting to produce a differentiated interior. Vesta is also a protoplanet. On January 4, 2017, the Psyche mission was chosen along with the Lucy mission as NASA's next Discovery-class missions.
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — NASA is considering funding a mission that would send a satellite the size of a mini-fridge to the asteroid belt to examine an unexplored world, a massive asteroid scientists call Pallas.
The decision will be announced in mid-April. If the mission, dubbed Athena for the Greek goddess the asteroid is named for, is approved, it would follow in the path of NASA's Dawn mission. That spacecraft explored two other giant objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres, before its mission ended this fall.
"Pallas is really the only other object in the main asteroid belt that's like Vesta and Ceres … not just an asteroid, but a protoplanet, a real world," Joseph O'Rourke, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and principal investigator on the Athena mission proposal, told Space.com at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference being held here this week. "I see this as a way to go do a lot of the same science that Dawn did, but at a dramatically cheaper price, and Pallas is the sort of place that might be worth sending a much bigger mission to someday."
If selected, the mission would launch in August 2022, riding piggyback with NASA's Psyche mission that is bound for an asteroid made nearly entirely of metal. "We would race Psyche to Mars, use Mars as a gravity assist, and then catch Pallas," O'Rourke said. The Pallas flyby would come about a year after the launch.
During the maneuver, Athena would take an extremely precise measurement of just how massive Pallas is and snap a bunch of images of the asteroid, which scientists could then use to piece together how water and impacts may be shaping its surface. "There's hints on the ground that it might have bright spots like Ceres," O'Rourke said, referring to features Dawn scientists believe may represent salty patches on that asteroid's surface. "So it could potentially be a place with a lot of interesting chemistry going on."
With a price tag about a tenth the size of the $467 million Dawn mission, and a single flyby instead of long-term visits, Athena likely won't produce as comprehensive a package of science results as the Dawn mission has. But it should be enough to begin to understand this little-known world, according to O'Rourke. "This mission is going to pluck a lot of the low-hanging fruits scientifically," he said. "Hopefully, it will showcase the fact that we're beginning a new era of planetary exploration," in which cheap probes can precede flagship missions.
The Athena team would also post all its images soon after downloading them from the spacecraft. "In fact, one of my biggest worries about the mission is that the mission team will get scooped on the science," O'Rourke said. "Everyone will be able to make our discoveries right along with us, so we'd better be ready to bang out some papers."
NASA's decision, whether it chooses Athena or not, will come just a few months after the first tiny satellites to venture beyond Earth's orbit proved just how valuable small spacecraft can be to planetary scientists. Two cubesats the size of bread boxes hitchhiked with NASA's Mars InSight lander as the Mars Cube One (MarCO) mission. The little satellites captured stunning images of the Red Planet and in November, they acted as communications relays, saving scientists from hours of agony about whether the main spacecraft had touched down safely.
Shadowy outlines of the terrain in Vesta's northern region are visible in this image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. The image comes from the last sequence of images Dawn obtained of the giant asteroid Vesta as it departed the giant asteroid. The view looks down at Vesta's north pole, which is in the middle of the image.
Athena would be larger — the size of a miniature refrigerator and about 400 lbs. (180 kilograms) — but would still represent a new mindset for planetary science, one that relies on dramatically less complicated spacecraft than traditional missions.
"I think the asteroid belt is a really great target for smallsats because there are so many targets that are interesting, we're not going to send these half-billion-dollar-plus missions to every single one," O'Rourke said. "So we have to get good at building these small flight systems that are versatile and can be used to explore."
The Joint European Torus tokamak generator, as seen from the inside. (Credit: EUROfusion)
Nuclear fusion has long been considered the “holy grail” of energy research. It represents a nearly limitless source of energy that is clean, safe and self-sustaining. Ever since its existence was first theorized in the 1920s by English physicist Arthur Eddington, nuclear fusion has captured the imaginations of scientists and science-fiction writers alike.
Fusion, at its core, is a simple concept. Take two hydrogen isotopes and smash them together with overwhelming force. The two atoms overcome their natural repulsion and fuse, yielding a reaction that produces an enormous amount of energy.
But a big payoff requires an equally large investment, and for decades we have wrestled with the problem of energizing and holding on to the hydrogen fuel as it reaches temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Fahrenheit. To date, the most successful fusion experiments have succeeded in heating plasma to over 900 million degrees Fahrenheit, and held onto a plasma for three and a half minutes, although not at the same time, and with different reactors.
The most recent advancements have come from Germany, where the Wendelstein 7-X reactor recently came online with a successful test run reaching almost 180 million degrees, and China, where the EAST reactorsustained a fusion plasma for 102 seconds, although at lower temperatures.
Still, even with these steps forward, researchers have said for decades that we’re still 30 years away from a working fusion reactor. Even as scientists take steps toward their holy grail, it becomes ever more clear that we don’t even yet know what we don’t know.
The first plasma achieved with hydrogen at the Wendelstein 7-X reactor. Temperatures in the reactor were in excess of 170 million degrees Fahrenheit.
(Credit: IPP)
For Every Answer, More Questions
The Wendelstein 7-X and EAST reactor experiments were dubbed “breakthroughs,” which is an adjective commonly applied to fusion experiments. Exciting as these examples may be, when considered within the scale of the problem, they are only baby steps. It is clear that it will take more than one, or a dozen, such “breakthroughs” to achieve fusion.
“I don’t think we’re at that place where we know what we need to do in order to get over the threshold,” says Mark Herrmann, director of the National Ignition Facility in California. “We’re still learning what the science is. We may have eliminated some perturbations, but if we eliminate those, is there another thing hiding behind them? And there almost certainly is, and we don’t know how hard that will be to tackle.”
We will almost certainly get a better perspective on the unknown problems facing fusion sometime in the next decade when an internationally-backed reactor, intended to be the largest in the world, comes to fruition. Called ITER, the facility would combine all we have learned about fusion into one reactor.
It represents our current best hope for reliably reaching the break-even point, or the critical temperature and density where fusion reactions produce more power than is used to create them. At the break-even point, the energy given off when two atoms fuse is enough to cause other atoms to fuse together, creating a self-sustaining cycle, making a fusion power plant possible.
Perhaps inevitably, however, ITER has fallen prey to setbacks and design disputes that have slowed construction. The U.S. has even threatened to cut its funding for the project. It is these sorts of budgetary and policy hesitations that could ensure we continue saying fusion is 30 years away, for the next three decades.
In the face of more immediate challenges, from health epidemics to terrorism, securing funding for a scientific long bet is a hard sell. A decades-long series of “breakthroughs” that lead only to more challenges, compounded by pervasive setbacks, have diluted the fantastic promise of a working fusion reactor.
What Exactly Is Fusion?
Reliably reaching the break-even point is a twofold problem: getting the reaction started and keeping it going. In order to generate power from a fusion reaction, you must first inject it with sufficient energy to catalyze nuclear fusion at a meaningful rate. Once you have crossed this line, the burning plasma must then be contained securely lest it become unstable, causing the reaction to fizzle.
To solve the issue of containment, most devices use powerful magnetic fields to suspend the plasma in midair to prevent the scorching temperatures from melting the reactor walls. Looking something like a giant doughnut, these “magnetic containment devices” house a ring of plasma bound by magnetism where fusion will begin to occur if a high enough temperature is achieved. Russian physicists first proposed the design in the 1950s, although it would be decades before they actually achieved fusion with them.
A magnetic confinement fusion device, the Wendelstein 7-X, under construction.
(Credit: IPP)
To create a truly stable plasma with such a device, two magnetic fields are required: one that wraps around the plasma and one that follows it in the direction of the ring. There are currently two types of magnetic confinement devices in use: the tokamak and the stellarator.
The differences between the two are relatively small, but they could be instrumental in determining their future success. The main disparity in their design arises from how they generate the poloidal magnetic field — the one that wraps around the plasma. Tokamaks generate the field by running a current through the plasma itself, while stellarators use magnets on the outside of the device to create a helix-shaped field that wraps around the plasma.
According to Hutch Neilson of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, stellarators are considered more stable overall, but are more difficult to build and suffer from a lack of research. Tokamaks, on the other hand, are much better understood and easier to build, although they have some inherent instability issues.
At the moment, there is no clear winner in the race between the two, as neither appears to be close to the “holy grail.” So, due to lack of a victor, researchers are building both.
“There is a lack of a solution at this time, so looking at two very realistic and promising configurations for closing that gap is the responsible thing to do,” says Neilson.
One of five sections that comprise the outer vessel of Wendelstein 7-X, photographed during production.
(Credit: Wolfgang Filser/IPP)
Currently, the largest fusion reactor in the world is the Joint European Torus (JET), a tokamak based in England and supported by the European Union. JET was commissioned in the 1970s and first came online in 1983 and successfully produced plasma, the first step in achieving fusion.
With a series of upgrades beginning in the late 1980s, JET became the world’s largest fusion generator, and currently holds the record for the most energy produced in a fusion reaction at 16 megawatts. Even so, it has not yet reached the break-even point.
ITER Offers a Way
To reach this all-important milestone, we will likely have to wait for ITER.Latin for “the way,” ITER will be the largest and most powerful fusion generator in the world, and is expected to to cross the break-even point. ITER is projected to produce 500 MW of power with an input of 50 MW, and be able to hold plasma for half an hour or more.That’s enough energy to power roughly 50,000 households.
Based on the tokamak design, the project is the result of a collaboration between the European Union and six other countries, including the U.S., that have pooled resources and expertise to build a reactor that is expected to be the gateway to useable fusion energy.
One of the cables used to create the toroidal magnetic field within ITER.
(Credit: ITER Organization)
One of the main issues facing current generators is one of size, says Duarte Borba, a researcher at EUROfusion, and ITER will attempt to overcome this shortfall. As reactors get larger, they become more stable and can achieve higher temperatures, the two key factors in creating fusion.
ITER is meant to be the successor to JET, and will take the technology developed there and apply it on a much larger scale. This includes JET’s tungsten and beryllium divertors, which capture energy in the reactor, as well as the capability to fully control the system remotely. ITER will also use superconducting magnets to create its magnetic field, as opposed to ones made of copper, according to Borba.
Such magnets will reduce the amount of energy consumed by the device and will allow for longer, more sustained plasma production. JET can currently only produce plasma in bursts, as it cannot sustain the high levels of energy use for very long.
Collaboration Is Key
The most important development made by JET and implemented with ITER may not even be scientific, but rather bureaucratic in nature, says Borba. As a project supported by multiple nations, JET forged the path for organizing and implementing a large-scale, decades-long project.
With a projected price tag of $15 billion and a daunting shopping list of complex components, ITER could only exist today as a collaborative effort. Each of the member nations contributes researchers and components, with the hope that the potential benefits will be shared by all.
An illustration showing which countries are responsible for manufacturing various parts of the ITER reactor.
(Credit: ITER Organization)
However, the democratic nature of ITER has significantly slowed down its construction. The goal is to have all of the parts arrive at the same time, but allocating each part to a different country brings in political and economic variables that throw the timing off. When ITER first received formal approval in 2006, it was slated to first achieve fusion in 2016, a date which has since been pushed back at least 10 years. Issues with component construction and design disagreements have been blamed for the delays.
A Worldwide Effort
To achieve a fusion power plant capable of addressing our energy needs, ITER alone is still not enough, according to Neilson. Even though it represents a significant advancement in reactor design, ITER isn’t the end game for fusion research.
If everything goes to plan, ITER will pave the way for another reactor, called DEMO, which will expand the technologies perfected by ITER to an industrial scale, and hopefully prove that nuclear fusion is a viable source of energy.
In the meantime, the new crop of fusion reactors appearing around the world will continue to play crucial roles in the chase for fusion. Far from being redundant, their supplemental research will attack the problem from different angles.
While ITER addresses the issue of scale, fusion projects in Asia are attempting to hold on to plasmas for longer and longer as they probe the benefits of superconducting magnets, Neilson said. Meanwhile, in Germany, the Wendelstein 7-X is pushing the boundaries of the stellarator design, possibly sidestepping issues of stability entirely. Nuclear fusion research has been a mild success in terms of international cooperation, with a growing number of countries determined to contribute their own piece of the puzzle.
Today, there are nuclear fusion experiments operating in the U.S., Germany, United Kingdom, India, France, Japan and several other countries. More reactors are being planned or are currently under construction. Even with the surge of interest, it’s still not enough, says Neilson.
“For a problem as dense and challenging as fusion, you want to have many more experiments trying out different parts of the problem than we actually have,” says Neilson.
More Than a Scientific Problem
Ultimately, the question may be one of funding. Multiple sources said they were confident that their research could progress faster if they received more support. Funding challenges certainly aren’t new in scientific research, but nuclear fusion is particularly difficult due to its near-generational timescale. Although the potential benefits are apparent, and would indeed address issues of energy scarcity and environmental change that are relevant today, the day when we see a payoff from fusion research is still far in the future.
Our desire for an immediate return on our investments dampens our enthusiasm for fusion research, says Laban Coblentz, the head of Communication at ITER.
“We want our football coaches to perform in two years or they’re out, our politicians have two or four or six years and they’re out — there’s very little time to return on investment,” he said. “So when somebody says we’ll have this ready for you in 10 years, that’s a tough narrative to tell.”
In the U.S., fusion research receives less than $600 million in funding a year, including our contributions to ITER. This is a relatively small sum when compared to the $3 billion the Department of Energy requested for energy research in 2013. Overall, energy research represented 8 percent of the total funding the U.S. gave out for research that year.
“If you look at it in terms of energy budgets, or what’s spent on military development, it’s not really a lot of money that’s going to this,” says Thomas Pedersen, division head at the Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik. “If you compare us to other research projects, it seems very expensive, but if you compare it to what goes into oil production or windmills or subsidies for renewables, its much, much less than that.”
The JET reactor, as seen from above.
(Credit: EUROfusion)
Pedersen looks at fusion research in terms of expected inputs and gains. Research into solar and wind power may be relatively cheap, but the payoff pales in comparison to a working nuclear fusion generator.
Always 30 Years Away
However, the finish line has been visible for some time now, a mountaintop that seems to recede with every step forward. It is the path that is obscured, blocked by obstacles that are not only technological, but also political and economic in nature. Coblentz, Neilson and Borba expressed no doubts that fusion is an achievable goal. When we reach it however, may be largely dependent on how much we want it.
Soviet physicist, Lev Artsimovich, the “Father of the Tokamak” may have summed it up best:
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Ancient Alaska Pyramid Can Power Canada!
Ancient Alaska Pyramid Can Power Canada!
Linda Moulton Howe has been following an incredible story about a buried dark pyramid in Alaska. The top of the pyramid is about 150 feet underground but they’ve been researching this structure it seems for many years as you’ll hear about in her latest youtube video posted recently. You’ll find some very interesting information in her video. Here’s some of the most interesting highlights.
Back in 2012, Linda received an email from one of her whistleblowers who was a retired US Army counterintelligence Warrant Officer Officer named Douglass Mutschler. Mutschler had heard about this buried Alaska pyramid in 1992 while stationed in Anchorage He was told it was discovered in 1992 while US scientists had setup listening equipment in Alaska to study the vibrations from a Chinese nuclear test on May 22nd 1992. Analyzing the data they got while studying the signals from the nuclear test uncovered a buried pyramid in Alaska.
Mutschler knew there was a no fly zone 60 miles west of Mt Denali so he thought it might be located in this area. A short time later while on a mission to Fort Meade in Maryland he began to dig a little into the matter after he had finished with his current project. He asked the librarian if she had any files on underground archeology sites in Alaska. She showed him to a couple of combination safes with files on Alaska. He sat down and began to read but within a very short period of time he felt he was being watched. He turned around and two goons were right behind him looking at him and said “You Don’t Have the Need to Know that information”. He replied he was just looking for something and they said, “We know what you’re looking for and you’re going to have to leave now. They don’t want us messing with them up there.”
You can hear the entire interesting exchange at about the 10 minute mark in the video.
Linda got more information for another whistleblower. This information shows this pyramid was known about far before 1992! She got information from a man who said his father worked at the Western Electric Company from 1959 to 1961. One of his assignments was to travel by bus to a site in Alaska via a bus with blacked out windows. He then went down an elevator shaft 700 feet to the corner of a 550 foot high dark black pyramid. His father told him the US government was trying to get energy to go through the corners of the pyramid and up the middle out the top! Apparently the shape of this pyramid is very special and even when models are made at those exact angles they create power! The electrical engineer made models and when he got the exact angles correct he was able to make power! So this pyramid was probably already being studied in the 1950s or earlier.
Another whistleblower reported to Linda some additional information. This man was a retired pilot who was taken up to the site by another pilot. The pilot told him this buried pyramid was as super secret as the Manhattan project! Nobody is supposed to know the place exists. The pilot said it’s some kind of a power generator that is thousands of years old. They don’t where it came from or who made it. It produces enough energy to power all of Alaska and the entire country of Canada also!
Clearly we’re all being kept as free range slaves without access to this free energy technology. None of us should be paying for electricity! Tweet this article to Trump @potus and @realdonaldtrump and tell him when is he going to make Make America Great Again with Free Energy like they’ve discovered in Alaska! Or did he get blackmailed to keep us slaves? I’m very disappointed in President Trump regarding not one word about free energy. Free energy destroys the deep state’s slavery system. Now that the Mueller hoax is over, it’s time to get busy putting out the truth Mr. President!
BUTTE – Many people believe UFOs visit Earth from other planets far, far away. A Montana Tech professor believes UFOs are much closer to home.
“The phenomenon may be our own distant descendants coming back through time to study us in their own evolutionary past,” said Michael P. Masters.
Could UFOs be time travelers from our own future ?
Image Credit: PD Max Pixel
Masters writes about this theory in his newly released book, “Identified Flying Objects.” With a doctorate in anthropology from Ohio State University, Masters uses science to explain why people who report close encounters with aliens always describe them the same way.
“The extra-tempestrial are ubiquitously reported as being bipedal, upright-walking, five fingers on each hand and foot, bi-lateral symmetry that they have two eyes, a mouth a nose, they can communicate with us in our own languages,” said Masters.
Masters understands this study may be considered fringe science, but he defends the research in the book.
“I stand by the product. I’m happy to talk about it with anyone. It’s written for my academic peers as much as it is for anyone in the UFO community,” he said.
Here’s the point in the story where the journalist makes a flippant comment about little green men to show he doesn’t take it that seriously, but the U.S. Defense Department spent $22 million investigating the UFO phenomenon, and that’s why Dr. Masters believes it’s time scientists take a serious approach to the study of this phenomenon.
“The hope is we can begin a new dialogue, get past some of the stigma and not have to defend this as science because it is very scientific as well,” said Masters.
Masters has been on several radio and television programs here and abroad to discuss his book. He will appear on the national radio show Coast to Coast next week.
UFO’s zijn tijdmachines uit de toekomst. Professor doet opzienbarende uitspraken
UFO’s zijn tijdmachines uit de toekomst. Professor doet opzienbarende uitspraken
Een professor van Montana Tech, een Amerikaanse universiteit, stelt dat onze planeet al is bezocht door UFO’s.
Het zijn volgens Michael P. Masters onze verre nazaten die terug in de tijd zijn gereisd om ons te bestuderen.
Hij schrijft over zijn theorie in zijn nieuwe boek ‘Identified Flying Objects’.
Eigen taal
Aan de hand van wetenschappelijk onderzoek legt Masters uit waarom mensen ontmoetingen met aliens altijd hetzelfde omschrijven.
De aliens zijn altijd tweevoetig, hebben vijf vingers aan iedere hand, twee ogen, een mond en neus, en ze kunnen met ons communiceren in onze eigen taal, aldus de hoogleraar.
Masters is niet bang voor kritiek en staat volledig achter zijn onderzoek.
Hoog tijd
“Ik wil er gerust met iedereen over praten. Het is geschreven voor zowel mijn academische collega’s als de UFO-gemeenschap,” zei hij.
Het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie investeerde jaarlijks 22 miljoen dollar in onderzoek naar het UFO-fenomeen en om die reden vindt dr. Masters het hoog tijd dat wetenschappers dit fenomeen serieus gaan benaderen.
Stigma
“Ik hoop dat we het stigma kunnen doorbreken en ons onderzoek niet steeds hoeven te verdedigen, omdat dit heel erg wetenschappelijk van aard is,” aldus de professor.
Masters is te gast geweest in diverse radio- en tv-programma’s om zijn boek te bespreken.
While it hasn’t happened yet, at least one politician in the Pacific Northwest state of Washington – an alleged hotbed of Bigfoot sightings – is pushing for Sasquatch to be named the official State Cryptid, making it the first to carry that title in the U.S. Jealous? New Jersey, shouldn’t the Jersey Devil be the first? Michigan – how about the Dogman? West Virginia – isn’t Mothman more worthy of this honor? How about the rest of you? New Hampshire – why not replace that tired old slogan with ‘Live Free With a Wood Devil’? Do you even know what your state’s most popular cryptid is? Now there’s help. A new map of the U.S. lists the most famous cryptids and mythical creatures in each state, along with illustrations to help seekers and public relations people identify them for possible official state honors.
The American Bestiary map and project was commissioned by CashNetUSA and is well-researched and fair — eliminating clear hoaxes and awarding multi-state cyrptids (Bigfoot, for instance) to the state with the most references. The information on each creature (and ins some cases, aliens) includes links for more details. The artwork is creative, informative and fun. While some are well-known, even outside the paranormal world, the map is giving others some much-deserved attention. For example:
“According to the legend there’s a fairly straightforward explanation for Sink Hole Sam, Kansas’s aquatic answer to the exogorth from Star Wars; it’s just a foopengerkle… whatever that is. Locals have speculated that the eel-like creature had been living in a prehistoric underground cavern that had filled with water from a sinkhole. This flooding allowed the creature to finally escape. Fishermen reported seeing something that was 15 feet in length and as round as an “automobile tire.””
“Despite having far more terrifying features than any self-respecting monster actually needs, the Snallygaster remains popular three centuries after it was first spotted; it even has a guest role in the Harry Potter universe. Early settlers told tales of a demonic, bird-like creature with a metallic beak filled with teeth. In 1909, locals reported seeing a bird-like monster with; “enormous wings, a long-pointed bill, claws like steel hooks and an eye in the center of its forehead”.”
“What happened to Sam Harris? Sightings of a previously unseen pig-man shortly after the teenager’s disappearance on the Halloween of 1951 conjure just two alternatives: either young Harris transformed into a pigman, or a preexisting pigman ate him. Whatever happened to Sam; years after his disappearance, some high school students reported a monster emerging from the woods. It walked like a man, but was covered in white fur, and had a pig’s face.”
“The carrot-headed aliens who visited a pair of night-fishermen on the Pascagoula River in a glowing egg-shaped spaceship may just have been symptoms of the witness’s hunger. Or they might have been robots; either way, they’ve not returned, having apparently been satisfied by the experiments they conducted on the two perfectly sober men. The fishermen claimed they heard a “zipping” sound and saw a glowing object hovering above the ground. Then three robot like aliens, that were just over 5 feet tall, exited from the craft.”
There’s 46 more stories and illustrations awaiting you at :
Welcome to Friday Futures, our weekly guide to the latest visions of The Future from around the web. This week: the sea could be the best source of fuel; levitation by light; AI and science; DNA as a computer; DNA regenerates limbs.
1. The oceans could be the real source of renewable fuel
The ocean may soon be a valuable source of renewable energy.
A team of scientists at Stanford have figured out a way to make hydrogen fuel out of saltwater. The discovery could open up the world’s oceans as a potential source of energy.
Stanford University
A team of scientists at Stanford have figured out a way to make hydrogen fuel out of saltwater. The discovery could open up the world's oceans as a potential source of energy. Researchers view electrolysis, or the act of splitting water into hydrogen and gas, as a promising new source of renewable energy. But it comes with many roadblocks; a major one being that only purified water can be used in electrolysis. Seawater tends to corrode water-splitting systems.
Unfortunately, purified water is in itself a scarce resource. Which is why Stanford chemistry professor Hongjie Dai and her team sought out to discover a way to keep salt water from breaking down devices used for water-splitting. "We barely have enough water for our current needs in California," said Dai in a press release.
The Stanford team layered nickel-iron hydroxide and nickel sulfide on top of a nickel foam core, essentially creating a barrier that would slow down the decay of the underlying metal. By acting as a conductor, the nickel foam transports energy from the power source and the nickel-iron hydroxide sparks the electrolysis. What happens without the nickel coating? The water-splitting device lasts roughly 12 hours, unable to withstand seawater corrosion. But with the nickel layer, the device can keep going for more than a thousand hours.
We're still far away from harnessing ocean water as a new renewable energy source. The new discovery hasn't been attempted outside of Stanford's research labs. But scientists are hoping it will pave the way for increased use of hydrogen fuel.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) say they’ve found a way to levitate and propel objects using only light — though, for the time being, the work remains theoretical.
Scientists say their new "levitation" tech could send a spacecraft to the nearest star in just 20 years.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) say they’ve found a way to levitate and propel objects using only light — though, for the time being, the work remains theoretical.
They hope the technique could be used for “trajectory control of ultra-light spacecraft and even laser-propelled light sails for space exploration,” according to a paper published in the journal Nature Photonics Monday. That means no fuel needed — just a powerful laser fired at a spacecraft from back on Earth.
Optical Tweezers
The Caltech scientists devised the so-called “photonic levitation and propulsion” system by designing a complex pattern that could be etched into an object’s surface. The way the concentrated light beam reflected from the etching causes the object to “self-stabilize,” they say, as it attempts to stay inside the focused laser beam.
The first breakthrough that laid the groundwork for the new research were the development of “optical tweezers” — scientific instruments that use a powerful laser beam to attract or push away microscopic objects. The big downside: they can only manipulate tiny objects at only microscopic distances.
Ognjen Ilic, post-doctoral scholar and first author of the new study, puts the tweezer concept and its limitations in much simpler terms: “One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer,” he said in a statement. “But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on.”
From Micrometers To Meters
In the paper, the Caltech researchers argue that their light manipulation theoretically could work with an object of any size, from micrometers to spaceship size.
Though the theory is still untested in the real world, the researchers say that if it pans out, it could send a spacecraft to the nearest star outside our solar system in just 20 years.
“There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft,” said Harry Atwater, professor at the Caltech Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”
The Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope slated to switch on in the mid-2020s, will generate about as much data traffic each year as the entire internet.
Computer scientists at Caltech have designed DNA molecules that can carry out reprogrammable computations, for the first time creating so-called algorithmic self-assembly in which the same “hardware” can be configured to run different “software.”
Harvard researchers say they’ve identified a “DNA switch” enabling animals to regrow entire portions of their bodies — a finding that, with a few important caveats, could pave the way to helping human lost limb regeneration.
8. And of course, the dating app based on the contents of your fridge
The first time John Stonehill was invited back to his girlfriend’s house, he headed straight for the refrigerator. It was stainless steel with a water and ice dispenser.
We take light for granted and often forget just how weird and powerful the sometimes-wave, sometimes-particle is. Never mind that our entire existence is dependent on light, there’s a whole host of other wacky applications that science is only beginning to get get a grasp on. For example, new research from the California Institute of Technology has apparently found a way to levitate macro-scale objects using noting but light. Scientists at Caltech say that, once implemented, this technology would allow a spacecraft to surf its way on a beam of light to the nearest planet outside our solar system in as little as 20 years.
The new research is only theoretical at this point, but it builds off decades of previous work using light to manipulate very small objects. The first so-called “optical tweezers,” which use the radiative pressure of focused light beams to manipulate nano-scale objects, led to the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. The principle is more or less the same, but but there’s a big difference between moving microscopic objects microscopic distances, and launching interstellar spacecraft. Ognjen Ilic, postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and author of the new paper, says:
“One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer. But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on.”
The key to the new research is in creating nano-scale reflection patterns on the surface of the objects to be levitated. By giving the surface of the object the right pattern it will interact with the light beam in such a way that it will continually spin itself back into the beam of light, creating a feedback loop of sorts with the radiative pressure of light all the way to another star system. While previous theoretical concepts for light sails relied on incredibly powerful lasers to do the heavy lifting, this method would encode the objects surface with what it needs to stay stable, and would work with a light source even millions of miles away.
Of course, this is still theoretical. They haven’t started building light sails yet, and actual real world demonstrations will be needed. Still, it’s pretty exciting. Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Caltech says:
“We have come up with a method that could levitate macroscopic objects. There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft. We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”
It probably won’t look like this.
If it works, this technology would allow starships to travel at close to the speed of light and would open up a whole new realm of possibilities for the future of sustained interstellar travel. Just think, we’ve spent so much time lighting stuff on fire, trying to squeeze out the little bit of propulsion we could from it, when all we really needed was a big flashlight.
What do magnetic and glassy impact-related spherules, nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, biomass burning, and anomalous levels of platinum and chromium in ancient sediment layers all have in common?
Here’s a hint: it involves a controversial theory about an ancient cataclysmic event… and one that is gaining new support, after an international team of scientists found compelling new evidence for its cause in South America.
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis contends that around 12,800 years ago, a disintegrating comet or asteroid led to an impact event—or maybe several—along with possible airbursts which resulted in widespread fires and climate changes identified in relation to the Younger Dryas Climate Event.
Proponents of the theory also believe climate changes occurring at this time may have been a contributing factor in megafaunal extinctions, along with existing evidence of human predation, which began to occur several thousands of years ago. However, archaeological evidence also seems to indicate that human populations were affected at the same time; presumably a result of the same environmental changes.
Evidence for large scale climate changes related to these proposed impacts or air bursts had been found already on several continents. However, a new study titled “Sedimentary record from Patagonia, southern Chile supports cosmic-impact triggering of biomass burning, climate change, and megafaunal extinctions at 12.8 ka,” argues that features remarkably similar to existing North American sites associated with the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) were found at the South American archaeological and paleontological site of Pilauco Bajo.
According to the new paper’s extract:
“In the most extensive investigation south of the equator, we report on a ~12,800-year-old sequence at Pilauco, Chile (~40°S), that exhibits peak YD boundary concentrations of platinum, gold, high-temperature iron- and chromium-rich spherules, and native iron particles rarely found in nature.”
As I noted elsewhere in relation to the new Chilean discoveries, “The significance of the platinum concentrations and other metallic signatures at the Chilean site presents another unique identifier, with relevance to previous studies that located an anomalous abundance of the rare earth metal at several YDB sites, as well as within ice core samples from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Christopher R. Moore, Ph.D. of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, who contributed to the recent Chilean study, was the lead author of a paper published in Scientific Reports in 2017 which first identified this platinum anomaly.”
UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus James Kennett, also a co-author on the new paper, says at least one of the discoveries made at Pilauco, Chile, was unique to the site. Kennett was particularly interested in an abundance of chromium found in the YD boundary at the new location, since it is an element that is not commonly found at similar sites located in the Northern Hemisphere.
However, Kennett told UC Santa Barbara’s The Current that “volcanic rocks in the southern Andes can be rich in chromium,” which he and other scientists conducting research on the site felt could explain the prevalence of the material.
“Thus, the cometary objects must have hit South America as well,” Kennett concludes. The paper appeared on March 13 in Scientific Reports and can be viewed online here.
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis remains controversial, largely due to the fact that its deterrents feel that the Younger Dryas can be explained more simply as a climate event unto itself. Critics primarily argue that meltwater from the glaciers at the end of the Pleistocene spilled into the Atlantic as global temperatures began to naturally warm, causing a cooling effect that disrupted ocean currents that led to further cooling prevalent throughout the Northern Hemispheres. Further, it has been noted that periods of cold reversal similar to the Dryas appear in the geological record toward the end of past ice ages as well; it seems unlikely that a cosmic impact event would occur at the end of every ice age.
Nonetheless, the accumulation of new evidence over the last few years makes the once unlikely theory of a cosmic impact 12,800 years ago now something worthy of a second look. Hence, the question is perhaps not so much one of “where is the evidence,” but instead who is willing to look at it?
Residents in the city of Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, were left shocked and confused when they witnessed what they thought was a UFO in the sky. Near the border of Oman, people noticed a “whirlpool hole” in an otherwise heavily clouded sky, as if someone had punched a large hole above their heads.
Ebrahim Al Jarwan, who is an astronomer and meteorologist, was able to capture the strange phenomena on video and posted it to Twitter. This natural phenomena is known as a “hole punch cloud” or “fallstreak hole”. One user commented that it looked as though “God has thrown a stone into a lake”, while others wondered if it was made by a UFO. When a large circular patch of clear sky suddenly appears, surrounded by lots of clouds, it’s not surprising that some people believed that an unidentified flying object may have peaked through the clouds, therefore creating the hole.
Hole punch cloud
Meteorologists, however, were quick to point out that it was a hole punch cloud that is normally created in mid-to-high level clouds and made from super-cooled water droplets (water that’s below 0 degrees Celsius but is not yet frozen) and they are actually caused by aircrafts, including commercial jet airliners, private jets, military jets, and turbo props.
As planes fly through the layer of clouds, the air expands and cools off as it passes over the propeller or wings of the aircraft. This sudden change in temperature causes the super-cooled water droplets to freeze, creating ice crystals which are then heavy enough to drop from the layer of clouds. That’s what causes the large hole to form. Andrew Heymsfield, who is from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, confirmed this by telling EarthSky, “The whole idea of jet aircraft making these features has to do with cooling of air over the wings that generates ice.”
Heymsfield’s team also found that when aircrafts create the large holes in the clouds, and after the droplets of water freeze to ice, they then turn into snow as they fall to the ground. Occasionally, within an hour of a hole punch cloud appearing, it can reach up to 30 miles wide because other water droplets beside the original ones begin to freeze. In fact, hole punch clouds can keep expanding for several hours after initially forming.
Hole punch cloud
And while scientists know what hole punch clouds are and what causes them to appear, not everyone knows about them because they’re a rare occurrence. This is why so many people who haven’t seen them before often mistake them for UFOs.
Video of dramatic close encounter with the Black F-117 Nighthawk
Video of dramatic close encounter with the Black F-117 Nighthawk
The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk is an American single-seat, twin-engine stealth attack aircraft that was developed by Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works division and operated by the United States Air Force (USAF).
The Nighthawk was the first operational aircraft to be designed around stealth technology. Its maiden flight took place in 1981 at Groom Lake, Nevada, and the aircraft achieved initial operating capability status in 1983.
The Nighthawk was shrouded in secrecy until it was revealed to the public in 1988.
The black F-117 Nighthawk was officially retired in 2008 but this incredible video recorded in February 2019 proves that some of these aircraft still remain in service today.
Cloaked UFO Hovering Over United Arab Emirates On March 17, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Cloaked UFO Hovering Over United Arab Emirates On March 17, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 17, 2019 Location of sighting: United Arab Emerates This week in the UAE an eyewitness Tweeted about seeing a hole in the clouds above him and asked what it might be? Thats easy to answer, its a clocked alien craft. They are over the UAE to observe one of the richest countries in the world for their oil and wealth. If you look closely at the hole, you will see and inner and outer ring. This means the UFO is still there right now as this photo was taken. Thats right, it hasn't flown away, its still there. Did you also notice that the center of the circle has a pushed down lower area of clouds? Because the ships lower part shoved the clouds out of the way to make room for the UFO. UFOs can create clouds and even make holes through them, but one thing they can't do...fill in the inside of the ship with clouds. LOL, I don't think they would like that too much. I consider UFO observations like this to be an intrusion on the publics privacy. Much how apps on your phone can track you and record the information you look at on the net? Or how Mark Zuckerbergs' company Facebook would track your likes, comments, and personal info and sell it off to some freak company we never heard of, without our permission. Well, the aliens are doing the same. They are watching, recording and gathering more data on you than you knew existed. All without your permission to do so. That is a crime that has continued for thousands of years on Earth and still does. I call that a crime against humanity. Scott C. Waring
إبراهيم الجروان@ibrahimaljarwan
شوهدت هذه الظاهرة النادرة والجميلة صباح اليوم في مدينة العين
If the Space Force Won’t Fight Aliens, Who the Hell Will?
If the Space Force Won’t Fight Aliens, Who the Hell Will?
by Kyle Mizokami
Late last week, military news site Task & Purpose confirmed a disturbing fact: the newly created U.S. Space Force has no intention of fighting aliens. Despite the recent uptick of military UFO sightings, the Pentagon appears uninterested (at least officially) in the possibility of hostile aliens. But if an alien invasion does take place, which arm of the Pentagon would respond? The answer: probably all of them.
During a recent Pentagon roundtable, Task & Purpose’s Pentagon reporter Jeff Schogol asked if the Space Force “is concerned about threats posed by extraterrestrial intelligence.” The official answer he got back? “No.”
Schogol’s question was asked with tongue firmly planted in cheek, but the revelation last year that U.S. Navy fighter jets encountered alleged UFO craft in 2004 and again in 2015—in both instances appearing on radar and leaving behind video evidence—makes one wonder.
If the unidentified flying objects described by Navy pilots, as well as military and civilian personnel for the past seventy years, are really of extraterrestrial origin and unfriendly, how would the Pentagon deal with them?
If UFOs suddenly descended from the skies, toasting the Statue of Liberty, the Great Mall of America, and the Golden Gate Bridge with death rays, the Pentagon would need to convene some sort of study group to quickly determine what kind of threat it was dealing with. If that happens, forget the Air Force.
Ironically, the service that would most likely take the lead is the U.S. Navy.
Why the Navy? Aliens would likely come from vast distances, traveling light years in long distance voyages, to smash puny humans. The U.S. Navy is unique among the services in planning similar, though much, much shorter voyages. Both submarines and UFOs deal with pressure—in the case of submarines the pressure is on the outside, while in space the pressure is on the inside of the vehicle. From an operational and technical standpoint, aliens and sailors have a few things in common.
Would all of this firepower matter in a fight with aliens?
Image: U.S. Navy (Getty)
There are other reasons the Navy might take the lead. Seventy-one percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, and if aliens operated from the water (remember, the 2004 sighting included reports of a 737-sized object on the surface of the ocean) the Navy is unique in having manned aircraft, surface ships, and submarines prowling above, on, and below the surface of the ocean. The Navy could also sail to the most remote locations in the world’s oceans, establishing a military presence for weeks or months, to investigate and monitor for enemy activity.
The Air Force could operate against aliens, but the service’s fighters and bombers could only remain on station for mere minutes or hours before returning to base. Against a terrestrial threat this isn’t really a big deal, but against an alien threat we know nothing about—and according to the 2004 incident, theoretically capable of traveling extraordinary distances in a blink of an eye—such a force will be less useful.
If humans could lure aliens into a set-piece battle the Air Force could bring a lot of firepower, but how one lures aliens into battle is anyone’s guess. In the meantime the Space Force, nestled under control of the Air Force, would contribute to the alien war by maintaining the U.S. military’s network of position, navigation, and timing/GPS satellites, communication satellites, and other space-based assets.
US Army Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles exercising in Estonia, 2017.
Photo: Sean Gallup (Getty)
The Army would be the service responsible if aliens attempted a landing in the United States, or presumably one of our allies. The Army’s 10 combat divisions would spring into action, attempting to destroy the aliens with fire and maneuver. It would be in many ways similar to countering an airborne landing, with the Army attempting to destroy the alien’s landing zone and prevent the flow of alien reinforcements. The Marines could also get in on the alien fighting, particularly overseas in Asia, Europe, or even the Middle East—though one would like to think aliens would be smart enough to avoid that region and the prospect of their own 18-year war altogether.
Of course, all of this is contingent on the U.S. military being on par with alien technology... which, frankly, is extremely unlikely. The universe is billions of years old, and other races could easily have a head start of a million years or more on us. And certainly, any species capable of interstellar flight is far more technologically advanced.
Consider that a handful of 21st century tanks could crush an army from the 11th century, or even the 19th century for that matter. Even a difference of a thousand years would be ample enough to ensure humanity’s defeat from even a minor alien expedition/hunting trip/bachelor party.
The entire U.S. military could have the same effectiveness against aliens as cavemen—or in this case cosplayers pretending to be cavemen at Comicon—would have against the U.S. military
Image: Daniel Zuchnick (Getty)
If aliens do exist, ultimately it may not matter if they are hostile or not. Our destruction at their hands would be about as inevitable as destruction from an extinction-level meteor impact. They could even be friendly, the combination of advanced, destructive technology and violent tendencies leading to intelligent life self-screening itself from interstellar travel. (That would be bad news for humanity.) The “UFOs” people are seeing could even be top secret U.S. government craft. The aliens could be us. In the end, maybe it doesn’t matter if the Pentagon has a plan to fight aliens after all.
Carbon monoxide detectors could warn of extraterrestrial life
Carbon monoxide detectors could warn of extraterrestrial life
For some distant worlds, carbon monoxide may actually be compatible with a robust microbial biosphere
AUTHOR:SARAH SIMPSON
Carbon monoxide detectors in our homes warn of a dangerous buildup of that colorless, odorless gas we normally associate with death. Astronomers, too, have generally assumed that a build-up of carbon monoxide in a planet’s atmosphere would be a sure sign of lifelessness. Now, a UC Riverside-led research team is arguing the opposite: celestial carbon monoxide detectors may actually alert us to a distant world teeming with simple life forms.
Edward Schwieterman, a postdoctoral researcher in UCR’s Department of Earth Sciences.
“With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope two years from now, astronomers will be able to analyze the atmospheres of some rocky exoplanets,” said Edward Schwieterman, the study’s lead author and a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow in UCR’s Department of Earth Sciences. “It would be a shame to overlook an inhabited world because we did not consider all the possibilities.”
In a study published today in The Astrophysical Journal, Schwieterman’s team used computer models of chemistry in the biosphere and atmosphere to identify two intriguing scenarios in which carbon monoxide readily accumulates in the atmospheres of living planets.
In the first scenario, the team found answers in our own planet’s deep past. On the modern, oxygen-rich Earth, carbon monoxide cannot accumulate because the gas is quickly destroyed by chemical reactions in the atmosphere. But three billion years ago, the world was a very different place. The oceans were already teeming with microbial life, but the atmosphere was nearly devoid of oxygen and the sun was much dimmer.
The team’s models reveal that this ancient version of inhabited Earth could maintain carbon monoxide levels of roughly 100 parts per million (ppm)—several orders of magnitude greater the parts-per-billion traces of the gas in the atmosphere today.
“That means we could expect high carbon monoxide abundances in the atmospheres of inhabited but oxygen-poor exoplanets orbiting stars like our own sun,” said Timothy Lyons, one of the study’s co-authors, a professor of biogeochemistry in UCR’s Department of Earth Science, and director of the UCR Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center. “This is a perfect example of our team’s mission to use the Earth’s past as a guide in the search for life elsewhere in the universe.”
A rocky planet orbiting Proxima Centauri might sustain liquid water (artist’s depiction). Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Bacon (STSc)
A second scenario is even more favorable for the buildup of carbon monoxide: the photochemistry around red dwarf stars like Proxima Centauri, the star nearest our sun at 4.2 light years away. The team’s models predict that if a planet around such a star were inhabited and rich in oxygen, then we should expect the abundance of carbon monoxide to be extremely high—anywhere from hundreds of ppm to several percent.
“Given the different astrophysical context for these planets, we should not be surprised to find microbial biospheres promoting high levels of carbon monoxide,” Schwieterman said. “However, these would certainly not be good places for human or animal life as we know it on Earth.”
Earth-sized, rocky planets have been discovered orbiting in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri and other similar stars, meaning they could harbor liquid water, an essential ingredient for life. Such planets are likely targets for further characterization by the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in March 2021.
The current study is one component of a broad effort to prepare for these future missions by cataloguing different combinations of atmospheric gases that might be evidence of an inhabited world—so-called biosignature gases. Some gases, such as carbon monoxide, had been proposed previously as ‘antibiosignatures’— evidence that a planet is not inhabited —if remotely detectable at sufficient abundance. But those assumptions only apply in specific cases.
Carbon monoxide features prominently in oxygen-rich atmospheres in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star like Proxima Centauri.
“Although other studies have done exoplanet photochemical modeling that includes carbon monoxide, no one had focused on carbon monoxide on Earth-like exoplanets in such a systematic way,” Schwieterman said. “Now we have a guidebook for determining what levels of carbon monoxide are compatible with a photosynthetic biosphere.”
In addition to Schwieterman and Lyons, the paper’s authors are Christopher Reinhard from the Georgia Institute of Technology; Stephanie Olson, a former UCR graduate student now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago; Kazumi Ozaki, a former NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at Georgia Tech now from Toho University in Japan; Chester E. Harman from Columbia University, and Peng K. Hong from Chiba Institute of Technology. This project was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
Koolmonoxide in de atmosfeer van exoplaneten kan wijzen op buitenaards leven
Koolmonoxide in de atmosfeer van exoplaneten kan wijzen op buitenaards leven
Vivian Lammerse
Onze aarde bestond ook ooit uit grote hoeveelheden koolmonoxide.
Bij koolmonoxide denk je nou niet meteen aan het bestaan van leven. Sterker nog; het kleur- en geurloze gas is levensgevaarlijk. Ook astronomen hebben aangenomen dat opeenhopingen van koolmonoxide in de atmosfeer van een planeet een teken is van een levenloze toestand. Maar een onderzoeksteam bewijst in eennieuwe studie juist het tegenovergestelde. De aanwezigheid van het gas kan volgens de onderzoekers wijzen op een wereld vol met eenvoudige levensvormen.
James Webb ruimtetelescoop De onderzoekers bereiden zich voor op de komst van de James Webb ruimtetelescoop, die – naar verwachting – in 2021 gelanceerd gaat worden. De telescoop zal onder andere een grote rol gaan spelen in de zoektocht naar buitenaards leven. Zo gaat de telescoop de atmosfeer van exoplaneten uitpluizen en daarin zoeken naar signalen van leven. “Het zou een schande zijn om een bewoonde wereld over het hoofd te zien, omdat we niet alle mogelijkheden in overweging hebben genomen,” zegt onderzoeker Edward Schwieterman.
Aarde De onderzoekers namen daarom ook koolmonoxide mee in hun beraad en ontwikkelden computermodellen. En daar kwam iets opmerkelijks uit. Zo vonden de onderzoekers bewijs dat in het diepe verleden van onze eigen planeet, de aarde koolmonoxide herbergde. Nu, in onze zuurstofrijke omgeving, kan het gas zich niet ophopen omdat het in onze atmosfeer gelijk door chemische reacties wordt vernietigd. Maar drie miljard jaar geleden was de wereld een hele andere plaats. In de oceanen krioelden al microbieel leven, terwijl er in de atmosfeer nog geen zuurstof bestond. De modellen van de onderzoekers onthullen dat het koolmonoxide-level van onze aarde destijds tot wel 100 ppm kon oplopen. “Dit betekent dat we hoge koolmonoxide-gehaltes kunnen verwachten in de atmosfeer van bewoonde, maar zuurstofarme exoplaneten die om sterren cirkelen die lijken op onze zon,” vat onderzoeker Timothy Lyons samen.
Proxima Centauri Daarnaast concluderen de onderzoekers nog iets anders. Zo namen ze in hun studie ook rode dwergen zoals Proxima Centauri onder de loep. De modellen van de onderzoekers suggereren dat als een planeet rond zo’n dergelijke ster bewoond en rijk aan zuurstof is, er waarschijnlijk ook hoge gehaltes koolmonoxide in de atmosfeer te vinden zijn. “Gezien de verschillende astrofysische context van deze planeten, zouden we niet verrast moeten zijn om microbiële biosferen te vinden die hoge niveaus van koolmonoxide herbergen,” zegt Schwieterman. Echter hoeven we in dat geval niet te rekenen op de aanwezigheid van mensen of dieren zoals op aarde.
In de leefbare zone van Proxima Centauri zijn rotsachtige planeten ontdekt, wat kan betekenen dat deze planeten vloeibaar water herbergen; een essentieel ingrediënt voor leven. Deze exoplaneten staan al op de agenda van de James Webb ruimtetelescoop, die over twee jaar het luchtruim kiest. Meer weten over deze missie? Lees alles over de James Webb telescoop op onze thema-pagina.
De studie bewijst maar weer dat we niet zomaar zaken zonder goed onderzoek moeten uitsluiten. “Hoewel ook andere onderzoeken koolmonoxide meenamen in de modellen, heeft nog nooit iemand zich op zo’n systematische manier geconcentreerd op de aanwezigheid van het gas op aardachtige planeten,” zegt Schwieterman. “Het is een perfect voorbeeld van de missie van ons team om het verleden van de aarde als leidraad te gebruiken bij het zoeken naar leven elders in het universum.”
Exomars landing platform arrives in Europe with name
Welcome to Europe, Kazachok
Exomars landing platform arrives in Europe with name
The platform destined to land on the Red Planet as part of the next ExoMars mission has arrived in Europe for final assembly and testing – and been given a name.
An announcement was made by the Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos of its new name: ‘Kazachok’.
The ExoMars programme is a joint endeavour between ESA and Roscosmos and comprises two missions. The Trace Gas Orbiter is already circling Mars examining the planet’s atmosphere, while the second mission – comprising a surface science platform and a rover – is foreseen for launch in 2020.
ExoMars rover
Last month, the rover was named ‘Rosalind Franklin’ after the prominent scientist behind the discovery of the structure of DNA. Now the surface platform also has a name. Kazachock literally means little Cossack, and it is a lively folk dance.
Once on the martian surface, Rosalind the rover will drive off the Kazachok platform to perform scientific investigations. Kazachok will remain stationary to investigate the climate, atmosphere, radiation and possible presence of subsurface water in the landing site.
Kazachok left Russia after being carefully packed to meet planetary protection requirements, making sure to not bring terrestrial biological contamination to Mars. It was shipped to Turin, Italy, on an Antonov plane along with ground support equipment and other structural elements.
Packed for Europe
The Italian division of Thales Alenia Space will perform final assembly and testing of the mission in close cooperation with ESA and the Russian Lavochkin Association, the developer and manufacturer of the descent module including the landing platform.
There will be more components arriving to Italy throughout the year, including avionics equipment, the carrier and rover modules and thermal protection systems for the landing platform.
Several test campaigns with ExoMars models are running in parallel in preparation for launch and landing.
Recent shock tests in Russia have successfully proved the mechanical compatibility between the spacecraft and the adapter for the Proton-M rocket that will set ExoMars on its way to Mars.
ExoMars landing platform in Italy
The ExoMars teams have also just completed the egress and locomotion tests with a full-sized model of the rover in Zurich, Switzerland.
There the rover drove off ramps and through all the terrain conditions that it might encounter on Mars: different types of soil, various obstacle shapes and sizes and all kind of slopes.
“We have now a very challenging schedule of deliveries and tests both in Italy and France. The coordination between the Russian and European teams is key to timely reach the Baikonur cosmodrome in 2020,” says François Spoto, ESA’s ExoMars team leader.
Nieuwe naam voor de ExoMars-lander bekend: Kazachok
Nieuwe naam voor de ExoMars-lander bekend: Kazachok
Vivian Lammerse
Samen met Rosalind de Marsrover reist hij volgend jaar af naar de rode planeet.
Volgend jaar gaat het dan echt beginnen: dan zal de ExoMars-missie van start gaan. De missie bestaat uit zowel een Marslander (gebouwd door de Russen) en een Marsrover (gebouwd door ESA). Een maand geleden maakte ESA al de naam bekend van de marsrover: zo is deze tot Rosalind Franklin gedoopt, vernoemd naar de wetenschapper die de structuur van DNA onthulde. En nu laten ook de Russen weten met welke naam hun lander voortaan door het leven zal gaan.
Naam De lander heeft de naam Kazachok gekregen, wat letterlijk ‘kleine kozak’ betekent. Daarnaast is Kazachok een vrolijke volksdans. De lander is ondertussen naar Italië verscheept voor de eindmontage en de laatste testen, voordat deze volgend jaar het luchtruim kiest.
De lander is heelhuids aangekomen in Italië voor de laatste puntjes op de i.
Afbeelding: Roscosmos
Missies Het ExoMars-programma is een gezamenlijke onderneming van de Europese en Russische ruimtevaartorganisaties (ESA en Roscosmos) en bestaat uit twee missies. De Trace Gas Orbiter cirkelt op dit moment al rond Mars en onderzoekt de atmosfeer van de planeet. De tweede missie – bestaande uit Rosalind Franklin en Kazachok – zullen zich meer op het oppervlak van de rode planeet concentreren. Rosalind de rover zal tot twee meter onder het oppervlak op zoek gaan naar sporen van levensvormen die lang geleden op Mars leefden, of mogelijk tot op de dag van vandaag stand hebben weten te houden. Kozachok zal op één plek blijven om het klimaat, de atmosfeer en de mogelijke aanwezigheid van ondergrond water op de landingsplaats te onderzoeken.
Zoals gezegd wordt de missie in 2020 gelanceerd. Vervolgens komen Rosalind en Kazachok in 2021 op de rode planeet aan. De precieze landingsplek is zorgvuldig door de twee ruimtevaartorganisaties uitgezocht. Zo zullen de rover en de lander voet aan de grond zetten in een gebied dat Oxia Planum wordt genoemd. Oxia Planum bevindt zich nabij de evenaar van Mars en is een wat lager gelegen gebied. Observaties vanuit de ruimte onthullen dat Oxia Planum rijk is aan klei-achtige mineralen die ongeveer vier miljard jaar geleden zijn gevormd. Aangezien deze mineralen alleen in combinatie met water kunnen zijn ontstaan, gaan onderzoekers ervan uit dat Oxia Planum ooit behoorlijk wat water bevatte. Maar of dat ook echt zo blijkt te zijn? Rosalind en Kazachok zullen ons dat over twee jaar laten weten.
Niet Venus, maar Mercurius staat het dichtst bij de aarde
Niet Venus, maar Mercurius staat het dichtst bij de aarde
Vivian Lammerse
Mercurius zou zelfs de dichtstbijzijnde buur van elke planeet in ons zonnestelsel zijn.
Vraag een willekeurige astronoom welke planeet het dichtst bij de aarde staat en het antwoord dat je waarschijnlijk krijgt is Venus. Maar een nieuw onderzoek gepubliceerd in het tijdschriftPhysics Todayschoffelt die aanname onderuit. Met een nieuwe wiskundige methode bewijzen de onderzoekers dat Mercurius in feite ons naaste buur is. Sterker nog: Mercurius zou het dichtst in de buurt staan van elke andere planeet in ons zonnestelsel.
Fout Volgens de onderzoekers gaat het eigenlijk fout bij de berekening over de gemiddelde afstand tussen planeten. Meestal wordt de gemiddelde afstand namelijk berekend door de afstand van de planeet tot de zon te bepalen. Zo is de afstand van de aarde tot de zon vastgesteld op 1 AE (astronomische eenheid) en die van Venus op 0,72 AE. De afstand tussen de aarde en Venus is op die manier vastgesteld op 0,28 AE.
Venus Hoewel het klopt dat geen enkele andere planeet ons zo dicht nadert, zegt dit niets over de gemiddelde afstanden, zo stellen de onderzoekers in Physics Today. Wanneer Venus zich namelijk aan de andere kant van de zon bevindt, is de afstand tussen de aarde en Venus 1,72 AE. En dus stellen de onderzoekers dat gemiddeld gezien Venus helemaal niet het dichtst bij de aarde staat.
a: De uniforme probabilistische verdeling om de afstanden tussen planeten te bepalen. b: De nieuwe methode.
Afbeelding: Physics Today
Methode “Om de gemiddelde afstand tussen planeten nauwkeurig te bepalen, ontwierpen we de puntcirkelmethode,” leggen de onderzoekers in Physics Today uit. In deze methode wordt de gemiddelde afstand bepaald op basis van een aantal punten op elke baan (zie afbeelding hierboven). De onderzoekers berekenden met behulp van de nieuwe methode alle afstanden tussen de planeten opnieuw. En uit de resultaten blijkt dat Mercurius veel dichter bij de aarde staat dan Venus (1,04 AE en 1,14 AE respectievelijk).
Mercurius staat niet alleen het dichtst bij de aarde. De berekeningen laten namelijk zien dat Mercurius het dichtst bij elke planeet in ons zonnestelsel in de buurt staat. “Mercurius is dus zelfs de dichtstbijzijnde planeet van Neptunus,” besluiten de onderzoekers.
Evidence of Ancient Stone Cutting Technology? Where is this coming from?
Evidence of Ancient Stone Cutting Technology? Where is this coming from?
It is not surprising that the occasional eyebrow was raised in the past concerning the extent of the Egyptian masonry skills. Not only were the structures superior in a visionary capacity, but also in precision, design and execution.
The impressive cutting-in-stone technique reveals our ancestors were familiar with an extremely advanced technology we have long been unable to use. Large-sized holes found in ancient stone demanded engineering skills and proper cutting equipment. All kind of stones (even the hardest ones) were drilled for architectural, ritualistic or symbolic functions.
The methods employed by the Egyptians in cutting the hard stones which they so frequently worked, have long remained undetermined.
Various suggestions have been made, some very impractical; but no actual proofs of the tools employed, or the manner of using them, have been obtained.
Looking at these impressive cutting-in-stones technique one wonders if not plenty of our technologies which are thought to be modern have ancient roots or in some cases may have been lost and then reinvented.
CASTING A LONG SHADOW The Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft (whose shadow is visible at the top of the image) took this picture of the asteroid Ryugu on February 22 about one minute after touching down on its surface and then lifting off again.
JAXA, UNIV. OF TOKYO, KOCHI UNIV., RIKKYO UNIV., NAGOYA UNIV., CHIBA INST. OF TECHNOLOGY, MEIJI UNIV., UNIV. OF AIZU, AIST
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — The asteroid Ryugu is a chip off the old block. Planetary scientists on the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft team have narrowed down the near-Earth asteroid’s parent body to one of two larger, more distant asteroids: Polana and Eulalia.
“Based on links to those specific asteroids, we can talk about the longer history of Ryugu,” said planetary scientist Seiji Sugita of the University of Tokyo in a March 19 news conference at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
Ryugu’s small size, about 900 meters across, and its rubble-pile nature make scientists think the asteroid formed after the breakup of a larger body some 700 million years ago. Based on Ryugu’s orbit, which takes the space rock within 95,400 kilometers of Earth, astronomers think the asteroid probably came from the inner part of the solar system’s main asteroid belt, which sits between Mars and Jupiter. But it was hard to narrow down Ryugu’s origins any further until the Hayabusa2 spacecraft arrived at the asteroid in June 2018 (SN Online: 6/27/18).
Hayabusa2 showed that Ryugu is uniformly dark, one of the darkest known objects in the solar system. Its color best matches that of main-belt asteroids Polana, which is about 55 kilometers wide, and the 37-kilometer-wide Eulalia, Sugita said. He put the odds that Ryugu came from one of those two bodies at about 80 to 90 percent.
Ryugu’s chemistry suggests that its parent asteroid had some water in its rocks early on, but lost much of that water before the breakup that led to Ryugu. Pinning down the timing of Ryugu’s water history could help scientists understand how water may have been delivered to Earth by asteroids in the early solar system.
The real test of Ryugu’s origins will come when Hayabusa2 returns a sample of the asteroid to Earth in late 2020, and scientists can measure the space rock’s age (SN: 1/19/19, p. 20). An older Ryugu would suggest that the more ancient Polana is the parent, while a younger sample would point to Eulalia.
NASA scientists have recently released a trove of data and images from the Bennu asteroid, a carbonaceous asteroid currently orbited by theOSIRIS-RExspacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is currently orbiting and mapping the asteroid, and will then attempt to land on the asteroid, gather samples, and return the samples to Earth.
Yes, this is an image from an actual asteroid’s surface.
Image credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin.
Although Bennu is only slightly larger than the Empire State Building, it’s already turning out to be even more intriguing than we thought it would be. For starters, it appears to contain minerals dating from the earliest days of the solar system, which could offer astronomers valuable insights into how the system formed and evolved through the eons.
It also appears to be rife with water-containing (hydrated) minerals. This will allow researchers to study the hypothesis that Earth and other planets in our solar system were “fertilized” by water-rich asteroids. Bennu also appears “craggier” than expected — the rocky structures on its surface came as a surprise to NASA.
Based on Earth observations, astronomers were expecting a relatively smooth surface, but images from OSIRIS-REx show that the asteroid is riddled with rough boulders. The boulders also appear to be denser than expected, raising concerns about the spacecraft’s ability to drill and extract samples. NASA engineers, however, are confident.
“Throughout OSIRIS-REx’s operations near Bennu, our spacecraft and operations team have demonstrated that we can achieve system performance that beats design requirements,” said Rich Burns, the project manager of OSIRIS-REx at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Bennu has issued us a challenge to deal with its rugged terrain, and we are confident that OSIRIS-REx is up to the task.”
But perhaps the most stunning discovery is that Bennu is still active, spewing giant plumes of matter.
This view of asteroid Bennu ejecting particles surprised astronomers. The photo was created by combining two images taken onboard NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The features have been accentuated through processing techniques such as cropping and brightness and contrast adjustment.
Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin.
“The discovery of plumes is one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “And the rugged terrain went against all of our predictions. Bennu is already surprising us, and our exciting journey there is just getting started.”
The plumes consist of dirt and rock, but their source is not yet known. OSIRIS-REx is hard at work to help answer that question.
Image of Bennu’s northern hemisphere.
Image credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin
The OSIRIS-REx mission of NASA’s New Frontiers program was launched towards on September 8, 2016. It is currently orbiting the asteroid at a distance of 3 miles (5 km), approximately 190,000 miles (300,000 km) away from Earth. OSIRIS-REx is expected to return samples to Earth in 2023. There is a cumulative 1 in 2,700 chance that Bennu will impact Earth between 2175–2199.
We’ve learned a lot about Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, since it was first discovered in 1846. Some scientistsbelieve it could be an “ocean world” with liquid water — and maybe even harbor life.
And now, pending approval, we might soon get our best glimpse yet. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposed on Tuesday at a conference in Texas to send a spacecraft called “Trident” to Triton — with the goal of sussing out whether it’s a habitable world.
Low Cost Mission
Rather than spending billions of dollars, the proposed spacecraft called Trident aims to keep costs low — roughly the “price of a small mission to the moon,” in the New York Times’ reckoning.
“The time is now to do it at a low cost,” said Louise Prockter at Tuesday’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston and the principal investigator of the proposed mission. “And we will investigate whether it is a habitable world, which is of huge importance.”
Along with a Triton flyby, Trident would also visit Jupiter’s moon Io and stop by Venus — it’s been almost twenty years since NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft visited the second planet from the Sun.
Video Killed The Radio Star
The last good look we got of Neptune was during a 1989 flyby of NASA’s Voyager 2 — the first time any spacecraft had ever done so.
“We are comparing with the Voyager encounter in 1989, which was built on early 1970s technology, essentially a television camera attached to a fax machine,” said Karl Mitchell, the proposed mission’s project scientist, as quoted by the Times.
Meteor no one saw coming exploded over Earth with force of 10 atomic bombs
Meteor no one saw coming exploded over Earth with force of 10 atomic bombs
NASA says the blast was the second-largest meteor impact on record.
A meteor weighing about 1,500 tons exploded over the Bering Sea on Dec. 18, 2018.narvikk / Getty Images/iStockphoto
By Brandon Specktor, Live Science
On Dec. 18, 2018, a school bus-size meteor exploded over Earth with an impact energy of roughly 10 atomic bombs.According to NASA, the blast was the second-largest meteor impact since the organization began tracking them 30 years ago, bested only by the infamous fireball that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in Feb. 2013.
This image sequence from the MISR instrument, aboard the Terra satellite, was taken a few minutes after a meteor exploded over the Bering Sea on Dec. 18. 2018. It shows the shadow of the meteor's trail, and the orange-tinted cloud it left behind.
As to why one of the largest meteor impacts in recent history may have totally passed you by, that's likely because the space rock in question shattered over the Bering Sea, a cold stretch of the Pacific Ocean between Russia and Alaska, miles from inhabited land.
NASA learned about the December impact thanks to the U.S. Air Force, whose missile-monitoring satellites were among the first to detect the blast. The rumble of the impact also registered on infrasound detectors — stations that measure low-frequency sound waves inaudible to human ears — around the world, giving scientists enough data to draw some basic conclusions about the sneaky meteor.
According to NASA, that meteor weighed about 1,500 tons, had a diameter of about 32 feet, and was traveling through the atmosphere at about 71,582 mph when it exploded. The blast occurred about 15.5 miles over the ocean and erupted with an energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT — roughly 10 times the energy of the atomic bomb that the United States detonated over Hiroshima during World War II.
The world's asteroid-monitoring groups failed to see the rock headed our way likely due to its smallish size. Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told New Scientist that most modern telescopes are best able to detect objects measuring several hundred meters or more in diameter, making smaller objects like this one easy to miss. NASA asteroid hunters are most concerned about identifying near-Earth objects measuring 460 feet across, which have the potential to obliterate entire US states if allowed to pass through the atmosphere, Live Science previously reported.
The December 2018 impact only came to attention this week thanks, in part, to a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas that was delivered by Kelly Fast, NASA's near-Earth objects observations program manager. Fast told BBC Newsthat the December event exploded with "40 percent the energy release of Chelyabinsk," but didn't show up in the news because of the impact's relatively remote location.
The Chelyabinsk meteor, which measured 62 feet wide, passed over mainland Russia and was recorded by many motorists. The resulting shockwaves injured more than 1,200 people.
JAPAN’S YONAGUNI RUINS MAY HOLD THE KEY TO A SUNKEN CIVILIZATION
JAPAN’S YONAGUNI RUINS MAY HOLD THE KEY TO A SUNKEN CIVILIZATION
The mystery of the lost continent of Atlantis has puzzled researchers for centuries, as growing evidence supports the theory that an advanced civilization may have been destroyed and gone unnoticed by mainstream archeology. This antediluvian civilization is assumed to have been located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and is thought to have been the progenitor of ancient civilizations like those in Egypt and India. But could there have been another sunken continent from that era that predates Atlantis? The Yonaguni ruins might provide an answer.
THE YONAGUNI MONUMENT
In 1985, a Japanese diver named Kihachiro Aratake was exploring the seafloor off the southern shore of Yonaguni-Jima island, the western-most island in the Ryukyu archipelago of Japan. Aratake came across what appeared to be the sunken ruins of an ancient, megalithic, stepped pyramid, similar to the ziggurats built in ancient Sumer. Since his discovery, the provenance of the ruins has been debated as to whether they are man-made or naturally occurring, due to the possibility of natural geological terracing.
Dr. Masaaki Kimura from the University of Ryukyu is the biggest proponent for the theory supporting the artificiality of the ruins. Surprisingly, Dr. Robert Schoch is one archeologist who has contended Kimura’s theory, despite his support for the Sphinx water erosion hypothesis.Although, Schoch has conceded that he doesn’t perceive Yonaguni to be a closed case and that he hasn’t spent as much time diving there, compared to Kimura’s 15 years.
According to Kimura, the Yonaguni monument appears to depict carvings of animals and people as well as the remnants of a carved face, which he compares to the Moai heads on Easter Island.At the end of the last ice age, Yonaguni would have been connected to what is now mainland China. It is likely that the fate of the civilization that built the Yonaguni pyramid, was sealed by a massive tectonic event that triggered a tsunami and subsequent sea level rise.
Since the end of the last Ice Age, sea levels have risen some 40 meters, causing drastic changes in topography and lending credibility to the theory that there may have been cities or even continents that disappeared into the sea. Based on stalactite found in caves near the ruins, Kimura has calculated the Yonaguni pyramid to be at least 6,000 years old when it sank, with the potential to be up to 10,000 years old including the time prior to flooding. The oldest recorded flooding event at Yonaguni occurred in the late 1700s, during which a tsunami ravaged the island with 130 foot waves. This combination of sea level rise and catastrophic climatic events were likely the cause of this ancient city’s demise.
Courtesy of www.yonaguni.ws
An interesting discovery has been made when looking at the orientation of the angles in the Yonaguni ruins. One researcher believes that the radial lines, when extended out from the ruins, might potentially outline a territory in the Pacific. This theory employs geoglyphology, or the study of coded maps and messaging in ancient geoglyphs, and has drawn out the radial lines of the Yonaguni ruins. The Faram Research Foundation’s work shows lines that depict a map very similar to the territory sought after by Japan during WWII.
The area extends from Yonaguni and the South China Sea, up to the tip of Alaska’s archipelago, down to Hawaii and back over encompassing Indonesia and Burma (Myanmar). This territory, some believe, could be that which was occupied by the lost continent of Mu, a lost civilization larger and older than Atlantis.
THE LOST CONTINENT OF MU
The lost civilization of Mu, is thought to have spanned a large swath of the Pacific Ocean. Reaching from the Philippines Sea all the way to Easter Island, Mu would have encompassed most of the small islands in the mid-Pacific, including Guam, Fiji, Christmas Island, Midway and Hawaii. The conception of Mu was first proposed by Augustus LePlongeon in the 19th century who was the first explorer to photographically document the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza. It was there that he supposedly learned of the lost continent of Mu through his translation of the ancient Mayan Troano Codex.
LePlongeon’s translation showed that the Mayan civilization was aware of and predated the ancient Egyptian and Greek civilizations, while also mentioning another civilization that was lost in a cataclysmic event. But LePlongeon’s account is thought to be spurious due his use of a false translation of the ancient Mayan language.
But a later account of the ancient continent from a book published in 1926, by James Churchward, is thought to possibly carry more veracity. Churchward was an English occultist who spent several decades living and studying with a group of mystic priests in India. There he was shown esoteric tablets that detailed the erstwhile civilization and its supposed 64 million inhabitants called the Nacaal, who lived roughly 50,000 years ago. The tablets contained a multitude of vignettes, or a series of pictographs that supposedly told the story of Mu. In order to properly transcribe the vignettes, Churchward had to study an ancient language called Naga-Maya, known to only a handful of people in the world.
Although it is difficult to conceive of a continent this size to have just disappeared underwater, some believe that the Yonaguni monument may be a key to the explanation. Though Churchward’s translation didn’t garner as much notoriety as the search for Atlantis, some believe his interpretation of Mu to be one in the same with the lost city of Lemuria, popularized by Russian theosophist, Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky’s depiction of the Lemurian people shares many similarities with Churchward’s account, that she also claims to have learned from an esoteric text given to her by Indian mahatmas.
Were Lemuria and Mu one in the same, or two disparate, ancient civilizations that fostered the mysteriously advanced ancient cultures we’re aware of today. While we have been obsessed with the search for Atlantis, it appears that there could be evidence of an older society that may hold clues to the knowledge of our ancient ancestors. Could the Yonaguni ruins be the key to uncovering these antediluvian people?
It works just like a hydrogen fuel cell except that the liquid used for storing energy is saltwater. This isn’t far from the water powered car, an idea labelled as a conspiracy by many despite the massive amount of evidence behind it. You can read more about thathere.
In this case (saltwater) the liquid passes through a membrane in between the two tanks, creating an electric charge. This electricity is then stored and distributed by super capacitors. The four electric motors in the car are fed electricity which makes it run. The car carries the water in two 200-litre tanks, which in one sitting will allow drivers to travel up to 373 miles (600km). Overall, the four-seater is 5.25 metres (0.4ft) long, 2.2 metres wide (7.2ft), the 1.35 metre (4.4ft).
“After making its debut at the 2014 Geneva Motor Show (pictured) in March, the saltwater technology has now been certified for use on European roads.”
Nanoflowcell AG is the company behind the design, and they are currently preparing the technology for mass production.
‘We’ve got major plans, and not just within the automobile industry. The potential of the NanoFlowcell is much greater, especially in terms of domestic energy supplies as well as in maritime, rail and aviation technology”
– NanoFlowcell AG Chairman of the Board Professor Jens-Peter Ellermann.
This is huge news, and is another example out of so many that clearly show how we have so many ways to do better here. Although money remains an issue, it doesn’t have to be.
All cars should be required to be made from this type, or other similar types of clean green energy. A few years ago, if you told somebody it’s possible to fuel a car by pouring saltwater into it, they would have called you a conspiracy theorist.
Last Year The U.S Navy Developed a Technology To Create Fuel From Seawater
Scientists at the U.S Naval Research Laboratory have developed a technology to recover carbon dioxide and hydrogen from seawater and convert it into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. This could be a tremendous breakthrough and eliminate the need for old ways of generating fuel.
It’s just another example of the many ways of generating energy that are now available that could end our dependence on fossil fuels. These new, clean green ways of generating energy have been around for decades, so why are we always talking about them without ever implementing them?
“Refueling U.S. Navy Vessels, at sea, is a costly endeavor in terms of logistics, time, fiscal constraints and threats to national security sailors at sea. In Fiscal year 2011, the U.S. Navy Military Sea Lift Command, the primary supplier of fuel and oil to the U.S. Navy fleet, delivered nearly 600 million gallons of fuel to Navy vessels underway, operating 15 fleet replenishment oilers around the globe.”
The Navy successfully used the new fuel-from seawater process to power a radio-controlled scale-model replica of a World War II aircraft with an internal combustion engine. Below is the footage from the test flight.
“In close collaboration with the Office of Navel Research p38 Naval Reserve program, NRL has developed a game changing technology for extracting, simultaneously, CO2 and H2 from seawater. This is the first time technology of this nature has been demonstrated with the potential for transition, from the laboratory, to full-scale commercial implementation.”
Researchers say that this approach could be commercially viable within the next seven to ten years. They state interest in pursuing land-based options that could provide a solution to our current problems.
Again, another option, and example showing the power of human potential, so what’s stopping us from the implementation of cleaner and greener technologies?
Not long ago, Department of Defence adviser Dr. Harold Puthoff made some noteworthy comments while discussing the reality of free energy. This is what he said:
“I’ve been taken out on aircraft carriers by the Navy and shown what it is we have to replace if we have new energy sources to provide new fuel methods.”
Whether it be Solar, Free Energy (zero-point), or converting seawater, it’s clear we can do better than we are doing now. It’s remarkable how Barack Obama has constantly pointed out that we will be using oil, gas and coal for the next twenty years, and that we don’t have the technology to lift our dependence off of these resources. Those who are looking into it can clearly see that this simply isn’t true. We have the means to live in ways that are more harmonious with the planet and all beings on it.
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Ancient Egypt: Did aliens build the pyramids? Archeologist addresses SHOCK UFO claims
Ancient Egypt: Did aliens build the pyramids? Archeologist addresses SHOCK UFO claims
ANCIENT Egypt’s imposing Great Pyramids of Giza of have been at the heart of conspiracy debate and wild UFO claims for decades – but were the pyramids built by ancient aliens?
The three Great Pyramids of Giza have towered over the capital of Egypt for at least 4,500 years but their origin is shrouded in mystery. There are no detailed records of their construction and the sophisticated methods involved in their design appear to be centuries ahead of time. Archaeologists have spent years trying to decode the mysteries of the ancient Pharaohs' burial places but are yet to even scratch the surface of the pyramids' history. The pyramids' enigmatic past has invited over the course of the 20th and 21st century a myriad ofconspiracy theoriesconcerning their construction.
Speaking candidly in a bizarre documentary on the subject of the pyramids’ supposed alien origins, the scientist argued the knowledge was stored in KGB archives as early as 1961.
He said: "The presence of this creature and the design of the pyramids, and the whole pool of historical and scientific evidence shows that this particular visitation took place about 11,000 years BC.”
Conspiracy theory author David Childress said: “If this gigantic pyramid in Antarctica is an artificial structure, it would probably be the oldest pyramid on the planet and in fact it might be the master pyramid that all the other pyramids on planet Earth were designed to look like.”
Another conspiracist also said on the show: “All the way around the world we find evidence of pyramid structures.
“We should start looking at the possibility there was habitation on Antarctica.
“Was it a lost civilisation? Could it be ancient astronauts?”
However, claims of any links between the pyramids and supposed alien astronauts have been widely debunked by experts in the field of archaeology.
UFO claims: Some conspiracists believe ancient aliens shaped early civilisations
(Image: GETTY)
Assistant Professor Matthew Peeples, the co-founder of the School of Human Revolution at Arizona State University, refuted all paranormal conspiracies concerning the pyramids.
The building technology is impressive, but we don’t need to invoke aliens to explain it
Matthew Peeples, Arizona State University
The expert said the idea intelligent extraterrestrial helped shape ancient civilisations here on Earth is the single most outrageous archaeological narrative in popular culture.
He said: “These ideas are not supported by scientific evidence, but they’ve become so prevalent that many people believe there must be something to them.
“To use the Great Pyramids in Egypt as an example, archaeologists have clearly shown how these structures fit in a broader tradition of smaller stone structures and earlier attempts at pyramid construction.
The building technology is impressive, but we don’t need to invoke aliens to explain it.
“Another popular notion is that professional archaeologists themselves are actively hiding the truth about the past.
“I’ve personally had people accuse me of being part of a widespread cover-up or conspiracy.
“This trope shows up again and again in pop culture through shows like ‘The X-Files’ or ‘Stargate’.”
Ancient Egypt: There is no evidence aliens helped build the pyramids
(Image: GETTY)
The archaeologist said conspiracy claims like the ones about the pyramids have a long history, dating as far back as 1911.
And he believes they have held strong for so long, particularly in contemporary times, because “pseudoscience” is easily bought by the public.
Dr Peeples said: “A lot of pseudoscientific ideas attempt to put on the trappings of science by using the jargon but completely ignore the scientific process of formal observation and evaluation.
“Plausible arguments need to be supported by evidence rather than simply asserted, and the methods and data used should be made available for scrutiny.”
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Zijn de piramides gebouwd door aliens? Documentaire over geheime Russische expeditie naar Egypte
Zijn de piramides gebouwd door aliens? Documentaire over geheime Russische expeditie naar Egypte
De Piramiden van Gizeh worden nog altijd omgeven door mysterie. Niemand kan met zekerheid zeggen hoe ze zijn gebouwd.
Volgens een populaire complottheorie hebben de oude Egyptenaren hulp gekregen van buitenaardsen.
In een documentaire uit 2001 claimtdr. Viktor Ivanovitsj Belenko, een voormalige Russische overheidswetenschapper, dat de KGB resten van aliens had gevonden in de Piramide van Cheops.
Een bezoek
Hij zei dat informatie hierover al in 1961 in de archieven van de KGB werd opgeslagen.
“Het historische en wetenschappelijke bewijs laat zien dat er zo’n 11.000 jaar voor Christus een bezoek is geweest,” klonk het.
Het verhaal over project ISIS, een geheime Russische expeditie naar Egypte in 1961, wordt voor het eerst genoemd in de documentaire The Secret KGB UFO Abduction Files, die werd uitgezonden door Sci-Fi (nu Syfy).
Bevestigd
Zwart-witbeelden tonen Sovjet-personeel dat de mummie van de vermeende alien uit een sarcofaag in een graftombe in Gizeh haalt. De beelden zouden afkomstig zijn uit het geheime archief van de KGB.
Hoewel niet bevestigd kan worden of het gaat om beelden van een mummie van een buitenaards wezen, claimde Sci-Fi dat de authenticiteit van de beelden is bevestigd door experts. De zender zei de beelden te hebben gekocht van anonieme Russische bronnen.
Militaire doeleinden
Project ISIS zou in 1961 zijn gelanceerd als reactie op berichten dat de Amerikanen toegang hadden gekregen tot geavanceerde buitenaardse technologie.
Belenko zei dat de Russen project ISIS waren gestart om buitenaardse technologie uit een geheime tombe op het Gizeh-plateau te halen voor militaire doeleinden.
It’s getting harder and harder to separate the alien spacecrafts and extraterrestrial orbs from the meteors, the secret military tests, the usual flares and Chinese lanterns and all of the other bright and unusual objects increasingly crowding our nighttime and even daytime skies. The latest example occurred this week in the air over Los Angeles on the night of the third and final supermoon of 2019 when thousands witnessed bright objects streaking across the sky that behaved nothing like the ones Californians are used to seeing, even without the aid of mind-altering substances. They became even more suspicious when officials quickly called their reports “bull.” Cover-up?
“A mysterious streak of light in the Los Angeles sky sent the imaginations of many onlookers over the moon.”
ABC News, along with other national, local, international and Internet news organizations were quick to report on the incident which occurred as night darkness approached on March 20. SyFyWire’s science writer and astronomer Phil Plait began receiving accounts and videos from the less imaginative wondering if the wandering fireballs were drunken meteors and, at first glance, Plait agreed.
“Apparently quite the meteor show over LA tonight! Looks like it skimmed through the upper atmosphere but I’m guessing. Waiting for more footage. It’s LA. There’ll be more footage.”
Those with better imaginations or better zoom lenses suspected flying humanoids, and it turns out they were closer to the truth. Tired of all of the emergency calls, the LA police and fire departments issued similar explanations.
“PSA: A meteor did not crash into Downtown Los Angeles, and no, it’s not an alien invasion…just a film shoot. This is Tinseltown after all.”
Were Los Angelenos witnessing the opening shots or battle scenes of the long-rumored Independence Day 3 sequel? If so, they will be disappointed, not just because a few measly little flaming humanoids would not be much of a blockbuster-worthy invasion but because this wasn’t a theatrical shoot but a commercial one. And yes, the elected officials who said “Bull!” were, for a change, telling the truth.
“As the third and final supermoon of 2019 rose over the iconic Los Angles skyline, the Red Bull Air Force – a team assembled from the most accomplished and experienced skydivers in the world – marked the occasion as only they can: springing into the air to get an up close and personal look at the phenomenon.”
Really? An energy drink promotion? Do we really need another “War of the Worlds” panic, a Phoenix Lights confusion, a Great Los Angeles Air Raid cover-up or a death-defying stunt just to sell more of a product that is already ubiquitous? Did it have to be tied to a supermoon – another over-hyped natural phenomenon that did not portend the apocalypse, much less an alien invasion, a new movie or an old product? Have we regressed from Mulder’s “I want to believe” back to Groucho’s “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
Are we really becoming this gullible? This fearful? This enslaved to advertising?
Asteroids were once the forgotten lesser members of the Solar System, far behind planets, moons, comets and meteorites. That changed as telescopes, especially orbiting ones, became stronger and space probes began visiting the asteroid belt instead of just passing through on their way to Jupiter and beyond. Now we’re suddenly finding out intimate details about the behavior of these space rocks and learning we’re much closer relatives that once thought. This past week brought the news that the asteroid Bennu has a weird and possibly disgusting habit of spitting out smaller rocks, while a piece of a meteorite found in Turkey has been identified as a chunk of the asteroid Vesta.
Asteroid 101955 Bennu was discovered on September 11, 1999, during a Near-Earth asteroid survey by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR). It’s roughly a smoothish sphere with a mean diameter of 492 m (1,614 ft; 0.306 mi). Because of its size and close proximity to Earth, Bennu was chosen as the destination for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to acquire and return samples from an asteroid. OSIRIS-Rex has been orbiting Bennu since December 3, 2018, and once it’s done mapping the surface it will land in July 2020, scoop up some material and return it to Earth in September 2023. Unless it gets hit by spitting rocks.
“(This) is probably the biggest surprise of the early stages of the OSIRIS-REx mission and, I would say, one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career.”
OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, announced the discovery at a news conference on March 19. It turns out Bennu is a rare ‘active’ asteroid that has been observed at least 11 times spewing bursts of surface particles numbering up to 100 per spit, with some measuring 10 cm (4 inches) or larger and traveling at a rate of 11 km/h or 7 mph. That could sting, although Lauretta, being your typical space scientist, thinks it’s cool.
“Basically, it looks like Bennu has a continuous population of particles raining down on it from discrete ejection events across its surface. This is incredibly exciting.”
And incredibly puzzling, since they’re not sure what is causing the spewing. While it doesn’t appear to be a danger to Bennu, it could be to Earth. The asteroid-lets may be causing an annual meteor shower in September in the Southern Hemisphere, which Lauretta says astronomers are now searching for.
Speaking of meteor showers, that takes us to Turkey, where in 2015 a three-foot meteor burst into pieces near Sariçiçek. An amazing 343 chunks were recovered and researchers identified them as Howardites, an unusual type of meteorite believed to have come from the asteroid Vesta. Why Vesta? The brightest asteroid visible from Earth was hit by something 22 million years ago, creating a massive crater and knocking a huge amount of Vesta particles into space. When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta in July 2011 for a year, it studied what the 10 mile (17 km) wide Antonia crater and determined it was 22 million years old.
Vesta (Credit: NASA)
Still with me?
The Turkish researchers determined that the Howardite meteorite pieces were also 22 million years old. However, that wasn’t enough to connect the dots. That’s when they looked at the videos. Believe it or not, security cameras in Sariçiçek picked up the incoming meteor and gave them enough information to determine its trajectory, which they traced back to … get your eureka ready … the area in the sky where Vesta is located! Put it all together and they’re confident they’re holding a piece of the asteroid Vesta. All of this is published in the current edition of Meteoritics & Planetary Science.
That sound you hear is Turkish scientists yelling, “Eat our asteroid dust, OSIRIS-REx!”
This view of asteroid Bennu ejecting particles from its surface on Jan. 19 was created by combining two images taken by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Other image processing techniques were applied, such as cropping and adjusting the brightness and contrast of each image.
(NASA / Goddard / Univ. of Arizona / Lockheed Martin Photo)
Photographs are an amazing thing. We now take them for granted, but have you ever stopped to think about how incredible they truly are? They manage to freeze one moment in time forevermore, a peek at a split second in time that we can never get back, but which remains eternally etched upon that picture as if it never left. We have come a long way since the first attempts to capture images on film, and it is weird to think that less than 200 hundred years ago the thought of taking a picture of any kind was magic. How many scenes and images over human history have been lost to die with those who last saw them, before we had the capability of preserving them for all to see? Vast swaths of history have been visually lost to us, from a time before cameras and Instagram. Looking at old photographs can be a surreal experience, a step through time to another era, and here we will take a look at some major pioneering firsts in the world of pictures, a peek through the ages to another era.
When it comes to fascinating photographs of the past, perhaps it is best to start at the very beginning, with the first one ever taken, or at least the oldest surviving one. This particular picture was taken in around 1826, by inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, using a special, revolutionary method (for the time) that involved a pewter plate covered in an asphalt derivative. The process is though to have taken several days of exposure, and the result is a view out of a window at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, in a time long forgotten but forever preserved in this image.
The oldest surviving photograph
Moving on to other early firsts, we have the 1838 photograph taken by Louis Daguerre at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, France, at a place called the Place de la République, in what is thought to be the first photo ever taken of a human being. At the time, the process required at least 10 minutes of exposure to take a picture, meaning that human beings did not show up, and this was just a regular landscape photo for quite a long time until someone noticed that a human figure can be seen in the bottom left. It is believed that the unidentified man had been standing still for long enough to show up because he had been having his shoes shined. There is another blurry figure of a person that can be seen as well, although not nearly as clearly. Daguerre was actually the inventor of the device he used to take it, called a “daguerreotype,” which utilized silver plates and mercury fumes, and was used to take many of the earliest photos.
First photograph of a person. You can see him in the lower left.
From the following year, in 1839 we have what is considered to be the world’s first selfie, taken by a student in Pennsylvania named Robert Cornelius, who would also be instrumental in further refining and developing the daguerreotype. He tested it out by taking a photo of himself as he stood in front of a store front in Philadelphia, standing completely still for an estimated 10 to 15 minutes to capture this historic shot.
First selfie
Speaking of firsts, there is also the first photograph ever taken of a woman, a portrait taken by a Dr. John W. Draper of his sister, Dorothy Catherine Draper, at his New York studio in 1840. The photo looks like a pretty normal old-timey pic, but it is important to note that the subject had to keep completely still without even blinking for over a minute to achieve this.
First photograph of a woman
The oldest surviving photograph of a president was taken by daguerreotype in 1843, and shows the then former president John Quincy Adams approximately 14 years after his presidency had ended. The photograph was taken by Philip Hass, and although Adams was no longer in office at the time it is remarkable nonetheless.
First photo of an American president
The year 1845 saw more breakthroughs in photography when the French physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault managed to take the first ever photos of the sun. It is interesting to note that just 5 years before these same men had also been the first to take a photograph of the moon, from a rooftop observatory in New York. Also note that sunspots can even be observed in this photograph.
First photo of the sun
Another unique daguerreotype photograph is what is believed to be the first photo ever taken of New York City. The picture in question was taken in 1848 at Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and you can see that at the time it wasn’t nearly the big bustling metropolis we see today. There was another even older picture of New York, but it has been lost over the years, and so this is effectively the oldest.
First photo of New York City
There is also a very intriguing image taken in 1853 by a man named Solomon Nunes Carvalho at Big Timbers, Colorado. This photo would become part of the U.S. Library of Congress, and is thought to be the very first photograph taken of a Native American village. Most people only have the image of these places in their heads from Western movies and Cowboys and Indians shows, so to take a glimpse through time in this photo is fascinating to say the least, with even two Native American figures visible in the center left.
First photo of a Native American camp
Just less than a decade after this photo first, in 1860 there was taken the first aerial photo ever. Although we now take such pictures for granted, at the time it was unheard of, but James Wallace Black and Samuel Archer King managed to capture this image from 2,000 feet in the air, which shows Boston, Massachusetts at the time. There were earlier photos taken from hot air balloons, but they were lost and this is the earliest surviving one.
First aerial photograph
The very next year, in 1861, the first ever color photograph would be taken, by photographer Thomas Sutton. The technique used was first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, and he was the first to suggest that three light sources could be mixed and matched to achieve any desired color. Sutton used Maxwell’s advice and took three different black and white photos of a ribbon and used blue, red, and green filters on each one, after which he merged them into one image to create the first known color photograph, a truly revolutionary concept at the time.
First color photograph
At the start of the following decade, in 1870 another photographic milestone was reached when photographer Carol Popp de Szathmari took what is regarded as the very first photograph taken of a battle. The picture shows Prussian troops advancing against French defenders, and it is largely due to images like this that Szathmari is widely said to be the first war photographer.
First photo of a battle
The ensuing decades would bring some other photographic firsts, when in April of 1884 the first photo of a tornado was taken by an A.A. Adams in Garnett, Texas. Adams was lucky enough to be present or the tornado and to find a comfortable vantage point from around 14 miles away, standing by the United Presbyterian Church in Garnett where he went about capturing this historic and unique image.
First photo of a tornado
Finally we come to a whole new avenue of photography in the early years, that of underwater photography. This had long been seen as virtually impossible, but in 1926 National Geographic photographer Charles Martin, along with botanist William Longley, were in the Florida Keys trying out their new fancy equipment utilizing waterproof housing and a magnesium flash, when they managed to snap this pic of a hogfish off the Florida Keys. It may seem rather quaint in modern times, but this had never been done before, and stands as a testament to human ingenuity and remains a rather dramatic photographic first.
First underwater photograph
While we now take and share photographs instantaneously at a moment’s notice, it seems that we should sometimes take a step back and look at where it all began, to the time when this was extremely cutting edge science fiction stuff. Looking at these photos we are brought to another era in history, frozen there for all time. Even as we move into the future and the world changes, these moments will not, frozen there on film forevermore, and earning their place in history.
Just about everyone has heard of the Loch Ness Monster. You may be aware of some of the more well-known and famous cases. There are, however, aspects of Loch Ness’ long and strange history that you may not be aware of. So, I thought today I would share with you a few examples of some of the lesser known facts and tales concerning that huge body of water. One of the strangest storiesof paranormal weirdness at Loch Ness came from an acclaimed author on all manner of mysteries, Andrew Collins. As Christmas 1979 loomed, Collins – with colleagues Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman – spent a week in Scotland, investigating the Nessie enigma. It involved interviewing witnesses, spending time poring over old archives in Inverness’ library, and checking out the loch itself. It was while they were deep in the heart of their investigation that the trio uncovered a very weird story. Back in the early 18th century a young couple inexplicably vanished while riding a horse and trap near Loch End, on the south shores of Loch Ness. Rumors circulated that the pair was either murdered or abducted. And neither the horse nor the trap were ever seen again. It would have remained a complete mystery, were it not for one thing; a very uncanny thing.
A typical almshouse
More than one hundred years later, and at the height of tumultuous thunderstorm, a young man and woman walked into a local almshouse, inquiring if the priest that oversaw it would give them shelter for the night, which he did. The priest couldn’t fail to see that the pair was dressed in the kind of clothing that was popular around a century or so earlier. Plus, they seemed very confused, dazed and bewildered, and completely unable to explain where they were from. They remained in that odd, altered state for a couple of days, after which they simply walked out of the almshouse and were never seen again. When the story got out, however, several of the locals recalled old tales of the events of a century earlier, and the missing pair of young lovers. Was this, perhaps, a case of a slip in time having occurred? Did the couple vanish from the 18th century, only to briefly and incredibly manifest in the 19th? Or was the whole thing just an old legend that had endured? Take your pick. Moving on…
Alexander MacDonald made mention of Scottish lake monsters in his 1914 book, Story and song from Loch Ness-side, which was almost twenty years before the phenomenon of Nessie began. He said: “The fairy-lover in this story is identified in many parts of the Highlands with the water-kelpie, of which the conception that prevailed generally was one that inspired repulsiveness. There seems no getting away from the fact that, in the far back, obscure corridors of the past, came across the path of man as he slowly but diligently was making his way upward and onward.”
Four years later, Henry Cyril Dieckhoff revealed some interesting and eye-opening data in Mythological Beings in Gaelic Folklore, which was published by the Gaelic Society of Inverness. He was of the opinion that even though much of what had been written about Scotland’s supernatural kelpieswas clearly folkloric in nature, he solidly believed that the beasts had a basis in fact. It was his firm belief that the tales were specifically born out of a combination of inherited memory and oral lore of giant, violent creatures of an unknown kind that lived during the earliest years in which the Celts first appeared on the scene. It’s hardly surprising, then, that when the Nessie phenomenon hit the headlines in 1933, Diekhoff became a fervent follower of the mystery and an adherent of the theory that Loch Ness was the home of terrible monsters.
Then, there’s the possibility of the Nessies being supernatural in nature; maybe even paranormal shapeshifters. In 1880, Duncan MacDonald had a terrifying, eye to eye encounter with something that resembled a giant, goat-sized frog. A tusked beast was seen in the waters of the River Ness, in 1932, by a Miss K. MacDonald. Lieutenant McP Fordyce described seeing an animal that walked like an elephant, that looked like a combination of a “very large horse and a camel,” and which was shaggy in appearance. Arthur Grant’s sighting was of something more akin to a plesiosaur. Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer encountered a creature that had a jerky, wormy gait and which provoked both nightmares and what practically sounds like post-traumatic stress disorder. And, Hugh Gray photographed an animal with a beak-like, turtle-style head. Finally…
Aleister Crowley
Nineteen-seventy-one was the year in which Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page, purchased Aleister Crowley’s old abode, Boleskine House, which, for years, overlooked Loch Ness. Until, that is, December 2015. That was when it was almost destroyed in a fire. Ironically, for someone who was a major devotee and follower of the teachings of Crowley, Page actually spent very little time there. Boleskine House has had a long and turbulent history. Despite his lack of time spent at Crowley’s old home, Page certainly acknowledged that the entire place was saturated in high-strangeness. He acknowledged it had “bad vibes,” adding that, “A man was beheaded there and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down.” None of this kept Page away from the world of the occult. That much is evidenced by the fact that he later owned a famous London bookshop devoted to all things supernatural, paranormal, and esoteric. Its name: The Equinox. In addition, portions of Led Zepelin’s movie, The Song Remains the Same (released in 1976, but shot in 1973) were filmed on the grounds of Boleskine House. Page sold the creepy, old house in 1992.
Mystifying circular ‘hole in the sky’ over UAE could be a cloaked UFO
Mystifying circular ‘hole in the sky’ over UAE could be a cloaked UFO
United Arab Emirates citizens were left baffled after a mysterious 'whirlpool hole' suddenly appeared in the sky above the city of Al Ain this weekend. The large circular patch of clear sky emerged inside the otherwise heavy cloud near the border with Oman, as if somebody had punched a hole in the atmosphere.
Astronomer and meteorologist Ebrahim Al Jarwan posted a short video clip of the hole on Twitter, adding that the 'rare and beautiful' sight was referred to as a 'Fallstreak hole' or 'hole punch cloud'. Others pondered whether the strange phenomenon had been caused by an extra terrestrial UFO.
According to Gulfnews, meteorologists quickly cleared up the mystery with a scientific explanation for the mystifying hole. Aircraft punching through this cloud layer can cause air to expand and cool as it passes over the wings or propeller.
Although scientists have a clear explanation for the origins of the photogenic phenomenon, fallstreak holes are not widely known about because of their rarity.
We know that meteorologists always say that it is a hole punch or fallstreak hole caused by planes but I never have seen such holes are hexagonal formed. It looks like the sun reflects on the bottom of an solid object making it partially visible. Could it be a UFO?
إبراهيم الجروان@ibrahimaljarwan
شوهدت هذه الظاهرة النادرة والجميلة صباح اليوم في مدينة العين
NASA is trying to explain this huge 3-5 mile UFO as an explosion over the Bering Sea this week. I guess NASA couldn't think up a better excuse for this large UFO over the ocean. Surly they did it because they knew that it was seen on world wide radars and weather satellites, so they made up the excuse its a meteor. If you think about it, any 3 mile craft coming through our atmosphere at high speed would leave a bit of trail behind it, heating up the air. So, I just can't buy the NASA excuse of it being a meteor. Look at the UFO photo. Does it look like an explosion? Not really. But it does look like a 3 mile UFO that is lowering itself below the waters surface. I bet if ships were sent out there to investigate, they will find that as they approach the location, their electrical instruments will begin to go haywire and malfunction until further from the location.
They also said it released 173 kilotons of energy. Thats 10X more that the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. And yet, we only see an area of 3 miles? If it was 10X the Hiroshima bomb, we would see a 30-60 mile radius explosion, but we don't.
This UFO was seen over Mersey, England two days ago. The eyewitness took the photo and posted it to Reddit to share with others interested in UFOs. If you look carefully you will see not one, but three cloaked UFO using clouds to hide in. The third UFO cloud is seen in the far distance directly below the large one. Its a well known fact that UFOs do create clouds to hide within and they can even contain the cloud around the ship so it doesn't fly off with the wind...probably keeping the cloud within a forcefield around the UFO itself. Scott C. Waring
Two days people in many cities in China saw something during sunset that took them by surprise...the figure of a naked woman kneeling in the sky. Here is a fact many people don't know...that aliens visualise in such detail that sometimes their mere thoughts cause nearby clouds to take those shapes. Some call it Telekinesis others call it Psychokinesis...moving objects with your mind. Using thoughts only to control the movement of things around you. Aliens however often have a mind so powerful that they themselves don't even know that they are creating some of these cloud formations. They may just be thinking about a distant memory of their past and all the while a cloud near the alien UFO or base will take the shape of the persons figure, face or silhouette. It looks like this alien had a very happy memory of a very beautiful woman. This planet we live on...we share it. Scott C. Waring
AFPSatellietbeeld van de grote meteoor en het punt van explosie.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Een metersgrote meteoor - waarbij wel tien keer meer energie vrijkwam dan bij de atoombom die op Hiroshima werd gegooid - is door onze dampkring geraasd. Maar bijna niemand die de explosieve vuurbal zag. Tot nu, op satellietbeeld althans. De Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA, dat eerder deze week de passage van de meteoor eind vorig jaar heeft onthuld, heeft nu ook foto’s vrijgegeven.
Volgens NASA explodeerde de grote metoor op 18 december 2018 boven de aarde. De knal was de een-na-grootste in de afgelopen dertig jaar en de grootste sinds de explosie van een meteoor boven het Russische Tsjeljabinsk in februari 2013. Dat bijna niemand het zag gebeuren komt omdat de knal plaatsvond boven de Beringzee in het oosten van Rusland, op honderden kilometers van de kust.
Op de vandaag gedeelde beelden is de schaduw van de weg die de meteoor aflegt op de wolken, alsook de explosie, te zien. De beelden zijn geschoten door de satelliet Tera.
Lindley Johnson vertelt namens NASA dat een vuurbal van deze grootte per honderd jaar maar twee of drie keer voorkomt. De bewuste meteoor had een omvang van enkele meters en raasde met 32 kilometer per seconde (ruim 115.000 kilometer per uur) door de dampkring. Het gesteente knalde op 25,6 kilometer hoogte uit elkaar met een kracht van 173 kiloton TNT (met TNT wordt de kracht van een explosie uitgedrukt).
AFPDe Tera-satelliet kon de meteoor spotten.
Tsjeljabinsk
“Dat is veertig procent van de energie die vrijkwam bij de explosie boven Tsjeljabinsk (460 kiloton TNT)’’, zegt Kelly Fast van NASA. Die ontploffing boven de Russische Oeral was toen zo hevig dat de schokgolf twee keer de aarde rondging. Meer dan 1.500 mensen raakten gewond omdat door de drukgolf ramen sprongen en daken beschadigd raakten.
“Gelukkig vond de explosie nu plaats boven water”, aldus Fast. “Er is dan ook gelukkig veel water op onze planeet.”
Screenshot YouTubeDe meteoor die een enorme explosie veroorzaakte nabij het Russische Tsjeljabinsk.
NASA Earth✔@NASAEarth
·
Did you miss the meteor spotted over the Bering Sea in December 2018? Don’t worry — our satellite saw it! The MODIS instrument on @NASA's Terra satellite caught this view of the meteor’s shadow, visible as the gray streak above the clouds .https://go.nasa.gov/2Jx7tGX
NASA Earth✔@NASAEarth
The MISR instrument, also on Terra , saw the large "fireball" — the term used for exceptionally bright meteors that are visible over a wide area — as it exploded about 16 miles above the Bering Sea, far enough way to pose no threat. pic.twitter.com/lyjyZKBZOm
This image sequence from the MISR instrument, aboard the Terra satellite, was taken a few minutes after a meteor exploded over the Bering Sea on Dec. 18. 2018. It shows the shadow of the meteor's trail, and the orange-tinted cloud it left behind.
Students of computer history know mathematician John von Neumann was key in the development of early digital computers and algorithms. Students of atomic history know von Neumann was involved with the Manhattan Project. Students of both science and science fiction history know he developed the theory of the self-replicating machine (also known as the universal constructor) which makes exact copies of itself which then make exact copies of themselves ad infinitum, or at least until the raw materials give out. John von Neumann died in 1957, but his work lives on today, as evidenced by a new paper which claims that the reason why we don’t see self-replicating interstellar probes from advanced alien civilizations – an idea many Earthlings also believe is the best way to explore space – is because their algorithms develop flaws that eventually turn them into predatory cannibals that cause their own extinction. Really? Would Von Neumann agree? How about Fermi? Asimov?
John von Neumann
“The concept of a rapid spread of self-replicating interstellar probes (SRPs) throughout the Milky Way adds considerable strength to Fermi’s Paradox. A single civilisation creating a single SRP is sufficient for a fleet of SRPs to grow and explore the entire Galaxy on timescales much shorter than the age of the Earth – so why do we see no signs of such probes? One solution to this Paradox suggests that self-replicating probes eventually undergo replication errors and evolve into predator-prey populations, reducing the total number of probes and removing them from our view.”
Duncan H. Forgan invokes both John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi in his new study, “Predator-Prey Behaviour in Self-Replicating Interstellar Probes” which will be published soon in the International Journal of Astrobiology and was recently reviewed in Cosmos magazine. Forgan, a research fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, starts with the Fermi paradox (if there are billions of stars offering the possibility of billions of civilizations, why haven’t we seen a single one?) and applies it to von Neumann-style self-replicating space probes.
“Such a probe would be able to produce a copy every time it visits a new star system. As each copy makes copies, the number of self-replicating probes (SRPs) grows exponentially, and every star in the Milky Way is explored on a timescale much, much shorter than its age. Estimates for this exploration timescale vary, but are as short as ten million years (Nicholson & Forgan, 2013), and perhaps shorter still. Given that this timescale is much shorter than the age of the Earth, and only one ETI constructing SRPs is sufficient to produce this scenario, on balance we should expect to see an interstellar probe orbiting the Sun. And yet, we do not. How can this be resolved?”
Yeah, how? Forgan’s answer starts with the potential for encoding errors by the probes’ creators which, over time, could cause the breakdown of the probes and end their trips. A more interesting (and better for a sci-fi movie) scenario is that the error causes the probes to notice that it would be far easier and faster to gather parts from its own copies. As the clones become both self-predators and self-prey, they could eventually self-cannibalize themselves into self-extinction with nothing left to show for their existence but selfies.
Mmmm … dinner.
Forgan’s theory assumes that the advanced civilization which created the von Neumann machines was not sharp enough to make them perfect and not moral enough to ponder the negative consequences of sending them out into space to potentially attack other civilizations for cloning materials and decide it wasn’t worth the negative galactic publicity and cancel their creation. It also assumes that the last replicator standing wouldn’t find raw materials on a planet or asteroid, build more clones and start the process again. He does admit that some cloned replicating probes could escape before being eaten, but they would have the error in their software and would eventually succumb to cannibalism and self-destruction.
Does this explain why we’ve never seen any von Neumann-style self-replicating probes from other civilizations? That was one of the many theories bounced around when ‘Oumuamua passed through the solar system, but it didn’t stay and didn’t seem to make any copies. Or did it? If its program is flawed, how would we know?
Sic-fi movie plot or plausible explanation for the machine version of the Fermi paradox. Whatever you decide, don’t blame von Neumann.
Remember in those literally dozens of science fiction stories where AI turned against its human creators after being armed with the most cutting edge weapons humanity possesses? Even Frankenstein, one of the most well-known horror stories of all time, is in many ways about humans reaching too high with our creation. Well, it seems nobody at the Air Force has seen or read a single one of them, because it turns out the Air Force wants to do exactly what so many tales have warned against for centuries: arm the robots.
YOUTUBE
The Pentagon is building a pilot's little helper.
According to a report published by Military.com, the Air Force is training AI to fly its most advanced unmanned aerial vehicles and potentially serve as assistants to human pilots in other aircraft. The system is called Skyborg, of course, and is being developed by the Air Force Research Lab to fly the XQ-58A Valkyrie stealth drone as well as the QF-16, a full-scale unmanned version of the F-16. Ultimately, the goal is to have a fully-capable AI assistant in the cockpit that can respond to natural language and even control various aircraft if Air Force pilots ever needed it to.
Skyborg version 1.0 didn’t impress Air Force brass quite like the engineers had hoped.
The Air Force wants Skyborg to work across multiple aircraft platforms and essentially be a ‘hive mind’ which can access and share the collected knowledge and data of the entire Air Force. Yeah, I know, I remember that awful movie too, and that was way back in 2005. Just think of how more advanced and terrifying the AI of today is.
Dr. Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, says the Skyborg program is all about maintaining that coveted American air superiority in the age of AI. Skyborg-equipped aircraft could theoretically react to changing battlefield conditions more quickly than a human can, deploying weapons or executing aerial maneuvers almost instantly. “Imagine having trained person after person, generation after generation … what if, once you get on the curve, what if it’s exponential? And whoever gets on it first has an advantage forever?” Roper says. “I don’t want China on that curve, I want us on that curve, and us accelerating ahead of the pack.”
An unmanned QF-16 used for target practice.
Roper then actually added “you can’t spell Air Force without A [and] I,” and presumably threw up in his own mouth from the stress of holding that joke in throughout the entire interview. He’s probably been carrying that one around inside for weeks.
Will Skyborg inevitably become Skynet, or will this pan out to be merely the Air Force’s equivalent of Alexa for the cockpit?
A disturbing new report indicates a U.S. Government agency’s involvement in a bizarre array of tests, which were conducted on cats and dogs purchased from what the story calls “Asian meat markets.”
According to the NBC report, the remains of hundreds of dogs and cats were purchased by the U.S. Government, for use with experiments that occurred in Maryland at the U.S. Department of Agriculture lab. Part of the testing included “feeding dog remains to cats and injecting cat remains into mice,” the report states.
The investigation was carried out by the White Coat Waste Project, a group who describes itself as “a taxpayer watchdog group representing more than 2 million liberty-lovers and animal-lovers who all agree: taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay over $15 billion every year for wasteful and cruel experiments on dogs, cats, monkeys and other animals.”
Although the Department of Agriculture research only recently became public knowledge following an NBC story based on White Coast Waste’s report, the testing appears to have occurred between 2003 and 2015, and was aimed at attempting to study the parasite behind toxoplasmosis, a food-borne illness.
However, the new revelations are particularly concerning since some of the animals acquired for tests carried out in the recent Department of Agriculture studies came from markets condemned by Congress in a 2018 House Resolution, according to the White Coat Waste report.
Several U.S. politicians spoke out in condemnation of the tests. “We can advance scientific discovery while treating animals humanely, and American taxpayers have every right to expect our government will meet that standard,” said Jeff Merkley, a Democratic Senator in Oregon.
Sadly, the explosive White Coat Waste report is not the only one of its kind which indicates such concerning behavior by government agencies. Over the course of the last several decades, there have been numerous examples of bizarre testing carried out on animals which raised ethical questions. Too many to name, in fact… although a few noteworthy examples (which might at least be on par with the “cat cannibalism” discussed in the recent NBC report) do exist.
The well-known and oft-cited tale of “acoustic kitty” is high on the list of wasteful government spending projects that also involved questionable treatment of animals. This incident, which I recounted previously here at MU, involved a Cold War-era CIA project that produced a bizarre surveillance system that was built into a house cat, which included antennae fittings within the creature’s tail, as well as hidden battery compartments and microphones. The cat was released outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., where it was deployed to monitor a conversation taking place in a park nearby. The cat was struck by a car and killed within minutes of being released; additional attempts at field testing “acoustic kitties” were not carried out.
There are still some varieties of “militarized” animal testing that occur today, although in far less ethically questionable forms. Just last year, a report revealed that DARPA hoped to find ways of genetically engineering various aquatic species for use in future surveillance programs. Much like the recent White Coat Waste project report, questions have been raised about the long term concerns pertaining to genetically modified organisms, as well as the fact that taxpayer money has been used to support such programs.
It is believed that an estimated 4000 cats may have been killed over the course of the 12 years the Department of Agriculture’s studies were undertaken. Based on previous statements made by the USDA, the agency has apparently defended the studies as “life-saving research,” although White Coat Waste argues that it was unnecessary and wasteful spending of U.S. taxpayer dollars.
The Secret Space Program GARY MCKINNON 1st interview in years by Richard Dolan
The Secret Space Program GARY MCKINNON 1st interview in years by Richard Dolan
UK citizen Gary McKinnon is the most famous UFO "hacker" of all time. Arrested in 2002, he was in danger of extradition to the US for ten years.
What he found was apparent evidence of a secret space program, including references to "non-terrestrial officers" and ship to ship transfers of vessels not in the U.S. military inventory.
Moreover, a high-resolution photograph, taken from space, of a smooth, cigar-shaped craft. Gary also talks about the repercussions of being sought by the U.S. government, his depression, suicidal thoughts, and more.
Richard Dolan who interviews Gary is one of the world’s leading researchers and writers on the subject of UFOs and believes that they constitute the greatest mystery of our time.
Back in 2016, the physicist Stephen Hawking and the billionaire Yuri Milner unveiled a plan to travel to the stars. The so-called Breakthrough Starshot project is a $100 million program to develop and demonstrate the technologies necessary to visit a nearby star system. Potential targets include Proxima Centauri, a system some four light-years away with several exoplanets, including one Earth-like body orbiting in the habitable zone.
This visualization shows two merging black holes, whose great speed could provide a boost to laser light swinging around them.
Hawking and Milner’s plan was to build thousands of tiny spacecraft the size of microchips and use light to accelerate them to a relativistic speed—one this close to the speed of light. The large number increases the chances that at least one would arrive safely. Each “starchip” would be attached to a light sail the size of a badminton court and then zapped with hugely powerful ground-based lasers.
Laser propulsion has various advantages. The most significant is that the spacecraft need not carry any fuel, vastly reducing their mass. It should also be capable of accelerating the light sails to a velocity of up to 20% the speed of light. At that rate, a starchip would arrive at Proxima Centauri in less than 30 years.
The fantastically powerful lasers required for such a mission will be particularly difficult and expensive to develop. And that raises an obvious question: is there any other way to reach relativistic speeds?
Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of the David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York. Kipping has come up with a novel form of gravitational slingshot, the same technique that NASA has used, for example, to send the Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter. The idea is to accelerate a spacecraft by sending it skimming past a massive object such as a planet. In this way, the spacecraft steals some velocity from the movement of the planet, propelling it on its journey.
Gravitational slingshots work best around hugely massive bodies. In the 1960s, the physicist Freeman Dyson calculated that a black hole could accelerate a spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But the forces on the spacecraft as it approached such an object would be likely to destroy it.
So Kipping has come up with a clever alternative. His idea is to send photons around a black hole and then use the extra energy they gain to accelerate a light sail. “Kinetic energy from the black hole is transferred to the beam of light as a blueshift and upon return the recycled photons not only accelerate, but also add energy to, the spacecraft,” says Kipping.
The process depends on the hugely powerful gravitational field around a black hole. Because photons have a small but measurable rest mass, this field can trap light in a circular orbit.
Kipping’s work is based on a slightly different orbit that steers a photon emitted from a spacecraft around the black hole and back to the spacecraft—a kind of boomerang orbit. During this journey, the boomerang photons gain kinetic energy from the motion of the black hole.
It is this energy that can accelerate a spacecraft fitted with an appropriate light sail. Kipping calls this a “halo drive.” “The halo drive transfers kinetic energy from the moving black hole to the spacecraft by way of a gravitational assist,” says Kipping, pointing out that the spacecraft does not use up any fuel of its own in the process.
Since the halo drive exploits the movement of a black hole, it is best applied to binary systems in which a black hole is orbiting another object. The photons then gain energy from the movement of the black hole at appropriate points in its orbit.
And the drive should work for any mass that is significantly smaller than the black hole. Kipping says this could allow planet-size vehicles. So a sufficiently advanced civilization could travel at relativistic speeds from one part of the galaxy to another by hopping from one black-hole binary system to another. “An advanced civilization might utilize the light sailing concept to conduct relativistic and extremely efficient propulsion,” he says.
The same mechanism can also decelerate spacecraft. So this advanced civilization would probably look for pairs of binary black-hole systems to act as accelerators and decelerators.
The Milky Way contains around 10 billion binary black-hole systems. But Kipping points out that there are likely to be just a limited number of trajectories that link them together, so these interstellar highways are likely to be valuable regions.
Of course, the technology to exploit this concept is well beyond humanity’s capability at the moment. But astronomers ought to be able to work out where the best interstellar highways lie and then look for the techno-signatures of civilizations that might be exploiting them.
All that sounds like good fun, and critics might argue that it is little more than fodder for science fiction fans. Perhaps.
But the starchip concept has been discussed for decades, usually on the fringes of science. In the wake of Hawking and Milner’s announcement, the project has suddenly gained legs. Indeed, the first starchip technologies have already been tested in low Earth orbit and the first mission penciled in for around 2036, at a cost of $5 to $10 billion.
That’s an ambitious goal, but even allowing for various delays, interstellar travel is likely to be possible within a hundred years of humanity’s first forays into space. That’s rapid progress. And it suggests that any civilization with even a small head start on us could have made significantly larger strides.
Ref:arxiv.org/abs/1903.03423 : The Halo Drive: Fuel-Free Relativistic Propulsion of Large Masses Via Recycled Boomerang Photons
Met een halo drive kun je ruimteschepen ter grootte van een planeet aandrijven. Deze astronoom legt uit hoe het werkt
Met een halo drive kun je ruimteschepen ter grootte van een planeet aandrijven. Deze astronoom legt uit hoe het werkt
Je hoort wetenschappers vaak zeggen dat aliens onze planeet niet kunnen bereiken vanwege de enorm afstanden die ze dan zouden moeten overbruggen.
Een astronoom van de Columbia University in New York lijkt nu een oplossing voor dit probleem te hebben bedacht.
David Kipping zegt dat je ruimteschepen ter grootte van een planeet kunt aandrijven met behulp van een zogeheten ‘halo drive’ die werkt op basis van de extreme zwaartekrachtsgolven in zwarte gaten.
Katapulteren
Het is dan niet langer mogelijk dat de brandstof opraakt, aldus Kipping.
De astronoom liet zich inspireren door het werk van de 95-jarige natuurkundige Freeman Dyson.
Dyson stelde voor om ruimteschepen als het ware te katapulteren bij enorme planeten of zwarte gaten, door gebruik te maken van de zwaartekrachtsgolven.
Versnellen
Toen NASA de Voyager en Galileo naar Jupiter stuurde, bleken de onbemande sondes te versnellen dankzij de enorme omvang van de planeet en de snelheid waarmee hij om de zon draait: 13,1 kilometer per seconde.
Je hoeft volgens Kipping niet eens met je ruimteschip in de buurt van een zwart gat of enorme planeet te vliegen.
Laser
Je stuurt fotonen of lichtdeeltjes met behulp van een laser naar bijvoorbeeld een zwart gat en gebruikt ze bij terugkeer, als ze geladen zijn, om het schip aan te drijven.
Met een lichtzeil kun je op deze manier zelfs de grootste ruimteschepen voortbewegen zonder dat je brandstof nodig hebt, stelt Kipping.
Deze technologie zou de schepen in staat stellen snelheden te bereiken die dicht in de buurt van de lichtsnelheid komen.
In onderstaand filmpje bespreekt hij de halo drive:
Flat Earthers plannen cruise naar Antarctica om ‘einde van de wereld’ te bereiken. Komen ze van een koude kermis thuis?
Flat Earthers plannen cruise naar Antarctica om ‘einde van de wereld’ te bereiken. Komen ze van een koude kermis thuis?
Er is momenteel veel aandacht in de media voor een expeditie naar ‘het einde van de wereld’ van Flat Earthers, mensen die geloven dat de aarde plat is.
Ze willen afreizen naar Antarctica om ‘eens en voor altijd’ te bewijzen dat de planeet niet bolvormig is, meldt Forbes.
De Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) organiseert ergens in 2020 een cruise naar het continent.
Navigatie
Experts hebben erop gewezen dat de navigatie van een cruiseschip is gebaseerd op de aanname dat de aarde rond is.
GPS maakt gebruik van een netwerk van satellieten die ronde aarde draaien.
Henk Keijer, een Nederlandse oud-kapitein, legde aan The Guardian uit: “De reden dat er 24 satellieten gebruikt worden bij navigatie, is dat de aarde rond is.”
“Er zijn minimaal drie satellieten nodig om de positie van één schip te bepalen,” zei hij. “Maar als iemand aan de andere kant van de wereld zijn positie wil weten, moeten daar ook weer een aantal satellieten voor gebruikt worden.”
Logan Paul
“Als de aarde plat was, zouden drie satellieten genoeg zijn geweest,” klonk het. “Maar drie is niet genoeg, omdat de aarde rond is.”
Keijer: “Ik heb ongeveer twee miljoen keer gevaren en heb nog geen enkele kapitein ontmoet die gelooft dat de aarde plat is.”
Tijdens een recente Flath Earth International Conference in de Verenigde Staten dook opeens YouTube-ster Logan Paul op.
De muur
Hij maakte de nieuwe documentaire ‘The Flat Earth: to the Edge and Back’, een zoektocht naar de ‘rand van de wereld’ op de Zuidpool.
In de trailer van de film, die al 1,8 miljoen keer is bekeken, geeft hij toe een Flat Earther te zijn en zegt hij als eerste ‘de muur’ te willen bereiken.
Overigens gaat de mythevorming rond Nibiru nog veel verder. Op een religieus getinte website wordt bijvoorbeeld haarfijn uit de doeken gedaan hoe het zit met de samenleving op de planeet. Nibiru zou niet alleen een soort planeet zijn, maar ook een ruimteschip: het kan alle uithoeken van het heelal bezoeken. Anu is de patriarch van de familie die momenteel heerst over Nibiru.
Dit alles is weer relevant omdat ufoloog Scott Waring nu ook met beelden en een verhaal komt dat vergelijkbaar is met het verhaal in Trouw destijds.
Het gaat om de volgende afbeelding die afkomstig is van één van de NASA ruimtetelescopen.
Een enorm ruimteschip bracht vandaag een bezoek aan onze zon. Dit schip heeft een afmeting van ongeveer 15 keer groter dan onze aarde. Dus, ik durf te wedden dat de Amerikaanse regering en NASA hier al vanaf weten.
Ze zullen deze informatie natuurlijk nooit van z'n leven delen met het publiek. Ze willen de bevolking in angst houden, zodat zij gemakkelijker in staat zijn om deze te controleren.
Ik denk dat dit enorme ruimteschip de legendarische Planeet X is, ook wel Nibiru genoemd.
Het is een ruimteschip ter grootte van een planeet die iedere 15 tot 20.000 jaar ons zonnestelsel bezoekt. Ze komen alleen wanneer ze willen en hoe ze willen.
Wanneer ze weer verschijnen, dan doen ze dat om gegevens te verzamelen over de evolutie van de mensheid op aarde. Ze zullen DNA analyseren en waar nodig aanpassingen maken en ze gaan zelfs zover dat ze bepaalde soorten wereldwijd misschien zullen uitroeien. Ja, ik bedoel de dinosaurussen.
Dus, de vraag is wat ze in de buurt van onze zon doen, tenzij de zon hol is zoals ik eerder heb gezegd. Ik vind het vreemd dat van alle zonneobservatoria op aarde niet één melding heeft gemaakt van bovenstaande.
Hoewel, dat is natuurlijk ook weer niet vreemd als je beseft dat 99 procent van die observatoria geld krijgt van NASA en alles via die organisatie loopt voordat het mag worden vrijgegeven.
Strange Moon Anomalies - No One is Talking About These Lunar Oddities
Strange Moon Anomalies - No One is Talking About These Lunar Oddities
What is actually happening on the moon that no one has yet revealed?What is going on under that familiar crater-scarred surface?
Ever since the first measurements were made with the Passive Seismic Experiment instruments that were placed on the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission it’s been suspected by a few open-minded thinkers that our natural satellite could have an empty interior.
David Adair answer all these questions and more on our exploration of Earth’s very first satellite and the experts that maintain that the moon is definitely, absolutely, without a doubt, not what it seems.
“It wasn’t until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right”
Damian Robinson
Ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote extensively about the boat during his travels to Egypt in 450BC.
In his magnum-opus – Historia – he described how the barge used sails made of papyrus, had a mast made of acacia wood and used a rudder that passed through a hole in the keel.
Until recently, however, modern-day historians were unsure whether the boat even existed.
That belief was shattered when the ship was discovered in the now-sunken port city of Thonis-Hercaleion, located off the Egyptian coast.
MYSTERIOUS: The barge once sailed along the River Nile thousands of years ago (Pic: GETTY/ HILTI FOUNDATION )RELATED ARTICLES
FOUND: The ancient ship was located thousands of years after it was mentioned in texts (Pic: HILTI FOUNDATION )
While the boats were found in 2000, it wasn’t until recently it was discovered they matched Herodotus’s descriptions.
Damian Robinson, director of Oxford University’s centre for maritime archaeology, told The Guardian: “It wasn’t until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right. What Herodotus described was what we were looking at.”
The barges were used to transport goods and soldiers along the Nile river.
Mr Robinson continued: “The one from Thonis–Heracleion was also likely involved in moving goods to and from the emporium.
EGYPT: Herodotus journeyed to the African country in 450BC (Pic: GETTY)
HERODOTUS: The historian documented the vessel during his travels (Pic: GETTY)RELATED ARTICLES
ADVANCED: Some people believe ancient Egyptian monuments were made by aliens (Pic: GETTY)
“Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs. Nobody really knew what that meant.
“That structure has never been seen archaeologically before. Then, we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying.”
During its golden age, ancient Egypt was one of the most advanced civilisations on Earth.
Herodotus, the man referred to by the Roman orator Cicero as “The Father of History”(and who are we to argue with Cicero?), wrote in 440 BCE what is considered to be the founding work of history in Western literature — The Histories. In that book, Herodotus mentions a strange and mysterious river boat he saw in Egypt called a “baris” – strange because the extremely long boat had one rudder that passed through a hole in the keel, and mysterious because no one else in recorded history has ever seen one since … until now. Underwater archeologists excavating the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion in Abu Qir Bay near Alexandria have discovered the wreck of a long boat that meets the description by Herodotus, restoring faith in the writings of the historian and the endorsement by Cicero.
“(The builders) cut planks two cubits long [100 cm or 40 inches] and arrange them like bricks. On the strong and long tenons [pieces of wood] they insert two-cubit planks. When they have built their ship in this way, they stretch beams over them… They obturate the seams from within with papyrus. There is one rudder, passing through a hole in the keel. The mast is of acacia and the sails of papyrus…”
Title page of Herodotus’ The Histories
With that excellent account of the building of one of these 92 foot (28 meters) barges, archaeologists have long known what to look for … they just never found an Egyptian baris, whole or wrecked. Their luck changed in 2000 with the discovery by French archaeologist Franck Goddio of the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion (the former is its Egyptian name, the latter Roman) in the bay of the Canopic Mouth of the Nile, 2.5 miles off the coast. Since then, over 70 ships have been found in the area and given numbers. Archeologists noticed that Ship 17, with over 70 % of its original hull intact, had an unusual arrangement of planks that no one had ever seen before.
“Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs. Nobody really knew what that meant. … That structure’s never been seen archaeologically before. Then, we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying.”
Damian Robinson, the director of Oxford University’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology, said this in an interview with The Guardian about the recent release of a paper by Alexander Belov, an archaeologist and shipwreck specialist who worked with Franck Goddio, entitled “Ship 17: A Baris From Thonis-Heracleion.” Robinson believes the baris was used on the Nile to move imports from Greece and Persia and Egyptian exports of grain and salt.
Even though his writings have generally been proven to be historically accurate, Herodotus has often been criticized as being just an entertaining but not always factual historian. This discovery helps his reputation and also gives a little vindication to his promoter Cicero, who was killed, beheaded, mutilated and disparaged for his opposition to Mark Antony.
Anjouan is a remote tropical island in the Indian Ocean that’s making headlines for being the location of one of the biggest geological mysteries of all time. The small island, which is located between Madagascar and the east coast of Africa, is 163 square miles, has lots of vegetation and has a population of approximately 277,000 people. Anjouan, which is one of the Comoro Islands, was created 4 million years ago from undersea volcanoes and has steep, mountainous terrain as well as beaches containing black sand.
Since the island was formed by volcanoes, it consists of a lava-derived rock called basalt, but that’s not all. There are sedimentary rocks which are lighter in color that are found all over the island and should not be there as they aren’t part of the volcanic rock that formed this island millions of years ago. The rocks are made from a type of sandstone called quartzite.
Cornelia Class, who is a geochemist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said, “It doesn’t look like anything that could have formed on an island like that,” adding, “There is nothing there that could form a quartzite.”
Quartzite
Class led an expedition to the island in order to further research the rocks and found that there was much more quartzite than expected as it made up nearly half of a mountain. The scientists searched around the town of Tsembehou and found large boulders of quartzite. Then they climbed up a ridge called Habakari N’gani and found that the top was made almost entirely of the substance. Some locals use the quartzite to sharpen knives, as pieces of it have made their way to the villages by travelling down rivers and stream beds.
Sometimes crust ends up in the ocean after breaking off of a continent, and since quartzite comes from continental crust, it somehow must have made its way into the ocean basin and was lifted up with the volcanic rock to form the island.
There is still much more research that needs to be done in order to explain how the quartzite ended up on a volcanically made island. First, the researchers need to find out how old the quartzite is and find out where exactly it originated from. While Class thinks that it originated from Madagascar or East Africa, the substance needs to be studied much more thoroughly to find out for sure. She also said that additional geochemical measurements of the volcanic rocks need to be conducted in hopes of figuring out the geological history of the island.
Anjouan Island
This is definitely an interesting and mysterious find, “This is what nature presents, sometimes,” Class stated, “It’s something we consider impossible, but then we find it, and once we find it, we have to explain it.”
Retired Air Force intelligence officer George Filer will discuss his experiences onboard an aircraft tanker over the UK when he and his crew were asked to check out a UFO on radar. Later, while serving at Ft. Dix, he was asked to brief generals on an incident involving the shooting of an alien that had landed its craft on their runway. George Filer is a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer. He is now a MUFON regional director and produces a weekly UFO newsletter called Filer’s Files.
New UFO video filmed in Edirne, Turkey on 17th March 2019.
Witness report:
I am doing astrophotography as an amateur.I saw an object on the moon when I prepared my equipment for the moon shot.got it on record very quickly.At 6 seconds, my computer is locked because there is no more space.I thought it was the space station pass that day, but it wasn’t at that hour.I hesitated and sent it to you..Thank You.
My equipment
Celestron Avx mount Meade 6000 80mm Apo Telescope Qhy5-iii 174mm camera SharpCap 3.1 File type:Ser
The U.S. Department of Defense wants to test a directed energy weapon in space, one that it hopes will someday destroy ballistic missiles moments after launch. The weapon, a so-called neutral particle beam, would be boosted into space and tested from orbit in 2023.
Neutral particle beams don’t get as much attention as lasers but are attractive in their own right. The weapons work by accelerating particles without an electric charge—particularly neutrons—to speeds close to the speed of light and directing them against a target. The neutrons knock protons out of the nuclei of other particles they encounter, generating heat on the target object.
Promo for the 1953 movie "The War of the World", which featured alien invaders with heat rays.
MOVIE POSTER IMAGE ARTGETTY IMAGES
Particle beams are effectively the “heat rays” or even “death rays” of science fiction. Unlike lasers, which burn the surface of a target, particle beams penetrate beyond the surface to affect its interior. This makes particle beams immune to measures that can deflect lasers, like brightly polished, mirror-like surfaces. A sufficiently powerful beam could generate enough heat to burn a target, igniting its fuel supply, melting it and rendering it aerodynamically unstable, or frying a missile’s onboard electronics.
A neutral particle beam requires an accelerator to produce the atomic or subatomic particles that make up the beam. The accelerator must produce a tremendous amount of particles in very short amount of time, then release them in a focused beam. A weaponized neutral particle beam would also need a power supply, a power storage system, and staging system to feed energy to the accelerator. Finally it would require an aiming system and either onboard sensors or communications links allowing it to take targeting cues from other space or air-based sensors or a centralized battle management system.
A piece of aluminum burned by a ground test of the BEAR particle beam.
BETTMANNGETTY IMAGES
In 1989, as part of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) the U.S. launched a neutral particle beam accelerator into space aboard a rocket. The Beam Experiments Aboard Rocket (BEAR) project launched the accelerator from White Sands Missile Range to an altitude of 124 miles, where it successfully tested, “(neutral particle beam) propagation characteristics in space and the effects on spacecraft components.” The satellite was recovered intact after reentry.
According to DefenseOne, the Pentagon wants to test a neutral particle beam weapon from orbit in 2023. Officials believe technological advances over the past three decades make such a weapon more viable, especially the getting it small enough to launch into space part. Previous particle beam designs had large accelerators and power supplies, but officials believe they could probably design a weapon that could be launched into orbit. The Pentagon is holding the door open for the possibility such a system still isn’t doable, but is setting the goal for a 2023 test.
The Pentagon evidently hopes to use particle beams to destroy ballistic missiles for the so-called “boost phase intercept” missile defense role. Once launched, ballistic missiles swiftly accelerate through and beyond Earth’s atmosphere to low earth orbit. Once there, one or more individual warheads separate from the missile and then continue on their own trajectories to the same or separate targets.
Boost phase missile defense would target missile such as this North Korean Hwasong-14 moments after launch.
AFP CONTRIBUTORGETTY IMAGES
Boost phase missile defense calls for shooting down ballistic missiles seconds after launch, while they are still accelerating, and before they have released their warheads. This simplifies matters greatly for the defender but has a number of problems, particularly getting the interceptor close enough to enemy territory to hit the missiles in time. The Pentagon evidently believes that space-based directed energy weapons—like lasers or particle beams—could react fast enough to shoot down ballistic missiles in the boost phase.
Will it work? There are a lot of technical issues that need to be resolved to make space-based particle beams work. The neutral particle beam will need to hold a coherent beam over the 1,000 kilometers or so from low-earth orbit to the ground. The system will need a sufficiently portable power supply. The Pentagon will need to figure out how to detect a launching missile, pass the data to a satellite, and then have that satellite engage the missile. It will also have to figure out how many satellites it will need, and since objects in low-earth orbit do not remain stationary, will need a fleet of satellites to ensure that one or more will be over the target in the event of a launch. These are all issues Washington wrestled with in the 1980s—and then failed to deploy a usable system. Only time will tell if things are different this time around.
The stakes in the looming war in space keep getting higher and higher. This week, budget documents released by the Missile Defense Agency, or MDA show that the usual suspects in spooky weapons research are hard at work turning science fiction into reality by aiming to put a directed energy weapon in orbit. According to the proposed budget, the MDA wants the Pentagon to grant it $380 million in order to get a working “ Neutral Particle Beam” directed energy weapon in space by 2022. Why does the Pentagon want to put a particle beam in space?
For now, the beam’s intended purpose on paper is to shoot down enemy missiles. The Defense Department released documents this week outlining the Neutral Particle Beam’s budget along with the program’s aims. The documents state the Neutral Particle Beam is “a new directed energy capability to defeat the emerging threat” of ballistic missiles and is “a game changing space-based directed energy capability for strategic and regional missile defense.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office, Department of Energy, and the Air Force are all working collaboratively on the research and development of this new directed energy weapon. The ultimate plan is to “execute a directed energy kill chain; acquisition, tracking and lethality” using the Neutral Particle Beam.
I guess we may be in the future after all: the U.S. military industrial complex is working on putting a giant particle beam in space. While it’s objectively awesome, it’s pretty terrifying as well. The MDA’s request for a particle beam weapon comes just a few months after Chinese scientists announced plans for an allegedly peaceful solar-powered microwave energy beam in orbit. While that beam could theoretically be aimed at a collector below and converted into electricity, it could also likely melt other nation’s satellites or missiles in the process. Why not? Could it be used to burn whole swaths of the Earth at a time like a Bond villain’s superweapon? Is the Pentagon’s Neutral Particle Beam an effort to keep up with the Chinese and not allow a particle beam gap?
The whole document is worth a read and shows just what kind of threats these research agencies have to plan for each day. I found it interesting that in the MDA’s Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Estimate Overview section, the document states of course that the Neutral Particle Beam is only one of the new capabilities being tested for ballistic missile defense systems. Included in the MDA’s research are programs looking into “hypersonic defense technology” and “high-powered lasers” and as part of this research, the MDA is “conducting ground, airborne, and space-based technology experiments to track representative hypersonic threats.” Anyone who’s followed my research into mystery booms knows that I’ve been saying for years now that a large number of the booms are likely caused by military testing of new hypersonic aerospace and defense technologies. Could this tiny section of the MDA’s overview be in any way related to the mystery boom phenomenon?
The war for space weapon supremacy has been heating up in the last few years, and each of the world’s major space-faring superpowers has some form of ‘killer’ satellite in orbit. It’s believed the Russians may have even put secret killer satellites in orbit by ‘birthing’ them Matryoshka doll style because of course they would: they’re Russian. With so many mysterious launches worldwide lately, there’s no telling what’s up there at this point. Will the Neutral Particle Beam be able to save us in time?
Two UFOs Over Moons Surface Flying Side By Side, Recorded From Telescope, March 17, 2019. Video, UFO Sighting News.
Two UFOs Over Moons Surface Flying Side By Side, Recorded From Telescope, March 17, 2019. Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 17, 2019
Location of sighting: Earths moon
Source: MUFON #99274
A person in Edirne, Turkey was observing the moon through a telescope and was lucky enough to catch a great shot of not one, but two UFOs flying low over the moons surface. Yes I said that right. This object is actually two UFOs flying side by side, like a military wingman for USAF fighter jets.
Both objects are diamond shaped, yet one is twice the size of the other. If these were meteors, they would be leaving a trail of debris behind them, and there is no way they would be perfect diamond flying side by side. These are alien craft flying over our moon!
Now, I wonder...if the eyewitness caught this while observing for a half hour...then how often does this occur on our moon daily? Well, if you say 24 hours in a day, and divide it by 30 minutes, we get 48. Thats a lot on only the side that we can see. I imagine its much more on the side we cannot see. This is 100% proof that aliens are actively using our moon not just as a base, but as a home.
Humanity turns Earth into planet-size spacecraft in epic Chinese movie.
China's 2019 blockbuster movie "The Wandering Earth," based on the novel by Liu Cixin, takes audiences on a epic journey outwardthrough the solar system.
The 125-minute film directed by Frant Gwo is currently the second highest-earning film in the history of Chinese cinema, according to the entertainment websiteDeadline. As of March 15, the film had grossed over$692 million worldwide.
The great human odyssey of "The Wandering Earth" is told with fantastic visual effects and a talented cast of actors. The story begins in somewhat contemporary times, when humanity pulls together to make a desperate attempt to flee the sun's volatile activity. Governments around the globe join forces to construct hundreds of thruster engines across the planet's surface to propel Earth toward a new home around another star well beyond the solar system.
To make the centuries-long trip across space, humanity has to make many changes. Humans dwell in subterranean communities, and occasionally, crews ascend to Earth's frozen surface to ensure the engines are fueled and running. The International Space Station becomes a monumental gyroscope-shaped spacecraft sent farther out in the solar system to facilitate the blue planet's navigation past Jupiter.
Meanwhile, Earth travels toward the gas giant for a massive gravity assist to slingshot out of the solar system. In real life, gravity assists — on a smaller scale — are common practice. For example, the Parker Solar Probe mission, which launched last summer, is scheduled to use about two dozen assists from Venus to approach the sun.
Two astronauts moving through space around the space station in the new film Liu Lang Di Qiu, or 'The Wandering Earth' (2019).
The movie is worth watching if you love all things Jovian: The imagery of Jupiter's streams and its Great Red Spot are mesmerizing, especially as Earth approaches it and succumbs to a planetary tug-of-war. And in one particularly epic chapter of the story, Earth's horizon fills up with the sight of the Jovian atmosphere.
The film does an excellent job of hiding exposition within heartfelt conversations among three generations of the protagonist's family, and the drama is balanced out among the many key players. The film also features a HAL-like sentient computer called MOSS as its antagonist.
The film unfolds at a rather gentle pace considering its complex plot-driven story, and audiences can therefore savor the movie's incredible cinematography.
Jin Mai Jaho in Liu Lang Di Qiu or The Wandering Earth (2019)
"'The Wandering Earth' looks better than most American special-effects spectaculars," film critic Simon Abrams wrote in a film review published on RogerEbert.com, "because it gives you breathing space to admire landscape shots of a dystopian Earth that suggest old fashioned matte-paintings on steroids."
Still, there are a few criticisms to be made about the film. If the world is collaborating at an unprecedented scale to accomplish the mission, why not imagine more diversity in race and gender in its change-makers? There is also something to be desired when the global intercom communications system announces important updates about Earth's status in multiple languages and never speaks Spanish, for instance, which Ethnologue lists as the second most-spoken language in the world, but does feature a whole lot of spoken French, ranked 16th on that same 2019 list of languages. Arabic was also absent in the film. And though the creators may have their reasons, it's worth noting the impact science fiction has on shaping the public's mental landscape of what may come.
"The Wandering Earth" is creatively told, exciting to watch and does away with the trope that blockbusters are just eye candy: Audiences are invited to imagine what the future will indeed be like for our vulnerable planet.
"The Wandering Earth" is currently being screened in select theaters and has been picked up for future release by Netflix.
Check out some awesome stills from the movie below:
As the Earth traverses the Universe in search of a new star system, unanticipated dangers lead to an unlikely group stepping up to protect it and its inhabitants.
After 2500 years in search of a new solar system, teamwork becomes essential to fight for the survival of the planet and the species. Actor Jing Wu portrays Liu Peiqiang in "The Wandering Earth."
A group of young people rise to the call of contending with a frozen Earth traveling the cosmos to find a new home. Actor Jing Wu, as Liu Pieqiang, somberly assumes responsibility for the mission.
A dying Sun brought a desperate decision to earthlings — stay and die or move and possibly survive. Giant thrusters transform Earth into a planet-sized spacecraft to go in search of a new solar system to call home. Liu Peiqiang, played by Jing Wu, dons a spacesuit in the mission to save Earth.
It will take over 2500 years and and a distance 4.5 light years for Earth and its inhabitants to complete Project Wandering Earth and many unexpected hazards put the journey in jeopardy.
Traveling from the Milky Way to another solar system proved more dangerous than the scientists anticipated. Though humanity is hidden away deep inside the Earth, a group of brave souls ventures outside.
MOSS, a computer program aboard the space station, makes trouble for the astronauts involved in the unexpected mission to save Earth in "The Wandering Earth."
In "The Wandering Earth," scientists use thousands of thrusters to move the planet away from its dying Sun into another star system 4.5 light years away.
Scientists hunting for signs of alien life shouldn't be so quick to dismiss carbon monoxide (CO), a new study suggests.
The substance is highly poisonous to people and most other animal life here on Earth because it latches firmly onto hemoglobin, preventing this blood protein from carrying vital oxygen in the required quantities.
And the gas hasn't typically rated as a promising "biosignature" that astrobiologists should target in the search for ET. Indeed, many researchers regard CO as an anti-biosignature, because it's a readily available source of carbon and energy that life-forms should theoretically gobble up. So, finding lots of CO in an exoplanet's atmosphere would suggest the absence of life as we know it, according to this line of thinking.
But it may be time to revise such reasoning, the new study said. In it, researchers used computer models to better understand the atmospheric chemistry of Earth about 3 billion years ago, when our planet's air contained very little oxygen. Microbial life was common on Earth back then, but animal life was a long way off. (The earliest fossils of multicellular organisms date to about 600 million years ago.)
The team's results indicated that CO could have accumulated in significant quantities in those long-gone days, reaching concentrations of around 100 parts per million (ppm), or about 1,000 times higher than current levels.
"That means we could expect high carbon-monoxide abundances in the atmospheres of inhabited but oxygen-poor exoplanets orbiting stars like our own sun," study co-author Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), said in a statement.
The scientists also applied their models to exoplanetary systems — specifically, those centered on red dwarfs, the small, dim stars that make up about 75 percent of the Milky Way galaxy's stellar population.
The team found that inhabited red-dwarf planets with lots of oxygen in their atmospheres likely sport high levels of CO as well. In fact, CO concentrations on such worlds could be as high as several percent.
"Given the different astrophysical context for these planets, we should not be surprised to find microbial biospheres promoting high levels of carbon monoxide," study lead author Edward Schwieterman, a postdoctoral researcher in UCR's Department of Earth Sciences, said in the same statement.
"However, these would certainly not be good places for human or animal life as we know it on Earth," he added.
The new study, which was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal, serves as a reminder that the hunt for alien life is a very complicated endeavor. Given the incredible abundance and diversity of alien worlds, there's certainly no reason to assume that ET will look like Earth life or employ the same biochemical pathways.
So, researchers, such as Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are greatly expanding the list of possible biosignatures beyond the handful (such as methane and oxygen) that work for Earth-like life.
Such work will likely have practical applications, and soon. NASA's $8.9 billion James Webb Space Telescope will search for biosignatures in the air of some nearby exoplanets after the observatory's planned March 2021 launch. And three huge, ground-based scopes scheduled to come online in the mid-2020s — the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope — will do some atmosphere-sniffing as well after they come online in the mid-2020s.
If you’d ask most people what; the closest planet to Earth, you’d probably come across one answer: Venus. That answer, while apparently logical, is not really true. Mercury is the planet closest to us.
Even more surprising is the fact that Mercury is the closest neighbor, on average, to each of the other seven planets in the solar system. How can this be?
Image credits: Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington (Wikimedia Commons).
Mercury’s in retrograde
What’s the planet closest to the Earth? Even without any prior knowledge, a decent guess would be Venus or Mars — these are our planetary neighbors, after all. A simple Google search reveals that Venus’ orbit is closer to that of Earth’s so, naturally, Venus must be the answer, right?
Wrong. Mercury is the planet closest to Earth — at least on average.
As it turns out, Venus being the closest planet to Earth is simply a misconception — one that has propagated greatly through the years.
“By some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularisers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets,” write engineers Tom Stockman, Gabriel Monroe, and Samuel Cordner in a commentary published in Physics Today.
Instead, they recommend a different method of measuring which planet is closest, which they demonstrated using the motions of the planets within the last 10,000 years.
“By using a more accurate method for estimating the average distance between two orbiting bodies, we find that this distance is proportional to the relative radius of the inner orbit.”
Using this method, Mercury is closer to Earth on average. A GIF created by Reddit user u/CharcoalCharts does a great job at depicting this (the Earth is in Blue). The Earth is usually closest to Mercury, although, at some points of the year, it’s closest to Venus or Mars.
Non-intuitive
It feels intuitive that the average distance between every point on two concentric ellipses is closer than ellipses which are farther apart, but this is not necessarily the case. While Venus can get very close to the Earth (at only 0.28 Astronomical Units, with 1 AU being the distance from the Earth to the Sun), the two planets can also be quite far apart, at 1.72 AU. In total, Venus is 1.14 AU from Earth, but Mercury is a much closer 1.04 AU.
There are also two other shocking conclusions from this: first of all, on average, the Sun is closest to the Earth than any other planet (because it’s at 1 AU by definition). Secondly, it’s not just the Earth — Mercury is the closest neighbor of all planets in the solar system. In other words, Uranus is, on average, closer to Mercury than its presumed neighbor, Neptune. The same stands for even the dwarf planet Pluto (we still love you, Pluto!).
A simulation of an Earth year’s worth of orbits by the terrestrial planets begins to reveal that Mercury (gray in orbital animation) has the smallest average distance from Earth (blue) and is most frequently Earth’s nearest neighbor.
Image credits: Tom Stockman/Gabriel Monroe/Samuel Cordner.
The whirly-dirly corollary
Researchers also found that the distance between two orbiting bodies is at a minimum when the inner orbit is at a minimum — something which they call the “whirly-dirly corollary” — after an episode of the cartoon Rick and Morty.
The method might also be useful in estimating distances between other orbiting bodies such as satellites or extrasolar planets or stars. In the Physics Today commentary, the researchers explain:
“As best we can tell, no one has come up with a concept like PCM to compare orbits. With the right assumptions, PCM could possibly be used to get a quick estimate of the average distance between any set of orbiting bodies. Perhaps it can be useful for quickly estimating satellite communication relays, for which signal strength falls off with the square of distance. In any case, at least we know now that Venus is not our closest neighbor—and that Mercury is everybody’s.”
Artist concept of nano-patterned object reorienting itself to remain in a beam of light.
In the future, spacecraft could travel to other stars faster than anything currently available by using laser light sources that are millions of miles away. For the moment, this prospect has been explored only theoretically by physicists at Caltech. In their new study, the researchers propose levitating and propelling objects using a beam of light by etching the surface of those objects with specific nanoscale patterns.
Conceptual illustration of a nano-patterned object reorienting itself to remain in a beam of light.
(Credit: Courtesy of the Atwater laboratory)
A pattern that keeps objects afloat
For decades, researchers have been using so-called optical tweezers to move and manipulate microscopic objects (i.e. nanoparticles) using a focused laser beam. Nanoparticles can be suspended mid-air due to the light scattering and gradient forces resulting from the interaction of the particle with the light. Such devices have been used to trap small metal particles, but also viruses, bacteria, living cells, and even strands of DNA. For his contributions to developing optical tweezers, Arthur Ashkin was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.
However, optical tweezers are limited by distance and the size of the objects. Essentially, only very small objects can be manipulated with light in this fashion and only from close range.
“One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer. But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on,” Ognjen Ilic, a postdoc at Caltech and the study’s first author, said in a statement.
In their new study, Ilic and colleagues have proposed a radical new way to use light in order to trap or even propel objects. Theoretically, their method is not limited by an object’s size or distance from the source, which means macroscopic objects such a spacecraft could be accelerated, perhaps even close to relativistic speeds, using the force of light alone.
For this to work, certain nanoscale patterns need to be etched on an object’s surface. When the concentrated laser beam hits this patterned surface, the object should begin to “self-stabilize” by generating torque to keep it in the light beam. The authors say that the patterning is designed in such a way as to encode the object’s stability.
This would work for any kind of object, from a grain of rice to a spaceship in size. The light source could also be millions of miles away which would make this technology ideal to power a light sail for space exploration.
“We have come up with a method that could levitate macroscopic objects,” said Harry Atwater, Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft. We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”
Controversial Book Argues: Humans Are Not From Earth
Controversial Book Argues: Humans Are Not From Earth
A researcher argues that humans evolved on a different planet and were eventually brought to Earth in the very distant past.
What if we are the aliens we’ve been searching for all along?
Despite the progress made in various branches of science like biology, chemistry, and astrophysics, we are still unable to say for certain how life started on Earth.
Was this a unique event across the universe? Or is it possible that there are out there planets eerily similar to Earth, which also harbor life, even if it is just primitive?
The truth is that we have theorized about the origins of life, ever since the human mind was capable of thinking.
Did life come from space? Or did life originate on the planet, without ‘extraterrestrial’ (Comets, Asteroids, etc.) influence?
If amino acids arrived with comet impacts, it would suggest, as some experts argue, that life may be widespread in our solar system.
But what if things are not so simple? What if the origins of life are anything but rational? And what if humans are NOT from Earth?
That’s a controversial subject touched by a book written by American ecologist Dr. Ellis Silver.
Dr. Silver provides arguments based on various subjects like human psychology, arguing that mankind did not evolve alongside other life forms on Earth. Instead, the researcher indicates that humans came into existence on a different planet, and we were ‘brought to Earth’, in the very distant past.
53 factors that prove we couldn’t have evolved on Earth.
Why we’re here on Earth, and how and when we got here.
Where our true home planet is, and what it’s like to live there.
Why valid evidence is ignored, denied and covered up by scientists and governments. (There’s actually a very good reason.)
What we really know about extraterrestrials and their spacecraft.
The researcher explained that his book is based on the scientific differences between humans and other animals on Earth.
The Earth approximately meets our needs as a species, but perhaps not as strongly as whoever brought us here initially thought,” explained Dr. Silver in an interview.
The researcher points towards chronic diseases that affect the human race, like back pain, indicating it could be a sign that proves our species formed on another world, with much less gravity.
Dr. Silver also mentions other uniquely human traits: humans have 223 extra genes, not found in any other species.
The American researcher further suggests the human race has a number of ‘serious flaws’ that point to the possibility we are not from this planet.
“We are all chronically ill,” Dr. Silver explains.
“Indeed, if you can find a single person who is 100% fit and healthy and not suffering from some (perhaps hidden or unstated) condition or disorder (there’s an extensive list in the book) I would be extremely surprised – I have not been able to find anyone.”
“I believe that many of our problems stem from the simple fact that our internal body clocks have evolved to expect a 25-hour day (this has been proven by sleep researchers), but the Earth’s day is only 24 hours. This is not a modern condition – the same factors can be traced all the way back through mankind’s history on Earth.”
So, if we are not from Earth, where did we come from?
Dr. Silva argues that one possibility is Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to the sun.
In his book, Silva explains that even though mankind is supposedly the most developed species on the planet, it is surprisingly unsuited and ill-equipped for our planet’s environment: humans are harmed by sunlight and tend to have a strong dislike for naturally occurring (raw) foods. The researcher argues that humans have ridiculously high rates of chronic disease, among other things.
“My thesis,” says Silver “proposes that mankind did not evolve from that particular strain of life, but evolved elsewhere and was transported to Earth (as fully evolved Homo sapiens) between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago.”
And while we may not have arrived to earth in alien spaceships, experts conducting simulations using supercomputers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US have discovered that amino acids, the building blocks of life, may have reached our planet from outer space via comets or meteors. This sole possibility suggests that life is not unique on Earth, and there could be similar forms of life on distant alien moons and planets, some of them even inside our very own cosmic neighborhood.
A Rock Hill, South Carolina, man says he saw a UFO, with video showing it. Richard Heath said he saw a rotating sphere with lights in the sky in Rock Hill and Chester.
By Hannah Smoot
ROCK HILL, SC
A Rock Hill man says he saw a UFO in December, but he’s just talking about it now.
“I would’ve said something before but I said ‘OK, they’re going to think I’m crazy,’” Richard Heath said.
That’s not what Heath said he saw Dec. 16, 2018, but he’s glad there are other people talking about UFOs. Heath postedthe video of what he sawon YouTube and immediately called his mom.
On Tuesday, he brought the video to The Herald.
He said he saw the flying object — a rotating silver orb with two lights on one side, and one on another — near his home, flying above the AMC Classic Rock Hill 7 movie theater on Cherry and Anderson roads. He said the object was just feet above the movie theater roof, but later flew higher in the sky.
Heath said he followed the object down Interstate 77 to Chester, where he lost sight of it over the treeline. He said it was difficult to get the object on video. His phone wouldn’t pick it up on camera, so he had to use a digital camera.
“My hands were shaking so bad,” he said. “Because I saw it up close. I was freaked out.”
Heath and the Kiawah Island woman aren’t alone. The National UFO Reporting Center database shows 76 reports of UFO sightings in South Carolina from 2018.
The UFO database lists 1,797 reports from South Carolina total, going back to 1939 and as recent as a report from Tega Cay on March 11, of three unidentifiable orange lights in the sky near Lake Wylie.
Some of the reports are pretty out there. One person in Lancaster reported seeing something that looked like a “jiggly ball of bright white vibrating jello” in the sky on Dec. 21, 2017.
Other reports have scientific explanations. The National UFO Reporting Center notes a report from North Myrtle Beach on July 15, 2018, of a “single fireball shape hovering high over the water” may have been a Mars sighting.
The organization said two reports from June 29, 2015m, one from Rock Hill and one from Chester, of space debris and a “fireball with a long tail,” respectively, were sightings of satellite debris re-entering the atmosphere. The American Meteor Society said the organization was sent 150 reports from Georgia and the Carolinas of “a bright fiery object” that day in 2015, which they also said was likely satellite debris.
Other South Carolinians have even reported seeing an orb with rotating lights, like Heath.
One person reported seeing three orange orbs that rotated in Myrtle Beach on May 15, 2017. Someone in Fort Mill reported seeing three objects rotating vertically and horizontally in the sky Oct. 18, 2014, according to the UFO Reporting Center database.
RICHARD HEATH
Dwayne Brown, head of NASA’s science communications office in Washington, D.C., said it’s common to see meteorites or objects re-entering the atmosphere. But he said the office hasn’t seen any recent reports.
NASA experts have not evaluated Heath’s video yet, but Brown said he would take a look.
UFO usually refers to supposed alien technology in common use, but UFO technically just means any “unidentified flying object.”
Heath said he’s never seen anything like the orb, which at one point seemed to change color and shape and do flips. He said he believes it was either extraterrestrial tech or a top secret government project.
Heath didn’t always believe in the unexplainable.
“I felt like anything was possible, but I was skeptical,” he said.
But now?
“To be honest with you, I think it had to be a UFO,” he said.
A shocking new study suggest that, at a quantum level at least, two different versions of reality exist. The new study comes from the idea brought to the forefront in Eugene Wigner's friend scenario, which states that two people could see the same photon, or light particle, and have different observations of the photon. Even though the observations, and the conclusions drawn from those observations, are different, they would both be correct.
If you've ever questioned the nature of your reality, a new study suggests that there are actually two different versions of it — at least at the quantum level.
The pre-published study, found in arXiv, sheds new light on the complex idea that two people could see the same photon, come to different conclusions about the photon, yet still both be correct.
"In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner’s eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities," the researchers wrote in the study. "While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an extended Wigner’s friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test."
They continued: "In a state-of-the-art photon experiment, we here realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not."
One of the study's co-authors, Martin Ringbauer, told Live Science that "you can verify both of them," adding that theoretical advances were needed before they were able to prove Wigner's hypothesis, which was first proposed in 1961.
"Theoretical advances were needed to formulate the problem in a way that is testable. Then, the experimental side needed developments on the control of quantum systems to implement something like that," he told the news outlet.
To test the idea, the researchers designated "two different laboratories, each involving an experimenter and their friend," introducing two pairs of entangled photons, which allowed for their fates to be intertwined. They also introduced "people" (who were not real, but rather represented observers) to measure one photon in the pair, record their results and repeat the process for the second photon using quantum memory.
In 1961, when Wigner introduced the idea that would eventually become known as "Wigner's friend," only one scenario was used. With the new experiment, it was doubled and the results that Wigner had first discussed more than 50 years still rang true.
Quantum mechanics gives detail on how the world works at a scale so small that the rules of physics do not apply, Live Science added. With the new findings of the study, the field of quantum mechanics may change if measurements are not the same for everyone.
"It seems that, in contrast to classical physics, measurement results cannot be considered absolute truth but must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement," Ringbauer told Live Science. "The stories we tell about quantum mechanics have to adapt to that."
Er bestaat meer dan één realiteit, blijkt uit deze schokkende studie
Er bestaat meer dan één realiteit, blijkt uit deze schokkende studie
Uit een nieuwe studie blijkt dat er twee verschillende versies zijn van jouw realiteit, in ieder geval op kwantumniveau.
Twee mensen kunnen naar hetzelfde lichtdeeltje kijken, verschillende conclusies trekken over dat lichtdeeltje en toch allebei gelijk hebben.
Twee waarnemers kunnen dus verschillende realiteiten waarnemen, aldus de onderzoekers.
Beide
“Je kunt beide [realiteiten] verifiëren,” zei coauteur Martin Ringbauer tegen Live Science.
Tijdens een experiment werden twee paren verstrengelde fotonen in twee fictieve laboratoria gemeten.
Aan het scenario werden vier ‘mensen’ – Alice, Bob en twee vrienden – toegevoegd als waarnemer.
De twee vrienden van Alice en Bob werden ‘in’ de laboratoria geplaatst, waar ze elk afzonderlijk lichtdeeltje maten.
Twee keuzes
Hierdoor raakte de verstrengeling verbroken.
De resultaten werden opgeslagen in kwantumgeheugen.
Alice en Bob, die ‘buiten’ de laboratoria waren geplaatst, hadden twee keuzes: ze konden de resultaten van hun vrienden in het kwantumgeheugen overnemen of zelf gaan experimenteren met de verstrengelde fotonen.
Beïnvloed
Het verrassende was dat de conclusies van zowel Alice en Bob als hun vrienden altijd bleken te kloppen, ook al kwamen ze tot verschillende conclusies.
“Het lijkt er dus op dat meetresultaten niet kunnen worden gezien als absolute waarheid, maar worden beïnvloed door de waarnemer die de meting heeft uitgevoerd,” aldus Ringbauer.
They’re ba-ack! OK, they never left us, but you might have thought they would after Flat Earthers had their core belief system destroyed by their own leaders inan attempt to prove their pancaked planet theory with a gyroscopeand instead reinforced the fact that Earth is round, round, get around, it is a-round. They obviously don’t followBrian Wilsoneither, but seem to be more prone to John Belushi’s Bluto in “Animal House,” whorallied fellow frat members into action with his battle cry:
“What? Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!… It ain’t over now, ’cause when the goin’ gets tough, the tough get goin’. Who’s with me? Let’s go! Come on!..”
Well, the “tough” Flat Earthers are getting going and they’re going to … Antarctica! For those not familiar with the theory, the continent at the bottom of the planet that’s round to the rest of us is different if a globe were flattened with the North Pole in the center. Then, the outer rim would be a thin band we’d all call Antarctica. For those who know their math, that’s also called a circumference. The circumference of the round Earth is about 24,900 miles (40,000 km) but that’s around the equator and there’s still the southern hemisphere to flatten out and add to the flat map. In an interview with Forbes, flat-earther Jay Decasby, who is developing a flat earth reality series, puts the white ring of Antarctica circling such a round map at over 60,000 miles.
“But, but, but!” you say … didn’t Colin O’Brady just complete the first-ever solo crossing of Antarctica on a trip that took 54 days and measured 932 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean via the South Pole? Decasby scoffs at your question.
“They’ve made laws to not allow any kind of motorized equipment on the ice which would help us prove not only flat earth but what’s beyond the ice wall, but in reality, we don’t even need to get onto the ice to prove flat earth.”
That’s right. He claims the best way to prove the Earth is flat is to sail a ship around the circumference of Antarctica which should be 60,000 miles. Such a trip would also prove that the edge of the Earth is circled by a wall of ice 150 feet high. Captain James Cook did this first, although that claim is obviously disputed by flat earthers like Decasby who says there’s no way Cook sailed 60,000 miles (did you catch the flaw in this logic?), but still quotes Cook’s description of a high wall of ice in which the captain was never able to find an inlet that penetrated it. Never mind that Antarctica has since been circled many times and many inlets have been found.
Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg strove to go around the world in 80 days. Viking Ocean Cruises is offering an Ultimate World Cruise that will circumnavigate the Earth and visit 59 countries in 245 days (for the low, low price of $93,000). Why not, in the name of science or the debunking of science, let these flat earth believers finance and sail a ship around Antarctica and prove their theory to the “the sun-worshipping cult of heliocentrism” or forever hold their peace?
Entertainment could be provided by bands singing flat versions of “I Get Around,” “Roundabout” and “Fat-Bottomed Girls (You Make the Rockin’ World Go Round).” The challenge will be to find a cruse ship with a big enough galley to stock a buffet for 60,000 miles. What would Bluto say?
The Incredible Challenge of Landing Heavy Payloads On Mars
The Incredible Challenge of Landing Heavy Payloads On Mars
It’s too bad Mars is such an interesting place, because it’s actually one of the most difficult places to visit in the Solar System, especially if you want to bring along a lot of luggage. That planet is a graveyard of missions that didn’t quite make it.
As our ambitions grow, and we think about exploring Mars with humans – maybe even future colonists – we’re going to need to solve one of the biggest problems in space exploration.
Successfully landing heavy payloads on the surface of Mars is really really hard to do.
There are a bunch of challenges with Mars, including its lack of a protective magnetosphere and lower surface gravity. But one of the biggest is its thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide.
If you were standing on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, you’d freeze to death and asphyxiate from a lack of oxygen. But you’d also experience less than 1% the atmospheric pressure you enjoy here on Earth.
And it turns out, this thin atmosphere is making it incredibly challenging to get significant payloads safely down to the surface of the Red Planet. In fact, only 53% of missions to Mars have actually worked out properly.
So let’s talk about how missions to Mars have worked in the past, and I’ll show you what the problem is.
Landing on Mars Is the Worst
Historically, missions to Mars are launched from Earth during the flight windows that open up every two years or so when Earth and Mars are closer together. ExoMars flew in 2016, InSight in 2018 and the Mars 2020 rover will fly in, well, 2020.
Artist’s impression of the InSight Lander commencing its entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase to Mars. Credit: NASA
The missions follow interplanetary transfer trajectory designed to either get there the fastest, or with the least amount of fuel.
As the spacecraft enters the atmosphere of Mars, it’s going tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. It has to somehow lose all that velocity before landing gently on the surface of the Red Planet.
Here on Earth, you can use the thick Earthican atmosphere to slow your descent, bleeding off your velocity with a heat shield. The space shuttle’s tiles were designed to absorb the heat of re-entry, as the 77 tonne orbiter went from 28,000 km/h to zero.
A similar technique could be used on Venus or Titan, where they have thick atmospheres.
The Moon, without any atmosphere at all is relatively straightforward to land on as well. Without any atmosphere at all, there’s no need for a heat shield, you just use propulsion to slow your orbit and land on the surface. As long as you bring enough propellant, you can stick the landing.
Back to Mars, with a spacecraft hurtling into its thin atmosphere at more than 20,000 kilometers per hour.
Curiosity Is the Limit
Traditionally, missions have started their descent with an aeroshell to remove some of the spacecraft’s velocity. The heaviest mission ever sent to Mars was Curiosity, which weighed in at 1 metric tonne, or 2,200 pounds.
When it entered the Martian atmosphere, it was going 5.9 kilometers a second, or 22,000 kilometers an hour.
Curiosity passing into the Martian atmosphere. Credit: NASA/JPL
Curiosity had the largest aeroshell ever sent to Mars, measuring 4.5 meters across. This huge aeroshell was tilted at an angle, allowing the spacecraft to maneuver as it hits the thin atmosphere of Mars, aiming for a specific landing zone.
At about 131 kilometers altitude, the spacecraft would start firing thrusters to perfect adjust the trajectory as it approached the surface of Mars.
About 80 seconds of flight through atmosphere, the temperatures on the heat shield rose to 2,100 degrees celsius. In order to not melt, the heat shield used a special material called Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, or PICA. The same material SpaceX uses for its Dragon Capsules, by the way.
Once it had slowed its velocity to lower than Mach 2.2, the spacecraft deployed the largest parachute ever built for a mission to Mars – 16 meters across. This parachute could generate 29,000 kilograms of drag force, slowing it down even more.
The suspension lines were made of Technora and Kevlar, which are pretty much the strongest and most heat resistant materials we know of.
Then it jettisoned its parachute and used rocket engines to slow its descent even more. When it was close enough, Curiosity deployed a skycrane that lowered the rover down gently to the surface.
This is the quick version. If you want an extensive overview of what Curiosity went through landing on Mars, I highly recommend you check out Emily Lakdawalla’s “The Design and Engineering of Curiosity”.
Illustration of Curiosity’s skycrane, gently placing it on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL
Curiosity only weighed one tonne.
Going Heavier Doesn’t Scale
Want to do the same thing with heavier payloads? I’m sure you’re imagining bigger aeroshells, bigger parachutes, bigger skycranes.
In theory, the SpaceX Starship will send 100 tonnes of colonists and their stuff to the surface of Mars.
Artist’s illustration of the SpaceX Starship. Credit: SpaceX
Here’s the problem. The methods of decelerating in the Martian atmosphere don’t scale up very well.
First, let’s start with parachutes. To be honest, at 1-tonne, Curiosity is about as heavy as you can get using a parachute. Any heavier and there just aren’t any materials engineers can use that can handle the deceleration load.
A couple of months ago, NASA engineers celebrated the successful test of the Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment, or ASPIRE. This is the parachute that’ll be used for the Mars 2020 rover mission.
ASPIRE payload separates from its booster. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech
They put the parachute made of advanced composite fabrics, like nylon, Technora and Kevlar, onto a sounding rocket and launched it to an altitude of 37 kilometers, mimicking the conditions the spacecraft will experience as it arrives at Mars.
The parachute deployed in a fraction of a second, and fully inflated, experienced 32,000 kilograms of force. If you were on board at the time, you would experience 3.6 times as much force as crashing into a wall going 100 km/h wearing your seatbelt. In other words, you wouldn’t survive.
If the spacecraft was any heavier, it would need to be made of impossible composite fabrics. And forget about passengers.
NASA has been trying out different ideas to land heavier payloads on Mars, like, as much as 3 tonnes.
Artist’s illustration of the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. Credit: NASA
One idea is called the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, or LDSD. The idea is to use a much larger aerodynamic decelerator that would inflate around the spacecraft like a bouncy castle as it enters the Martian gravity.
In 2015, NASA actually tested this technology, carrying a prototype vehicle on a balloon to an altitude of 36 kilometers. The vehicle then fired its solid rocket, carrying it to an altitude of 55 kilometers.
As it was rocketing upwards, it inflated its Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator to a diameter of 6 meters (or 20 feet), which then slowed it back down to Mach 2.4. Unfortunately its parachute failed to deploy properly, so it crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
That’s progress. If they can actually work out the engineering and physics, we could someday see 3 tonne spacecraft landing on the surface of Mars. Three whole tonnes.
More Propulsion, Less Cargo
The next idea to scale up a Mars landing is to use more propulsion. In theory, you can just carry more fuel, fire your rockets when you arrive at Mars, and cancel all that velocity. The problem, of course, is that the more mass you have to carry to decelerate, the less mass that you can actually land on the surface of Mars.
Illustration of SpaceX Starship landing on Mars.Credit: SpaceX
The SpaceX Starship is expected to use a propulsive landing to get 100 tonnes down to the surface of Mars. Because it’s taking a more direct, faster path, the Starship will hit the Martian atmosphere faster than 8.5 km/s and then use aerodynamic forces to slow its entry.
It doesn’t have to go this fast, of course. The Starship could use aerobraking, passing through the upper atmosphere several times to bleed off velocity. In fact, this is the method that orbital spacecraft going to Mars use.
But then passengers on board would need to spend weeks for the spacecraft to slow down and go into orbit around Mars, and then to descend through the atmosphere.
According to Elon Musk, his delightfully unintuitive strategy for handling all that heat is to build the spacecraft out of stainless steel, and then tiny holes in the shell will bleed methane fuel out to keep the windward side of the spacecraft cool.
Once it sheds enough velocity, it’ll turn, fire its Raptor engines and land gently on the surface of Mars.
Aim For the Ground, Pull Up at the Last Minute
Every kilogram of fuel the spacecraft uses to slow its descent to the surface of Mars is a kilogram of cargo that it can’t carry to the surface.
I’m not sure there’s any viable strategy that will easily land heavy payloads on the surface of Mars. Smarter people than me think it’s pretty much impossible without using enormous amounts of propellant.
That said, Elon Musk thinks there’s a way. And before we discount his ideas, let’s watch the twin side boosters from the Falcon Heavy rocket land perfectly together.
And pay no attention to what happened to the central booster.
A new study from the Aerospace Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposes that missions to Mars could take advantage of the thicker atmosphere that’s closer to the surface of Mars.
In their paper titled, “Entry Trajectory Options for High Ballistic Coefficient Vehicles at Mars”, the researchers propose that spacecraft flying to Mars don’t need to be in such a hurry to get rid of their velocity.
As the spacecraft is screaming through the atmosphere, it’ll still be able to generate a lot of aerodynamic lift, which could be used to steer it through the atmosphere.
They ran the calculations and found that the ideal angle was to just point the spacecraft straight down and dive towards the surface. Then, at the last possible moment, pull up using the aerodynamic lift to fly sideways through the thickest part of the atmosphere.
This increases the drag and lets you get rid of the most amount of velocity before you turn on your descent engines and complete your powered landing.
That sounds, um, fun.
If humanity is going to build a viable future on the surface of Mars, we’re going to need to crack this problem. We’re going to need to develop a series of technologies and techniques that make landing on Mars more reliable and safe.
I suspect it’s going to be much much more challenging than people are expecting, but I’m looking forward to the ideas that will be tested in the coming years.
A big thank you to Nancy Atkinson who covered this topic here on Universe Today more than a decade ago, and inspired me to work on this video.
Paging Arnold Schwarzenegger, this liquid metal can stretch and move
Video screenshot by CNET
In good news, scientists have not created a remorseless Terminator-style killing machine for real. In other good news, they've figured out how to make a liquid metal that can stretch in all sorts of directions. It looks like a sci-fi visual effect made real.
Robert Patrick as the liquid metal T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Video screenshot by CNET
The shiny liquid metal can be manipulated with magnets. It stretches like the fictional T-1000 robot from Terminator 2, and can also be used to complete a circuit.
Scientists at Beihang University in China led the research project.
"They added iron particles to a droplet of a gallium, indium and tin alloy immersed in hydrochloric acid," the ACS reports. "A gallium oxide layer formed on the droplet surface, which lowered the surface tension of the liquid metal." This allows it to stretch out and move without breaking apart.
We're a long way off from morphing androids, but the researchers believe this sort of liquid metal could one day be incorporated into soft robotics. You can almost hear it whispering, "I'll be back."
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
L’apparition du mystérieux OVNI “TR-3B” provoque la panique au sujet de “Plans Militaires Américains Top-Secrets”
L’apparition du mystérieux OVNI “TR-3B” provoque la panique au sujet de “Plans Militaires Américains Top-Secrets”
Il y a eu une augmentation choquante du nombre d’observations présumées d’OVNI triangulaires de type TR-3B dans le monde entier – avec les plus récentes images montrant l’avion près d’une base aérienne américaine dans l’Ohio.
Une augmentation récente du nombre d’observations d’avions de type TR-3B présumés a déclenché une panique dans les milieux complotistes en ligne. Les experts craignent que “quelque chose ne se prépare” au cœur des inquiétudes suscitées par les expériences militaires américaines top-secrètes impliquant potentiellement des extraterrestres. Michael, de la chaîne YouTube MrMBB333, a publié sur Youtube la dernière observation du présumé TR-3B à Toledo, Ohio.
Il a dit :
“D’après le type qui a filmé ça, il avait fait au moins trois fois le tour de son quartier.”
“On dirait un triangle parfait. On ne voit rien d’autre que les lumières.”
“J’ai essayé de mettre différents filtres de lumière pour obtenir une image plus claire, mais tout ce l’on voit sont les lumières vives.”
“Nous en voyons beaucoup ces derniers temps, surtout dans l’Ohio.”
“Il se passe quelque chose.”
La vidéo montre que l’objet possède une grande lumière au centre du triangle, une lumière plus petite à l’avant et trois autres à l’arrière.
Les spectateurs ont remarqué que les “vaisseaux en forme de triangle sont partout de nos jours”.
Un utilisateur a dit : “J’ai l’impression que j’allais commencer à voir beaucoup plus de ce genre de choses bientôt.”
L’observation a eu lieu à quelques kilomètres seulement de la base aérienne de Wright-Patterson, ce qui soulève des inquiétudes quant à la participation militaire américaine.
Les TR-3B sont fréquents dans les observations d’OVNI en tant qu’objets triangulaires noirs, silencieux et de grande taille, souvent observés la nuit.
Selon des fonctionnaires du gouvernement, le TR-3B “n’existe pas”.
La théorie autour de ces vaisseaux prétend qu’ils sont fabriqués dans des bases militaires top-secrètes comme la Zone 51 dans le Nevada, via la rétro-ingénierie des technologies extraterrestres.
D’autres prétendent qu’il s’agit de vrais OVNI pilotés par des extraterrestres en visite sur Terre.
Il y a eu d’autres observations d’OVNI triangulaires récemment en Russie et en Caroline du Nord.
L'apparition du mystérieux OVNI "TR-3B" provoque la panique au sujet de "Plans Militaires Américains Top-Secrets" Il y a eu une augmentation choquante du nombre d'observations présumées d'OVNI ...
Piloot spot mysterieus vliegend object boven Las Vegas met nachtkijker. Luister naar de reactie van de luchtverkeersleiding
Foto: Wikimedia Commons
Piloot spot mysterieus vliegend object boven Las Vegas met nachtkijker. Luister naar de reactie van de luchtverkeersleiding
Een piloot van de Amerikaanse luchtambulance zag op 16 maart 2019 iets vreemds in de lucht ten westen van Las Vegas.
De helikopterpiloot kon het ongeïdentificeerde object waarnemen dankzij zijn nachtkijker.
Hij nam contact op met de luchtverkeersleiding, maar daar zeiden ze dat ze niets op de radar konden zien in het gebied waar hij het object zag.
Verbaasd
Toen de luchtverkeersleider hoorde dat de piloot het object alleen kon zien met zijn nachtkijker, reageerde hij verbaasd.
Beluister hieronder het gesprek tussen de piloot en luchtverkeersleider:
De piloot zegt dat hij iets heeft gespot boven het gebied rond Southern Hills, een ziekenhuis in het zuidwesten van Las Vegas.
Geweldig
Hij merkt op dat het object op zo’n twee kilometer hoogte vliegt en onverlicht is.
De luchtverkeersleider reageert dat hij het niet ziet. De piloot zegt vervolgens dat hij het alleen kan zien met zijn nachtkijker.
“Oooo, dat is geweldig,” zegt de luchtverkeersleider.
Ballon
Website The Drive gaat proberen meer informatie over het incident te krijgen.
De piloot dacht dat het zou kunnen gaan om een soort ballon, maar het is nogal vreemd om ’s avonds op een afstand van enkele kilometers een onverlichte ballon te spotten met een nachtkijker, aldus de site.
Geen toegang
De website merkt op dat de hoogte ook interessant is, aangezien twee kilometer niet bepaald laag is.
De basis waar de piloot is gestationeerd wil geen commentaar geven en ook krijgt de site geen toegang tot de piloot.
We kennen allemaal de beroemde piramides van Gizeh en de daarbij behorende sfinx.
Wat nu als er een tweede sfinx zou blijken te zijn?
Het volgende artikel is afkomstig van auteur Snavelman (dank!), van wie al eerder een artikel publiceerden.
Het echte gezicht van de Sfinx
Het begon allemaal jaren geleden, met een droom waarin ik het Gizeh plateau zag met de piramides. En in die droom stond ik vóór de grote sfinx.
Maar ik zag op de romp niet het hoofd van de sfinx zoals die nu is, maar met een leeuwenkop. De kop die ik zag was uniek, precies zoals de beelden van Anubis,Ra of Bastet hun eigen typische kenmerken hebben. Ik zou het beeld uit duizenden herkennen. En ik heb dus ook heel lang in boeken gezocht of ik mijn gedroomde beeld ergens kon vinden. Dat gebeurde echter niet en toen gaf ik het maar op. Pas na jaren, toen ik per toeval een boek over Egypte oppakte in een winkel, zag ik een figuur genaamd Neb-Neru. Dit was een staande leeuwenfiguur in een triade (een set van drie figuren) namelijk de triade van Hery-Maät ofwel 'de man die waarheid beveelt'. Deze afbeelding kan gevonden worden in de tombe van Khaem-Vaset, een zoon van Ramses II.
Toen ik erbij las dat Neb-Neru vertaald wordt als 'heer van het verschrikkelijke' ging er bij mij een licht aan. Dit is namelijk dezelfde benaming als de huidige Arabische naam voor de grote sfinx; Abu'l Hol. Ik had daarmee een bevestiging dat de huidige staande sfinx van het Gizeh plateau Neb-Neru is. Ik dacht direct dat 'heer van het verschrikkelijke' beter vertaald kon worden als 'heer van de ondergang'. Want de grote leeuwensfinx kijkt immers naar de baan van de zon aan de hemel. En de huidige sfinx Neb-Neru kijkt vandaag de dag naar het opkomstpunt van de zon in het Oosten. Neb-Heru, de heer van de opgang, moest er dan óók geweest zijn en deze keek in vroeger dagen naar het Oosten. Zou hij vandaag de dag nog staan, dan zou hij dus naar het Westen kijken. Ik kom hier nog op terug. Met de afbeelding die ik nu had heb ik een reconstruktie gemaakt van de originele leeuwenkop. Dat is dus niet met het huidige menselijke hoofd van een farao erop, waarvan men aanneemt dat die van koning Cheops (Khufu) is. U kunt zelf wel zien dat dit beeld niet klopt. Het gezicht van de Farao is duidelijk veel te klein voor de rest van het lichaam, en is daarom vermoedelijk gemodelleerd uit de resten van een eerder hoofd. Maar hieronder zie je dan hoe het echte beeld er waarschijnlijk uit heeft gezien.
Voetplaat van de tweede sfinx De bewakers van de onderwereld van Osiris, de Duat, ook wel de "heren van de landbouwgrond", werden Aker's (akkers) genoemd en dat lijkt niet toevallig op Nederlands. Maar dat is even een ander verhaal. Akers stonden altijd ergens als duo. Dus Neru móet zijn evenbeeld Heru gehad hebben aan de andere kant van het Gizeh plateau. Dit was voor mij reden om te gaan zoeken op foto's van Gizeh. En ik heb de exacte verblijfplaats van Heru ook gevonden, door het Gizeh plateau te spiegelen op het centrale punt naast de grote piramide. Op luchtfoto's zie je een basement liggen op de plaats waar die moet zijn, de voetplaat van Heru. Dit basement is rechthoekig en precies even groot als het grondvlak van de huidige sfinx aan de andere kant. Dit kan de theorie van twee sfinxen bevestigen. Sterker nog, het lijkt op deze foto of er aan de linkerkant twee uitsteeksels zijn, die de voorpoten van de sfinx geweest kunnen zijn!
Horus en Seth De namen neb-Heru en neb-Neru zijn afgeleiden van de goden Horus en Seth. Mijn vermoeden daarbij is dat er witte verf op Heru zat, en zwarte verf op Neru zoals we bijvoorbeeld de zwarte Anubis kennen, en de witte Osiris. De heer van de ondergang moet zwart zijn geweest. Het zijn namelijk allebei vertegenwoordigers van één kant van de volledige cyclus van een etmaal. De ene staat voor de oprijzende zon, de andere voor de ondergaande zon. Eén leeuw staat symbool voor de dag, de andere voor de nacht. De piramides zelf vertegenwoordigen dan het middelpunt van de zon op de dag. De term 'Phyr-a-mid' ofwel het 'vuur op het midden', zegt het eigenlijk al. In feite zagen de makers de baan van de zon langs de hemel als een soort van gevecht tussen Horus en Seth. Na het bereiken van het middagpunt begon Seth aan het neerhalen van de zon, wat werd gezien als de strijd met Horus. De grote sfinx krijgt in dit geheel ineens een duidelijke betekenis, maar de piramide zelf ook, die precies in het midden ervan staat. Denk dan eens aan de Engelse term "Sunset" ofwel zonsondergang. Tevens lijkt Seth ook de bron van de latere Satan, de engel van duisternis, en Horus nam de vorm aan van Jezus in het Christendom. In feite zien we op het Gizeh plateau dus de veel oudere Egyptische versie van de strijd tussen Jezus en Satan. Wat dit betekent voor de waarheid over het Christendom, laat ik maar aan u.
Het geheim van Harry Potter In de moderne Harry Potter films worden Heru en Neru verbeeld door Harry Potter en Lord Voldemort! Harry is Heru, de heer van de opgaande zon ofwel Horus, en Voldemort is dan natuurlijk Neru, de heer van de duisternis ofwel Seth. Voldemort's gezicht, met de sterke onderkin en een afgekapte neus en met het platte voorhoofd, is overduidelijk gemodelleerd op het hoofd van de grote sfinx in Gizeh. Dit betekent dat de makers van de films dit gegeven van twee sfinxen in Gizeh al wisten, en het verwerkt hebben in een filmreeks. Daarbij is het niet toevallig dat de filmreeks bestaat uit zeven delen. Omdat dit volgens mij verwijst naar de zeven binnenwerelden uit het Hindoeïsme, en dus ook naar de binnenaarde van Osiris, de Duat. Ook dat is een verhaal op zich, waar ik nu niet verder op in ga. Komt Harry Potter niet in de tweede film in een onderaardse ruimte met Egyptische cobra-sfinxen (Uraeus) in "The chamber of secrets"? Jazeker. Volgens mij niets anders dan een hint aan ons onwetende stervelingen, dat de illuminati deze ruimtes onder de voeten van de sfinx allang hebben opengemaakt en het bestaan ervan bij hen bekend is. Overigens is het symbool uit de laatste film (The deathly hallows) met een cirkel, een lijn en een driehoek, niets anders dan de Osiris triade. Ik heb hier al meer over geschreven. Wie dus denkt dat Harry Potter zomaar een leuke film is, moet maar eens goed wakker worden, want er is over die films nog veel meer te zeggen.
Waarom verdween Heru? We kunnen ons nu afvragen; is de leeuw van de opgang Heru dan toevallig verdwenen? Is hij geheel afgebrokkeld door de tand des tijds? Ik denk van niet. Het komt mij voor dat Heru doelbewust is vernietigd door de illuminati, omdat deze lieden sterk geloven in de kracht van allerlei symbolische handelingen. Het vernietigen van Heru zou namelijk inhouden dat alleen nog de kracht van de ondergang of de duisternis blijft bestaan, en dat is nu precies wat deze Satan(Seth) aanbiddende club verlangt op Aarde. Wanneer zouden ze dat dan hebben gedaan? Wel dat is een goede vraag, maar in elk geval ver voor de ons bekende tijd. Deze figuren zijn al duizenden jaren met hun plannen bezig dus dat kan. Bedenk maar eens hoe het in de Harry Potter films afloopt met Voldemort. In feite wordt Voldemort geheel vernietigd door de witte magie van Harry. Wanneer je dat gegeven omkeert, krijg je dus dat Harry (Heru) geheel wordt vernietigd door de zwarte magie van Voldemort. Een signaal van de illuminati dat zij Heru hebben vernietigd, wellicht met de bekrachtiging van een satanisch ritueel? Het zou zomaar kunnen. Satan zet alle goddelijke waarden ondersteboven. Wat recht is wordt krom, wat boven is wordt onder, wat links is wordt rechts. En nu we het daar dan toch over hebben... De Aarde hangt ondersteboven! Het meest schokkende gegeven in dit verhaal heeft de oplettende lezer al door gehad. Namelijk dit... als Heru, de heer van de opgang momenteel kijkt naar het Westen, en Neru naar het Oosten, dan impliceert dit dat de hele Aarde momenteel ondersteboven hangt ten opzichte van de tijd waarin die monumenten zijn gebouwd. Dit gegeven van twee sfinxen in Gizeh die de verkeerde kant op kijken, kan dus een bevestiging zijn van een fysieke aard-omkering! Een heel eng idee, maar zo belangrijk is het dus dat de aanwezigheid van de tweede sfinx eens officieel wordt aangetoond. Misschien is het bovenstaande ook wel de reden dat de tweede sfinx ooit is gesloopt omdat dit het huidige wereldbeeld letterlijk op z'n kop zet.
Tot slot een opmerking voor de Niburu lezers. Zou het kunnen, dat de naam van Neb-Neru de grote 'Heer van de ondergang' uiteindelijk verworden is tot 'Niberu' en dat daarmee een verkeerd idee is ontstaan over een soort van rode doomsday ster/planeet? In feite is Niburu dan niets anders dan de rode ondergaande zon die een periode van duisternis aankondigt (de nacht), en verwijzen ook de bekende blauwe en rode 'Cachina' van de Hopi-indianen naar niets anders dan de tocht van onze eigen zon langs de hemel. Immers; de ochtendzon heeft meer blauw in het spectrum, en de avondzon meer rood. De rode Cachina die de blauwe Cachina overneemt, zoals Horus en Seth dat doen. Het is maar een idee...
Auteur: Snavelman 2018
In aanvulling op het artikel van Snavelmans volgt hierna een recente video die laat zien dat er zich onder het plateau van Gizeh complete ondergrondse complexen bevinden die onderling allemaal met elkaar zijn verbonden. Ook hoe je symbolen die je daar aantreft weer terugvindt in de Joodse Torah en de tempels van de vrijmetselarij.
Dat ze voor de geboorte van Christus in die onderaardse gewelven al beschikten over eeuwig brandende lampen.
Giant Nephilim Mummies Found in Underground Egyptian City in Grand Canyon Exposed by a 1956 Accident! Smithsonian Cover-up
Giant Nephilim Mummies Found in Underground Egyptian City in Grand Canyon Exposed by a 1956 Accident! Smithsonian Cover-up
Researcher discovers an underground city at Grand Canyon after a tragic crash in 1956.
Giants and Egyptian Mummies were taken out of the grand canyon to be hidden at area 51. Underground ancient structures found demonstrates a unique biblical history very different from our current evolutionary model and it also characterizes the flat earth model.
The Nephilim /ˈnɛfɪˌlɪm/ (Hebrew: נְפִילִים, nefilim) were the offspring of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men” before the Deluge, according to Genesis 6:1-4. A similar or identical biblical Hebrew term, read as “Nephilim” by some scholars, or as the word “fallen” by others, appears in Ezekiel 32:27.
Hi, I’m Vincent Rhodes. I am a pastor and an American Educator. I believe that religion is inescapable and plays a major part in shaping the history, beliefs, and culture. In my view, there are no value neutral educators or academic philosophies. All education has a driving philosophy of religion behind it. The real question is, which philosophy do you subscribe to? For us Americans, secular humanism can be said to be the religion of our people.
And since we deliberately leave God out of our academic discussions within our public schools, we have by default, become subscribers to the religion of materialism. We worship at the altars of success and material prosperity. In reality, there is no such thing as the separation of church and state. Church and state are the mother and father of a free society. And if these two are separated, then our American homes are broken.
Strange Ray of Light emerges from the sky in Russia captured on Camera
Strange Ray of Light emerges from the sky in Russia captured on Camera
Russian photographer Zhiganov, who initially planned to photograph some of his friends lounging in a hot tub with the aurora overhead in the city of Aptity, Russia quickly changed when he noticed a strange phenomenon, explained as a vertical aurora, in the sky upon he started to film it.
"It was the first time I ever saw an aurora in such a rarified form” Zhiganov said but I wonder whether it was an aurora or some sort of a laser/plasma beam since it turned into an enormous bright sphere that moved across the surface until it disappeared.
Here is the amazing video and please decide for yourself whether it is a rare vertical aurora or not.
Huge UFO Visits The Space Station On NASA Live Feed, Video, March 21, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Huge UFO Visits The Space Station On NASA Live Feed, Video, March 21, 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighing: March 21, 2019
Location of sighting: Earths orbit at space station
I was looking at the live Internet NASA cams when I caught an object near the space station. I first caught a small object, which is the same UFO, just further away and a few hours earlier. Then I caught the same UFO closer up. This time it was about 30-50 meters away from the space station. It was huge! The UFO was partially cloaked but was revealed by sunlight bouncing off of it. Strangely enough, the shape came more into focus later in the video and what I thought to be a thick round cylinder turns out to be something way more complex looking. (Look at the photo below).
There is no way that this object is man made. Its not the Dragon capsule and its not part of the space station, and its not the top secret remote control mini shuttle called the X-37B. So, therefor if we know what its not, then only one possibility remains...an alien craft.
A Spock quote is stuck in my head right now. He said, "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Now do you see why NASA deliberately causes distortions during the live cam? Its so we the public will stay in the dark, but as you see, thinks are lighting up.
An unidentified flying object (UFO) that appeared in the skies of Prescott Valley, Arizona is now the hottest debating point among conspiracy theorists and extraterrestrial enthusiasts. The strange clip that was submitted to MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) recently shows a dark object hovering in the skies in broad daylight.
The eyewitness who saw this sighting described the UFO as a dark ghost-like object. However, popular extraterrestrial researcher Scott C Waring who analyzed the clip revealed that this dark object could be actually an alien spaceship. Waring also added that this UFO is partly cloaked, and suggested that aliens might be living in a base that would be about 4-5 miles below the ground.
"Look closely at this UFO and you will see its partly cloaked. What looks like smoke, is actually the hidden parts of the ship becoming visible. This UFO either just came out or was about to enter an alien base that would be about 4-5 miles below the ground. That is the only possibility for an alien craft to be hovering in a desolate location for so long. There are a lot of aliens that prefer the dryer hotter climate like the tall greys, the short greys, and the tall whites," wrote Scott C Waring on his website UFO Sightings Daily.
The website post made by Scott C Waring soon became the debating point among conspiracy theorists, and many people outlandishly confirmed that this incident is authentic proof of alien existence. Some of these people argued that aliens used to visit the earth for hundreds of thousands of years to monitor human activities.
A section of conspiracy theorists alleged a foul play by NASA, and they claimed that the United States space agency is intentionally covering up realities of alien life fearing public panic.
The news of this UFO sighting comes just a few days after another square-shaped black flying object was spotted in California. In the footage uploaded to YouTube by a user named Daniel Zermeno, a square object was seen moving slowly across the skies. Interestingly, the UFO in the video can be seen spinning in the air at regular intervals.
'Alien in my backyard:' The UFO community sill believes — and science is starting to listen
'Alien in my backyard:' The UFO community still believes — and science is starting to listen
GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
By CHABELI HERRERA | The Orlando Sentinel
ORLANDO, Fla. (Tribune News Service) — Trish Bishop said he appeared as if a hologram at first — then solid — suddenly at the edge of the forest behind her home in Kissimmee.
It was a Thursday in March 2013, the glow of the afternoon tucking in for the day behind the trees. She said he stood tall, at least 6-foot-3, perhaps 220 pounds and certainly muscular, wearing a formfitting tan colored uniform, boots and gloves.
Paralyzed with fear, she said she watched as what she believed to be an alien appeared to climb invisible steps, stopping often to snatch glances at her from where she sat on her back porch, fumbling with her phone to appear as though she couldn’t see him.
When he was about 10 feet off the ground, he turned his back to her and pulled himself up — “into a UFO?” she thought — and was gone.
Bishop sat stunned. “I’ve got a freaking alien in my backyard,” she thought.
It would be four years before she told anyone her story, before she’d discover the Mutual Unidentified Flying Objects Network, a nationwide organization 50 years old, and file her report under case number 84886 with the local Florida chapter.
But she worried: Who would believe her?
These days, more people than you’d think.
Across restaurants and meeting rooms in the United States, MUFON groups still gather every month to discuss cases like Bishop’s with the enthusiasm that once gripped the nation during the Cold War, when UFO sightings still made a splash on the front page.
The Space Coast group, made up of some former NASA employees and engineers, has 118 members, the largest in the state. Across the U.S. they number 3,500, with additional offices in 42 countries.
For many years, they were alone entertaining UFO theories. No more.
In the past two years, scientists, politicians and professionals have increasingly been willing to touch the taboo subject and perhaps lend a little credence to those who still believe.
In December 2017, the New York Times uncovered that the U.S. had gone so far as to fund a secret, $22 million, five-year project to study UFO claims.
Since then, respected researchers, from the chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department to at least one scientist at NASA, have come out with theories, albeit controversial ones, that suggest closer study of the role extraterrestrials may play in certain phenomena.
What’s changed, said Robert Powell, an executive board member on the non-profit Scientific Coalition for Ufology, is our understanding of the universe. As scientists have discovered more Earth-like exoplanets and begun to delve into the options for interstellar travel — one idea includes using a laser-propelled, microchip-shaped probe — the conversation has been shifting.
“We still think of ourselves, as a species, as the center of everything,” Powell said. “Once you ...at least start to discuss interstellar travel, you have to admit that, if there is intelligent life out there, then they have to be able to travel interstellar, too.”
Science weighs in
The challenge with UFO and alien sightings has always been the lack of evidence. Bishop said she was too scared to take a photo of her alien. Little to no consequential evidence exists in other cases.
Psychology can explain some of it. Common explanations include a person projecting their unconscious desires onto something, or a predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories informing what a person thinks they saw, said Alvin Wang, a psychology professor at the University of Central Florida.
People who believe they witnessed something may seek out others who reaffirm that belief, like “being in an echo chamber,” Wang said.
“People tend to hold on to that particularly if it fits in with their worldview and their belief system that there are other beings that inhabit the universe,” Wang said. “And they get ...confirmation support, when they are members of UFO believers community.”
But Bishop stands by what she said she saw. She works a government security job with three area contractors and said she has no reason to lie.
And she’s on the hunt for ET now. After reporting her case in 2017, she bought three hunting trackers on eBay and set them up in her backyard. They’re motion activated, and sometimes they’ll go off in the night and capture 6,000 images — but there’s nothing in the frame. She once caught a Tic Tac-shaped blur in the sky she believes to be a UFO.
“I just think it's a belief thing until you actually see them,” Bishop said. “You always gotta wonder.”
Some people, like Kathleen Marden, have been wondering all their lives.
It was September 1961 when the then 13-year-old got the call: Her aunt, Betty Hill, and her uncle, Barney Hill, said they’d seen a UFO on their drive through the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
Betty’s dress was torn and Barney’s shoes were scuffed. There were two hours they couldn’t account for and Barney was sure he’d seen eight to 11 figures dressed in black shiny uniforms that were “somehow not human,” said Marden, who now lives outside Orlando.
It wasn’t until the Hills were put through a hypnosis session by Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon that their stories of being taken into a UFO and physically examined were revealed.
“They were interested in the skin, in the skeletal structure, in the joints,” said Marden, MUFON’s director of experiencer research. “They examined their hands, they took their shoes off, they examined their feet, they did tests on them that appear to be testing their nervous systems, as well.”
The Hills’ alleged abduction was made public in 1965 — and the story gripped the nation. “Did They Seize Couple?” the Boston Traveler posited. “I Was Quizzed in ‘Space Ship,’” read another headline.
Marden has dedicated her life to uncovering the truth behind she said was government tampering with the Hills’ case and has written four books about her aunt and uncle and flying saucers. She’s seen the change in perception about UFOs in the public and scientific community first hand.
“I absolutely do think that there is a shift, that people are giving more credence to this they did in the past,” she said, pointing to the 2017 New York Times story on the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program as the turning point.
The program was run by military intelligence official Luis Elizondo and put together at the request of then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid. It ran from 2007 to 2012 in partnership with businessman Robert Bigelow’s company Bigelow Aerospace, which studied cases of American military personnel observing unknown objects.
One case in particular garnered attention when it was declassified because videos showed a craft with no apparent propulsion moving at alarmingly fast speeds. It was filmed in 2004 by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets off the coast of San Diego.
Navy pilot Commander David Fravor, who witnessed the Tic Tac-shaped craft, told the Washington Post in late 2017 that he maintained it was “something not from Earth.”
Then came Harvard’s astronomy department chair, Avi Loeb, a renowned scientist who Time Magazine named one of the 25 most influential people in space in 2012.
He, along with colleague Shmuel Bialy, wrote in a publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters that a thin interstellar object seen passing through our solar system called Oumuamua “is a lightsail, flowing in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment.”
Loeb went a step further, theorizing that, “alternatively, a more exotic scenario is that Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.” The theory has provoked the ire of the scientific community, but Loeb has stood by it.
Is it aliens, for sure? Loeb can’t say. He just says he can’t find another explanation.
At NASA Ames Research Center in California, scientist Silvano Colombano has gone on record suggesting the space agency look at all explanations in its approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI. Historically, NASA has not weighed in on the issue much, most recently opening a Center for Life Detection Science that is more about finding biosignatures than analyzing alleged UFO sightings.
But Colombano argued in a March 2018 white paper that the scientific community should be more open about looking at the evidence that is already there, “consider the UFO phenomenon worthy of study” and engage in “speculative physics” grounded in solid scientific theories but with some “willingness to stretch possibilities as to the nature of space-time and energy.”
Essentially, he said, it was time NASA had a more open mind.
The Believers
While science dukes it out, the members of the MUFON’s Space Coast chapter take their places at their monthly meeting in the back room of an old-fashioned BBQ joint in Palm Bay called Memaw’s to discuss what they all believe to be a universal truth.
Many believers come to the meetings because someone they know saw something they couldn’t explain, or because they’ve nursed an interest in the subject since the days of the Cold War, when UFO sightings and abduction claims spiked. Some say they have seen things. Others put stock in more eccentric theories.
They are what’s left of a movement that once captured the interest of thousands, inspired books like Carl Sagan’s “Contact,” long-running TV show “The X-Files,” and made Betty and Barney Hill the stars of a 1975 film starring James Earl Jones.
There are many people like Barbara Stusse, who says her mother saw a UFO in 1947 and kept it from her children for 30 years. Stusse remembers waiting for her copy of the Boston Herald every day for a week in 1965, when the Hills’ story unraveled in three to four pages of newsprint a day.
“I read that and I thought, ‘I believed it,’ ” said Stusse, 80, who has been coming to MUFON meetings for three years.
And there’s Bill Fisk, who is always at meetings taking notes. He’s in charge of taking in reported sightings like Bishop’s and trying to explain them. Could weather have played a role? Could the person have dreamed it?
Fisk, who has been hooked since the moment he saw a light in the sky make a sharp 90-degree turn when he was 9 years old, joined the local MUFON chapter in 2015.
He went all in, taking 100 hours of online classes over three months to get certified as a field investigator for MUFON. He learned how to read flight plans, how to measure longitude, latitude and cloud altitude, how to use a Geiger counter to measure ionizing radiation.
Sometimes he gets hoaxes. One man copyrighted an image he took of the sky through a window because he was convinced it was a UFO. Turns out, it was just the reflection of his hotel room’s ceiling light on the glass. Chinese lanterns in the sky are often confused with flying saucers. And one woman even claimed an alien came into her house and had sex with her.
“A lot of it is that people don’t look up, they don’t pay attention to the sky, the last time they read a science book was in 12th grade,” Fisk said. “It’s just one of those things that sometimes you just have to bring them along, give them the information, the education to do something with what they saw, put it into a framework.”
A customer solutions representative for CareerSource Brevard, Fisk works on cases at lunch or after work. He can close most in three to four days, write them off as someone thinking Venus was a UFO, but sometimes he gets one he can’t crack.
Only a dozen of these cosmic oddballs are currently known.
This view of the asteroid Bennu ejecting particles from its surface on Jan. 19, 2019, was created by combining two images taken by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: a short-exposure photo, which shows the asteroid clearly, and a long-exposure version, which shows the particles clearly. Other image-processing techniques were also applied, such as cropping and adjusting the brightness and contrast of each layer.
The near-Earth asteroidBennuis a lot weirder and more interesting than scientists had thought.
The 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) space rock ejected particles of dust and gravel into space multiple times over the past few months, newly announced observations from NASA'sOSIRIS-REx spacecraftreveal. So, Bennu is one of just a dozen or so known "active asteroids" — and the only one to be observed up close.
The discovery "is probably the biggest surprise of the early stages of the OSIRIS-REx mission and, I would say, one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career," OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, of the University of Arizona, said during a news conference today (March 19).
The $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission launched in September 2016 and arrived in orbit around Bennu on Dec. 31 of last year. If all goes according to plan, in mid-2020, the probe will dip down and grab a sample of Bennu material, which will come down to Earth in a return capsule in September 2023.
Analysis of this pristine cosmic dirt and gravel will help scientists better understand the solar system's early days. It could also help reveal the role that dark, carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu may have played in delivering water and the chemical building blocks of life to our planet, mission team members have said.
OSIRIS-REx's observations will additionally shed light on how potentially dangerous asteroids move through space and which of the space rocks miners may want to target down the road, among other things. Indeed, there are numerous subsidiary goals, as indicated by the mission's full name: "Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer."
But the team didn't expect to get an up-close look at an active asteroid. So, it came as a big surprise when OSIRIS-REx photos showed particles streaming from Bennu's rugged surface on Jan. 6, just a week after the probe's arrival in orbit around the space rock.
And that was hardly an isolated incident: Mission team members have now identified 11 such events, three of which were "substantial" ones involving dozens to more than 100 particles, Lauretta said. And researchers are still going through the imagery.
The ejection events involve bits of space rock ranging from a few centimeters to up to tens of centimeters in diameter, Lauretta said. And the particles' velocities vary widely, too. Some move at up to 7 mph (11 km/h), fast enough to escape Bennu's weak gravity and cruise into interplanetary space. And other pieces merely mosey out, becoming trapped in orbit around Bennu for a spell and then falling back down onto the asteroid's surface.
"Basically, it looks like Bennu has a continuous population of particles raining down on it from discrete ejection events across its surface," Lauretta said. "This is incredibly exciting."
The team doesn't know what's spurring the ejection events. The ejections have been observed around the time of Bennu's closest passage to the sun during the asteroid's elliptical orbit, which occurred this year on Jan. 10. So, solar heating of the asteroid's surface and near-subsurface may be the main driver. But that's just speculation at the moment, Lauretta stressed.
(Bennu's orbit takes the space rock as close as 0.9 astronomical units, or AU, to the sun, and as far away as 1.36 AU. Reminder: One AU is the Earth-sun distance, which is about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)
But let's get back to those particles that manage to break free of Bennu's tenuous grip. It's possible that these little asteroid pieces cause a meteor showerhere on Earth every year, Lauretta said. The putative "Bennid" shower would appear in September and be best-observed from the Southern Hemisphere.
The mission team is working with meteor experts from the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute to hunt for the Bennids, Lauretta said.
After a series of analyses, the OSIRIS-REx team has concluded that the ejected particles don't pose a serious risk to the spacecraft or its mission objectives. But other complications have arisen, suggesting that the 2020 sampling sortie will be more difficult than previously imagined.
OSIRIS-REx scientists announced today in a series of papers that Bennu is far more rugged and boulder-strewn than ground-based radar imagery and modeling work had indicated.
The original mission design called for OSIRIS-REx to sample material from a relatively smooth, flat patch of Bennu's surface at least 165 feet (50 m) wide. But there don't appear to be any such oases on the asteroid; the biggest flat patch appears to be in the 65-foot (20 m) size range, mission team members announced today.
OSIRIS-REx will likely require an update to its navigation software to pull off a sampling run in a tighter space, Lauretta told Space.com. And the team will probably need to take more high-resolution photos of the sampling site than had been anticipated.
But Lauretta and his fellow team members think OSIRIS-REx will meet the challenge.
"Our navigation performance has been exquisite," OSIRIS-REx project manager Rich Burns, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said during today's news conference. "We feel confident that our systems and our teams are up to the task."
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — If you want to use a nuclear weapon to save the world from an asteroid, don't try to do it the way Bruce Willis did in "Armageddon," NASA's planetary defense office would like to remind you.
"If you've seen those movies, they're completely bogus," Lindley Johnson, the planetary defense officer at NASA headquarters, said during a media session on asteroids and the art of protecting Earth from them held at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference taking place here this week. "That's not how we would use a nuclear explosive device to do this at all."
But nuclear weapons are one of three techniques planetary defense experts have their eye on for nudging an asteroid off course if its orbit seems to be carrying it too close to Earth for comfort. Another method, impacting an asteroid, will be tested for the first time during the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, a NASA mission scheduled to launch in June 2021 and collide with an asteroid's moon in October 2022.
Another tactic would use gravity to slowly tug an asteroid far enough off course to miss Earth. And then there's the nuclear option, which is the best option for larger asteroids more than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) or so in diameter.
All three of these techniques take the same basic approach: adjust the asteroid's orbital speed so that its path no longer intersects with our own. "We just need to change that speed by maybe a couple of centimeters per second," Johnson said. "If we do that several years in advance, the change that occurs in the orbit as it comes around several years later to that impact point — the change in velocity will cause it to arrive early or late to the impact point. That's all we need."
To get that change in velocity from a nuclear explosion, however, there's no need to actually touch the asteroid directly, Johnson said. Instead, the trick is to set off the explosion a few hundreds of meters up. "That causes an irradiation of the surface of the asteroid on that side, heats it up, superheats the surface," he said. "That surface will then blow off from the asteroid."
And because the laws of physics still apply, that dramatic action triggers an equal and opposite reaction, with the asteroid rebounding away — precisely what's needed to avert a catastrophe here on Earth. You wouldn't even need to fall into orbit around the object if you planned the mission carefully enough, Johnson said, a flyby would do.
Satellite image of Mayotte island in the Indian Ocean. Photo: Getty Images
On November 11, 2018, adeep rumble ricocheted around the world, one that humans couldn’t feel but that registered quite clearly on seismometers. A newpre-print paper about the event is now suggesting that it was caused by the largest offshore volcanic event in recorded history.
Originating 30 miles east of the island of Mayotte, near Madagascar, the mid-November signal immediately caught the attention of a disparate group of geoscientists. They subsequentlytook to Twitterto express their fascination over this mysterious event—one evenjoked about a “giant prehistoric sea monster.”
The rumble formed part of a prolonged seismic sequence that had started in the area back in May 2018, but the very low-frequency, potent growl in November stood out because it wasn’t immediately obvious what caused it. These scientists eventually agreed that it could only have originated from a volcanic event, one involving the movement of a vast volume of magma beneath the seafloor, causing the ground there to significantly deflate.
Now, a new paper by researchers at the French Geological Survey and France’s Ecole Normale Supérieure has been uploaded to the public server EarthArXiv. Although there are plenty of unanswered questions, this first-order estimation of what happened between May and mid-November matches up with the calculations of those geoscientists that took to social media. In fact, the volume of magma involved is so huge that this is certainly one of the largest offshore volcanic events to be spotted by modern scientific instrumentation.
There is a major caveat to all this, however. Compared to land-based monitoring, there’s a huge lack of offshore monitoring happening around the world today, and there are likely plenty of offshore events that have taken place since modern records began that scientists haven’t picked up on.
Make no mistake, though: The recent event offshore from Mayotte, which is still ongoing, is colossal.
According to the data from the onshore GPS stations, as well as the seismic signals—including the weird November 11 event—the rumbling is definitely being generated by volcanic activity of some sort. The way the ground on Mayotte is moving implies that the seafloor off its eastern shoreline is sinking at a rate of around 0.4 inches per month. At the same time, Mayotte itself is shifting eastward at a rate of 0.63 inches per month. Both indicate something huge underground is on the move, causing some serious deflation.
The nature of these tremors suggest that the magmatic source is centered at a depth of 16 miles beneath the seafloor. In the first six months of the sequence alone, at least 0.24 cubic miles of magma has shifted around. That’s roughly equivalent to 385 Great Pyramids of Giza.
Helen Robinson, a geothermal expert and PhD candidate at Glasgow University, compared it to volumes of other submarine eruptions. From the 1998 Axial Seamount eruption offshore from Oregon, to the Havre paroxysmnorth of New Zealand on the Kermadec arc, “it certainly seems this is the largest submarine event in terms of volume on record,” she told Gizmodo.
Samuel Mitchell, an expert in underwater eruptions at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, and who worked on the Havre eruption, agreed that the amounts of volcanic material involved are definitely comparable. “The 2018 event at Mayotte does appear to show a substantial volume of magma leaving a deep storage region which, if erupted, would make this indeed one of the largest recent submarine eruptions documented,” he said.
That’s a big “if,” though. As Robinson also points out, and as the new pre-print paper acknowledges, what’s happening near Mayotte is not necessarily an eruption.
Pierre Briole, a geophysicist at France’s Ecole Normale Supérieure and one of the authors of the pre-print, told Gizmodo that the indirect evidence means that he’s “pretty sure it’s an eruption.” But as there is currently no direct evidence of an eruption having taken place, “there is a significant probability that no lava reached the surface.”
Failing to breach into the sea, the migrating magma might have injected itself into thick sediments in the seafloor and spread itself around. Mitchell explained that this has been observed elsewhere, when the magma is denser than the surrounding sediment.
Although the overall volume of magma involved is comparable to the 2012 Havre eruption, the two are likely to be quite different events. The former definitely involved plenty of eruptive material, whose huge pumice raft was first spotted from a plane. At the same time, large, gloopy volcanic domes formed on the seafloor.
In Mayotte’s case, if an eruption did take place, Mitchell explained, it’s more likely to be some sort of fissure effusion involving more fluid lava, a bit like an underwater version of what happened on the slopes of Hawaii’s Kīlauea in 2018.
Jean Paul Ampuero, a seismologist and director of research at France’s Research Institute for Development, told Gizmodo that “this whole sequence is record-breaking in many aspects.” Along with the huge volume of magma, the November 11 signal was also easily one of the largest low-frequency tremors of its kind.
That the low-frequency rumble spread across the world was probably due to a “perfect storm,” according to Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at the University of Southampton.
In this case, that meant having both a very large source and vibrations at the exact right pitch to carry them across a considerable distance.
The November 11 signal’s individual elements still remain deeply puzzling. In particular, its repeated high-frequency bursts, which are similar (but aren’t related to) industrial activity, are difficult to explain. Ampuero said that they fall into a timing pattern that indicates they are strongly connected to the low-frequency pulses, indicating the two components “are talking to each other in some way.”
One highly speculative explanation is that the high-frequency events are related to the collapse of the rocky walls surrounding the magmatic monster. This disturbs the magma reservoir, causing it to oscillate or ‘hum.’ At the same time, waves bouncing back and forth hit other flanks and trigger more collapses, generating more high-frequency events. This all happens, Ampuero suggests, in a way that causes the low- and high-frequency events to synchronize, forming the November 11 signal.
It’s very difficult to say for sure. Some smaller tremors in the sequence also had a similar signal, Ampuero added, so “perhaps they’ll catch another one” like the big tremor and take it apart to see what it’s made of.
The geological setting is also pretty weird. This major volcanic event is taking place on the eastern end of the island chain, whereas the youngest volcanic islands are to the west. So it appears to be happening in the ‘wrong’ place.
It’s also unclear what’s responsible for the volcanism in the first place. It could be caused by action along a tectonic plate boundary, an upwelling plume of superheated mantle material, or even an extension of the East African Rift, a major tectonic event that’s slowly tearing the continent apart, said Hicks.
There is even an ecological element to the story that’s currently unexplained: the emergence of lots of dead fish offshore from Mayotte. Volcanic gases can suffocate sea life during eruptions, but the pre-print reports that the gases remained trapped in the magma.
Briole has heard unverified reports that the fish that died were deep-sea fish. The magmatic activity might have scared them up to the surface, where they experienced low pressures that they couldn’t survive in. Robinson said that the magma, which may have intruded into seafloor sediments, cooked those sediments and released carbon dioxide into the water column, which could also have asphyxiated those deep-sea fish.
Like much about the event, this remains speculative for now. Clearly more instrumentation is required, and the French National Centre for Scientific Research—with help from the BRGM and other authorities—are now deploying plenty. This includes equipment on Mayotte, at the site of the activity, and on the Glorioso Islands to the east, so that they can ‘listen’ to the disturbances from the other side.
That still won’t solve all the enigmas. Mitchell pointed out that underwater drones and ship-based radar surveys will be required to determine how much lava erupted at the surface, if any, and Hicks suggested that numerical simulations and laboratory work may be required to better comprehend what’s going on beneath the surface.
As Ampuero emphasizes, this isn’t just about scratching a scientific itch, but helping out the local communities, too. “The people in Mayotte really want to know what’s going to happen next,” he said. As a recent report on the situation notes, there is often an atmosphere of confusion and distrust on the island. The more research that’s conducted, the better off everyone will be.
Correction: This article has been corrected to note that the rate of eastward drift of Mayotte is 0.63 inches per month, not 6.3 inches.
Op 11 november vorig jaar werd de aarde opgeschud door mysterieuze seismische golven. Nu weten we waarom
Op 11 november vorig jaar werd de aarde opgeschud door mysterieuze seismische golven. Nu weten we waarom
Op 11 november vorig jaar werden mysterieuze seismische golven opgepikt van Madagaskar tot Canada. Wetenschappers stonden voor een raadsel.
Onderzoekers die de signalen hebben geregistreerd zeggen dat ze afkomstig waren uit een gebied voor de kust van het eiland Mayotte (foto).
Op Twitter schreven ze over deze mysterieuze gebeurtenis. Eén van hen grapte dat het ging om ‘een gigantisch prehistorisch zeemonster’.
Grootste
Ze dachten in eerste instantie aan een vulkaanuitbarsting.
De golven waren meer dan 20 minuten meetbaar. De meeste mensen hebben er niets van gemerkt.
Volgens een nieuw studie werden de golven veroorzaakt door de grootste onderzeese uitbarsting uit de geschiedenis.
Kolossale uitbarsting
Onderzoekers van de École normale supérieure in Parijs zeggen dat in het gebied een enorme hoeveelheid magma onder de zeebodem is verplaatst.
Het zou gaan om één van de grootste, zo niet de grootste onderzeese uitbarsting die ooit is vastgelegd.
Het moet in ieder geval een kolossale uitbarsting zijn geweest.
Iets heel groots
Uit gegevens die zijn verzameld, blijkt dat de golven worden veroorzaakt door vulkanische activiteit.
De zeebodem bij Mayotte blijkt met een centimeter per maand te dalen, terwijl het eiland zelf met 1,6 centimeter per maand richting het oosten verschuift. Dit wijst erop dat het gaat om iets heel groots.
Vrij zeker
In zes maanden tijd werd ongeveer 0,38 kubieke kilometer magma verplaatst. Dat staat gelijk aan 384 Piramides van Gizeh.
Pierre Briole van de École normale supérieure zei ‘er vrij zeker van te zijn dat het gaat om een eruptie’.
Around 9pm local time on Saturday, March 16th, 2019, an air ambulance helicopter was flying roughly 15 miles west of central Last Vegas when something odd caught his aided eye. During an exchange with an air traffic controller, the pilot of Mercy Air 21,an Agusta 119 Koalahelicopter, noted spotting an unidentified object some distance from his position and only he was likely able to see it in the darkness as he was wearing night vision goggles (NVGs). The controller responded that he had nothing on radar in the area where he was seeing the object, but when he heard the pilot could only see it through his NVGs, he responded with amazement.
Our good friend @Aircraftspots mentioned the odd exchange on twitter and posted the audio to Soundcloud, which you can listen to in full below. Apparently, he was tipped off to it by fellow Twitter user and aviation aficionado @KE6ZGP.
Bryan Herbert@KE6ZGP
125.9000 -- PIlot reporting a UFO at 7000 feet around the Southern Hills area of Las Vegas
You can hear the pilot alert the controller to spotting something over the "Southern Hills area." This is not a topographic landmark, it is a hospital in the southwest corner of the Las Vegas metropolitan area. He notes that the objects appears to be at around 7,000 feet and that it could be a balloon or "something along those lines" and that it is unlit.
AIR METHODS FACEBOOK PAGE
An A119 Koala like the one involved in the radio exchange.
The controller responds saying he doesn't see it, but that doesn't mean there isn't something out there. The pilot then informs him that he has night vision goggles on and that he can only see it through the goggles. The controller seems pretty amazed with the pilot's capabilities, responding "oooh that's awesome."
GOOGLE EARTH The red arrow is the location of South Hills Hospital and the red outlined area is a window roughly 15 miles west of McCarran International Airport. Our best guess on where the helicopter was that spotted the object.
We ran back the tracking data Flightradar24 had during the time of the radio exchange and we couldn't find anything unusual in the area where the pilot saw the object and we couldn't find Mercy Air 21 definitively either. This isn't surprising as lower-flying aircraft have spotty tracking in that area.
We did find an air ambulance helicopter that briefly appeared over the western Las Vegas metropolitan area at around the right time of the radio call. According to @Aircraftspots, that aircraft, N608CF, doesn't historically use the Mercy Air 21 callsign. Still, it is the same type as the one that does and appears to be owned by the same company—Air Methods. So it is possible that this was the helicopter communicating with air traffic control, although its position is closer to the center of Las Vegas than it should be, at least based on the positioning call given by the air traffic controller in the recorded audio.
FLIGHTRADAR24 N608CF, a A119 owned by Air Methods Corp, appeared just for a moment over West Las Vegas around the time of the radio call.
Really, all that doesn't matter that much. What we are left with here is an interesting piece of air traffic control audio more than an unexplained sighting of a pressing or extremely extraordinary nature. As the pilot notes, it could have been some sort of a balloon, but it does seem a bit odd spotting an unlit balloon at night, with night vision goggles, from miles away. The altitude is also interesting, 7,000 feet isn't exactly low. But without more information and/or additional witnesses, we don't have much to warrant further investigation.
At least not yet.
We have reached out to Air Methods to see if the pilot can give us any more info on the incident.
UPDATE: 6:30pm PST—
There was a bit of confusion about the time indexing between the flight data and the audio clip and our friend @thenewarea51 figure it out. Because it was UTC time, we were a day behind, so the data we wanted to see was on the 17th not 16th of March. When we reviewed the correct data from Flightradar24, we got Mercy Air 21 (MA021) exactly where it should be, roughly 15 miles west of KLAS in the red box I originally outlined.
We can also positively ID the helicopter. It is an Agusta A109, registered N238AM, belonging to Air Methods. We also now have better positioning information. According to this, MA021 would have been roughly nine miles from the South Hills Hospital, the approximate area where the pilot thought the object was flying over at 7,000 feet, when the radio exchange occurred.
A nine mile visual ID of a party ballon or something like that at night using NVGs seems really questionable. So size of the object and its exact configuration is the big question at this point. We also know that the A109 was flying at 7,000 feet. So, the pilot would have seen this object at eye level from his perspective.
FLIGHTRADAR24
Update: March 18th, 2019 @ 6:19pm PST—
We finally talked to the Mercy Air operations base where the helicopter flies out of and they informed us that Air Methods headquarters has told them not provide comment or access to the pilot who was talking on the radio and spotted the object. They told us Air Methods wants any inquiries sent to their headquarters. The problem is that I had reached out to them and have heard nothing back in well over 24 hours. I will keep trying to contact them directly, but at this point it looks as if they are actively trying to avoid discussing the event with us.
Air traffic controllers in Las Vegas recorded a bizarre interaction this week stemming from a pilot’s encounter with an unidentified aerial object. The event took place on Saturday, March 16th, 2019 around 9:00 pm local time when an air ambulance pilot flying 15 miles west of Las Vegas spotted something odd in the sky at around 7,000 feet over the southwestern corner of Las Vegas. The pilot told air traffic controllers about the object and that he could only see the object through night vision; air traffic control, meanwhile, reported seeing nothing on radar.
Aviation sleuth Tyler Rogoway at The Drive ran a scan of available flight data and found no aircraft nor anything anomalous on radar at the time. Still, that doesn’t mean a low-flying or small object couldn’t have eluded radar. In the audio of the interaction posted online, the pilot tells air traffic control that it may have been a balloon – although a pilot spotting an unlit balloon at night from nine miles away would be pretty amazing, night vision or not.
Bryan Herbert@KE6ZGP
125.9000 -- PIlot reporting a UFO at 7000 feet around the Southern Hills area of Las Vegas
While there’s not much to go on in this incident other than a somewhat comical interaction between air traffic control and a pilot concerning some type of unidentified and seemingly insignificant object, any UFO report from the Nevada desert is curious based on the area’s history. The deserts of Nevada are home to many of the most famous and infamous UFO sightings, paranormal hotspots, alleged research facilities, and overall weirdness. Who knows what the pilot might have seen?
Air Methods, the air ambulance company which operates the helicopter, has yet to respond to requests for more information concerning the incident and The Drive reports that “at this point it looks as if they are actively trying to avoid discussing the event with us.” Again, probably nothing, right?
Then again, is anything in the Nevada desert ever what it seems?
Only Every Two or Three Times Every 100 Years Humongous Meteor Exploded Over Russia's Bering Sea Went Unnoticed (Video)
Only Every Two or Three Times Every 100 Years! Humongous Meteor Exploded Over Russia's Bering Sea Went Unnoticed (Video)
A huge fireball exploded in the Earth’s atmosphere in December, according to Nasa. The blast was the second largest of its kind in 30 years, and the biggest since the fireball over Chelyabinsk in Russia six years ago. But it went largely unnoticed until now because it blew up over the Bering Sea, off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
The space rock exploded with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer at Nasa, told BBC News a fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every 100 years.
Huge Meteor Exploded Over Russia’s Bering Sea Went Unnoticed
David Wilcock: Secret Space Breakaway Civilizations Using Advanced Technology
David Wilcock: Secret Space Breakaway Civilizations Using Advanced Technology
David Wilcock says they had a lot of basic infrastructure already developed, in Antartica, on the Moon and on Mars. They had spacecraft that could leave our solar system, and they had alliances that provided support for their agenda. Corey says the Americans sent Admiral Byrd with a major Navy contingent to the southern continent during Operation Highjump to deal with these German bases there.
The effort was a major failure, as Byrd encountered heavy resistance such as highly advanced craft. David mentions that these ancient cities in Antartica were probably built at a time when the continent was not covered by glaciers. 12,000 years ago is when the conditions were right to build them.
He goes on to suggest that there have been pole shifts in the Earth’s past and these could have reoriented the positions of Earth such that Antartica may have been closer to the equator in the past. He says perhaps the civilization in Antarctica could have been Atlantis of legend.
In today’s world, there are new opportunities for new discoveries that keep appearing and as a result, these new findings are constantly happening. Archaeology also uses the latest achievements in technology to aid in their research..
However, some of these remarkable discoveries are made by just common every day, people. For example, a little girl found a real sword in a lake and that weapon is at least 1,000 years old!
So here are some recent archaeological findings that have stupefied scientists all over the world.
What Everybody Dislikes About Ufo Sightings and Why
What Everybody Dislikes About Ufo Sightings and Why
The sighting itself, in spite of the corroborative sightings, isn’t difficult to dismiss by itself. Almost thirty individual sightings would be reported as a consequence of the serious-minded appeal to the general public. Recently, among the most renowned mass sightings was the Phoenix Lights.
With the numbers of UFO sightings increasing each calendar year, it’s important that you know just where to report a UFO sighting and what information will be necessary to be able to report it successfully. UFO sightings aren’t a modern phenomenon, they’re not a US-only phenomenon. During February in Minnesota, for instance, only 69 UFO sightings are reported since the start of the 21st century.
The sighting came amid several similar sightings in the region in the preceding weeks. The sighting remains unexplained, merely one of many in and about the Quaker State. By way of example, over Midlothian, quite a few sightings are made from January to March. One perhaps can only imagine how a lot more sightings may be on record in the event the Internet was available for witnesses to log and go over their encounters. What follows is a mere assortment of what’s a huge number of strange aerial sightings over the uk at the conclusion of the 1970s.
The Basics of Ufo Sightings
While ghost hunting is our favourite kind of paranormal investigation, we additionally delight in a very good alien conspiracy. Around the Earth, there are a great deal of UFO enthusiasts. They believe that the region is the best hotspot in the country for UFO sightings. Many UFO scientists have found Mrs. Moreland to be a dependable witness who’s consistent within her account of the incident. They have examined the multiple pieces of video footage and photographs. Two decades afterwards the scientists publicized the results of their test that they argued revealed that the animal isn’t human.
With no fear whatsoever, the witness would step from his vehicle to receive a better look. The witnesses weren’t clear in the event the craft had sped away or in the event the lights had simply gone out. What’s more, a lot of other witnesses would back-up the 2 officers’ sighting. Furthermore, there’s definite evidence of an ancient settlement in the place. Investigation would indicate that the rash wasn’t an answer to something like poison ivy or an allergic reaction. If you’re still not convinced or want to read more evidence an Arizona UFO might not be a laughing matter, you might delight in seeing for yourself, more UFO Evidence.
Ufo Sightings – the Conspiracy
Particulars of the sightings were always the exact same. Perhaps the most intriguing detail of the aforementioned sighting is the light splitting itself into two distinct objects. Among the truly strangest characteristics of the paranormal activity in Hoia-Baciu is that experiences have a tendency to be unique from 1 person to another. UFO sighting levels depend on not only the presence of unrecognizable objects, but in addition, needless to say, on the chance of actually reporting such observations. What’s more, the radiation levels measured at UFO sightings consistently demonstrate a greater count than that which is normally found in the surroundings.
While pilots reporting UFOs is nothing new, there now seems to be a feeling of urgency to create such reports known on the section of the respective witnesses. Besides that simple fact, it may even be possible to blind a UFO pilot. So shocked was the officer he’d request back-up to likewise see the sighting.
Some reports state it’s a ping, while some claim it’s a beep. Another report caused the discovery a meteor had descended Scotland. Reports of aliens sightings and abductions are typical things throughout the world.
UFO sightings: NASA expert urges to take alien claims SERIOUSLY - 'There must be life'
UFO sightings: NASA expert urges to take alien claims SERIOUSLY - 'There must be life'
UFO claims and stories of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth need to be considered without blanket scepticism, a physicist and former NASA researcher has shockingly claimed.
NASA’s hunt for proof of alien life is at the forefront of the space agency’s deep space exploration. But here on Earth, many conspiracy theorists and self-appointed UFO-hunters are already certain aliens visit Earth on a regular basis. Most of these alien claims, supposed UFO sightings and stories of mysterious crop circles appearing overnight are immediately dismissed by the scientific community. A former NASA researcher and physicist at the University of Albany, however, has argued immediate scepticism to all UFO-related theories is counterproductive.
Kevin Knuth, an associate professor at Albany, argued in an opinion piece for Cosmos Magazine, the odds of life existing outside of Earth are pretty high.
The “unsettling and refreshing” possibility is exactly why, he argued, more attention needs to be paid to what is happening in the skies.
Dr Knuth said: “I think UFO scepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy.
“A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out.
UFO sightings: A former NASA researchers hopes alien life exists
(Image: GETTY)
“In the end, the sceptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion
Kevin Knuth, University of Albany
“The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.”
The main reason why scientists are exhorted about the prospect of alien life, outside of questionable UFO footage, is the so-called Fermi Paradox.
Nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi explored the probability of life developing outside of Earth after he considered some 300 billion stars exist in the galaxy, many of which are billions of years older than our own Sun.
Even if intelligent life was to develop on a small fraction of these planets in the near 14 billion-year-long history of the universe, tens of thousands of alien species should technically exist outside of Earth.
Dr Knuth said this might in and of itself does not prove aliens do exist somewhere in the Milky Way but the prospect is nonetheless exciting.
The biggest problem faced by human explorers today is the lack of speedy and efficient interstellar travel technology.
The scientist said: “With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilisation like ours to colonise our Milky Way galaxy.
UFO sightings: There are enough solar systems in the universe for life to have developed
(Image: GETTY)
UFO sightings: There is no concrete evidence to prove UFOs exist
(Image: GETTY)
“Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilisations?
“This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilisations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.”
Unfortunately, Dr Knuth said, there has been no “smoking gun” evidence, which could once and for all prove the existence of UFOs.
But the topic remains an area worthy of interest, study and serious debate for as long as even the slightest possibility of alien life exists.
Dr Knuth said it would greatly benefit the scientific community to try and better understand alien visitors should they ever arrive.
He said: “Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
Mystery Object Spotted Over Las Vegas, Only Visible With Night Vision
Does NASA expect to find alien life outside of Earth?
One of the US space agency’s principal goals in deep space exploration is to find evidence of extraterrestrial life.
William Borucki, the principal investigator for NASA's Kepler mission, said: “If we find lots of planets like ours we’ll know it’s likely that we aren’t alone, and that someday we might be able to join other intelligent life in the universe.”
Current life hunting missions are focused on the discovery of distant exoplanets with habitable conditions similar to those of Earth’s.
However, NASA said: “Unless we get lucky, the search for signs of life could take decades.”
UFO-scepsis is een soort religie met een agenda geworden. NASA-expert springt in de bres voor UFO-jagers
UFO-scepsis is een soort religie met een agenda geworden. NASA-expert springt in de bres voor UFO-jagers
Een voormalige NASA-onderzoeker en natuurkundige van de University at Albany in New York heeft gezegd dat scepsis over UFO’s averechts werkt.
Professor Kevin Knuth schrijft in een opiniestuk voor Cosmos Magazine dat de kans groot is dat er buiten de aarde leven bestaat.
Dat is precies de reden waarom er meer aandacht moet komen voor de dingen die zich afspelen in ons luchtruim, stelt Knuth.
Religie
“UFO-scepsis is een soort religie met een agenda geworden,” zei hij.
Vaak worden er domme hypotheses gesteld waarbij slechts één of twee aspecten van een UFO-waarneming worden beschreven, aldus de professor.
“Een wetenschapper moet juist alle mogelijke hypotheses overwegen die alle gegevens kunnen verklaren,” klonk het.
Geen goede verklaring
“En omdat er nog weinig over bekend is, kan de buitenaardse hypothese nog niet worden uitgesloten,” zei Knuth.
De sceptici bewijzen de wetenschap volgens hem een slechte dienst.
“Het is een feit dat er geen goede verklaring is voor veel van deze waarnemingen,” zei hij.
Smoking gun
Hij hoopt dat er ooit een smoking gun wordt gevonden die het bestaan van UFO’s voor eens en voor altijd kan bewijzen.
Dr. Knuth zei dat de wetenschappelijke gemeenschap er alleen maar bij gebaat zal zijn om buitenaardse bezoekers, als ze landen, beter te leren begrijpen.
It’s no secret that asteroids may often contain significant quantities of precious metals. In fact, by some measures, it’s reasonable to conclude that much of Earth’s private stock of valuable metals–especially tungsten–actually came from past impacts where space objects collided with the Earth. Hence, many conclude that the future business prospects of mining asteroidsin space for their valuable metallic stock are promising.
That is if the next asteroid that collides with Earth doesn’t destroy all life as we know it first.
While this statement may sound alarmist, it is a very legitimate concern, and one that must be dealt with for two primary reasons:
1) such impacts have occurred in the past, and will inevitably occur again, and
2) some past impact events have caused widespread devastation, and even mass extinctions.
However, direct impacts aren’t even necessary for there to be widespread devastation. Despite this, it could be argued that the most alarming thing about asteroids and their potential dangers is that humanity is still massively under-equipped for dealing with such a threat.
The Guardian recently reported on a meteor airburst over the Bering Sea which occurred in late 2018, which went largely unnoticed due to its remote location. Despite this, the meteor unleashed an estimated 10 times as much energy as the atomic blasts that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
“The fireball tore across the sky off Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula on 18 December,” The Guardian reports, “and released energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT. It was the largest air blast since another meteor hurtled into the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, in Russia’s south-west, six years ago, and the second largest in the past 30 years.”
At the time of the Chelyabinsk event, NASA and other space agencies had been observing the passing of another space object near Earth, an asteroid called 2012 DA14, which flew as near as 28,000 km from Earth as it passed. Most evidence points to the two events being unrelated (although it is worth noting that one aerospace expert who I spoke with on conditions of anonymity at the time told me he found it hard to believe that the two events were entirely unrelated).
Whether or not the events were related, many raised the question as to why, if one object was already being tracked by NASA, there had been no advance warning of the Chelyabinsk meteor. Writing for Skeptical Inquirer in 2013, David Morrison, Alan Harris, and Mark Boslough noted that, “With a diameter of [about] twenty meters… the Chelyabinsk impactor was smaller than most asteroids that have been detected by the telescopes of the NASA Spaceguard Survey, which focuses on finding asteroids of about one hundred meters or larger.”
Of course, it wouldn’t necessarily require a space object 100 meters or larger to cause widespread devastation. Perhaps the best evidence for this is the famous Tunguska incident of 1908, which involved an object that was estimated to have been a mere 120 feet across, and which managed to destroy 800 square miles of forest in remote Siberia, flattening 80 million trees, according to data from NASA.
As noted at the space agency’s website:
“It is estimated the asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour. During its quick plunge, the 220-million-pound space rock heated the air surrounding it to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit. At 7:17 a.m. (local Siberia time), at a height of about 28,000 feet, the combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to fragment and annihilate itself, producing a fireball and releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs.”
Flattened trees visible in the aftermath of the Tunguska event.
Along with the fact that asteroids smaller than those in the range of easy detection can be devastating is the fact that they can’t easily be destroyed. Charles El Mir, Ph.D of Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering described the problem in a recent paper, where he and his colleagues found that previous computer models used to determine how easily an asteroid would break were outdated. By employing a new computer model known as a Tonge-Ramesh model (named in part for one of his colleagues, K.T. Ramesh, who is director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute), the group succeeded in calculating more detailed processes which determine what happens when an asteroid collides with another object.
“We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws,” El Mir wrote. “Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered.”
Not that anyone ever said that it would be easy to destroy a potentially deadly asteroid, of course, although knowing just how resilient they can be isn’t very comforting. Fortunately, what is comforting is that of the detectable asteroid threats presently known to NASA, none pose any direct dangers to Earth within the next century.
So at very least, we may have some time to work on these problems before any Armageddon-style events become an imminent threat. Nonetheless, the evidence shows that even smaller asteroids–whether or not they ever collide directly with Earth–can also be problematic. The time to act is now if we hope to develop reliable methods of detecting and intercepting asteroids and other space objects that may pose a danger to the future of humankind.
Something strange is happening at night on the frozen bottom of the world. An unknown phenomenon is causing the frozen landscape of Antarctica to shake up to thousands of times a night. What is causing these mysterious ice quakes?
Like most things in Antarctica, this seismic activity still remains largely unexplained and the geological forces at work under the Antarctic continent still aren’t well understood – although we all likely understand with a subtle horror that any unknown and worrisome natural phenomenon likely stems from the same incessant cause: climate change. In many ways, our whole understanding of Antarctica is based on our observations of a rapidly shifting landscape, since modern anthropogenic climate change started in the industrial age just as explorers and scientists were beginning to reach the southernmost continent.
Nevertheless, scientists from the University of Chicago have been using networks of seismometers spread miles apart on the Antarctic ice sheet to try to understand what exactly is happening below the ice and better understand how the Antarctic ice sheet is melting. While mapping seismic activity in the ice, the scientists observed the ice come ‘alive’ each night with hundreds to thousands of tiny ice quakes lasting less than a second. While ice quakes are a known phenomenon, the perfectly nocturnal cycle of these quakes is anomalous.
Naturally, this mysterious phenomenon is thought to be linked to melting polar ice caps. In a press release, University of Chicago glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal says the ice quakes likely stem from the cyclical melting and freezing of ice on the surface, a process which strains the ice below:
In these ponds, there’s often a layer of ice on top of melted water below, like you see with a lake that’s only frozen on top. As the temperature cools at night, the ice on the top contracts, and the water below expands as it undergoes freezing. This warps the top lid, until it finally breaks with a snap.
The Antarctic landscape is truly an almost living system, undergoing cyclical and constant change due to the incredible geological and meteorological forces it encounters. As our planet appears to be undergoing a period of climate stress, these glaciers and the ice quakes they experience may be yet one more way to quantify and measure our impending self-wrought doom.
Despite all the reasons why it’s a truly terrible idea, humanity still seems desperate to actively seek out alien life. NASA recently created a new department dedicated to searching for alien life, and one of the increasingly popular avenues for this search is looking for “technosignatures,” the distinctly artificial byproducts of advanced civilization. One of those technosignatures is the spaceships the aliens are cruising around in, or more accurately, the radiation emanating from the engine of the galactic hot-rod. A new paper from Dr. Louis Crane, a mathematician at Kansas State University, argues that the most likely interstellar engines are powered by artificial black holes, the gamma-ray radiation signatures of which we’d be able to see. In fact, Crane says, we may have already detected them.
Black hole spaceships, if possible at all, would require a civilization that was already at Type II on the Kardashev scale, which would mean they had achieved total mastery over the energy output of their entire solar system. Why would they need to be that advanced? Because making a black hole is one of the harder things a civilization could accomplish. In an email exchange with Universe Today, Dr. Louis Crane wrote:
“To produce an artificial black hole we would need to focus a billion ton gamma ray laser to nuclear dimensions. It’s like making as many high tech nuclear bombs as there are automobiles on Earth. Just the scale of it is beyond the current world economy. A civilization which fully utilized the Solar System would have the resources.”
In her recent paper, titled Searching for Extraterrestrial Civilizations Using Gamma Ray Telescopes, Dr. Crane acknowledges that black hole spaceships would be far out of reach for any civilization at the development level of humanity, and that it is impossible to say for certain whether an advanced civilization could ever solve the problems necessary to build a black hole spaceship. However, Crane says that a black hole engine may be the only means of interstellar travel capable of powering a ship that could shield its inhabitants from the many hazards of space travel. She writes:
Only with a much denser power source than anything yet tried would it be possible to shield a habitat from the radiation of space and accelerate it continuously to provide a livable human environment. A black hole can convert matter into energy, so it would be the ultimate power source. An artificial black hole, although extremely difficult to produce or control, would open possibilities that nothing we can currently conceive would equal. We think that it should be investigated as far as it can be.
In terms of investigating, Dr. Crane says that we could use gamma ray telescopes to detect the radiation from black hole spaceships. The ships would, she says, produce a very distinct pattern gamma radiation that would be easily distinguishable from natural phenomena.
Interestingly, she says that we have detected mysterious points of unexplained gamma radiation coming from the galactic center—an area likely to house potential civilizations due to the extremely high density of stars. These mysterious gamma ray emissions are puzzling due to their lack of associated X rays and the intensity of their energy output, which, so far, no known phenomena can explain. Dr. Crane suggests that these points of gamma rays be observed over the following decades to see if they begin to show the distinctive patterns predicted with black hole spaceships.
We’d be barely able to recognize a Type II civilization.
And what then? If we found evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations that are using black holes to power their ships, while we’re still lighting stuff on fire to spin turbines, we better hope they don’t notice us looking at them. Contact with such a species probably wouldn’t result in a good time. On the other hand, just knowing that such technology was possible, and that we’re not alone out here, could be the impetus for us to focus on claiming our destiny among the stars. Or we’d hurl a couple nukes at them, just to show them who’s boss, and that, as they say, would be that.
You can't believe it when you see This in the sky above the Earth
You can't believe it when you see This in the sky above the Earth
Strange square clouds, roll clouds from horizon to horizon, UFOs disguised as clouds, V-shaped - diamond-shaped anomalies in the sky, hole punches in cloud formations caused by unknown objects falling through the clouds, many unexplained things happen in the atmosphere.
Credit images: Mrmb333.
An enormous hole appeared in the sky photographed by a driver as he drove down a highway in France. At first glance it looks like an ordinary hole punch but this hole has been fabricated by a circular/flying saucer shaped anomaly near the gaping hole what looks like a lenticular cloud.
It seems unlikely that it was just a lenticular cloud that came through the cloud formation. Looking at this anomaly that seemly moves away from the hole then it is more likely that the photographer has photographed a cloaked UFO.
Not only cloaked UFOs move through the skies, what about the v-shaped objects that manifest themselves as shadow figures in the sky.
And we have the strange square clouds, cloud formations that seem to have been formed in such an unnatural way that it makes me feel that these clouds have been created by weather modification.
Take a look at the next two videos from Mrmb333 showing some of the latest unexplained phenomena in the sky.
Dark UFO Over Prescott Valley, Arizona On March 18, 2019, VIDEO, UFO Sighting News.
Dark UFO Over Prescott Valley, Arizona On March 18, 2019, VIDEO, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 18, 2019 Location of sighting: Prescott Valley, Arizona, USA Source: MUFON #99235 Look closely at this UFO and you will see its partly cloaked. What looks like smoke, is actually the hidden parts of the ship becoming visible. This UFO either just came out or was about to enter an alien base that would be about 4-5 miles below the ground. That is the only possibility for an alien craft to be hovering in a desolate location for so long. There are a lot of aliens that prefer the dryer hotter climate like the tall grays and the short grays, and the tall whites. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
A glowing UFO was reportedly crash landed at the same area of a powerful meteorite. The bizarre event was captured on video, and it has since caused confusion as it appears to show an unidentified glowing ball crashing in Russia, Krasnoyarsk.
The video footage starts with showing two bright white lights of street lamps. A green ball of light is seen moving quickly towards the ground in the top left of the screen.
The video was apparently taken from a dash camera of a vehicle. As the car continues to drive forward on a road that is covered with snow, the green light turns to bright white before changing to orange.
The light then vanishes in the distance after lighting up the dark sky.
Witness Pyotr Bondarev claimed that the footage was taken close to the impact site of the Tunguska meteor in 1908, which was estimated as being as powerful as 185 Hiroshima bombs.
According to the witness, it was around 7:30 pm when the sky flashed green, white and orange. Bondarev said that many people saw the same thing and got very excited.
No crash has been reported in the area, and no debris has been recovered from any landing, but experts are maintaining an open mind about the possibilities of the unusual sighting.
A UFO sighting left a pet terrified in Newbury, Berkshire. An unnamed witness has reported into the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) their UFO sighting on the night of February 13. According to the report, they were walking their dog in Boxford, West Berkshire when suddenly a black triangle zoomed overhead, flying at nearly 40 miles per hour.
The UFO was moving without noise and about one kilometre in the sky, according to the witness. They said that the mysterious object reminiscent of a football stadium light.
The witness wrote in their report that the two leading edges seemed longer than the rear side, around 60-40 percent.
The rear edge looked like a light strip appearing a bit like a classic sci-fi light drive, according to the report. The lights were like the ones in the football stadium but not as bright.
The witness saw flashing red and white lights at the tips where white may have been constant, and red was flashing. They did not notice lights underneath, and the body looked to be satin/matte black.
The witness noticed their dog appeared to be disturbed as it jumped around three or four times and made a squeaky noise.
MUFON investigators are still verifying the report.
Leven op Mars? Volgens deze voormalige NASA-adviseur is een oude Marsbeschaving weggevaagd door een kernoorlog
Leven op Mars? Volgens deze voormalige NASA-adviseur is een oude Marsbeschaving weggevaagd door een kernoorlog
Richard C. Hoagland, een voormalige NASA-adviseur, stelt dat buitenaardse beschavingen ooit op Mars en andere planeten in het zonnestelsel hebben bestaan. Dat schrijft de Daily Express.
Op Coast to Coast AM Radio zei hij dat bewijs hiervoor is gevonden tijdens de Vikingmissies van de NASA.
Volgens Hoagland zijn op foto’s in de regio Cydonia bouwwerken en zelfs piramides te vinden.
Xenon-129
Een buitenaardse beschaving die er leefde is na een verwoestende kernoorlog verdwenen, aldus Hoagland.
In 1983 maakte hij deel uit van een onafhankelijk onderzoek naar Mars, waarbij bewijs werd gevonden voor opvallende isotopen op de rode planeet: xenon-129, dat onder meer ontstaat bij het radioactief verval van jodium-129 en cesium-129.
Bij het onderzoek was ook dr. John Brandenburg betrokken, die in 1994 meewerkte aan NASA’s Clementine-missie.
Kernproefgebieden
Hoagland stelt dat er kernbommen zijn ontploft op het Marsoppervlak.
De gefotografeerde gebieden zien eruit als kernproefgebieden op aarde, zei hij.
Brandenburg concludeerde dat er twee nucleaire ontploffingen zijn geweest in de Marsatmosfeer.
Doelbewuste pogingen
Dat zouden doelbewuste pogingen zijn geweest om al het leven op de rode planeet uit te roeien.
Dr. Brandenburg meent dat de hoge concentratie xenon-129 op Mars waarschijnlijk het gevolg is van een kernexplosie en niet van een natuurlijk kernsplijtingsproces.
Vergeet Roswell. Hier werden zes jaar eerder al UFO-wrakstukken en lichamen van aliens geborgen
Vergeet Roswell. Hier werden zes jaar eerder al UFO-wrakstukken en lichamen van aliens geborgen
In zijn boek ‘MO41: The Bombshell Before Roswell’ schrijft Paul Blake Smith dat in 1941, zes jaar voor het Roswellincident, een UFO is gecrasht in Amerika, vlak bij Cape Girardeau.
Het leger zou toen drie identieke lichamen geborgen hebben ‘van wezens die niet van deze planeet kwamen’.
Het begon allemaal toen de oma van ene Charlotte Mann op haar sterfbed informatie over de crash naar buiten had gebracht.
Plechtigheid
Ze vertelde dat haar man, dominee William Huffman, na de crash werd opgeroepen door de lokale sheriff om een plechtigheid te houden bij een neergestort vliegtuig.
Toen hij op de rampplek aankwam besefte hij dat het geen vliegtuig, maar een vliegende schotel was.
Ufoloog Leonard Stringfield (1920-1994) heeft zich uitvoerig verdiept in deze case.
“Politieagenten en legerofficieren waren op dat moment al ter plaatse en gingen door de wrakstukken,” zei Mann.
Drie lichamen
“Er lagen ook drie lichamen op de grond, niet van mensen,” herinnerde ze zich.
“Hij kon moeilijk bepalen of ze een pak droegen of dat het hun huid was. Ze waren van top tot teen gehuld in een soort aluminiumfolie,” zei ze.
“Ze hadden geen haar op hun lichaam en geen oren,” klonk het. “Ze waren niet veel groter dan een kind en hadden grote hoofden en lange armen.”
“Ze hadden grote ovaalvormige ogen, geen neus en geen lippen,” zei Mann.
Staatsgreep
De officieren zouden tegen Huffman hebben gezegd dat hij zijn mond moest houden.
Eenmaal thuisgekomen vertelde hij zijn vrouw, Floy, en twee zoons over wat hij had gezien op de crashplek, maar daarna heeft hij er nooit meer over gesproken, aldus Stringfield.
In 1978 adviseerde hij minister-president Eric Gairy van Grenada, die een speciale VN-commissie in het leven wilde roepen om onderzoek te doen naar vliegende schotels.
Die kwam er niet, omdat Gairy werd afgezet tijdens een staatsgreep, gevolgd door een Amerikaanse invasie.
Menselijk lichaam blijkt het aardmagnetisch veld te kunnen waarnemen. Hoe werkt ons interne kompas?
Menselijk lichaam blijkt het aardmagnetisch veld te kunnen waarnemen. Hoe werkt ons interne kompas?
Wetenschappers denken dat mensen net als vogels het magnetisch veld van de aarde kunnen waarnemen. Dat schrijft de Britse krant The Guardian.
Amerikaanse en Japanse onderzoekers hebben ontdekt dat mensen beschikken over een vorm van magnetoreceptie.
Vrijwilligers werden in een kooi met muren van aluminium geplaatst. In de kooi waren speciale spoelen aangebracht die konden worden gebruikt om magnetische velden op te wekken.
Veranderingen
Iedere deelnemer werd tijdens het experiment blootgesteld aan deze magnetische velden.
Ondertussen werd er een EEG (elektro-encefalogram) gemaakt om de hersenactiviteit te meten.
Onder bepaalde omstandigheden bleken de alfagolven af te nemen, wat erop wijst dat de vrijwilligers veranderingen in blootstelling aan magnetische velden konden waarnemen.
Onduidelijk
Het is nog onduidelijk welk mechanisme ervoor zorgt dat mensen magnetische velden kunnen waarnemen.
“Aangezien een aantal dieren het aardmagnetisch veld kunnen waarnemen, behoort het zeker tot de mogelijkheden dat mensen dat ook kunnen,” zei professor Kenneth Lohmann.
Lange reizen
Onder meer muizen, duiven, trekvogels, schildpadden, haaien en walvissen zijn in staat het magnetisch veld waar te nemen en dat te gebruiken om zich te oriënteren bij het ondernemen van lange reizen.
Mensen zouden dat dus hoogstwaarschijnlijk ook moeten kunnen.
Bekijk ook onderstaand filmpje van Veritasium over het onderzoek:
Since Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, followed by Venus, Earth, Mars, etc…, we’ve always believed that Venus was our closest planetary neighbor, but new research suggests that we may be wrong.
According to a commentary published in the magazine Physics Today, while Venus does come closest to Earth when it passes by, Mercury is the planet the stays the closest to us for the longest amount of time.
Tom Stockman (Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama), Gabriel Monroe (mechanical engineer at the U.S. Army’s Engineer Research and Development Center), and Samuel Cordner (mechanical engineer at NASA), wrote in the commentary, “By some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularizers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets.”
When calculating the distance between two planets, it is normally determined by measuring each of their distances from the sun; however, that only determines the distance from the two planets when they are closest to one another. Since the two planets move at very different speeds, Venus is sometimes on the opposite side of the Sun and quite far away from Earth.
Researchers figured out the distance between planets by using a new mathematical technique called the point-circle method in which they calculated quite a few different points on each planet’s orbit. In addition, they were able to map out where the planets were situated every 24 hours during a 10,000 year period. By using that new technique, they determined that Mercury stayed the closest to Earth for the longest amount of time. What’s even more interesting is that Mercury is also the closest to all the other planets in our solar system.
Unfortunately for the researchers involved with this new theory, not everyone is on board with their idea. Steven Beckwith, who is the director of the Space Science Laboratory and professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, disagreed by saying, “Suppose you live in a house where the people who live next door to you spend half the year someplace, maybe you live in Wisconsin and your nearest neighbors spend seven months of the long winters in Florida. During the winter, the people in the next house over would be closer to you.” He went on with his example by stating, “But most people would still say that their closest neighbors are the ones who live immediately next door for the rest of the year. It is an interesting way of redefining ‘closest’, but it is hardly profound.”
With Venus being our nearest planetary neighbor when it orbits by us, but Mercury staying the closest to us for the longest amount of time, whatever your definition of “closest” is, it is nevertheless a very interesting theory to ponder.
Are we alone? Probably not. After all, astronomers have already found 4,001 confirmed exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy, and expect there to beover 50 billion exoplanetsout there. For scientists gathering in Paris today, the question is different: why haven’t we made contact with alien civilizations?
What is the Fermi Paradox and the "Great Silence?"
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked 'where is everybody?' back in 1950 in what's now called the Fermi Paradox. It addresses a contradiction in astronomy, and can be summarized thus: if extraterrestrial life and even intelligent alien civilizations are not just likely, but highly probable, then why have none of them been in contact with us? Are there biological or sociological explanations for this "Great Silence?"
“We are very interested in the scientific approach used in the analysis of the Fermi Paradox and the search for intelligent life in the universe,” said Cyril Birnbaum and Brigitte David at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie (Cité), the science museum in Paris that's hosting today's meeting. “The question 'Are we alone?’ affects us all, because it is directly related to humanity and our place in the cosmos.”
Illustration of the view from the innermost of the two exoplanets orbiting Gliese 667 C (largest star, a red dwarf) in the Gliese 667 system, which lies around 24 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius.
GETTY
What are scientists doing in Paris?
Today, leading researchers from the fields of astrophysics, biology, sociology, psychology, and history are meeting at the Cité. “Every two years, METI International (METI stands for messaging extraterrestrial intelligence) organizes a one-day workshop in Paris as part of a series of workshops entitled What is Life? An Extraterrestrial Perspective,” said Florence Raulin Cerceau, co-chair of the workshop and a member of METI’s Board of Directors. The scientists are discussing some pretty insane-sounding questions:
Are extraterrestrials staying silent out of concern for how contact would impact humanity?
Do we live in a "galactic zoo?"
Should we send intentional radio messages to nearby stars to signal humanity’s interest in joining the "galactic club?"
Will extraterrestrial intelligence be similar to human intelligence?
Did life get to earth from elsewhere in the galaxy (interstellar migration)?
"This puzzle of why we haven’t detected extraterrestrial life has been discussed often, but in this workshop’s unique focus, many of the talks tackled a controversial explanation first suggested in the 1970s called the 'zoo hypothesis,’” said Raulin Cerceau. Ah yes, the idea that we're being watched by aliens and ... perhaps even being protected by them.
If a zebra started pounding out a series of prime numbers in a zoo, would we re-evaluate their intelligence? That's how some scientists are characterizing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
GETTY
What is the "zoo hypothesis"?
This is a mind-warping idea that there are alien civilizations out there (no, not on Oumuamua) that know all about us, but purposefully hide from us. It certainly explains the "Great Silence." "Perhaps extraterrestrials are watching humans on Earth, much like we watch animals in a zoo," explains Douglas Vakoch, president of METI. "How can we get the galactic zookeepers to reveal themselves?" At a workshop, Vakoch proposed that humans should be more active in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “If we went to a zoo and suddenly a zebra turned toward us, looked us in the eye, and started pounding out a series of prime numbers with its hoof, that would establish a radically different relationship between us and the zebra, and we would feel compelled to respond," he said.
It's hard to disagree with that. "We can do the same with extraterrestrials by transmitting powerful, intentional, information-rich radio signals to nearby stars,” he said.
No, there are no aliens watching us from Oumuamua, the first interstellar asteroid that passed through the solar system in late 2018.
GETTY
What is the "galactic quarantine" theory?
Think the "zoo hypothesis" theory is insane? That's nothing compared to another theory about alien benevolence. “It seems likely that extraterrestrials are imposing a ‘galactic quarantine’ because they realize it would be culturally disruptive for us to learn about them,” said Jean-Pierre Rospars, the honorary research director at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique and co-chair of the workshop. “Cognitive evolution on Earth shows random features while also following predictable paths ... we can expect the repeated, independent emergence of intelligent species in the universe, and we should expect to see more or less similar forms of intelligence everywhere, under favorable conditions,” he added. “There’s no reason to think that humans have reached the highest cognitive level possible. Higher levels might evolve on Earth in the future and already be reached elsewhere.”
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) at the Green Bank Observatory, West Virginia, is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope.
GETTY
What does the Drake Equation try to do?
A formula to estimate the number of technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, the Drake Equation is an attempt to put the Fermi Paradox into numbers. The Drake Equation was posited in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake, a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.
What is the Drake Equation?
OK, don't expect any answers here. The formula below, which comes from the SETI Institute might seem impressive, but it's mostly guesswork. Practically speaking, its purpose is not to find a definitive answer, but to keep the discussion going about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
N = The number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
R = The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.
fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.
fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
METI puts a special emphasis on those last three terms, which explore not just the frequency of intelligence-bearing worlds, but how long they last (before they get wiped out).
Radio astronomy Vs interstellar colonization
While for now, radio astronomy is the only practical way of humans sending messages out into the cosmos, says one scientist, only full-blown colonization of other stars is the only way to prove the existence of intelligent life. “It appears that although radio communications provide a natural means for searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence for civilizations younger than a few millennia, older civilizations should rather develop extensive programs of interstellar colonization," said Nicolas Prantzos, director of research of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), in advance of Monday's meeting. "This is the only way to achieve undisputable evidence, either for or against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, within their lifetime.”
In 1960, Dr. Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia used the 25-meter dish for his Project Ozma, in which he searched two nearby stars called Epsilon Eridani (an artist's impression pictured here) and Tau Ceti for signs of alien life.
GETTY
Why aliens could be very different from humans
Why should they be even remotely similar? “The environment on an exoplanet will impose its own rules,” said Roland Lehoucq, an astrophysicist who works at the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA). “There is no trend in biological evolution: the huge range of various morphologies observed on Earth renders any exobiological speculation improbable, at least for macroscopic ‘complex’ life.” Skeptical that humans would have much in common with extraterrestrial life forms, Lehocq discussed "our persistent anthropocentrism in our understanding and description of alien life" and how difficult it is for humans to imagine extraterrestrial intelligence radically different from ourselves.
In short? We're too self-obsessed to even imagine extraterrestrial life, let alone find and communicate with it, and if there's not going to be proof within our lifetimes, we're not much interested in looking. Is there intelligent life out there? Probably, but we'll probably never find it.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Mystery glowing ball streaks through skies above Russia: Footage of unidentified object was captured close to site of the most powerful meteor explosion in recent history that landed with the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs
Mystery glowing ball streaks through skies above Russia: Footage of unidentified object was captured close to site of the most powerful meteor explosion in recent history that landed with the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs
A mysterious 'UFO' was observed firing across the sky in remote central Russia
The bright light looked like it was headed for a collision with the Earth's surface
It was observed a few hundred miles from a famous explosion site 111 years ago
No crash has been reported and no debris has been retrieved from any landing
A mystery glowing ball was spotted streaking across the Russian night sky close to the site of the largest meteor explosion in modern history.
A dashcam captured a dazzling flash changing colour from green to yellow to orange in a remote area of Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia.
It was spotted near the impact site of the Tunguska meteor that struck the region with the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs in 1908.
A dashcam captured a dazzling flash changing colour from green to yellow to orange in a remote area of Krasnoyarsk region in Russia. One theory is that the spectacular luminous UFO streaking over the Siberian hills was caused by a meteor yet so far there is no evidence for it
Pyotr Bondarev, from Tura village where the flash was seen, said: 'The night got bright and warm, as if a giant light bulb was switched on in the sky'.
Experts believe the object seen streaking over the Siberian hills was also a meteor but no conclusive evidence has been found so far.
The shining body was also seen as far as 250miles (402km) away, but appeared less, bright.
Witnesses say it appeared to be heading for a crash landing.
No debris from a meteorite has been found so far and experts are keeping an open mind as to what caused the stunning spectacle.
The latest sighting lies several hundred miles from the site of the monumental Tunguska Event 111 years ago which caused devastation in the region
Mr Bondarev added: 'It was about 7.30pm, it was dark. I was outside having a walk with my wife and children, when the sky flashed green and yellow.
'Many people saw it and got very excited.'
Another local source said: 'It's impossible to tell what the shining object was. It might have been a meteor or something else.'
Krasnoyarsk Kirensky Physics University researcher Sergey Karpov said it was likely a small meteorite.
'Most likely it was something up to 10 centimetres [4inches] in diameter',' he said.
But this has not been confirmed by the Russian emergencies ministry.
There has been no suggestion that a stray missile or debris from a space launch was behind the 'UFO' sighting.
One theory is that the spectacular luminous UFO streaking over the Siberian hills was caused by a meteor yet so far there is no conclusive evidence that anything has landed nearby
The Tunguska explosion is thought to have been produced by a comet or asteroid hurtling through Earth's atmosphere at over 33,500 miles per hour (50, 000km/h), resulting in an explosion equal to 185 Hiroshima bombs as pressure and heat rapidly increased
Some have claimed it was a 'second Tunguska', as the site of the explosion 111 years ago which caused devastation across the region is within a few hundred miles.
More than 770 square miles (2,000 sq km) of forest was wiped out after a fireball - believed to be some 330ft (100m) wide - tore through the atmosphere and exploded in 1908, according to scientists.
An estimated 80million trees were destroyed and thousands of charred reindeer carcasses were left behind.
It is believed to have exploded three to seven miles (5 to 12km) above the earth's surface yet despite the carnage there was no impact crater.
There were no reports of casualties in the sparsely populated area, despite the power of the impact.
However, some experts have disputed the cause of 1908 Tunguska explosion.
The remote Tura village where the bright light was observed streaking over the Siberian hills in Russia. Tura is a mere few hundred miles from an infamous explosion caused by a meteorite landing over a century ago in the remote forests of Russia that caused devastation
No debris from a meteorite - a meteor that strikes the ground - has been found so far and experts are keeping an open mind as to what caused the stunning spectacle
WHAT WAS THE CHELYABINSK METEOR STRIKE?
A meteor that blazed across southern Ural Mountain range in February 2013 was the largest recorded meteor strike in more than a century, after the Tunguska event of 1908.
More than 1,600 people were injured by the shock wave from the explosion, estimated to be as strong as 20 Hiroshima atomic bombs, as it landed near the city of Chelyabinsk.
The fireball measuring 18 meters across, screamed into Earth's atmosphere at 41,600 mph.
Much of the meteor landed in a local lake called Chebarkul.
Other than the latest find, scientists have already uncovered more than 12 pieces from Lake Chebarkul since the February 15 incident. However, only five of them turned out being real.
What did they find in the meteorites?
Analysis of recovered Chelyabinsk meteorites revealed an unusual form of jadeite entombed inside glassy materials known as shock veins, which form after rock crashes, melts and re-solidifies.
By calculating the rate at which the jadeite must have solidified, the team were able to determine that the asteroid formed after a collision.
Jadeite, which is one of the minerals in the gemstone jade, forms only under extreme pressure and high temperature.
The form of jadeite found in the Chelyabinsk meteorites indicates that the asteroid's parent body hit another asteroid that was at least 150 metres (490ft) in diameter.
A mysteryUFOthat looked like a "glowing ball" in the sky turned the evening "bright and warm" despite it being a chilly -20C.
A dashcam captured a dazzling flash changing colour from green to yellow to orange in a remote area of Russia's Krasnoyarsk region.
It was spotted close to the Russian site of the world’s largest ‘meteor explosion’ which had the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs.
One witness claimed the edge was taken off the -20C cold by the eerie phenomenon shortly before 7.30pm on Friday.
“The night got bright and warm, as if a giant light bulb was switched on in the sky’, said witness Pyotr Bondarev from Tura village.
One theory is that the spectacular luminous UFO streaking over the Siberian hills was caused by a meteor, yet so far there is no conclusive evidence.
The strange light was recorded on a dashcam on Friday night(Image: The Siberian Times)
The shining body was also seen as far away as 250 miles and appeared to be heading for a crash landing.
No debris from a meteorite has been found so far and experts are keeping an open mind as to what caused the stunning spectacle.
Mr Bondarev said: “It was about 7.30 pm, it was dark.
“I was outside having a walk with my wife and children, when the sky flashed green and yellow.
"Many people saw it and got very excited.”
Eyewitnesses said it warmed the area which was at -20C(Image: The Siberian Times)
A local source said: “It’s impossible to tell what the shining object was. It might have been a meteor or something else.”
Some claimed it was a “second Tunguska”.
Tura lies several hundred miles from the site of the Tunguska meteor strike 111 years ago.
More than 770sq miles of forest was wiped out after a fireball - believed to be some 330 ft wide - tore through the atmosphere and exploded, according to scientists.
An estimated 80million trees were destroyed, and there were thousands of charred reindeer carcasses.
It is believed to have exploded three to seven miles above the earth’s surface yet despite the carnage there was no impact crater.
There were no reports of casualties in the sparsely populated area, despite an explosion with the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs.
Experts are unclear as to what the strange object was
(Image: The Siberian Times)
The forest that was flattened by the blast from the Tunguska meteorite in 1908
(Image: UIG via Getty Images)
However, some experts have disputed the cause of 1908 Tunguska explosion.
One the recent "glowing ball", Krasnoyarsk Kirensky Physics University researcher Sergey Karpov said it was likely a small meteorite.
“Most likely it was something up to 10 centimetres in diameter,” he said.
But this has not been confirmed by the Russian emergencies ministry.
There has been no suggestion that a stray missile or debris from a space launch was behind the colourful UFO.
A dashcam captured a dazzling flash changing colour from green to yellow to orange in a remote area of Krasnoyarsk region in Russia. One theory is that the spectacular luminous UFO streaking over the Siberian hills was caused by a meteor yet so far there is no evidence for it
The latest sighting lies several hundred miles from the site of the monumental Tunguska Event 111 years ago which caused devastation in the region
The Missile Defense Agency has offered new details about plans to develop a science fiction-sounding space-based neutral particle beam weapon to disable ordestroy incoming ballistic missiles. The goal is to have a prototype system ready for a test in orbit by 2023, an ambitious schedule to demonstrate that the technology has progressed to a more useful state from when the U.S. military last explored and then abandoned the concept nearly three decades ago.
The U.S. military’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2020 asks for $34 million in funding for the neutral particle beam program, or NPB, according to documents released on Mar. 18, 2019. The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) wants a total of $380 million through 2023 fiscal cycle for development of the directed energy weapon. Defense One, citing unnamed U.S. officials, had been first to report the existence of the plan on Mar. 14, 2019. It’s also worth noting that Congress set out a goal of testing of at least one space-based missile defense system prototype by 2022 and the deployment of “an operational capability at the earliest practicable date” in the annual defense policy bill for the 2018 Fiscal Year.
MDA included the new-start NPB program in a larger line item called “Technology Maturation Initiatives,” which also includes requested funding for the development of laser weapons and advanced airborne sensors. It does not expect to ask for any more funds for the particle beam system through this account in Fiscal Year 2024, which would indicate plans to move it into its own dedicated funding stream at that time.
“The NPB provides a game changing space-based directed energy weapon capability for strategic missile defense,” MDA’s latest budget request says. “The NPB is a space-based, directed energy capability for homeland defense, providing a defense for boost phase and mid-course phase” of a ballistic missile’s flight.
A staple in science fiction, particle beam weapons are grounded in real science. At its most basic, an NPB requires a charged particle source and a means of accelerating them to near-light speed to create the beam itself.
An extremely rudimentary graphic showing the components of a neutral particle beam system.
When this beam of charged particles hits something it produces effects similar to that of laser, namely extreme heat on the surface of the target capable of burning a hole through certain materials depending on the strength of the weapon. If the particles are not sufficently powerful to destroy something such as a missile or reentry vehicle, they may still be able to pass through the outer shells of those targets and disrupt, damage, or destroy internal components, similar broadly to how a microwave weapon functions.
In addition, since particle beams respond different to different materials, there is the potential that the system might also have the capability to discriminatebetween real incoming warheads a ballistic missile has released and decoys. Seperate sensors would be necessary to observe the impacts and categorize the results. But if it worked, this would help other ballistic missile defense systems, which generally have short engagement windows to begin with, focus only on actual threats.
The characteristics of these particles would make it hard, if not impossible for an opponent to shield their weapons from the effects or otherwise employ countermeasures, short of destroying the NPB itself, as well. All of this has long made the potential of a particle beam weapon attractive, especially for missile defense.
As part of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the U.S. military experimented with NPBs and hired Martin-Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, TRW, and a team from General Electric and Lockheed to craft potential designs for a space-based system. Between 1984 and 1993, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) spent approximately $794 million on the concept, according to a 1993 report from the General Accounting Office, now known as the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
MCDONNELL-DOUGLAS VIA AEROSPACE PROJECTS REVIEW A mockup of McDonnell-Douglas' space-based NPB.
Most notably, in July 1989, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in cooperation with the SDIO, conducted the Beam Experiments Aboard a Rocket test, or BEAR. This involved placing an actual particle beam system on board a sounding rocket and shooting it out of the Earth’s atmosphere.
As of 2018, this remained the “most energetic particle beam ever flown,” according to LANL presentation. “The experiment successfully demonstrated that a particle beam would operate and propagate as predicted outside the atmosphere and that there are no unexpected side-effects when firing the beam in space.”
LANL A picture of the particle beam-carrying sounding rocket ahead of the BEAR test.
However, the SDIO ultimately pursued a plan to build a massive constellation of space-based kinetic interceptors, known as Brilliant Pebbles, coupled with an equally extensive sensor network in orbit and on Earth. The entire project came to an end in 1993 ahead of the incoming administration of President Bill Clinton, who renamed SDIO the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization – the forerunner of MDA – and refocused its efforts on terrestrial missile defense.
SDIO’s particle beam program proved to be impractical given the technology available at the time. The prospective space-based systems were large and required massive power sources, with nuclear power being the most viable option. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding over nearly a decade between the 1980s and 1990s, the previous NPB effort did not demonstrate a beam powerful enough to produce the desired effects on a target or produce a sufficiently lightweight power source design, according to the 1993 GAO report. Despite the BEAR experiment, there had been no test of an actual complete weapon system by that point, either.
VIA THE NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM Artwork depicting the NPB system from the BEAR test.
“We’ve come a long way in terms of the technology we use today to where a full, all-up system wouldn’t be the size of three of these conference rooms, right? We now believe we can get it down to a package that we can put on as part of a payload to be placed on orbit,” an unnamed U.S. military official told Defense One in regards to the new particle beam initiative. “Power generation, beam formation, the accelerometer that’s required to get there and what it takes to neutralize that beam, that capability has been matured and there are technologies that we can use today to miniaturize.”
But even if a practical and functional design is possible, there’s no guarantee it would necessarily provide the promised capability, especially against ballistic missiles in their boost phase. Striking missiles in this first stage of their flight is attractive because they are moving relatively slow and are producing a massive heat signature that makes them easier to spot and track. It also means that the missile's contents rain down over or near the launch country in a more localized manner than if destroyed during mid-course or terminal phases of flight.
Unfortunately, they’re also moving through the atmosphere for a significant part of the boost phase. The beam that an NPB shoots out are notably vulnerable to distortion and deflection, since the particles can easily get sent off course by ricocheting off other particles hanging in the air.
There’s a reason why, if you want to build an NPB at all, putting it in the vacuum of space makes the most sense. The amount of power necessary to ensure the beam remains both focused and powerful at appreciable ranges and for enough time to actual damage or destroy a target in the atmosphere could be immense.
An NPB concept from the SDI program using a nuclear reactor at the rear to power the system.
For some context on the potential scale of power generation one might be looking at, in the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. military had also considered a ground-based particle beam that could defeat ballistic missiles in its latter stages of flight called Seesaw. The Advanced Research Projects Agency determined it would take a system propagating a particle beam across hundreds of miles of tunnels to work properly.
To create the necessary to power supply, Nicholas Christofilos, a Greek physicist working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the time, went so far as to propose using nuclear bombs to effectively create a ludicrously large drain hole that would allow the entire volume of the Great Lakes to flow into a massive hydroelectric generator complex underneath, according to Sharon Weinberger's 2017 book The Imagineers of War: The Untold History of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency that Changed The World. Needless to say, this idea was absurd and the entire program never left the drawing board.
Technological improvements since then in various fields, such as power generation efficiency and adaptive focusing systems, would reduce these requirements, but they could still be prohibitive depending on other design constraints. This would also be much less of an issue for exoatmospheric engagements.
Beyond these potential technical issues with the beam itself, boost-phase ballistic missile defense systems need to be in an optimal position to engage their target during a very short amount of time after a launch. On average this phase of a missile’s flight is around five minutes at most in total. Sensors would first have to spot and categorize the threat after which American officials would make a decision to engage or not.
VIA AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
A general timeline of the boost phase of ballistic missiles and the time available for defense systems to respond.
Ensuring that there are enough space-based NPBs “parked” in orbit near even a portion of known and possible launch sites could be a costly proposition that would also require significant investments in the U.S. military’s ballistic missile defense sensor architecture, a separate issue you can read about in more detail here and here. The speed of the particles and the range of the weapons in the vacuum of space could help mitigate these issues. It would also be far less of a concern during the mid-course portion of the missile's flight where the entire engagement would occur in space or the very upper reaches of the atmosphere and there would be more time to line up the best shot.
“It’s a very short timeline, first to even know where it [the missile] is coming from…It’s less than a couple minutes before it leaves the atmosphere,” the unnamed defense official that spoke to Defense One admitted. “So, you have to have a weapon that’s on station, that’s not going to be taken out by air batteries and so we have been looking at directed energy applications for that. But you have to scale up power to that megawatt class. You’ve got to reduce the weight. You’ve got to have a power source. It’s a challenge, technically.”
“I can’t say that it is going to be at a space and weight requirement that’s going to actually be feasible, but we’re pushing forward with the prototyping and demo,” this individual continued. “We need to understand as a Department [of Defense], the costs and what it would take to go do that. There’s a lot of folklore…that says it’s either crazy expensive or that it’s free. It needs to be a definitive study.”
Feasibility concerns notwithstanding, there would be political and legal ramifications on top of everything else, too. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in orbit. Though the NPB itself would not fit this definition, a nuclear power source would still have the potential to prompt outcry and formal protests.
HIPSASH A Russian MiG-31 Foxhound carries an air-launched anti-satellite weapon in a test.
Particle beams by their nature can also be difficult to detect and conclusively trace back to a particular source, making them non-attributable. This is something that Michael Griffin, presently Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and a major proponent of NPBs, has described in the past as an “advantage."
But it’s also something that America’s adversaries could look to exploit and weaponize, blaming the U.S. government for all manner of explained phenomena in space.
Russia has a long history of making unsubstantiated allegations against the U.S. government, claiming in recent years that Americans and their allies have staged chemical weapons attacks on civilians in Syria, are actively supporting ISIS terrorists in that country and in Afghanistan, and are running a covert biological weapons program in Georgia. A constellation of particle beam weapons in space capable, at least in principle, of conducting non-attributable attacks, would be an obvious goldmine for Russian propagandists seeking to spread conspiratorial claims, blaming any hole that appears in a spacecraft or malfunctioning satellite on an unprovoked particle beam attack.
It might be hard to challenge these claims. Beyond it's missile defense capabilities, a space-based particle beam does seem like an ideal anti-satellite weapon. It would offer an easy way to quickly knock out satellites, or at least disable them, in a crisis. It would be hard for an opponent to detect such as an attack was occurring in the first place and even more difficult to counter.
But proponents in the U.S. government, especially Undersecretary of Defense Griffin, who worked on the Reagan-era SDI program, are adamant about at least exploring the possibility of a space-based particle beam weapon system. “We should not lose our way as we come out of the slough of despondence in directed energy into an environment that is more welcoming of our contributions. We should not lose our way with some of the other technologies that were pioneered in the ’80s and early-’90s and now stand available for renewed effort,” he declared in 2018.
It remains to be seen whether MDA will determine that the technical and other considerations have changed sufficiently in the last 30 years to make the idea of particle beam weapons in orbit any more practical than it was during the Cold War. But we should get a better idea in the next five years as the Pentagon pushes toward its goal of lofting a prototype particle beam weapon into orbit for the first time.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)say they’ve founda way to levitate and propel objects using only light — though, for the time being, the work remains theoretical.
They hope the technique could be used for “trajectory control of ultra-light spacecraft and even laser-propelled light sails for space exploration,” according toa paperpublished in the journal Nature Photonics Monday. That means no fuel needed — just a powerful laser fired at a spacecraft from back on Earth.
Optical Tweezers
The Caltech scientists devised the so-called “photonic levitation and propulsion” system by designing a complex pattern that could be etched into an object’s surface. The way the concentrated light beam reflected from the etching causes the object to “self-stabilize,” they say, as it attempts to stay inside the focused laser beam.
The first breakthrough that laid the groundwork for the new research were the development of “optical tweezers” — scientific instruments that use a powerful laser beam to attract or push away microscopic objects. The big downside: they can only manipulate tiny objects at only microscopic distances.
Ognjen Ilic, post-doctoral scholar and first author of the new study, puts the tweezer concept and its limitations in much simpler terms: “One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer,” he said in a statement. “But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on.”
From Micrometers To Meters
In the paper, the Caltech researchers argue that their light manipulation theoretically could work with an object of any size, from micrometers to spaceship size.
Though the theory is still untested in the real world, the researchers say that if it pans out, it could send a spacecraft to the nearest star outside our solar system in just 20 years.
“There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft,” said Harry Atwater, professor at the Caltech Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”
On Dec. 18, 2018, a school bus-size meteor exploded over Earth with an impact energy of roughly 10 atomic bombs. According to NASA, the blast was the second-largest meteor impact since the organization began tracking them 30 years ago, bested only by the infamous fireball thatexploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in Feb. 2013.
As to why one of the largest meteor impacts in recent history may have totally passed you by, that's likely because the space rock in question shattered over the Bering Sea, a cold stretch of the Pacific Ocean between Russia and Alaska, miles from inhabited land.
NASA learned about the December impact thanks to the U.S. Air Force, whose missile-monitoring satellites were among the first to detect the blast. The rumble of the impact also registered on infrasound detectors — stations that measure low-frequency sound waves inaudible to human ears — around the world, giving scientists enough data to draw some basic conclusions about the sneaky meteor.
According to NASA, that meteor weighed about 1,500 tons (1,360 metric tons), had a diameter of about 32 feet (10 meters), and was traveling through the atmosphere at about 71,582 mph (115,200 kilometers per hour) when it exploded. The blast occurred about 15.5 miles (25 km) over the ocean and erupted with an energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT — roughly 10 times the energy of the atomic bomb that the United States detonated over Hiroshimaduring World War II.
The world's asteroid-monitoring groups failed to see the rock headed our way likely due to its smallish size. Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told New Scientist that most modern telescopes are best able to detect objects measuring several hundred meters or more in diameter, making smaller objects like this one easy to miss. NASA asteroid hunters are most concerned about identifying near-Earth objects measuring 460 feet (140 m) across, which have the potential to obliterate entire US states if allowed to pass through the atmosphere, Live Science previously reported.
The December 2018 impact only came to attention this week thanks, in part, to a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas that was delivered by Kelly Fast, NASA's near-Earth objects observations program manager. Fast told BBC News that the December event exploded with "40 percent the energy release of Chelyabinsk," but didn't show up in the news because of the impact's relatively remote location.
The Chelyabinsk meteor, which measured 62 feet (19 m) wide, passed over mainland Russia and was recorded by many motorists. The resulting shockwaves injured more than 1,200 people.
Understanding the process could help reveal the moon's strange origins.
The Stickney Crater on Mars' moon Phobos. New research suggests that reddish and bluish areas on the moon's surface point the way to understanding its formation.
The eccentric orbit of the Martian moon Phobos could drive the flow of powder across the moon's surface, a new study finds, shedding light on Phobos' mysterious origins.
Dark gray, potato-shaped Phobosis only about 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) wide, but it is by far the larger ofMars' two moons, at more than seven times the mass of its companion, Deimos. Phobos orbits at only about 3,700 miles (6,000 km) from the Martian ground, closer to its planet than any known moon; as a result of this tight orbit, Phobos zips around Mars three times per Earth day.
Previous work revealed an odd dichotomy on the surface of Phobos. Some areas are reddish, while others are bluish, Ron Ballouz, lead author of the new study and an astrophysicist at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), told Space.com.
The origins of these red units and blue units, as these regions are called, was uncertain. Solving this puzzle could shed light on the origins of Phobos and the way it interacts with its environment, the researchers said.
To help solve this mystery Ballouz's group investigated the grains of dust and rock known as regolith, which drift around the surface of Phobos due to the moon's slightly oblong orbit.
Although Phobos' orbit is nearly circular, it is very slightly eccentric, or oval-shaped. This eccentricity "is large enough to change the relative strength between Phobos' and Mars' gravity over each orbit. The closer you are to the Red Planet, the stronger its gravitational pull and vice versa," study co-author Nicola Baresi, an astrodynamicist at JAXA, told Space.com.
As such, Phobos wiggles a bit as it orbits Mars, causing slopes on the moon to vary by up to 2 degrees over the course of the natural satellite's 7-hour and 39-minute orbit around the Red Planet. This slight tilting back and forth is enough to draw grains of regolith downhill on Phobos.
Computer simulations revealed that the quantity of grains that flows "depends on where you are on Phobos," Ballouz said. When the scientists compared their data with photos of the surface of Phobos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, they found that the sites where they expected the highest amount of surface motion appeared to match the blue regions of Phobos.
The motion on the surface of Phobos "is very gradual," Ballouz said. "There is not a landslide on Phobos every orbit. We call this a 'cold flow' process, as opposed to the fast motion of a landslide."
"This process is not really expected to create new 'sand' or regolith," study co-author Sarah Crites, a planetary scientist at JAXA, told Space.com. Instead, the cold flow just moves existing particles around, she explained.
The researchers suggested that the blue units consist of relatively fresh, unweathered material from Phobos excavated by the rocking the moon experiences during its orbit. In contrast, the scientists suggested that the red units consist of regolith that, for the most, part stayed put over time and got weathered by being exposed to solar radiation.
These findings could shed light on the uncertain origin of Phobos. "One of the biggest mysteries surrounding Phobos is its origin — was it created from a giant impact onto Mars that created a debris disk around the planet that eventually coalesced into Phobos, or was it once an asteroid that was captured by Mars' gravity?" Ballouz said.
If Phobos originated from a giant impact on Mars, the blue units should resemble Martian rock, since the blue units represent pristine material from the Red Planet. However, the latest data suggest that the near-infrared signature of the blue units differs from that seen up to now from Martian rock, the researchers said.
The group is taking part in a future international mission led by JAXA called the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) probe, which is set to launch in 2024 and return samples from Phobos to Earth in 2029. These samples may finally help resolve the debate over Phobos' origin, Ballouz said.
The scientists detailed their findings online March 18 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
New research says that the Earth’s past ice ages may have been caused by tectonic pile-ups in the tropics.
A crevasse in a glacier. Image via Pixabay.
Our planet has braved three major ice ages in the past 540 million years, seeing global temperatures plummet and ice sheets stretching far beyond the poles. Needless to say, these were quite dramatic events for the planet, so researchers are keen to understand what set them off. A new study reports that plate tectonics might be the culprit.
Cold hard plates
“We think that arc-continent collisions at low latitudes are the trigger for global cooling,” says Oliver Jagoutz, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and a co-author of the new study.
“This could occur over 1-5 million square kilometers, which sounds like a lot. But in reality, it’s a very thin strip of Earth, sitting in the right location, that can change the global climate.”
“Arc-continent collisions” is a term that describes the slow, grinding head-butting that takes place when a piece of oceanic crust hits a continent (i.e. continental crust). Generally speaking, oceanic crust (OC) will slip beneath the continental crust (CC) during such collisions, as the former is denser than the latter. Arc-continent collisions are a mainstay of orogen (mountain range) formation, as they cause the edges of CC plates ‘wrinkle up’. But in geology, as is often the case in life, things don’t always go according to plan.
The study reports that the last three major ice ages were preceded by arc-continent collisions in the tropics which exposed tens of thousands of kilometers of oceanic, rather than continental, crust to the atmosphere. The heat and humidity of the tropics then likely triggered a chemical reaction between calcium and magnesium minerals in these rocks and carbon dioxide in the air. This would have scrubbed huge quantities of atmospheric CO2 to form carbonate rocks (such as limestone).
Over time, this led to a global cooling of the climate, setting off the ice ages, they add.
The team tracked the movements of two suture zones (the areas where plates collide) in today’s Himalayan mountains. Both sutures were formed during the same tectonic migrations, they report: one collision 80 million years ago, when the supercontinent Gondwana moved north creating part of Eurasia, and another 50 million years ago. Both collisions occurred near the equator and proceeded global atmospheric cooling events by several million years.
In geological terms, ‘several million years’ is basically the blink of an eye. So, curious to see whether one event caused the other, the team analyzed the rate at which oceanic rocks known as ophiolites can react to CO2 in the tropics. They conclude that, given the location and magnitude of the events that created them, both of the sutures they investigated could have absorbed enough CO2 to cool the atmosphere enough to trigger the subsequent ice ages.
Another interesting find is that the same processes likely led to the end of these ice ages. The fresh oceanic crust progressively lost its ability to scrub CO2 from the air (as the calcium and magnesium minerals transformed into carbonate rocks), allowing the atmosphere to stabilize.
“We showed that this process can start and end glaciation,” Jagoutz says. “Then we wondered, how often does that work? If our hypothesis is correct, we should find that for every time there’s a cooling event, there are a lot of sutures in the tropics.”
The team then expanded their analysis to older ice ages to see whether they were also associated with tropical arc-continent collisions. After compiling the location of major suture zones on Earth from pre-existing literature, they reconstruct their movement and that of the plates which generated them over time using computer simulations.
Animation showing suture zones developing as tectonic plates evolved over the last 540 million years. MIT researchers found sutures in the tropical rain belt, shown in green, were associated with Earth's major ice ages.
Credit: Swanson-Hysell research group
All in all, the team found three periods over the last 540 million years in which major suture zones (those about 10,000 kilometers in length) were formed in the tropics. Their formation coincided with three major ice ages, they add: one the Late Ordovician (455 to 440 million years ago), one in the Permo-Carboniferous (335 to 280 million years ago), and one in the Cenozoic (35 million years ago to present day). This wasn’t a happy coincidence, either. The team explains that no ice ages or glaciation events occurred during periods when major suture zones formed outside of the tropics.
“We found that every time there was a peak in the suture zone in the tropics, there was a glaciation event,” Jagoutz says. “So every time you get, say, 10,000 kilometers of sutures in the tropics, you get an ice age.”
Jagoutz notes that there is a major suture zone active today in Indonesia. It includes some of the largest bodies of ophiolite rocks in the world today, and Jagoutz says it may prove to be an important resource for absorbing carbon dioxide. The team says that the findings lend some weight to current proposals to grind up these ophiolites in massive quantities and spread them along the equatorial belt in an effort to counteract our CO2 emissions. However, they also point to how such efforts may, in fact, produce additional carbon emissions — and also suggest that such measures may simply take too long to produce results within our lifetimes.
“It’s a challenge to make this process work on human timescales,” Jagoutz says. “The Earth does this in a slow, geological process that has nothing to do with what we do to the Earth today. And it will neither harm us, nor save us.”
The paper “Arc-continent collisions in the tropics set Earth’s climate state” has been published in the journal Science.
In a series of scientific presentations held today (March 18) at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, mission scientists shared new data about the space rock's topography and composition, which is helping them to refine scenarios about how the object formed.
"Every single observation that we planned worked as planned," Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said during the team's first presentation. "We had a 100 percent successful flyby."
The wealth of data the spacecraft was able to gather has offered mysteries and hypotheses alike about the distant Kuiper Belt object, which scientists hadn't even discovered when New Horizons launched. In particular, the team has been eager to piece together how the object, which is formally known as 2014 MU69, formed.
Soon after the flyby, the team confirmed that MU69 is in fact two objects stuck together in what scientists call a contact binary. Continuing analysis of high-resolution black-and-white New Horizons photographs suggests that the two halves of the object formed separately, and that the larger lobe, nicknamed Ultima, appears to be the result of many much smaller objects clumping together, like Dippin' Dots.
"In some sense, Ultima has a fairly simplified geology, a bit like Frankenstein here," Jeff Moore, a New Horizons scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, said during a presentation. "Thule has a lot more stuff here going on." In particular, this smaller lobe sports the largest feature on the object, a depression the team has nicknamed Maryland. (New Horizons is operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in that state.)
A new map produced by the New Horizons team appears to show the many different lumps of rock that converged to form the object nicknamed Ultima Thule.
But when the team turns to color images, it's harder to see evidence of this aggregate structure. MU69's overwhelmingly red surface shows some variations in color that match surface features, but not the hypothesized small geologic subunits.
"You definitely see some correlation with the geological features, but one thing that you don't see is any logical correlations with these lumps which might be previous stages of accretion," Will Grundy, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, said during his presentation. "They don't look obviously different from each other."
The new findings also touch on how the two pieces of MU69 converged. As the team has gotten a closer look at the joint of the object, they haven't found any signs that a violent collision distorted the rock. Instead, the scientists believe that the two halves of the object formed separately, hung around together long enough to sync up their longest and shortest dimensions — like two neighboring pancakes — then very slowly touched, at a speed of about 9.8 feet (3 meters) per second.
"You can do this yourself, you can walk into a wall," William McKinnon, a New Horizons partner and a planetary scientist at the Washington University in St. Louis, said during his presentation. "It's a very gentle situation."
Although the spacecraft's stay at MU69 was incredibly brief, mission scientists will be receiving new data from New Horizons for more than a year. That's thanks to the amount of observations it was able to make and the slow data-relay rate possible for the probe at such a long distance from Earth. The combination means scientists will be grappling with puzzles about the object for quite a while to come.
"Ultima Thule is beyond remarkable," Stern said. "It has presented us with a wide variety of mysteries, and frankly, I think on a per-gram basis, it may even be outdoing Pluto itself.
Has the Enigmatic Voynich Manuscript Code Finally Been Cracked?
Has the Enigmatic Voynich Manuscript Code Finally Been Cracked?
The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious illustrated hand-written vellum codex in a currently unidentified written and visual code. However, according to a non-peer reviewed paper published in John's Hopkins University digital journal, a Canadian researcher has finally cracked the six century old Voynich Manuscript code. But has he really?
History of the Mysterious Manuscript
The manuscript’s documented history stretches back to 1639 (though it is said to be older than this), when a Prague citizen named Georgius Barschius wrote a letter to a Jesuit named Athanasius Kircher who was living in Rome. He told Kircher that he had a strange manuscriptfilled with illustrations of plants, stars, and “chemical secrets” accompanied by an “ unknown script .” Barschius wrote with hope that Kircher may help translate the work, but Kircher couldn’t apparently accomplish the task either.
The next time the manuscript appears is almost 300 years later, and that story explains how it became known as the Voynich Manuscript . The name comes from Wilfrid Voynich (1865 - 1930), a Polish revolutionary, antiquarian, and bibliophile who operated one of the largest rare book businesses in the world. Purchased by Voynich in 1912, the manuscript, which he simply called his “cipher MS,” has been Carbon-dated to between 1404 -1438 AD and it is thought to have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance.
There is much secrecy around Voynich’s acquiring the mysterious manuscript, but he did say some, possibly untrue, things about it. For example, Voynich claimed to have found the document in a collection of illuminated manuscripts in some “ancient castle in Southern Europe.” He wrote:
“While examining the manuscripts, with a view to the acquisition of at least a part of the collection, my attention was especially drawn by one volume. It was such an ugly duckling compared with the other manuscripts, with their rich decorations in gold and colors that my interest was aroused at once. I found that it was written entirely in cipher. Even a necessarily brief examination of the vellum upon which it was written, the calligraphy, the drawings and the pigments suggested to me as the date of its origin the latter part of the thirteenth century. The drawings indicated it to be an encyclopedic work on natural philosophy. [...] the fact that this was a thirteenth century manuscript in cipher convinced me that it must be a work of exceptional importance, and to my knowledge the existence of a manuscript of such an early date written entirely in cipher was unknown, so I included it among the manuscripts which I purchased from this collection.”
Famous Attempts to Decode the Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript traveled with its owner to London in 1912 and then to the United Sates in 1915. He sometimes provided people with photographic samples of the manuscript to see if they could decipher what it may mean. In 1920, a man named William Romaine Newbold famously suggested a possible solution to a part of the manuscript, but it was later disproved by John M. Manly in 1931.
In 1969, the Voynich Manuscript was donated by Hans P. Kraus to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where it is currently catalogued under call number MS 408. Measuring 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 cm (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 inches) the text is written from left to right in a sophisticated script. With around 240 pages collected into 18 quires, and because many pages fold out, the artifact brings to adults all the same intrigue and interactivity as pop-up books offer children. 14 of the pages are missing and there is no author or title provided on the cover.
Some pages of the Voynich Manuscript fold out to show larger diagrams.
Hundreds of professional cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and II, have attempted to decipher the text and interpret the images; but none of the hypotheses proposed thus far account for all, or even most, of its many parts. Literary specialists and historians have proposed a long list of possible authors including: Roger Bacon , John Dee , Edward Kelley , Giovanni Fontana, or even Voynich himself.
Mr. Voynich among his books in Soho Square circa 1899.
The text of the Voynich Manuscript is written in short paragraphs and is still a mystery. It may be tempting to assume there is some link between the writing and illustrations, which appear to be connected to Medieval science or medicine, but this can’t be verified. The manuscript’s visual content is generally described as being: herbal, botanical, astronomical, biological, cosmological, and pharmaceutical in nature, and specialists have observed characters from Latin/Greek/Old Cyrillic / Croatian Glagolitic cursive, and Hebrew. Detailed studies of the parchment, cover, binding, ink, paint, and retouching methods are available online and we will waste no time on these elements in this article. Our clear purpose here is to look at the solution recently presented by Canadian researcher, Mr. Amet Ardic, who believes the manuscript contains “shapes meaning prefixes and suffixes in distinctive letters, resembling the Turkish language used in his home country.”
Detail of an unidentified plant on page 78r of Voynich Manuscript, in a part of the text which has become known as the “biological” section.
Is Turkish the Key to Cracking the Voynich Manuscript Code?
Mr. Ardic claims he and his son have discovered more than 300 words in the Voynich Manuscript Code. His research paper was published on the John's Hopkins University digital journal. In his online video presentation , which has been watched almost a million times, Mr. Ardic concluded that the manuscript was written in a poetic, rhythmic method called "Phonemic Orthography" which describes speech visually.
Mr. Ardic first noticed the Turkish character “Turqu" seven times in the Voynich manuscript” and he made another convincing observation in the illustration featured in FOLIO 67-R, known as the “astronomy” section. A circle divided into 12 sections suggested to Mr. Ardic that it might be a calendar and each piece may represent one of the 12 lunar months .
Top: Folio 67r displays a circular design with 12 inner sections which are believed to represent the 12 annual lunar months.
To advance his theory, the researcher then replaced the characters detailed within each of the 12 suspected months with modern Turku characters, for example; October is pronounced “Ogzaf" and in the old Turkish dictionary it is spelled “Yuzai.” The word essentially means the season “fall.” The word "Ai" means “two moons”. From these, Mr. Ardic translated the letters of ‘October’ to mean "autumn moon.” Extending this system of interpretation across the ‘moon’ circle, further correspondences were noted, for example: November is written as “Sepel”, which when translated to modern Turkish “Seper Ayi” means "moon of rain.” Furthermore, July translates to "the month of harvest.”
What you have read and seen of the Voynich Manuscript thus far might have already convinced you that it has been successfully deciphered, but this would be a hastily drawn conclusion before taking a closer look at Mr. Ardic’s claims from alternative points of view; an activity which makes it clear that not everybody is buying his ancient Turkish theory.
Screen shot from promotional video showing Mr. Ardic researching a copy of the Voynich Manuscript.
Stand Back… Here Comes the Skeptical Opinion to Ruin Everything
Before we begin, I must make it clear that I am not a trained linguist, but I am an experienced investigator, and in this instance my case book is full of niggling inconsistencies which we will try to rationalize before drawing a conclusion.
Firstly, it is important to remember that Turkish is a very well documented language and the Voynich Manuscript has been studied by professional linguists from all over the world for over 500 years. Mr. Ardic, with all and absolute respect, is an electrical engineer. Any balanced juror would have to agree that the probability is much, much higher that, just like Egyptian hieroglyphics , cuneiform, Mayan, and Linear B , so too would the Voynich Manuscript most likely be decoded by a linguist.
Secondly, if you had just cracked the code of one of the world’s oldest cyphers, the video releasing your amazing findings to the world might begin with a simple table or chart translating the encoded characters into modern letters with a step by step decipherment; letter by letter, word by word, page by page. Contrary to this, one would need to watch the presentation on Ardic’s interpretation of the Voynich Manuscript code five times to really understand the theory. This suggests the researcher possibly found a seed, dug around it until he found a root, then a plant.
Detail of a page in Folio 33-V of the Voynich Manuscript.
I must now slow down a little on my unrelentingly skeptical attitude because Mr. Ardic and supporters of this hypothesis could firmly argue that Yale University made the manuscript public in the first place because not one of the world’s PhD linguists was able to decipher it for over five centuries. What is more, he might refer us to the quite brilliant book Wikinomics by author Don Tapscott, who provides many great examples of outsiders and amateur enthusiasts disrupting existing fields. And speaking personally, if we were to all underestimate the capacity of enthusiasts I wouldn’t even be writing this article! Not to mention, the world is full of highly advanced thinkers without PhDs applying themselves as software engineers, developers, and hackers – and they are running rings around the world’s national security and banking systems.
Mr. Ardic claims to have studied ancient Turkish languages with his son and they were able to pinpoint the Voynich writing style to an ancient phonetic variant. But his findings assume that there is only one language encoded into the manuscript. Why not 2, 5, or 12? That would go a long way to explaining why only a small part of the content can be related to Turkish.
What I find really interesting in all this is that the online amateur research community attributes a selection of different languages to the Voynich manuscript. When these proposed countries of origin are looked at on a map they form an approximate geographical area which might suggest the manuscript was not actually written in northern Italy, as many scholars have argued.
What is more, many researchers see Serbo-Croatian, Ottoman, and Old Turkic - it might be prudent for linguists to take these observations and look closer at Croatian Glagolitic cursive and Angular Glagolitic, which might have in part evolved from Turkic language systems. And then, it must be considered that the Voynich manuscript might be an amalgamation of Glagolitic and Turkic cultures condensing shared botanical, pharmaceutical, astronomical traditions, and craft knowledge.
Whether Mr. Ardic’s findings will stand up to peer review or not will remain to be seen, but there is no part of me that is not inspired by the dedication both he and his son have committed to furthering our understanding of the code within the Voynich Manuscript.
SLOW SMASH The two lobes of Ultima Thule probably came together at the speed of a person walking briskly into a wall, researchers announced.
NASA, JHU APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY, SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE, ESA
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Ultima Thule’s history may be written in the sum of its parts.
New analyses suggest that the tiny space rock formed from a rotating cloud of even smaller rocks that collapsed into two individual objects. Those objects then gently collided in the early days of the solar system, creating the distant double-lobed world studied by the passing New Horizons spacecraft, researchers reported March 18 at theLunar and Planetary Science Conference.
NASA’s New Horizons flew by Ultima Thule, officially known as MU69, on January 1 (SN Online: 12/30/18). The first images that the spacecraft sent back suggested a snowman-shaped world, with a larger lobe that the team dubbed “Ultima” and a slightly smaller bulb called “Thule” (SN: 2/2/19, p. 7). But subsequent images showed that the lobes look more like flat pancakes or hamburgers than jolly snowballs (SN: 3/16/19, p. 15).
The first map of the space rock’s geology may help explain that flatness. The map shows distinct mounds on both lobes whose borders are still visible today, planetary scientist Jeff Moore said at the meeting. Moore, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and his colleagues think that those mounds represent small or medium-sized rocks that organized themselves into a rotating disk before merging into two separate lobes that then collided. That rotation could have spread out material in a lobe, flattening it. “The disk was spinning … and that’s why we have the hamburger shape,” Moore said.
Planetary scientist William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis agrees, although he adds that “this has not been proven.” McKinnon also presented computer simulations of the final collision between Ultima and Thule that showed that the two must have been moving at about 2 meters per second when they collided. That’s about as fast as a person walking into a wall at a brisk pace, McKinnon said.
FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER This preliminary map of Ultima Thule’s geology shows how the space rock could have come together from many distinct objects. Each color represents a different possible section of the final body (a few examples highlighted with arrows), each of which could have been a separate smaller rock billions of years ago.
NASA, JHU APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY, SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE, ESA
That gentle crash, plus the Frankenstein body, suggests that planetesimals like Ultima Thule form from clouds of dust and rock clumping together under the force of their own gravity. Before New Horizons, it wasn’t clear if these proto-planets formed from cloud collapse or from small rocks slowly sticking together to form larger rocks over time.
“I think it's plausible” that clouds of rotating pebbles could have coalesced into Ultima Thule's two lobes, says planetary scientist David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. He and colleagues suggested in a 2010 study that collapsing clouds of small rocks in the Kuiper Belt — the distant zone of cold, primitive space rocks beyond Neptune’s orbit where Ultima Thule lives — could form close pairs of objects.
But the idea may not yet explain Ultima Thule’s flatness. “In my simulations back in 2010, I produced a lot of spheres,” Nesvorny says. Other researchers will now have to do new simulations that show that these rotating disks can lead to flat pancakes, he says.
Jupiter’s moon Europa likely has a subsurface ocean, possibly salty, with volcanic vents on its ocean floor. A new study suggests it might also have an oceanic jet stream, comparable to the Gulf Stream back here on Earth.
Europa’s icy surface is covered by long thin cracks, making the moon look like a cracked egg. A new study suggests that an equatorial jet stream in Europa’s ocean creates stress in this Jovian moon’s outer ice crust, resulting in the cracks.
Like Earth, Jupiter’s moonEuropais believed to be a water world. Scientists have strong evidence that a global subsurface ocean lies beneath Europa’s outer icy surface crust. From what we know so far, this marine environment isn’t too different from what exists in Earth’s oceans. There’s a rocky bottom and possiblehydrothermal ventsmuch like those found on ocean floors on our planet.
Now researchers in Paris have found that there might be another common feature – ocean currents – and specifically what scientists are calling an oceanic jet stream for Europa. In a new peer-reviewed paper in Nature Astronomy – published March 11, 2019 – these scientists described evidence that Jupiter’s magnetic field might be creating a jet stream in Europa’s ocean, which may be comparable to the Gulf Stream on Earth.
Christophe Gissinger and Ludovic Petitdemange co-authored the new work. They are both based in Paris with École Normale Supérieure and the Laboratory for Studies of Radiation and Matter in Astrophysics. From their paper’s abstract:
During recent decades, data from space missions have provided strong evidence of deep liquid oceans underneath a thin outer icy crust on several moons of Jupiter, particularly Europa. But these observations have also raised many unanswered questions regarding the oceanic motions generated under the ice, or the mechanisms leading to the geological features observed on Europa.
By means of direct numerical simulations of Europa’s interior, we show here that Jupiter’s magnetic field generates a retrograde oceanic jet at the equator, which may influence the global dynamics of Europa’s ocean and contribute to the formation of some of its surface features by applying a unidirectional torqueon Europa’s ice shell.
Illustration of Europa’s outer ice crust. It’s thought that water from the ocean below can reach the surface through cracks or volcanic vents.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The researchers used data from the Galileo mission to Jupiter, which ended in 2003. They theorized that Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field might produce movement in Europa’s salty subsurface ocean, and their numerical simulations confirmed this idea. They said the jet stream in Europa’s ocean should be close to the moon’s equator, moving a few centimeters per second, and flowing in the opposite direction of the moon’s spin.
Such a jet stream could help explain why Europa’s surface is so cracked. The flow of the jet stream opposite the moon’s rotation would cause stress in the outer ice shell, forming the cracks. Gissinger told New Scientist:
It will not slow down the entire moon because the tidal forces from Jupiter are huge and will keep Europa’s rotation the same, but it will create these cracks that we have seen.
Another calculated effect would be thinner ice near the poles, since some of the energy from the magnetic field would dissipate off the moon’s surface, near the poles. And that is exactly what has been observed. Possible geysers have been seen on Europa’s surface, similar to ones found on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which also has a global subsurface ocean.
What makes a jet stream even more interesting is that on Earth, the Gulf Stream helps to move around compounds that are needed for life. This may increase the chances of life existing in Europa’s ocean. As noted by Gissinger:
We know on Earth that the Gulf Stream is very important for transporting compounds which are important for life.
Europa’s ocean is thought to be quite similar to the deep ocean environment on Earth. It’s pictured as dark and salty, with hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor that could also serve as warm niches for life, just as they do on Earth. Life thrives around those kinds of vents in Earth’s oceans, which provide both heat and nutrients. Could the same be happening on Europa? Only further study of Europa will help to answer that question. To that end, space scientists are planning a new mission to this moon of Jupiter’s – Europa Clipper mission – to be launched sometime in the early 2020s.
Diagram of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean. Europa’s jet stream is thought to be quite similar to its earthly counterpart.
Image via Nature.
Europa Clipper will conduct multiple close flybys of Europa, using advanced instruments to analyze the moon’s surface and the ocean itself in much more detail than ever before. A lander mission may also follow Europa Clipper later, which would actually touch down on the icy surface and examine the ice and regolith for possible evidence of life that may have been deposited on the surface by geysers or other upwelling from the ocean below.
Europa’s ocean and the subsurface oceans of other moons like Enceladus and Titan have shown that water worlds are actually common in our solar system – and perhaps in other solar systems as well. The new study shows that while Earth’s oceans may be on the surface of the planet, hidden oceans on other worlds can still share many of the same characteristics, making them exciting environments for exploration.
Composite image of Jupiter and Europa.
Image via the Galileo spacecraft and NASA.
Bottom line: If there is a jet stream in Europa’s ocean, it would not only make that ocean even more similar to ones on Earth, but could even increase the chances of life in that deep, dark, alien abyss.
Each spring, flocks of migratory birds travel northward from their sunny vacations in the south, following a flight plan that’s ingrained in their DNA. Birds — like bats, bees, wolves, bears, and countless other animals — have the ability to use theEarth’s magnetic fieldasa map tonavigate the planet. We humans seem directionless in comparison, but as new research in eNeurosuggests, it’s probably not because we lack the tools.
A team including Caltech geoscientist Joseph Kirschvink, Ph.D., and neuroscientist Shin Shimojo, Ph.D., show in the new paper that the human brain responds to changes in the electromagnetic field, even if humans don’t realize it.
“Our results indicate that human brains are indeed collecting and selectively processing directional input from magnetic field receptors,” they write in their preprint on biorXiv.µ
The Earth's magnetic field lines are directed toward magnetic north and south, depending on the hemisphere.
The Earth’s electromagnetic field is generated by electric currents created from the swirling molten iron in its core. In the northern hemisphere, all field lines are oriented toward magnetic north, and ditto for the south. Those lines are what birds and their field-reading kin use to navigate — and, as the new evidence suggests, humans may be able to sense them too. When participants in the study went through simulated shifts in the Earth’s magnetic field, their brain activity reacted in predictable patterns, suggesting the human body is equipped for magnetoreception, even if we’re not aware of it.
It’s impossible to shift the planet’s actual magnetic field, so the team built a highly insulated chamber in which they could create “ecologically relevant rotations of Earth-strength magnetic fields” for the person sitting inside it. As the team rotated the magnetic field, they also measured the electrical activity of the participants’ brains using electroencephalography (EEG).
The experimental setup, designed to allow shifts in the magnetic field in one direction, any direction, or a "sham" shift.
In some people, with each rotation of the field, the team noticed a pattern neuroscientists have documented before: a sudden drop in amplitude in the alpha oscillation, the main brain wave on an EEG of a person at rest. That drop, called an “alpha event-related dysynchronization” (or alpha-ERD for short), is usually observed when a person is suddenly confronted with an external stimulus, whether visual, auditory, or physical. The participants didn’t know their brains were reacting, but their EEGs gave it away.
In total, 34 people “from the Caltech population” participated in the various experiments, in which the magnetic field was shifted in a range of directions, rotated, or not manipulated at all. Four of those people, the team writes, had especially stable alpha-ERDs even over follow-up experiments, suggesting their brains were always attuned to changes in the “normal” magnetic field. The other responses were more variable, though the general pattern of alpha-ERDs occurring in response to magnetic field shifts was clear.
Interestingly, the tests confirmed these people were attuned to magnetic north, as they were conducted in the northern hemisphere. A successful southern hemisphere follow-up experiment would further support their hypothesis.
The changes in brain activity, as Kirschvink told The Guardian, represent the brain “freaking out” in response to sudden changes in the environment. However, it’s still not clear how the brain is picking up on the magnetic field. Some researchers have suggested that retinal proteins called “cryptochromes” might react to the magnetic field, but Kirschvink predicts the body might contain specialized magnetosensory cells housing iron clusters that move like the needle of a compass. Unfortunately, finding these magnetosensory receptors has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack. “The receptors could be in your left toe,” Kirschvink told Science in 2016.
There’s a lot left to learn about where this ability to sense the magnetic fields came from, how it might have been used, and why we can’t use it anymore. But this study is an important first step in exploring an innate part of ourselves that we didn’t know existed. The timing couldn’t be better, as some scientists warn that we are overdue for a major shift in the Earth’s magnetic field.
“For now,” the team writes, “alpha-ERD remains a blank signature for a wider, unexplored range of magnetoreceptive processing.”
Abstract
Magnetoreception, the perception of the geomagnetic field, is a sensory modality well established across all major groups of vertebrates and some invertebrates, but its presence in humans has been tested rarely, yielding inconclusive results. We report here a strong, specific human brain response to ecologically-relevant rotations of Earth-strength magnetic fields. Following geomagnetic stimulation, a drop in amplitude of EEG alpha oscillations (8-13 Hz) occurred in a repeatable manner. Termed alpha event-related desynchronization (alpha-ERD), such a response is associated with sensory and cognitive processing of external stimuli. Biophysical tests showed that the neural response was sensitive to the dynamic components and axial alignment of the field but also to the static components and polarity of the field. Thispattern of results implicates ferromagnetism as the biophysical basis for the sensory transduction and provides a basis to start the behavioral exploration of human magnetoreception.
Antarctica BOMBSHELL: How scientists made SHOCKING find after drilling 500ft below ice
Antarctica BOMBSHELL: How scientists made SHOCKING find after drilling 500ft below ice
SCIENTISTS drilled 466ft into an Antarctica ice sheet in a bid to learn more about the history of the South Pole – but what they uncovered left them shocked, a documentary revealed.
Antarcticais the Earth’s southernmost continent, located on the South Pole, where temperatures can be as low as -90C. Anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 scientists reside there at various research facilities, carrying out their own experiments. However, one investigation left a team of researchers astonished.
Amazon Prime’s “Antarctica – An Adventure Of A Different Nature” revealed the moment scientists dug almost 500ft into an ice sheet to learn about the icy continent’s history.
The 1991 documentary explained: “A core drill digs deep into the ice sheet.
“Ice layers can read like the rings of trees and the climate record goes back 100,000 years.
“Entrapped bubbles of ancient air – the ice cores tell a simple story.
Scientists dig below Antarctica
(Image: GETTY)
The team dug below the ice
(Image: AMAZON PRIME)
Methane, strontium 90, lead, increased carbon dioxide, we are changing the air and we can see the effects
Antarctica – An Adventure Of A Different Nature
“When the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere change, so does the climate.”
However, when the scientists analysed the ice layer, they were left stunned.
The series explained: “A day, a week, a month, a year, a decade – the core came from 466ft down and its ice fell as snow about 4,000 years ago.
“From the crystal of the ice, the news from Antarctica is bad.
They drilled into the ice sheet to take a saple
(Image: AMAZON PRIME)
They then removed the ice from the drill
(Image: AMAZON PRIME)
"Methane, strontium 90, lead, increased carbon dioxide, we are changing the air and we can see the effects.
“20 years ago, scientists predicted man-made chemicals would thin the planet’s protective layer of ozone.
Since 1991, the United Nations Environment Programme has sponsored a series of technical reports on the Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion to reverse the effects.
In 2007, a report was released that showed the hole in the ozone layer was recovering and was the smallest it had been for around a decade.
The 2010 paper read: "Over the past decade, global ozone and ozone in the Arctic and Antarctic regions is no longer decreasing but is not yet increasing.
“The ozone layer outside the Polar regions is projected to recover to its pre-1980 levels before the middle of this century.
They took a large sample of ice
(Image: AMAZON PRIME)
“In contrast, the springtime ozone hole over the Antarctic is expected to recover much later."
In 2012, NASA confirmed the hole had decreased once again.
They revealed: "Warmer air temperatures high above the Antarctic led to the second smallest season ozone hole in 20 years averaging 17.9 million square kilometres.
“The hole reached its maximum size for the season on September 22, stretching to 21.2 million square kilometres (13.8 million square miles)."
Antarctica is an untouched nation, used for scientific research`
(Image: GETTY)
The frozen desert is home to some of science's most amazing discoveries.
He told BBC Radio 4 listeners: “We know there were dinosaurs there and we know there were giant penguins too – 6ft tall in fact.
“We reconstructed a penguin from a single metatarsal that was found – it is amazing what you can do with one bone.
“So we know it was a much more interesting continent previously.”
The unearthed bones dated back 37 million years and new studies show the species could have measured almost twice the height of today's emperor penguins.
It is believed the penguin could have weighed up to 19 stone, making it possible to dive deeper and stay underwater for longer.
Are octopuses ALIENS? 'There's something going on behind their eyes'
Are octopuses ALIENS? 'There's something going on behind their eyes'
A MARINE biologist has had her say on an extraordinary claim that octopuses evolved from extraterrestrial “cryopreserved” eggs hundreds of millions of years ago, which if true might explain their extraordinary intelligence and complexity.
Dr Helen Scales is due to deliver a talk at the Cambridge Science Festival tomorrow at which she will consider the theory, as well looking at the reasons why they are so clever. The 2018 study, entitled Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? was co-authored by a group of 33 scientists and published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology journal. The paper suggests that the explanation for the sudden flourishing of life during the Cambrian era – often referred to as the Cambrian Explosion – lies in the stars, as a result of the Earth being bombarded by clouds of organic molecules.
Octopuses are thought to be the most intelligent invertebrates
The paper states: “The genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes more than is present in Homo sapiens.
“One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth - most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilised Octopus eggs.”
Dr Scales, whose new book, Octopuses: A Ladybird Expert Book, is published on Thursday, March 21, does not actually buy the idea herself, saying: “They claim they have evidence to support their theory that extra terrestrial viruses came to earth around 500 million years ago and kick starting the Cambrian explosion.
“But there really is no proof that this is where viruses came from, and this doesn’t explain how they formed in the first place.
“Genetic evidence tells us that octopuses evolved from squid ancestors around 135 million years ago.
“The authors of the study argue that other unconventional ideas in the history of science have later turned out to be true. But that really doesn’t prove anything.
“There are plenty of other outlandish theories that aren’t true.
“Really, this paper just poses an interesting idea, which is perhaps worth thinking about, but there's no proof backing it up.”
There have been suggestions that octopuses have extraterrestrial origins
(Image: GETTY)
“Every time I've met an octopus in the wild I've had a strong sense that they're watching me and contemplating what I'm up to
Dr Helen Scales
Nevertheless, she emphasised the uniqueness of the remarkable cephalopods, often regarded as the most intelligent of all invertebrates.
She said: “There's something instantly captivating about Octopuses. I think it's because they look and behave so differently from any other animals.
“All those arms and suckers that twist and hold onto things, their ability to change shape and colour with such sophistication and control, the way they can squeeze into tiny spaces then peep out with those big eyes watching you.
“Every time I've met an octopus in the wild I've had a strong sense that they're watching me and contemplating what I'm up to.
Despite their incredible evolution octopuses only live a brief period of time (Image: GETTY)
“There's definitely something powerful going on behind their eyes.”
During her talk, Dr Scales will consider why octopuses have blue blood, and three hearts, why they navigate the seas by jet propulsion, and how their massive brains extend into their arms, giving them special sensory abilities.
She added: “What really marks them out is that fact they they’ve evolved highly complex nervous systems and complex behaviours that are not at all normal for invertebrates, animals without backbones.
“In my talk I’ll be considering how and why octopuses evolved such big brains, and what they tell us about the evolution of intelligence.
Octopuses use jet propulion - one of their many fascinating traits
(Image: GETTY)
“Octopuses are highly intelligent, especially compared to all the other invertebrates. They have complex nervous systems with around 500 million nerves, half of them clustered in their heads and the rest in their arms, controlling their agile limbs and super-sensitive suckers.
“Captive and wild octopuses have shown remarkable abilities to solve problems and use tools, like carrying two halves of an empty coconut around and assembling them as a shelter when they want to hide.”
Yet despite all this, most octopuses live for just two years on average, a fact which consistently baffles biologists.
Dr Scales said: “Their short life span is one of the really surprising things about octopuses. It’s undeniably odd that these smart animals live such rich lives, but for such a short time.
“It’s not exactly clear why they’ve evolved to live fast and die young. It could come down to a build up of genetic mutations that limit their life span.
“Essentially the theory goes that because octopuses are soft-bodied and highly vulnerable to predation, it means genetic mutations that act late in life tend not to be removed from the population: a mutation that causes, say, a break down of eye pigments leading to blindness, won’t affect many octopuses because they are mostly already dead and eaten by the time the mutation kicks in.
“Accumulating such late-acting mutations could lead to the situation most octopuses now face, of apparently being pre-programmed to die young. Not all do, though.
“An octopus in the deep sea has been seen brooding her clutch of eggs continuously for 4.5 years.”
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UFO sightings: NASA expert urges to take alien claims SERIOUSLY - 'There must be life'
UFO sightings: NASA expert urges to take alien claims SERIOUSLY - 'There must be life'
UFO claims and stories of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth need to be considered without blanket scepticism, a physicist and former NASA researcher has shockingly claimed.
NASA’s hunt for proof ofalienlife is at the forefront of the space agency’s deep space exploration. But here on Earth, many conspiracy theorists and self-appointed UFO-hunters are already certain aliens visit Earth on a regular basis. Most of these alien claims, supposed UFO sightings and stories of mysterious crop circles appearing overnight are immediately dismissed by the scientific community. A former NASA researcher and physicist at the University of Albany, however, has argued immediate scepticism to all UFO-related theories is counterproductive.
Kevin Knuth, an associate professor at Albany, argued in an opinion piece for Cosmos Magazine, the odds of life existing outside of Earth are pretty high.
The “unsettling and refreshing” possibility is exactly why, he argued, more attention needs to be paid to what is happening in the skies.
Dr Knuth said: “I think UFO scepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy.
“A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out.
UFO sightings: A former NASA researchers hopes alien life exists
(Image: GETTY)
“In the end, the sceptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion
Kevin Knuth, University of Albany
“The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.”
The main reason why scientists are exhorted about the prospect of alien life, outside of questionable UFO footage, is the so-called Fermi Paradox.
Nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi explored the probability of life developing outside of Earth after he considered some 300 billion stars exist in the galaxy, many of which are billions of years older than our own Sun.
Even if intelligent life was to develop on a small fraction of these planets in the near 14 billion-year-long history of the universe, tens of thousands of alien species should technically exist outside of Earth.
Dr Knuth said this might in and of itself does not prove aliens do exist somewhere in the Milky Way but the prospect is nonetheless exciting.
The biggest problem faced by human explorers today is the lack of speedy and efficient interstellar travel technology.
The scientist said: “With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilisation like ours to colonise our Milky Way galaxy.
UFO sightings: There are enough solar systems in the universe for life to have developedµ
(Image: GETTY)
UFO sightings: There is no concrete evidence to prove UFOs exist
(Image: GETTY)
“Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilisations?
“This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilisations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.”
Unfortunately, Dr Knuth said, there has been no “smoking gun” evidence, which could once and for all prove the existence of UFOs.
But the topic remains an area worthy of interest, study and serious debate for as long as even the slightest possibility of alien life exists.
Dr Knuth said it would greatly benefit the scientific community to try and better understand alien visitors should they ever arrive.
He said: “Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.”
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET SpaceX is begonnen met de bouw van het eerste prototype voor zijn ‘Starship’. Topman Elon Muks heeft dit bevestigd met een korte videoclip waarin het te gebruiken hitteschild wordt getest.
Elon Musk zegt op Twitter dat de tweede rakettrap, het gedeelte van de Starship-raket dat in de ruimte komt, momenteel al wordt gebouwd. Dit is de nieuwe, grote, geheel herbruikbare raket waarmee onder meer naar Mars moet worden gevlogen en die voorheen bekend stond onder de naam Big Falcon Rocket.
Momenteel is SpaceX ook al bezig om de roestvaststalen hitteschilden van de Starship te testen. Deze hitteschilden, die worden gevormd door zeshoekige tegels, hebben een beperkte hittetest succesvol doorstaan. Daarbij zijn temperaturen van 1.375 graden Celsius gehaald, wat volgens Musk de temperatuur is waar het ruimteschip mee te maken krijgt bij de terugkeer in de dampkring.
Dit hitteschild is gemaakt met een technologie die transpirational cooling heet. Kleine gaatjes in het hitteschild waar water of methaan doorheen gaat, moeten de buitenkant koelen. Dit moet eventuele schade aan het hitteschild beperken en ervoor zorgen dat de raket weer snel herbruikbaar is. Transpirational cooling wordt toegevoegd zodra er erosie optreedt bij het hitteschild, legde Musk uit.
Musk liet ook weten dat SpaceX ‘hopelijk’ nog deze week begint met het testen van de kleine testversie van StarShip, genaamd Starhopper. Deze wordt uitgerust met een Raptor, de methaanraketmotor waarmee de grote Starship uiteindelijk wordt uitgerust. De Hopper zal tijdens tests hooguit ietwat van het platform komen en nog niet echt opstijgen. In januari viel deze kleine testversie nog om door een sterke wind.
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Clif High: UFOs, Alien Encounters, & Secret Space via Richard Dolan
Clif High: UFOs, Alien Encounters, & Secret Space via Richard Dolan
Clif High and Predictive Linguistics. PL is the process of using computer software to aggregate vast amounts of written text from the internet by categories delineated by the emotional content of the words and using the result to make forecasts based on the emotional ‘tone’ changes within the larger population. A form of ‘collective sub-conscious expression’ is a good way to think of it.
Predictive linguistics can be used to forecast trends at many different levels, from the detail of sales to individuals, all the way up to forecasts about emerging global population trends. Richard Dolan is one of the world’s leading researchers and writers on the subject of UFOs and believes that they constitute the greatest mystery of our time. He is the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and the National Security State, both ground-breaking works which together provide the most factually complete and accessible narrative of the UFO subject available anywhere.
He also co-authored a speculative book about the future, A.D. After Disclosure, the first-ever analysis not only of how UFO secrecy might end, but of the all-important question: what happens next?
The powerful meteorblast exploded near Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula, over the open waters of the Bering Sea. Military satellite over the region tracked the meteor blast to around 16 miles (25.6km) above the ground. The incident occurred on December 18 last year, when the fireball entered the atmosphere at breakneck speeds of about 71,582mph or 32km per second. The meteor never reached the ground but NASA estimates the blast was more powerful than the devastating nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
NASA meteor: A monstrous fireball exploded over the Bering Sea
(Image: NA)
Kelly Fast, an asteroid expert at NASA, said of the latest meteor impact: “That was 40 percent the energy release of Chelyabinsk, but it was over the Bering Sea so it didn't have the same type of effect or show up in the news.
That was 40 percent the energy release of Chelyabinsk
Kelly Fast, NASA
“That's another thing we have in our defence, there's plenty of water on the planet.”
According to NASA, the meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a steep angle of around seven degrees.
The meteor’s explosion was then detected by military satellites and the information was relayed to NASA.
Dr Johnson, said the fireball flew towards the ground through an area populated by commercial aeroplane rates between North America and Asia.
Asteroids and comets of various sizes pelt the Earth on a regular basis but rarely does an object big enough to cause widespread destruction approach the planet.
The real danger comes from so-called “Near-Earth Objects” (NEOs) measuring more than 460ft (140m) in diameter.
In 2005, the US Congress tasked NASA with detecting and cataloguing the up to 90 percent of these objects within the boundaries of our solar system.
NASA meteor: The giant explosion remained largely undetected
(Image: GETTY)
NASA meteor: The fireball blast was bigger than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb
(Image: GETTY)
Space rocks this big are dubbed “Potentially Hazardous Asteroids” (PHAs) because they have the potential to wipe out or severely damage entire regions.
A 2018 joint-report between NASA and the White House said: “NEO impacts of varying size could have major environmental, economic, and geopolitical consequences detrimental to the United States, even if the impact is outside US territory.
“The direct effects from a NEO impact depend on its size, composition, and impact speed.
“Small, rocky NEOs are likely to explode before hitting the ground, resulting in an airburst that could produce a wider area of moderate damage compared with a similarly sized metallic object that would strike the ground and cause heavier, more localised devastation.”
New Lost Ancient Civilizations Documentary 2019 Cities Beneath the Jungles, Deserts and Seas
New Lost Ancient Civilizations Documentary 2019 Cities Beneath the Jungles, Deserts and Seas
There are many ancient mysteries in human history, none capture the attention as much as long lost civilisations that have never been rediscovered.
In a new, never seen before documentary, we will look in deserts, dense jungles and even underwater and prove that ancient cities are just waiting to be found. With the advance of new technology, it is entirely possible that archaeologists will one day make a history changing discovery that will simply defy comprehension, by unearthing a previously unknown civilisation.
Watch eye-opening documentaries by subscribing and of course hit the bell button in the top right to stay informed of our latest releases. Leave a like, comment and of course share far and wide.
UFO Hunter Suspected Alien Base on the Moon, Smells NASA Cover Up
UFO Hunter Suspected Alien Base on the Moon, Smells NASA Cover Up
While Waring claimed that NASA is purposefully withholding the evidence pointing to the existence of extraterrestrial life and UFOs, the space agency claims that his alleged lunar discovery could, in fact, be explained by a well-known phenomenon.
Dedicated UFO hunter Scott C. Waring has announced that he discovered what looks like an "alien structure" while studying an old NASA photo of the lunar surface.
As Waring explained in his blog "UFO Sightings Daily", the structure seems to be located near the edge of one of the craters dotting the moon’s landscape, adding that alleged building’s estimated size is "close to 1.5-3 miles across".
"The structure looks like an oval sphere with two thick arms coming out of it. It also appears to have a few antennas or thin structures coming out of its top center. The shininess indicates it is absolutely a metallic surface", he wrote.
He also accused NASA of purposefully withholding the evidence pointing to the existence of extraterrestrial life and UFOs and subjecting the public to what he described as "mental manipulation".
According to the Daily Express, however, the space agency rebuked the claims made by Waring, attributing his findings instead to pareidolia.
"Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon where people see recognisable shapes in clouds, rock formations, or otherwise unrelated objects or data. There are many examples of this phenomenon on Earth and in space", the newspaper quoted NASA as saying.
Earlier this month, Waring also declared that he found "the infamous ET base at Zeeman crater" while studying Google maps of the moon surface.
The UFO hunter claimed that the alleged alien base’s image has been “deleted” by Google, which he insists is “100 percent proof that Google is working with the US government to hide the existence of alien life from the public”.
Bestaan van buitenaardse basis op de maan geheim gehouden door NASA? Bekijk de beelden
Bestaan van buitenaardse basis op de maan geheim gehouden door NASA? Bekijk de beelden
Een UFO-jager heeft aangekondigd dat hij een ‘buitenaardse structuur’ op een oude NASA-foto van de maan heeft ontdekt. Dat meldt het Russische persbureau Sputnik.
Scott C. Waring schrijft op zijn blog UFO Sightings Daily dat de structuur zich nabij de rand van een krater op het maanoppervlak bevindt.
Hij denkt dat het gaat om een bouwwerk dat 2,4 tot 5 kilometer lang is.
Antennes
“De structuur is bolvormig en er komen twee brede armen uit,” zei hij. “Er lijken ook enkele antennes bovenop te staan. Het oppervlak is metaalkleurig.”
Hij beschuldigde de NASA ervan bewijs voor buitenaards leven en UFO’s doelbewust achter te houden en het publiek te manipuleren.
Het ruimteagentschap heeft volgens de Britse Daily Express gezegd dat de structuur een voorbeeld is van pareidolie.
Verwijderd
“In het geval van pareidolie zien mensen herkenbare vormen in wolken, rotsformaties of andere objecten,” aldus de NASA. “Er zijn vele voorbeelden van dit fenomeen te vinden op aarde en in de ruimte.”
Waring stuitte op de vreemde structuur in de Zeeman-krater toen hij beelden van het maanoppervlak op Google Moon aan het bekijken was.
De UFO-jager claimt dat beelden van het ‘bouwwerk’ inmiddels zijn verwijderd, wat volgens hem ‘bewijst dat Google met de Amerikaanse overheid samenwerkt om het bestaan van buitenaards leven te verbergen’.
Scientists named them Homo floresiensis because their diminutive hominin remains were discovered in a cave on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores. We call them “hobbits” because they remind us of JRR Tolkien’s diminutive Middle-earth characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. What no one can call them is “explained,” as details on their short span in hominin history is still a mystery. However, some new clues have emerged from the cave they were found as researchers switched from studying the remains of the hobbits to those of rats. Rats?
“Our paper is the first that we know of to use the leg bones of rats in this way to interpret ecological change through time, and it provides new evidence for the local environment during the time of Homo floresiensis.”
Elizabeth Grace Veatch, a PhD candidate at Emory University and co-author of a new study published in the Journal of Human Evolution, explains in a university press release that it really wasn’t hard to decide on studying rats for a while since nearly all of the bones in the Liang Bua cave are from animals and 80% of those are from rats. After identifying 10,000 rat bones, the team classified them into five species, each with different sizes ranging from mouse to (ironically) housecat. Each species was then linked to the type of environment they preferred to live in. they found that the middle-sized Komodomys rintjanus preferred the open open grasslands Flores had 100,000 years ago, while mousy R. hainaldi and the P. armandvillei, better known as the Flores giant rat, preferred the forests of 60,000 years ago. That’s about the time Homo floresiensis, pygmy Stegodons (a cow-sized elephant relative), giant storks, giant vultures and Komodo dragons disappeared from the cave.
An artist’s depiction of Homo floresiensis
“The evidence suggests that Homo floresiensis may have preferred more open habitats where they may have been a part of this scavenging guild of Stegodons, storks, and vultures. We think that when the habitat changed, becoming more forested, Homo floresiensis probably left the Liang Bua area, tracking these animals to more open habitats elsewhere on the island.”
The Scavenging Guild would be a great name for a band, but it doesn’t explain what animals the hobbits and friends were scavenging. One obvious guess would be rats, and Veatch is now giving the rat bones a closer look in hopes of finding teeth marks or cut marks from stone tools. While the Stegadons or the 6-foot-tall giant storks would obviously feed more hobbits, the under-four-foot hominins might have better luck hunting smaller game. To test that theory, Veatch is on the island trying to catch wild Flores rats. Really!
“In Indonesia, my nickname is Miss Tikus, which means ‘Miss Rat’. I’m perfectly fine with that because rats are really intelligent and extraordinary animals. We see them through the entire sequence in the archeology of Liang Bua and we will continue to use them in future studies to learn more about what went on in the cave.”
Whatever killed the hobbits, Stegodons and storks didn’t kill the rats. Perhaps that is the mystery Miss Rat should be trying to solve.
Many ancient Egyptian statues have one common and disturbing trait – they’re missing their nose. And the noses didn’t just get destroyed because they’re so old or because of being buried for so long, it was a deliberate act done by grave robbers.
Edward Bleiberg, who is the Brooklyn Museum curator, said that the destruction of the statues’ noses was done to prevent angry spirits from getting revenge against those who were robbing the graves. So why would the robbers destroy the noses on the statues? The answer is actually quite interesting.
Ancient Egyptians believed that the sculptures were vessels for the people who have passed away and that part of their soul could live in the statue, so that’s why they were put in the graves. Tombs and temples were the locations where the sculptures had the most meaning. “All of them have to do with the economy of offerings to the supernatural,” Bleiberg explained. In tombs, they “feed” the deceased person with food and gifts from this world so that they can enjoy it in the next world. In temples, it is the portrayal of their God accepting offerings from kings or others who were able to get a statue.
Statue with its nose broken off
As for the grave robbers, they would destroy the nose on the statues so that they wouldn’t be able to “breathe” anymore. By doing that, they believed that the spirits that were inside of the sculptures couldn’t seek revenge against those who robbed them.
Several nose-less statues are scheduled to go on display from March 22 to August 11 at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louise in an exhibit called Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt. During the exhibit, Bleiberg will go into further detail on the aggressive behavior conducted by the grave robbers that was “targeted” and usually “driven by political and religious motivations.”
Statue with its nose broken off
The exhibit will also include the legacies of pharaohs Hatshepsut (who reigned from around 1478 to 1458 BC) and Akhenaten (1353 to 1336 BC). The exhibit will display damaged and undamaged pieces from the Hatshepsut and Akhenaten eras. In the description of the exhibit, it says that by doing this, it “will thus show how the deliberate destruction of objects, a practice that continues in our own day, derived at that time from the perception of images not only as a means of representation, but also as containers of powerful spiritual energy.”
Hatshepsut Wearing the khat Headdress, ca. 1479–58 B.C. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Akhenaten and His Daughter Offering to the Aten, ca. 1353–36 B.C.E. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
Since the grave robbers broke the noses off the statues in order to make sure that the spirits didn’t come after them, it’s apparent that they didn’t consider the other potential consequence of their actions – if spirits were in fact living in the sculptures, they would become even more furious that someone destroyed their vessel, causing a much angrier spirit to seek revenge.
Have you ever wondered how NASA chose to explore a certain asteroid in space? Well, they chose according to those closest, slowest and with the most alien tech on it.
These structure are on Asteroid Bennu and show buildings, towers, pyramids and even some abandoned ships. All of which look a bit beaten up since they have probably been abandoned on this asteroid for millions of years. Nevertheless they still exist and here are the close ups to prove it.
The asteroid is littered with rocks, however some of those black or silver objects are more interesting than NASA wants you to know.
You are probably wondering is Scott reporting everything in this gif that he has found? No, not at all. I am reporting only what I found in one of 31 photos within that gif. Can you imagine the secrets in the other 30 photos? I'll include the gif at the bottom of this post...slowed down to better see it.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Planet Nibiru Seen Near Earths Sun, 15X The Size Of Earth, March 19, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Planet Nibiru Seen Near Earths Sun, 15X The Size Of Earth, March 19, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: March 17, 2019
Location of discovery: Earths sun
Source: SOHO/NASA images
A giant alien ship visited our sun today. The ship is close to ten to 15 times the size of earth, so you can bet that the US government and NASA knows about it already, but there is no way in hell they would ever alert the public. They want to keep the fear level down so they can control the publics behavior easier.
I believe that this giant space craft is the legendary planet X, also known by the ancients as Nibiru. Its a planet size space craft that orbits our solar system making an appearance only when it wants and where it wants. Legend has it that it flies in an orbit that passes Earth every 15,000 to 20,000 years. During that time they are suppose to gather data about the evolution of humans and all creatures on Earth, analysts the data and....make minor changes in DNA of creatures, even going so far as to cause extinction on a global scale...yes I mean the dinosaurs.
So the real question is why are they near our sun unless the sun is truly hollow as I have stated before. I am surprised that solar observatories around the globe have not announced anything about this, but mind you, 99% of those observatories receive money from NASA to do their research and therefore must go through NASA before releasing any findings found.
Scott C. Waring
The above and below photos show the UFO enlarged and added color to make it easier to see. It is not perfectly round at all and has zero resemblance to an actual planet. I would call this 100% an alien craft.
Ariel Ekblaw, the founder of MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative, welcomes the audience to the conference Beyond the Cradle 2019 on March 14 in Cambridge, Mass.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The technological utopias of science fiction may still be centuries away, but building the culture of that future starts now, a trio of sci-fi creators said.
On a panel at the Beyond the Cradle conference on March 14, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, science fiction creators Ytasha Womack, Daniel Suarez and Marc Okrand shared their ideas on sci-fi futures.
The trio discussed their perspectives on science, fiction and culture, arguing that this intersection not only creates an important opportunity to expand the scope of our own perspectives but also provides agency for those often left out of the conversation about space exploration.
"I think a lot of the science that we work towards is sometimes inspired by what we see in science fiction," said Womack, producer, director and author of works exploring Afrofuturism. "One of the exciting possibilities around sci-fi is that it can really continue to help push this notion of what we can create, especially as it comes to creating possible utopian societies."
Or dystopias, which popular science fiction and young adult novels tend to focus on. Womack said that while readers have an interest in dystopian stories of the future, many peoples and communities today are already living in their own forms of dystopias. By imagining societies of the future, we can explore how to improve human relations today, and in some cases even shine a harsh light on the ways our society has failed to live up to the standards we write about, Womack added.
One such disconnect is the way first contact with aliens is typically treated in fiction compared to how "aliens" on Earth are thought of and treated. While used in fiction to refer to extraterrestrials, Womack said that the initial meaning of the word "alien" simply referred to people on Earth who were different. "Even how we use it today around illegal aliens, or undocumented workers, I think it refers to a certain mentality around differences," said Womack.
Science fiction often imagines the enlightened, positive meeting of humans and an alien species, and the panelists said this approach to meeting beings different from ourselves should be brought to our everyday experiences. This will help us search for commonalities among humans instead of differences, and imagining ourselves as intergalactic beings unified by a sense of responsibility to something greater than ourselves can be an empowering experience for people, Womack said.
This acceptance of differences is important not only at the interpersonal level, but also at the level of linguistics, said Marc Okrand, a linguist known for creating "Star Trek's" Klingon language.
"Someone asked me, 'Of all the things invented for "Star Trek," what would you like to have be the most real one?'" said Okrand. "I think everyone expected me to say universal translator. But it's not [what I'd choose], because if everyone is only ever hearing in the same language all the time and not having to do a translation on their own, they're not getting the [other] perspectives."
While framed around the discussion of fiction at this panel, these ideas of including other perspectives resonated throughout the Beyond the Cradle conference. Ariel Ekblaw, the coordinator of the conference and founder of the Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative, said the focus of the day was to explore ways to democratize space and make it accessible not only to people all around the world, but also across many disciplines, including technology, art and design.
"The idea is to show that gradient [of expertise], but not siloed" Ekblaw told Space.com, "to show [everyone] all here together, talking together and co-designing the future of space."
Suarez addresses a growing urgency for grappling with this future in his sci-fi novels. He does so by exploring the impact of impending rapid technological change, such as the development of asteroid mining.
"In many ways, we're living in a sci-fi future already," Suarez said at the panel. "So, I try to bring my readers through the issues and challenges we're going to be facing."
Suarez's approach combines technology and culture to imagine a future where humanity can believe in a common goal, like creating industry opportunities in space, and finally imagine themselves as a single human race.
Imagining being a part of an intergalactic community via fiction can be particularly poignant for communities like the African diaspora, Womack said, because it can help people feel like they have a stake in these stories and their futures.
"I know a lot of people have been encouraged not to use their imagination," Womack said, "[but] imagination can be a tool of resilience to help people push beyond their circumstances so that they can even envision a future. And envisioning a future then inspires them to feel like they have agency in that future and take steps to create the kind of world that values humanity."
You can now also add herpes to the list of many perils and challenges to human health that outer space poses. According to a new study, spaceflight weakens the immune system enough to reactivate dormant viruses such as the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), varicella-zoster virus (VZV), and herpes-simplex-1 (HSV-1).
Credit: Public Domain.
Researchers at the Johnson Space Center found that spaceflight increases the secretion of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which are known to suppress the immune system. This way, viruses inside our bodies that are in a latent state (meaning they do not replicate) become reactivated because immune cells are no longer able to suppress or eliminate them.
“NASA astronauts endure weeks or even months exposed to microgravity and cosmic radiation—not to mention the extreme G forces of take-off and re-entry,” says senior author Dr. Satish K. Mehta of Johnson Space Center. “This physical challenge is compounded by more familiar stressors like social separation, confinement and an altered sleep-wake cycle.”
Mehta and colleagues analyzed saliva, blood, and urine samples collected from astronauts before, both during and after spaceflight. Most people get oral herpes — or herpes simplex virus type 1 — by the age of 20. Following the first infection, usually after one or two weeks, the virus will become dormant in facial nerve tissues. The researchers found that about half of all astronauts aboard Space Shuttle and International Space Station had four of eight know herpes viruses in an activate state, although only six astronauts (a small proportion) developed symptoms. Other reactivated viruses include CMV and EBV, which are associated with different strains of mononucleosis or the “kissing disease”.
“To date, 47 out of 89 (53%) astronauts on short space shuttle flights, and 14 out of 23 (61%) on longer ISS missions shed herpes viruses in their saliva or urine samples,” reports Mehta.“These frequencies—as well as the quantity—of viral shedding are markedly higher than in samples from before or after flight, or from matched healthy controls.”
The researchers found that virus shedding was active in astronauts for up to 60 days after returning to Earth. Although only a few astronauts developed symptoms, continued virus shedding could endanger immunocompromised or uninfected contacts on Earth, like newborns.
This is just one of the many adverse effects caused by spaceflight. Previously, researchers found that prolonged exposure to a microgravity environment can result in tissue damage to the gastrointestinal tract, eyes, and brain. Mehta and colleagues suggest that targetted vaccine protocols for astronauts might offset some of the risks associated with virus reactivation.
“Trials of other herpes virus vaccines show little promise, so our present focus is on developing targeted treatment regimens for individuals suffering the consequences of viral reactivation,” Mehta said.
“This research has tremendous clinical relevance for patients on Earth too. Already, our spaceflight-developed technologies for rapid viral detection in saliva have been employed in clinics and hospitals around the world."
WETENSCHAP Bij meer dan de helft van de astronauten die met de Space Shuttle reizen en op het Internationaal Ruimtestation ISS verblijven, steken slapende herpesvirussen opnieuw de kop op. Dat blijkt uit nieuw onderzoek van NASA. Het fenomeen kan volgens het ruimteagentschap een probleem vormen voor langdurige ruimtemissies.
“NASA-astronauten worden gedurende weken of zelfs maanden blootgesteld aan microzwaartekracht en kosmische straling, en dan zwijgen we nog van de extreme G-krachten bij het opstijgen en de terugkeer naar de aarde”, zegt dr. Satish Mehta, hoofdauteur van de studie en medewerker van het Johnson Space Center. “De fysieke uitdaging wordt verstrekt door andere stressfactoren zoals sociale scheiding, opsluiting en een gewijzigde slaapcyclus.”
In de studie, die werd gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift Frontiers in Microbiology, drukken de onderzoekers hun bezorgdheid uit over de reactivering van het virus. Het gaat dus niet over een nieuw virus dat zich in de ruimte ontwikkelt.
Immuunsysteem onderdrukt
NASA volgt de fysiologische impact van ruimtevaart bij de astronauten op via hun speeksel, bloed en urine. “Tijdens de ruimtevlucht is er een toename van de afscheiding van stresshormonen zoals cortisol en adrenaline, waarvan geweten is dat ze het immuunsysteem onderdrukken”, stelt de studie. “In overeenstemming hiermee ondervinden we dat de immuuncellen van astronauten – vooral diegene die normaal gezien virussen onderdrukken en elimineren – minder efficiënt worden tijdens ruimtevluchten en soms tot 60 dagen daarna.”
Wanneer het immuunsysteem onderdrukt wordt, is het voor het lichaam van een astronaut moeilijker om slapende virussen onder controle te houden, waardoor die weer de kop opsteken.
53 procent
“Tot op heden scheidden 47 van de 89 astronauten (53 procent) op korte ruimtevluchten, en 14 van 23 (61 procent) van diegenen op langere ISS-missies, herpesvirussen af in hun speeksel- of urinestalen”, aldus dr. Mehta. Dat is opvallend meer dan in stalen die voor of na de vlucht werden afgenomen.
Hoe langer de ruimtereis duurt, des te vaker staken de virussen dus weer de kop op. Slechts zes astronauten ontwikkelden ook echt symptomen als gevolg van de virale reactivering. Volgens Mehta ging het bij elk van hen om slechts lichte symptomen.
Gevaar voor lange ruimtereizen
Er zijn acht gekende herpesvirussen, waaronder de stam voor de waterpokken en gordelroos. Eens er een besmetting heeft plaatsgevonden, blijven de virussen aanwezig in de zenuwcellen van de drager voor de rest van zijn leven. Het immuunsysteem kan de virussen meestal onderdrukken, maar als het immuunsysteem zelf onder druk komt te staan, bijvoorbeeld tijdens ruimtereizen, dan kan dit grote risico’s met zich meebrengen voor astronauten die naar Mars of zelfs verder willen reizen.
De ontwikkeling van tegenmaatregelen tegen virale reactivering is essentieel voor het succes van langdurige ruimtemissies, betoogt Mehta. “De ideale tegenmaatregel voor astronauten is vaccinatie, maar dat is tot nu toe alleen beschikbaar voor waterpokken en gordelroos.”
“Testen met andere herpesvirusvaccins zijn weinig beloftevol, dus onze huidige focus ligt op de ontwikkeling van gerichte behandelingsschema’s voor personen die lijden aan de gevolgen van virale reactivering”, stelt de arts.
Don Davis/NASADe inslag van een asteroïde op aarde zou fataal kunnen zijn voor ons allemaal.
WETENSCHAPOnze planeet kreeg sinds de Cambrische explosie - de ‘Oerknal van het leven’ zo’n 500 miljoen jaar geleden - een vijftal gigantische externe wereldrampen te verwerken waarbij telkens meer dan 60 procent van levende soorten op aarde weggevaagd werd. Maar ook een complete uitroeiing van de mensheid kan niet worden uitgesloten. Het bekende zakentijdschrift Forbes lijst vandaag vijf buitenaardse mogelijke scenario’s op die daartoe in staat zouden zijn.
We moeten er onze slaap niet meteen voor laten, maar wetenschappelijk gezien kunnen bepaalde gebeurtenissen die zich buiten onze planeet afspelen ons helemaal uitroeien. Het hangt meestal van erg groot toeval af, maar er is wel één zekerheid: na ongeveer 2 miljard jaar zal de zon onze oceanen volledig opbranden en is het onherroepelijk gedaan met ons. Maar dat ligt nog héél erg ver weg. Tegen dan kunnen ons ook potentieel de volgende scenario’s overkomen:
REUTERS65 miljoen jaar geleden werden de dino’s uitgeroeid door een meteorieteninslag.
1. Asteroïde- of komeetinslag
Simpel gesteld: als een enorme massa uit de ruimte aan hoge snelheid op de aarde zou crashen, dan zou dat kunnen leiden tot massa-extinctie. Dat soort incidenten is uiterst zeldzaam. We kunnen nog makkelijk miljarden jaren verder zonder zo’n fatale inslag. De laatste keer is intussen alweer 65 miljoen jaar geleden, toen de dinosaurussen uitgeroeid werden. Een reële dreiging is de komeet Swift-Tuttle, waaraan we de Perseïden-meteorenzwerm te danken hebben. De komeet zou in het jaar 4479 kunnen inslaan op de aarde, al blijft die kans klein.
EPAGammaflitsen kunnen het einde betekenen.
2. Gammaflitsen
Een heftige uitbarsting van hoogenergetische gammastraling - met een energie-uistoot die honderden keren groter is dan de straling van een supernova-uitbarsting - zou de ozonlaag kunnen vernietigen, wat de ondergang van de mensheid zou betekenen. Dat kan alleen als een van de stralen naar de aarde is gericht en voldoende dichtbij is, te weten binnen ongeveer 6.000 lichtjaar. Die kans is amper één keer in één miljoen jaar. De uitbarsting kan erg kort zijn maar ook minutenlang duren.
EPA
3. Zomaar een clash
De Melkweg zit vol sterren, planeten, sterrenresten en zwarte gaten. Als daarvan iets door ons innerlijke zonnestelsel gaat, dan zou dat door de zwaartekracht onze planeet kunnen verstoten en ons allemaal vernietigen. Dat kan alleen gebeuren als de ster even dicht bij de aarde komt als de zon, en die kans is minder dan 1 op 1 miljard. Als het toch zou voorvallen, dan zou de aarde in korte tijd bevriezen en zou het menselijke leven er uitsterven.
PhotonewsAls de aarde terechtkomt in de krabnevel, dan kan dat dodelijk zijn voor de mensheid.
4. Supernova
Supernova’s hebben onze planeet al vaker belaagd, tot nu toe zonder noemenswaardige schade. Een supernova van het meest voorkomende type II op minder dan 25 lichtjaar van de aarde zou een bedreiging voor onze ozonlaag kunnen vormen, maar dat is een hoogst uitzonderlijk fenomeen. Het komt naar schatting minder dan één keer in een paar miljard jaren voor.
EPAAls niets anders ons heeft uitgeroeid, dan zal de zon dat zéker doen. Maar wel pas over 2 miljard jaar ongeveer.
5. Onze zon
De zon zal ons uiteindelijk verbranden, dat is onvermijdelijk. Vandaag kookt het water van de zee enkel als er lava vrijkomt bij een vulkaanuitbarsting of als er iets anders superheets in de oceaan terechtkomt. Maar dat verandert ooit. De zon is sinds haar ontstaan toegenomen qua omvang, helderheid en temperatuur, en die kenmerken zullen ook in de toekomst blijven evolueren. Binnen de twee miljard jaar zal de energie van de zon zo fel zijn dat het de oceanen zal doen koken en zo een einde zal maken aan het leven op aarde.
When playing a game of “What’s the weirdest thing you can imagine happening” (don’t tell me I and my friends are the only ones who play this), it pays to google your crazy idea first because 9 times out of 10, it already happened in Siberia or somewhere else in Russia (this isn’t cheating, according to the official rule book). Black snow? Check. Green snow? Check. Black living snow? No need to google it … we already did and it’s true. Plausible explanation? Safe for humans? Something sinister behind their appearance? Let the game continue!
This story comes from the village of Balasheika (or Balasheyka) in the Samara region, a heavily-populated urban area in the southeastern part of Russia at the convergence of the Volga and Samara rivers near the border with Kazakhstan (in case you want to go and see this for yourself). According to Pravda.Ru, residents of Balasheika awoke on the morning of March 12 to that everything outside looked to be covered with a black snowfall. Fearing it was caused by coal pollution like the black snowfall in multiple places this winter across Russia (some being so embarrassing that local officials painted it white – only in Russia!) and worried their children would run out and taste it, parents went out to inspect it and were confronted with a nightmarish scene far worse … the black snow appeared to be alive and moving! (Watch the video here.)
Upon closer inspection, they saw that the movement was caused by a blanket of insects they assumed had fallen from the sky in the previous night’s snowfall. While waiting for an official answer (or for someone to google it), they assumed the tiny bugs were blown in from Kazakhstan (it’s always Kazakhstan) during recent heavy “cyclonic” winds. Before you use this in your next game of “What’s the weirdest thing?”, that’s the wrong answer.
“These creatures are known as Collembola springtail insects, and they do not fall down from the sky. They crawl from under the ground to the surface, and they will return there as soon as it gets warmer.”
Actually, they’re more commonly called “snow fleas,” which is a misnomer since they’re neither fleas nor snow nor even insects. Collembola are hexapods that are not considered to be insects because they have internal mouthparts. They’re omnivorous, free-living organisms that prefer moist conditions and are named Collembola for their collophore (a straw-like body tube used for excretion and maintaining water balance) and their abdominal, spring-like furcula that is used for jumping when threatened. They generally live in decaying matter and one of the world’s most abundant tiny creatures, with about 100,000 per square meter of ground. Even in those numbers, their minute size, while visible to the naked eye, still makes them hard to see … except for the snow fleas, which sometimes emerge from winter hibernation when the temperature is warm enough to trick them into thinking it’s spring but not enough to melt the snow, giving the contrast that makes them easy to spot.
“These insects are absolutely safe for humans, domestic animals and grain crops. They may emerge on the ground surface too early, when it gets unusually warm for a few days.”
Pravda.Ru knows what its readers are thinking. Being wrongly called “fleas” makes Collembola springtails subject to the same fears of fleas, which truly deserve to be feared and avoided by warm-blooded creature. However, Collembola springtails are truly harmless and in fact are beneficial as lab test subjects for the early detection of soil pollution.
Conspiracy theorists may also know of Collembola springtails for their alleged use as biological weapons during the Korean War. They were rumored to have been infected by the U.S. military with anthrax, dysentery, cholera and small pox and dropped by airplanes on enemy villages. The rumors surfaced again in 1971-72 when the Nixon administration ordered all biological weapons stored at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas to be destroyed. The government denied snow fleas were ever used as six-legged biological weapons carriers.
Were they? Are they? Should the good folks of Balasheika be fearful of the sudden appearance of huge numbers of snow fleas? Should they question their government? Our? Anybody’s?
It is not the first time huge cigar-shaped UFOs have been spotted on google sky or by telescope.
The following object has been found by TruthSeeker on Google Sky which resembles a huge cigar-shaped craft.
The cigar-shaped craft is very similar to infamous Quamuamua and even it is the equivalent of our battleships or submarines.
Besides,you can see the sort of bridge on top of this craft and a large square hangar or docking facility for smaller incoming and outgoing UFOs on the craft’s side.
This discovery confirms once again that such interstellar alien spaceships do exist.
The craft is 1,400 meters width and 120 meters high and can be found on the following Google sky coordinates: 2 41 32.38 7 53 16.51
Toyota's proposed lunar rover will be self-driving and use zero-emission electric fuel cell technology.
JAPAN AEROSPACE EXPLORATION AGENCY & TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION
Japan is planning a moon landing for 2029 and wants its astronauts to explore the lunar surface in a vehicle built by Japanese automaker Toyota.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Toyota announced Tuesday that it will collaborate on international space exploration, specifically on developing a manned, pressurized rover that uses Toyota's fuel cell vehicle (FCV) technologies.
Toyota's concept for a lunar rover will travel 10,000km.
JAPAN AEROSPACE EXPLORATION AGENCY & TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION
“Manned, pressurized rovers will be an important element supporting human lunar exploration, which we envision will take place in the 2030s, " said Koichi Wakata, JAXA Vice President. "We aim at launching such a rover into space in 2029."
JAXA, which earlier this month landed its Hayabusa2 probe on the asteroid Ryugu, is hoping the collaboration with Toyota will "give rise to intellectual properties" needed for international space exploration.
The lunar rover will also have solar panels, which will be useful in lunar daylight, which lasts for two weeks in each month.
JAPAN AEROSPACE EXPLORATION AGENCY & TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION
An FCV is a type of electric vehicle that, instead of using a battery, uses a fuel cell of oxygen and compressed hydrogen, which react with each other to generate electricity. The zero-emissions technology is already used on Toyota's Mirai vehicle. “Fuel cells, which use clean power-generation methods, emit only water, and, because of their high energy density, they can provide a lot of energy, making them especially ideal for the project being discussed with JAXA," said Shigeki Terashi, Executive Vice President at Toyota. He also mentioned that Toyota's automated driving technologies were part of the project.
Although the amount of fuel that could be taken to the moon would be limited, said JAXA and Toyota, the pressurized rover would have a total lunar-surface cruising range of more than 10,000 km.
However, Toyota’s ‘space mobility’ concept for the pressurized rover being studied by JAXA and Toyota is pretty small. It envisions a 6 meter by 5.3-meter vehicle standing 3.8 meters tall. That's enough room for two people, say JAXA and Toyota, or four in an emergency. Toyota and JAXA also revealed that they have been jointly studying the concept of a manned, pressurized rover since May 2018.
The moon presents some special challenges for any vehicle. Gravity is one-sixth of Earth's, and the lunar surface is pocked by craters, cliffs, and hills. "It is exposed to radiation and temperature conditions that are much harsher than those on Earth, as well as an ultra-high vacuum environment," said Wakata. "For a wide-ranging human exploration of the moon, a pressurized rover that can travel more than 10,000 km in such environments is a necessity." Wakata also stressed the need for a 'Team Japan' approach to space exploration.
ispace's HAKUTO-R mission will launch on a SpaceX rocket in 2020 to orbit the moon and be followed by a mission to land on the surface in 2021.
HAKUTO/ISPACE
That's a message that appears to be finding favor. Japan Airlines-backed startup ispace last month announced that its HAKUTO-R mission will orbit the moon in 2020 ahead of a mission to land on the surface in 2021. An finalist in the ill-fated Google Lunar XPRIZE, ispace plans to map, and eventually recover, water ice on the moon and learn how to use it as a resource. If it can separate lunar water into hydrogen and oxygen, it could provide fuel for Toyota's moon buggy, as well as for a self-sufficient moonbase, and even rockets.
Aside from Japan Airlines, HAKUTO-R's corporate partners include Japanese national daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun and Japan NGK Spark Plug, which wants to test solid-state battery technology on the moon in 2021. Another is Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance, which last month announced a new lunar insurance service. “The availability of lunar exploration insurance will encourage new players to participate in the lunar industry by reducing the risk of entry,” said ispace founder Takeshi Hakamada last month. “With the ability to insure our landers and rovers, ispace and its customers will be able to concentrate on realizing our vision without hesitation."
One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe.
That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined.
Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in the universe.
A University of Massachusetts study found that black holes that are large and rotating enough could allow 'gentle' hyperspace travel.
HOW WOULD INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL WORK?
Black holes are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity – which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density.
This dense and hot singularity punches a hole in the fabric of spacetime itself, possibly opening up an opportunity for hyperspace travel.
That is, a short cut through spacetime allowing for travel over cosmic scale distances in a short period.
They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity – which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density.
This dense and hot singularity punches a hole in the fabric of spacetime itself, possibly opening up an opportunity for hyperspace travel.
That is, a short cut through spacetime allowing for travel over cosmic scale distances in a short period.
Researchers previously thought that any spacecraft attempting to use a black hole as a portal of this type would have to reckon with nature at its worst.
The hot and dense singularity would cause the spacecraft to endure a sequence of increasingly uncomfortable tidal stretching and squeezing before being completely vaporized.
My team at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a colleague at Georgia Gwinnett College have shown that all black holes are not created equal.
If the black hole like Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our own galaxy, is large and rotating, then the outlook for a spacecraft changes dramatically.
That's because the singularity that a spacecraft would have to contend with is very gentle and could allow for a very peaceful passage.
'Interstellar' was based on a book written by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Gargantua's physical properties are central to the plot of this Hollywood movie.
The reason that this is possible is that the relevant singularity inside a rotating black hole is technically 'weak,' and thus does not damage objects that interact with it.
At first, this fact may seem counter intuitive.
But one can think of it as analogous to the common experience of quickly passing one's finger through a candle's near 2,000-degree flame, without getting burned.
My colleague Lior Burko and I have been investigating the physics of black holes for over two decades.
This graph depicts the physical strain on the spacecraft’s steel frame as it plummets into a rotating black hole. The inset shows a detailed zoom-in for very late times. The important thing to note is that the strain increases dramatically close to the black hole, but does not grow indefinitely. Therefore, the spacecraft and its inhabitants may survive the journey.
In 2016, my Ph.D. student, Caroline Mallary, inspired by Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film 'Interstellar,' set out to test if Cooper (Matthew McConaughey's character), could survive his fall deep into Gargantua – a fictional, supermassive, rapidly rotating black hole some 100 million times the mass of our sun.
'Interstellar' was based on a book written by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Gargantua's physical properties are central to the plot of this Hollywood movie.
Building on work done by physicist Amos Ori two decades prior, and armed with her strong computational skills, Mallary built a computer model that would capture most of the essential physical effects on a spacecraft, or any large object, falling into a large, rotating black hole like Sagittarius A*.
What she discovered is that under all conditions an object falling into a rotating black hole would not experience infinitely large effects upon passage through the hole's so-called inner horizon singularity.
This is the singularity that an object entering a rotating black hole cannot maneuver around or avoid.
Singularity of massive black hole or wormhole. Researchers previously thought that any spacecraft attempting to use a black hole as a portal of this type would have to reckon with nature at its worst.
Not only that, under the right circumstances, these effects may be negligibly small, allowing for a rather comfortable passage through the singularity.
In fact, there may no noticeable effects on the falling object at all. This increases the feasibility of using large, rotating black holes as portals for hyperspace travel.
Mallary also discovered a feature that was not fully appreciated before: the fact that the effects of the singularity in the context of a rotating black hole would result in rapidly increasing cycles of stretching and squeezing on the spacecraft.
But for very large black holes like Gargantua, the strength of this effect would be very small. So, the spacecraft and any individuals on board would not detect it.
The crucial point is that these effects do not increase without bound; in fact, they stay finite, even though the stresses on the spacecraft tend to grow indefinitely as it approaches the black hole.
WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them - not even light.
They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them.
Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.
How they are formed is still poorly understood.
Supermassive black holes are incredibly dense areas in the centre of galaxies with masses that can be billions of times that of the sun. They cause dips in space-time (artist's impression) and even light cannot escape their gravitational pull
Astronomers believe they may form when a large cloud of gas up to 100,000 times bigger than the sun, collapses into a black hole.
Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every known massive galaxy.
Alternatively, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun's mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.
When these giant stars die, they also go 'supernova', a huge explosion that expels the matter from the outer layers of the star into deep space.
There are a few important simplifying assumptions and resulting caveats in the context of Mallary's model.
The main assumption is that the black hole under consideration is completely isolated and thus not subject to constant disturbances by a source such as another star in its vicinity or even any falling radiation.
While this assumption allows important simplifications, it is worth noting that most black holes are surrounded by cosmic material – dust, gas, radiation.
Therefore, a natural extension of Mallary's work would be to perform a similar study in the context of a more realistic astrophysical black hole.
Mallary's approach of using a computer simulation to examine the effects of a black hole on an object is very common in the field of black hole physics.
Needless to say, we do not have the capability of performing real experiments in or near black holes yet, so scientists resort to theory and simulations to develop an understanding, by making predictions and new discoveries.
But now, physicists have run computer simulations to show that certain types of black holes – large, rotating ones – could serve as portals for hyperspace travel.
Some physicists believe that you’d arrive at a remote part of theMilky Wayor perhaps in anothergalaxyaltogether.
One of the safest passageways might be the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*.
Following is a transcript of the video.
Narrator: Black holes skirt the line between science fiction and science fact. On the one hand, scientists have seen real black holes in action, consuming unsuspecting stars that pass too close. But where reality ends and fiction takes over is at the edge of a black hole – a place called the event horizon, where no spacecraft has ever gone.
So, whatever happens beyond that boundary, inside of a black hole, is anyone’s guess. Scientists agree that if you travel far enough into a black hole, gravity will eventually become so strong that it kills anything in its path. But sci-fi films are more optimistic, depicting black holes as portals through space and time or gateways to other dimensions. And it turns out, some scientists now think the sci-fi buffs may be onto something. Black holes might be suitable for hyperspace travel, after all; it just takes the right kind of black hole.
At the center of every black hole is a point of infinite density, called a singularity. It’s what gives black holes their strong gravitational pull. And for decades, scientists thought singularities were all the same, so anything that passed the event horizon would be destroyed the same way: by being stretched and pulled like an infinitely long piece of spaghetti.
But that all changed in the early 1990s when different research teams in Canada and the US discovered a second singularity called a “mass inflation singularity.” It still has a strong gravitational pull, but it would only stretch you by a finite amount, and potentially NOT kill you in the process, meaning, you might survive the trip through a black hole. More specifically, through a large, rotating black hole, which is where these types of singularities exist.
Now, astronomers obviously can’t travel through a black hole yet to test this theory. In fact, the best place to test this is at the supermassive black hole in the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is 27,000 light years away. Not conveniently close to the least.
Therefore, scientists instead run computer simulations to see what would happen if we did manage to reach an isolated, rotating black hole, and now, for the first time, a team of scientists at UMass Dartmouth and Georgia Gwinnett College has done exactly that.
Lior Burko: “You would feel a slight increase in temperature, but it would not be a dramatic increase. It’s just that you don’t have enough time to respond to the very strong forces. It would just go through you too quickly.”
Narrator: He added that passing through a weak singularity is like quickly running your finger through a candle flame that’s 1,000 degrees Celsius. If you hold your finger in the flame long enough, you’ll get burned, but pass your finger through quickly, and you’ll barely feel a thing. Similarly, if you pass through a weak singularity with the right speed and momentum, and at the right time, you may not feel much at all.
As for what happens once you get through to the other side, no one really knows, but Burko has his own ideas. He says one possibility is that we’d arrive at some other remote part of our galaxy, potentially light years away from any planets or stars, but a second, and perhaps more intriguing, possibility is that we’d arrive in a different galaxy altogether. That’s if you even make it that far.
Scientists say more research is needed before we’re anywhere close to successfully traveling through a black hole. But when we are ready, one of the safest passageways might be the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy called Sagittarius A*, and it might just be our ticket out of the Milky Way.
The robotics community likes to say that we’re at an inflection point, something akin to software’s position in the 1980s. In 1984, around eight percent of households had a computer, according toUS Censusdata, a percentage that grew to more than 23 percent by the early 1990s. That’s roughly two million households buying a new computer each year.
Similar projections exist for the adoption of household and workplace robotics. About 4 million robots were sold in 2015, according to data from Loup Ventures, the vast majority of which were vacuum cleaners. That number is expected to soar to 23 million by 2025. By then, either robots or some other form of automation will be completing roughly 52 percent of tasks worldwide, according to a recent projection from the World Economic Forum.
There are a few factors at play in this acceleration. Each week, the field overcomes new hurdles, and as 5G networks drastically expand network capacity over the next two years, that pace of progress will get even faster. If you don’t have robot colleagues already, it’s only a matter of time.
It should come as some relief to hear that research is already underway to see how robot growth is going to affect your workday.
The projected migration of tasks from human to machines, according to the WEF's data.
Robots Don’t Need to Take Jobs to Take a Toll on Workers
It’s obviously awful to be automated out of a job. But what if the robots you work with are simply colleagues? That’s the question underlying a study from a fascinating group of researchers at Cornell whose expertise spreads across engineering, robotics, and behavioral economics. In the study, published last month, the researchers tried to tease out the emotional impact of working alongside a robot with an identical job. The workplace, after all, is a competitive place — what happens when you make workers compete with robots who, obviously, don’t mess up or get tired? It turns out, they don’t like it.
“People thought they were worse at the job when the robot was there,” Guy Hoffman, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who specializes in robot-human interaction, tells Inverse. “To me, this raises the question of whether there’s this downside to highly productive robots working alongside people.”
To test for this effect, Hoffman, along with lead author Alap Kshirsagar, co-author Ori Heffetz, and two graduate students, pitted humans and robots against one another in a pretty tedious task, identifying G’s out of a string of letters. The better the human or the robot did, the greater their odds of winning a prize.
Throughout the challenge, the players were able to see their odds of winning, which allowed the researchers to assess whether working with a fast or slow robot had a different effect on the human participants. What they found leaves room for concern: The better the robot was doing, the less the human participants tried.
People, including John Oliver, are starting to pay more attention to automation and its possible downstream effects.
How Loss Aversion Comes Into Play
Ori Heffetz, an economics professor at Cornell and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explains that this is likely due to loss aversion, a common theory in behavioral economics which holds that people tend to prioritize avoiding losses over pursuing gains. Loss aversion, he said in an email, explains why people tend to slack off more when competing against a robot they thought would win anyway.
“People evaluate their outcomes not only in absolute terms, but also relative to a reference point,” Heffetz explained in an email. “Our task-competitors seemed to evaluate winning the prize relative to how much they expected to win it; when the robot was slower, they expected to win the prize more and worked harder to avoid disappointment. When the robot was faster, they knew their overall chances to win the prize are lower, and they tried less hard.”
Loss aversion is powerful. It explains why we’re too hesitant to bet our chips in poker, and why we’ll sometimes slack off when a goal seems unrealistic to us. In terms of financial behavior, it also explains why most people who invest tend to do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do, and buy assets when they’re high and sell them when they’re low. This effect is said to be about twice as psychologically powerful as the effect of equivalent gains, according to a famous 1992 paper by the Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahneman.
As to how we can triumph over loss aversion when robots are in the picture? More research needs to be done. And after all, spotting the “G” in a long strings of letters isn’t the same as doing a job where you can (at least hopefully) gain some satisfaction from seeing tasks being accomplished.
Heffetz says the next step is to continue studying how and where humans form reference points for when they feel like they’re winning and losing. A robot, after all, is obviously not a fair reference point to assess human ability. If we can crack the code to that particular question, then we might be able to crack the code for how to make robot-human collaboration a win-win for everyone.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
UK's air-breathing rocket engine set for key tests
UK's air-breathing rocket engine set for key tests
By Jonathan Amos - BBC Science Correspondent
Image copyrightREACTION ENGINES LTD
Artwork: Sabre could enable intercontinental travel at five times the speed of sound
The UK project to develop a hypersonic engine that could take a plane from London to Sydney in about four hours is set for a key demonstration.
The Sabre engine is part jet, part rocket, and relies on a novel pre-cooler heat-exchanger technology.
This pre-cooler system will begin a new phase of testing in the next month or so in Colorado, US.
Meanwhile, the core part of the engine has just gone through its preliminary design review.
Signed off by experts at the European Space Agency, the review sets the stage for this central section of Sabre to begin its own demonstration campaign at Wescott Space Cluster in Buckinghamshire next year.
Image copyrightREACTION ENGINES LTDImage captionArtwork: Space planes based on Sabre ought to be fully reusable and cheaper to operate
The company behind the project, Reaction Engines Ltd (REL), says it is making good progress.
Not only would Sabre power units enable rapid, point-to-point transport inside the atmosphere, but they would also allow reusable vehicles to make the jump straight to orbit without the need for multiple propellant stages - as is the case now with conventional rockets.
Sabre would work like an air-breathing jet engine from standstill to about Mach 5.5 (5.5 times the speed of sound) and then transition to a rocket mode at high altitude, going at 25 times the speed of sound to get into space, if this is the chosen destination.
Image copyrightREACTION ENGINES LTD
Image captionThe European Space Agency is auditing the technical development of Sabre
Achieving this flight profile is a challenge in managing temperature extremes.
The essential innovations include a compact pre-cooler heat-exchanger that can take an incoming airstream in the region of 1,000C and cool it to -150C in less than 1/100th of a second.
REL proved the pre-cooler's efficiency at taking an ambient air stream to low temperature in 2012. Now it must do the same in a very high-temperature regime. This is the purpose of the Colorado tests.
"To have a very high-temperature, high-volume flow of air to test the pre-cooler - we needed a new facility. That is now complete," explains Shaun Driscoll, REL's programmes director
"We will be running tests in the next month or two. We will be using re-heated aero engines to drive air through the system. We will drive air into the pre-cooler at up to 1,000C."
Image copyrightREACTION ENGINES LTDImage captionSabre would burn hydrogen in the oxygen it scoops from the air
Sabre, at a fundamental level, can be divided into three sections - the pre-cooler front-end; a core combustion section with a smart thermodynamic cycle to again manage heat and fluid flow; and a relatively conventional rocket arrangement at the rear.
It's the core section that is having a new test facility built for it at the Wescott space park, the site of Britain's post-war Rocket Propulsion Establishment.
Image copyrightREACTION ENGINES LTDImage captionNew building: On the site of Britain's post-war Rocket Propulsion Establishment
The building is nearing the end of its preparation and the design work on the core of Sabre is also moving towards its conclusion.
"The core can be tested on the ground, but it's the core that gets you air-breathing from the ground up to the edge of space, at which point there is no more oxygen to breathe and the system transitions to the pure rocket mode," Mr Driscoll said.
REL is a private venture with the backing of aerospace giants BAe Systems, Rolls-Royce and Boeing. It has also received significant R&D support from the UK government. Esa's propulsion specialists act as technical auditors, assessing each step in the development of the Sabre concept.
"The positive conclusion of our Preliminary Design Review marks a major milestone in Sabre development," commented Esa's Mark Ford.
"It confirms the test version of this revolutionary new class of engine is ready for implementation."
Sudden Change On YouTube Could Be The En Of UFO Research
Sudden Change On YouTube Could Be The End Of UFO Research
I subscribe to the Secureteam10 UFO channel on YouTube and they just released this disturbing discovery. Yes, I know, it's Secureteam10, but it affects all alternative UFO channels.
Now, there have been talks and actions by YouTube about removing Conspiracy videos from the suggested video lists but they now apparently made it almost impossible to find them on their search as well.
Note: The video talks of UFOs searches but this also is happening with conspiracy searches too. Already tested it.
Some of the conspiracies out there are outlandish and sometimes dangerous but not all of them fall into this category and what is concerning about this is that now any coverage of any nefarious activities of corrupt wealthy people or companies will never get to see the light of day through YouTube and possibly other sites if this trend continues to other popular sites.
I'd say it's more just Google clamping down on information control.
Massive censorship on the Internet is now a reality
First came mass surveillance, now comes mass censorship.
What we are witnessing here is the slow dissolving of the internet as we know it. And it can all be traced back to the ending of net neutrality which officially went into effect on June 2018. Just take a look at what soon followed.
On August 6th, a mere two months after net neutrality was repealed, Alex Jones lost his entire internet presence. This was clearly a planned and coordinated effort. In a single day Apple, YouTube, Facebook and Spotify entirely wiped him from the net with others to follow suit soon after.
This was just the first and most public example and it set the stage for where we are today. It continues happening widespread across the internet with increasing regularity. Common voices are being silenced and replaced by those of “Authority.” You can see examples of this censorship happening on all the major sites (recently rotten tomatoes deleted 50,000 user reviews from a film and there is already talk of them eliminating the user reviews altogether).
This isn’t just about Alex Jones or UFO videos on YouTube. This is about the internet itself. The message is clear: the internet is no longer a place for open discussion. Just like television and print before it, the internet is now to be made a place for the one-way ingestion of information. You will be free to parrot and repeat the views chosen by those in authority, but any deviation from those selected viewpoints will no longer be tolerated.
Eventually even the ability to point out that this is happening will be silenced.
Youtube deliberately broke the ability to sort by new/date hurting an untold number of content creators because of "The event"
This type of worldwide extreme censorship is a test run to remove en mass anything that the establishment/TPTB doesn't like or want you to see or know. This has a chilling effect and is a slippery slope to tyrannical abuse of power by corporations-states. The line between state authority and corporate governance becomes more Orwellian.
We're aware! This is only temporary and part of our efforts to better respond, review and remove graphic, violative content from YouTube. Thanks for your patience while we work through this.
A huge fireball exploded in the Earth's atmosphere
A huge fireball exploded in the Earth's atmosphere
The US coupled with spaceorganization, NASA, has identified a huge explosion in the Earth’s atmosphere. The blast has been described as the second largest of its kind in 30 years, and the biggest since the fireball over Chelyabinsk in Russia six years ago.
It has largely been unnoticed until now as it blew up over the Bering Sea, off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. To put it into perspective, the space rock exploded with 10 times more energy than that which was released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Planetary defense officer at NASA, Lindley Johnson, has said that a fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every 100 years so it's definitely a rare occurrence.
What actually happened?
On 18th December in 2018, at about noon local time, the asteroid came storming through the atmosphere at a speed of about 32km/s, on a steep trajectory of seven degrees. The space rock, which measured several meters in size, exploded 25.6km above the Earth's surface, with an impact energy of 173 kilotons, which is huge.
Simon Proud@simon_sat
On 18th December 2018 a huge #meteor exploded over the North Pacific:
The Japanese #Himawari satellite caught the meteor smoke trail, which is almost vertical - the meteor entered the atmosphere very steeply! You can also see the trail's long shadow.
The amount of energy was massive, it was still only 40% the energy release of Chelyabinsk, and it was over the Bering Sea, so it didn't have the same type of effect, which is why most people probably didn't see it in the news. Fortunately, that is something Earth has in its defense - there's plenty of water on the planet to absorb meteorites such as this one. There is a higher chance of the rock landing in water than making contact with land, and more worryingly, human civilizations.
We're the authorities aware of this?
Military satellites picked up the blast last year, at which point NASA was notified of the event by the US Air Force. It has been said that the huge rock came in over an area which isn't too far from routes used by commercial planes flying between North America and Asia. Researchers have since been checking with airlines to see if there were any reported sightings of the event. NASA was unaware of the meteorite until it was too late and it had exploded.
Fortunately, it did occur over the Bering Sea. However, it still shows that larger objects can collide with us without warning. Next time, Earth might not be so lucky. A more robust network would be dependent on both ground telescopes, as well as space-based observatories. There is currently a mission concept in development which is effectively a telescope called NeoCam that would be launched to a gravitational balance point in space, where it would discover and characterize potentially hazardous asteroids larger than 140m. This would allow researchers to identify objects before they collide with Earth and calculate where they will impact in case of any dangers.
This Temple Was Carved Out Of A Single Rock. Nobody Knows How 'The Builders' Made It!
This Temple Was Carved Out Of A Single Rock. Nobody Knows How 'The Builders' Made It!
In what could be the next wonder of the world, archaeologists have recently unearthed a temple that ancients have carved out of a mountain rock. Located in Elora, Maharashtra, India, the temple is known as The Kailasa Temple. Some name it the Kailash. The Kailasa temple is dedicated to the Hindu faith and was ordered to be built by King Krishna I of the Rashtrakuta dynasty inancientIndia.
Archaeologists Baffled By The Kailasa Temple
It forms part of a temple complex of 34 cave temples which were of similar construct.
The Construction
What has boggled and amazed scientists is the construction of the temple. Unlike many temples that were built from ground up, the Kailasa temple was carved out straight from the rock of a mountain. To add further amazement, a staggering 400,000 tonnes of rock were excavated and hauled out. During the construction of the temple.
The temple originated around 8th century A.D, and it is intriguing that technology of the period could have contributed to such a momentous construction task. One may wonder at the scope of the construction and estimate the temple to be completed after many decades or centuries. However, the temple only took less than 18 years to finish, according to scientific estimates.
It was estimated that 60 tonnes of rock were being removed every day during temple's construction phase. The temple workers laboured for 12 hours a day hauling at least 5 tonnes of rock out from the mountain per hour. Scientists still have not fully figured out the constructions methods used in conjunction with the tools available during the period and were left baffled at the scope of the operation.
Architecture
The Kailasa temple is part of a complex of 34 monasteries and temples which span over an area of 2 kilometres. As they were all cut out of the mountainside, they are collectively known as the Elora caves, carved out from a basalt cliff.
The temple has a height of 98 feet, was 109 feet wide, and had a depth of 164 feet. This makes it possibly one of the biggest known structures of its kind on the planet. The entrance of the temple faces the west. What is remarkable about the entrance is the degree of accuracy of its facing, giving it a 270-275 degree on a compass.
A 2 storey gateway adorns the entrance to the temple, which further leads to a U-shaped courtyard. The temple is dedicated to the worship of Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva, and deities of both lords align the interior of the temple. Three storey arcades line the perimeter of the courtyard and showcase many sculptures and panels of marvellous beauty and design.
Complex and majestic staircases and bridges link the many different areas of the temple together, adding to the splendour of the place.
Built By Extraterrestrials?
As mentioned before, the time when the temple was built and the available technology of the period coupled with the time it took to build and the momentous scope of the construction had left many baffled. The entire feat would be extremely difficult if not impossible to achieve at that time.
However, the video below reveals a theory which may offer an explanation, that extraterrestrials gave a hand in the construction of this temple.
Getty Images/iStockphotoEen illustratief beeld van een meteoriet die onze atmosfeer binnendringt.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETBoven de Beringzee is eind vorig jaar een metersgrote meteoriet ontploft. Dat heeft de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisaties NASA bekendgemaakt. Bij de explosie kwam 10 keer zo veel energie vrij als bij de atoombom op Hiroshima.
De onthulling werd gedaan tijdens de 50ste Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, bij Houston in de Amerikaanse staat Texas. Dat meldt de BBC.
Het was het Amerikaanse leger dat de gigantische explosie op 18 december detecteerde, dankzij een van zijn militaire satellieten. De luchtmacht nam daarop contact op met de NASA.
Het incident gebeurde voor de kust van het Russische schiereiland Kamtsjatka, rond de middag (plaatselijke tijd, bij ons was het op dat moment 1 uur ’s nachts). De asteroïde van “verscheidene meters groot” raasde toen met een snelheid van 32 kilometer per seconde door onze atmosfeer, in een hoek van 7 graden. Op 25,6 kilometer boven het aardoppervlak spatte hij uit elkaar, met een impact van ongeveer 173 kiloton.
Omdat het boven zee gebeurde, werd de explosie door niemand waargenomen. Wetenschappers probeerden nog bij een aantal vliegmaatschappijen – het incident gebeurde niet zo ver van een aantal commerciële vliegroutes tussen Noord-Amerika en Azië – om te weten te komen of niemand iets gezien had, maar dat bleek niet het geval te zijn.
Tsjeljabinsk
Het zou om de op één na zwaarste ontploffing van een meteoriet gaan in 30 jaar. De zwaarste gebeurde iets meer dan 6 jaar geleden boven de Russische stad Tsjeljabinsk. Die veroorzaakte flink wat meer opschudding omdat ze geregistreerd werd door tientallen getuigen. 1.600 mensen raakten ook gewond en heel wat gebouwen liepen schade op.
Volgens Lindley Johnson – ‘planetary defence officer’ bij de NASA – zou een explosie van dergelijke omvang maar twee tot drie keer per 100 jaar voorkomen.
RVDe ontploffing boven Tsjeljabinsk werd onder meer vastgelegd met een dashcam in een wagen.
Interessant om weten: in 2005 droeg het Amerikaanse Congres de NASA op om tegen 2020 zo’n 90 procent van de asteroïden van 140 meter en groter in de buurt van de Aarde te lokaliseren. Die worden als potentieel gevaarlijk beschouwd mocht het ooit tot een botsing komen met onze planeet, omdat ze een zware impact kunnen hebben op grote gebieden. Maar wetenschappers schatten dat het nog 30 jaar kan duren eer ze die taak vervuld hebben.
Telescopen
Er zou niet alleen een beter ontwikkeld netwerk van telescopen op Aarde voor nodig zijn, maar ook in de ruimte. Een concept dat nu op tafel ligt, omvat onder meer een telescoop – NeoCam – die in de ruimte gebracht zou worden en onder meer zou werken op basis van infraroodstralen.
Over the years, quantum physics has fed us a constant drip of mind-bending implications for the nature of reality. Of course, a lot of those mind-bending implications have been grossly misinterpreted, blended up, and turned into nonsense and predatory self-help books. It’s a funny field of research because while it is grossly misinterpreted, often and loudly, it also doeschallenge our assumptionsabout reality itself. Many of these challenges haven’t made it past the thought experiment phase. Recently, however, a real-life test of a famous quantum physics thought experiment was performed, and, according to the MIT Technology Review, the results areas weird as you could hope for.
The thought experiment is called the “Wigner’s Friend” experiment. Developed by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner in 1961, the Wigner’s Friend thought experiment deals with quantum weirdness of light and the effect of the observer on quantum superposition. The thought experiment asks if two people can observe one event, see different things, and both be correct, essentially creating two different realities that are forced to coexist.
It works like this: A single polarized photon can have either a vertical polarization or a horizontal polarization. Until the measurement of it’s polarization happens, according to the laws of quantum physics, it has both states at once and exists in something called a quantum superposition. It’s worth pointing out that scientists have observed that superpositions exist, and have devised experiments to show it. That becomes important in a minute.
So you have one polarized photon in a superposition of being both vertically and horizontally polarized at once, and you have two scientists: Wigner, and Wigner’s friend. Wigner is performing an experiment to show that the photon is in a superposition and has all possible states of polarization. In Wigner’s reality this is now “fact.”
Meanwhile, Wigner’s friend has sneaked in, without Wigner’s knowledge, to another lab looking at the same photon. Wigner’s friend measures which polarized state it’s in, which snaps it out of superposition and into a definitive state, and records the result without ever telling Wigner. They then compare notes and find that something very strange has then happened. At the exact same time, Wigner and his friend recorded two different versions of reality and they are both correct.
The double slit experiment is one that shows how quantum superposition exists.
Until now, that was simply a thought experiment. Just last week, however scientists at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh say they have performed a real life test of the Wigner’s friend experiment, and it worked out exactly as the thought experiment said it would. I’ll use the description of the experiment published in the MIT Technology Review:
The breakthrough that Proietti and co have made is to carry this out. “In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario,” they say.
They use these six entangled photons to create two alternate realities—one representing Wigner and one representing Wigner’s friend. Wigner’s friend measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result. Wigner then performs an interference measurement to determine if the measurement and the photon are in a superposition.
The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted.
If this experiment turns out not to have missed something, some loophole they were unaware of, then the implications are staggering. It means that the fundamental idea that there is one shared reality, that things that exist, exist for everyone, must be wrong. What does this say about strange phenomena like, say, the Mandela effect? According to the MIT TechnologyReview, the next step for these scientists is to push the idea further and see how drastically different they can make the two coexisting realities. As if the world wasn’t already confusing enough, leave it to quantum physics to make it even more nonsensical.
On their website, called The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, the team posted the announcement which read, “Today is a celebration day as we are now over 4,000 planets validated in our database, and this number will grow very quickly thanks to intensive ongoing work!”
Many new exoplanets will probably be discovered very soon, as NASA’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS) is analyzing around 85 percent of the sky which is approximately 350 times more than the Kepler Space Telescope viewed, although it did discover over 2,700 exoplanets.
The team discovered two new planets orbiting a distant star system called EPIC 203868608 which is located 499 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the Scorpius the Scorpion constellation, bringing the total to 4,001 exoplanets to date.
The discovery of exoplanets first began in the 1990s when two astronomers, named Alex Wolszczan and Dale Frail, found the first three known planets that were orbiting around pulsar PSR B1257+12, which was the remains of a once-massive star.
Not long after, in 1995, scientists discovered a planet near 51 Pegasi, which was very exciting as it was the first planet ever to be seen around a star in the about the same evolutionary stage as our own sun.
Through equipment both on the ground and in space, thousands more exoplanets have been discovered, some of which have a wide range of orbits including some planets in more than one system. In fact, some of those systems have two or three suns.
Abel Mendez, who is the director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, told EarthSky, “At least 49 of the known exoplanets are potentially habitable.” In order to sustain life, the planets need to be at a safe distance orbiting its star – not too close, not too far – which would allow them to possibly hold water on the surface.
Some of the closest stars to our sun, which include Proxima Centauri (4.3 light-years away) and Barnard’s Star (5.98 light-years away), have planets orbiting them and astronomers have suggested that there could be billions of exoplanets within our Milky Way Galaxy.
So if that’s true, if billions of exoplanets are located in our galaxy, and we have already found 4,001 of them, that means there is a lot of work that still needs to be done in order to located as many of these planets as possible. And maybe some of those that haven’t been discovered yet could possibly contain life. How exciting!
I found a crashed disk on a hilltop of Mars in this weeks most recent Curiosity Rover photos. The disk was half visible and about 30% of it was buried below the surface of the hill. Estimated size of the UFO...about 40 meters across. Now here on Earth, ancient Aztec and Mayan ruins are similar to the top of this craft, but the bottom of the craft gives it away. Why? Because when have you ever seen the base of any pyramid stick out like this? Never. But you can see that the object landed in this location, and was not built that way. It looks like the rover was not heading in this objects direction, but rather the camera accidentally swept past it when looking around. I would really like to drive that rover over to this hill top and get a closer look at this ancient craft. Scott C. Waring
I Tweeted Elon Musk and was surprised at all the retweets people gave it. Apparently there are a lot of people who think its a good idea for Musk to look into. I felt like maybe I should let Elon Musk know about on of the 10 mile long aliens ships that I found. This particular craft is in Waterman Crater on Earths moon. I thought that if I let him know that such a high tech ship with a length of about 10-11 miles long existed, that perhaps he may take an interest in salvaging it. Humanity needs to travel out of our solar system to colonize on other worlds and this craft may still be working. What I mean by working is that you know how a phone gets outdated in a few years, so you toss aside the old one? Well this may only have been replaced with a newer model. Think about how many people a 10 mile ship could accommodate on it. It would be enough to begin new colonies on other distant planets.
One person said Elon should salvage it and slap on a Tesla Logo on its side...so I made a photo of such a craft below for inspiration. LOL, what if Tesla did salvage the ship? Imagine how it would change our whole planet. Scott C. Waring
OH SNAP! Snapping shrimp slam their claws shut, producing bubbles that generate plasma and unleash shock waves at prey. Scientists have now reproduced this phenomenon using a 3-D printed claw replica.
Some shrimp have a secret superpower: Snapping their claws unleashes bubbles that produce plasma and shock waves to stun prey. Now a3-D printed replicaclaw has reproduced the phenomenon in the lab, scientists report March 15 in Science Advances.
When a snapping shrimp (Alpheus formosus and related species) slams its powerful claw shut, it spews a jet of water. That fast-moving stream creates a bubble, which then collapses on itself. The collapse produces extreme pressures and temperatures that reach thousands of degrees Celsius, generating a plasma, a state of matter in which electrons are freed from their atoms (SN: 10/6/01, p. 213).
Using scans of a snapping shrimp’s claw as a blueprint, scientists 3-D printed a version five times the size of the original, making it snap shut at about the same speed as the real thing. The team used high-speed imaging to observe the bubbles that the fake claw produced as well as another camera that picked up dim flashes of light associated with the plasma. The researchers are investigating whether similar techniques might be useful for disinfecting water with plasma, which can kill pathogens (SN: 3/4/17, p. 15).
But for the shrimp, the plasma production is an afterthought: “We don’t think the shrimp are intentionally trying to make a plasma,” says mechanical engineer David Staack of Texas A&M University in College Station, a coauthor of the study. Instead, the shrimp aim to produce a shock wave that immobilizes their prey. That shock wave occurs under conditions that also produce a plasma, Staack says. “It does go claw in hand.”
BUBBLE’S BIRTH A bubble forms when scientists operate their 3-D printed replica of a snapping shrimp’s claw, as shown in real time and in a high-speed video. The bubble oscillates in size as it collapses.
History Channel series Ancient Aliens also aired an episode about the conspiracy.
It revealed how computer hacker Gary McKinnon claimed to have discovered an image of a UFO on the NASA database, before his machine was mysteriously “shut down”.
And Kevin Burns, the producer of the show, has gone one step further by suggesting astronauts fear speaking about UFOs.
Speaking to Daily Star Online, he said: “We have interviewed NASA astronauts who are convinced that they have seen UFOs and who have confirmed with us that that information has been suppressed.
“The astronaut Edgar Mitchell was famous for believing in extraterrestrials based on his personal observation.
"Buzz Aldrin also spoke about it.
“There's a reluctance to confine a lot of this because of NASA, being a government agency, kind of frowns on it."
Mitchell was the sixth man on the moon but his legacy was also based on an interview with Kerrang radio in 2008.
COVER-UP? Astronauts have been 'stopped from revealing the alien truth by NASA' (Pic: DS)
In it, he said he believed that the infamous Roswell crash was a UFO and that governments around the world had been covering that and other incidents up.
Conspiracy theorists have claimed Aldrin – who was on the famous Apollo 11 mission – has spoken out in the past about aliens being real, but these claims have never been verified.
Kevin said it was hard to dismiss the testimony of such men who were in space “unless they went totally bonkers”.
“They tend to be very credible,” he added.
“They are aware of something flying by them and then flying away.
“Edgar Mitchell came back very convinced on what he saw and there are a lot of people, more and more astronauts.
“It's hard to dismiss this when we’re training astronauts to be extraterrestrials on Mars.”
But Kevin predicted that, as space becomes more "privatised", there could be a change in stance.
"It will be interesting to see if there will be the same amount of control over information as there has been over the last 30-40 years," he added.
Atlantis in the Sahara? Researcher Claims ‘Ey of Sahara’ is Atlantis’ Ruins
Atlantis in the Sahara? Researcher Claims ‘Eye of Sahara’ is Atlantis’ Ruins
Based on ancient writings by Plato, a striking hypothesis compares the details described by the Greek philosopher with photographs taken by modern satellites.
“…For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State stayed the course of a mighty host, which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic Ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot. For the ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, ‘the pillars of Heracles,’ there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. For all that we have here, lying within the mouth of which we speak, is evidently a haven having a narrow entrance; but that yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent.”
The Richat Structure. Image Credit: Bright Insight / YouTube.
In Critias, Plato wrote how some 9,000 years before our lifetime, a terrifying war took place between cavillations located outside the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar and those who dwelt within them.
Plato explains in his work that the mighty Atlanteans had already conquered great parts of Libya within the Pillars of Hercules, venturing inland as far as Egypt. In Europe, they conquered lands as far as Tyrrhenia—Etruria, a region of Central Italy, located in an area that covered part of what are now Tuscany, Lazio, and Umbria—subjecting its people into slavery along the way.
For centuries has the story of Atlantis been discussed among philosophers, historians, and archaeologists, and countless researchers set out to find the legendary lost city of Atlantis.
However, despite searching for evidence that may prove Atlantis once existed, no one has ever found conclusive evidence to back up Plato’s claims.
Nevertheless, a number of authors have suggested various locations as to where Atlantis may be located, and in modern times, thanks to tools such as Google Earth, UFO hunters as well as self-proclaimed researchers have discovered what they believe are traces of the long-lost Atlantean civilization.
Now, a YouTuber called Jimmy Bright proposes an original theory: that the mythical Atlantis was located in the Sahara Desert. Bright explains his theory in a video uploaded to YouTube which has already been viewed more than 2 million times.
According to Bright, and his hypothesis, the geological structure of Richat – also known as “the Eye of the Sahara” and located in the northwest part of the continent – could be the place where the mysterious city was located.
The blogger bases his theory on texts that describe Atlantis written by Plato.
According to Bright, the Eye of the Sahara perfectly fits into the description by Plato written in Critias and Timaeus.
According to Bright, the diameter of the Richat Structure is 23 kilometers which curiously corresponds to the description of Atlantis by Plato.
A Satellite view of the Eye of the Sahara. Image Credit: Bright Insight / YouTube.
Likewise, Richat’s form is very similar to that of Atlantis, which, as he relates, was composed of three concentric circles of earth and three concentric circles of water.
To support his hypothesis, Bright explains that Plato described that the city of Atlantis was surrounded by mountains and “protected from the north.”
From this data, the YouTuber explains that these alleged mountains are located north of the Eye of the Sahara. He also notices traces in the surrounding terrain of what he believes is evidence of ancient dry rivers.
An artists rendering of what Atlantis may have looked like in the past.
Another clue which Plato wrote about was that of the country or territory that surrounded that city of Atlantis.
According to the Greek philosopher, Atlantis was located on a “flat and smooth plain”, a detail that curiously corresponds to the Sahara Desert, according to the YouTuber.
A good number of YouTubers, amazed by this theory, highlights that there are many coincidences between Plato’s description of Atlantis and Richat’s Structure.
Others, however, point out that it is only a misinterpretation of ancient texts, and that there are many ambiguities in the logic of the proposed theory.
The academic community, for its part, showed no interest in such revelations.
In fact, modern scholars are convinced that Plato’s Atlantis was not real and that a world-power that existed some 9,000 years ago before our time, “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” is nothing more than pseudoscientific speculation
Did Ancient Mars Host an Alien Civilization? US Congressman Asks NASA Panel (Video)
Did Ancient Mars Host an Alien Civilization? US Congressman Asks NASA Panel (Video)
Is It Possible That Ancient Mars Was Host To An Alien Civilization?
This is exactly the question that Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, R-Calif., asked of a NASA panel of planetary scientists on July 18, 2017. To be clear, there isno official evidencethat this is the case. Mars, as far as we know, did not host any alien civilization in the past.
Mars Was Very Different Billions of Years Ago
The Mars we know today is not the Mars of the past. Ancient Mars likely had rivers, lakes, and possibly oceans. It’s not an impossible scenario to believe that life, in some form, once existed there. That being said, the existence a full-blown intelligent civilization is another story. It took earth almost 3.8 billion years to develop intelligent life. Mars is only about 4.5 billion years old. Life would have had to begin very early in the planet’s history to have enough time to develop into something capable of meeting our definition of a ‘civilization’.
Maybe this image is a little far-fetched, but fun to think about | Image Source: Pixabay
Ancient Martian Alien Civilization: Unlikely, But Not Impossible
As a rule of logic, it’s nearly impossible to disprove a negative. Though the panel of NASA scientists said it would be extremely unlikely, they didn’t quite say it was an impossibility. We understand a bit about Martian history, but our scope of research is obviously limited. If life on Mars had developed and then suffered some extinction event a few billion years ago, there would be very little evidence left today. There’s also the question as to whether humans would be able to recognize alien life at all.
What Convinced Congressman Rohrbacher to Ask This Question?
Judging from the reaction of the young man sitting behind the congressman when he finally asked the question, it’s likely that he was asking on his behalf. It’s no secret that Congressman Rohrbacher isn’t a scientist. He does, however, sit on the Committee on Science Space and Technology and has been consistently pro-NASA relative to his other Republican counterparts. He is also keen on having NASA send humans back to the moon.
The Video
You can see the congressman’s question in the video below as well as the response from NASA scientist Dr. Kenneth Farley. Farley is quick to correct Rohrbacher in that Mars was very different billions of years ago vs. thousands of years ago as the question was posed. A few billion years is a long time. If an alien civilization existed on Mars billions of years ago, the time has most likely wiped that slate clean.
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Bernese Mars camera CaSSIS returns spectacular images
Bernese Mars camera CaSSIS returns spectacular images
The image shows a panchromatic channel image of the InSight landing site on Mars. The image shows an area of about 2.25 km x 2.25 km in the Elysium Planitia region. The original image had a scale of about 4.5 m per pixel, and has been stretched by a factor of two for display purposes. The resulting resolution of this image is 5-6 m/pixel. The positions of the InSight lander itself, the blast marks from the retro rockets used during landing, the heatshield and the backshell of the entry descent and landing system are marked. The original image had a scale of about 4.5 m per pixel, and has been expanded to 2.25 m/pixel for display purposes.
Three years ago, on 14 March 2016, the Bernese Mars camera CaSSIS started its journey to Mars with the "ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter" spacecraft. The camera system developed at the University of Bern has been observing Mars from its primary science orbit since April 2018 and provides high-resolution, colour images of the surface. On 2 March 2019, CaSSIS also delivered its first image of InSight, NASA's lander on Mars.
ExoMars is a space mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) in cooperation with the Russian space agency Roskosmos. ExoMars stands for exobiology on Mars: for the first time since the 1970s, active research is being conducted into life on Mars. So called trace gases including methane and their sources are being detected by the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) while the ExoMars programme as a whole (combining TGO with a rover, Rosalind Franklin, due to launch next year) will investigate how the water and the geochemical environment has changed with time.
The Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) on board the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) was developed by an international team led by Prof. Nicolas Thomas of the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern. The TGO launched three years ago today, on 14 March 2016. It arrived at Mars on 19 October that year, and spent over a year demonstrating the aerobraking technique needed to reach its science orbit, starting its prime mission at the end of April 2018.
Hello, InSight
Amongst a new showcase of images from CaSSIS is an image of NASA’s InSight lander – the first time a European instrument has identified a lander on the Red Planet. InSight arrived on Mars on 26 November 2018 to study the interior of the planet. Images of the lander have already been returned by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, these are the first images from TGO.
The panchromatic image was captured by CaSSIS on 2 March 2019, and covers an area of about 2.25 x 2.25 km. At that time, InSight was hammering a probe into the surface in order to measure heat coming from inside the planet. The CaSSIS view shows InSight as a slightly brighter dot in the centre of the dark patch produced when the lander fired its retro rockets just before touchdown in the Elysium Planitia region of Mars, and disturbed the surface dust. The heat shield released just before landing can also be seen on the edge of a crater, and the backshell used to protect the lander during descent is also identified. “The TGO is being used to relay data from InSight to Earth,” says Nicolas Thomas, CaSSIS Principal Investigator, from the University of Bern. “Because of this function, to avoid uncertainties in communications, we had not been able to point the camera towards the landing site so far – we had to wait until the landing site passed directly under the spacecraft to get this image.”
CaSSIS is expected to provide additional support to the InSight team by observing the surface of Mars in the surrounding area. If the seismometer picks up a signal, the source might be a meteorite impact. One of CaSSIS’s tasks will be to help search for the impact site, which will allow the InSight team to better constrain the internal properties of Mars near the landing site.
The image of InSight also demonstrates that CaSSIS will be able to take pictures of the future ExoMars mission. The mission comprises a rover – named Rosalind Franklin – together with a surface science platform, and is due to be launched in July 2020, arriving at Mars in March 2021. TGO will also act as the data relay for the rover.
Science showcase
Also released today is a selection of images capturing the impressive science capabilities of CaSSIS, ranging from high-resolution views of curious surface features and images that highlight the diversity of minerals on the surface, to 3D stereo views and digital terrain models. The images have been produced by teams from the University of Bern, the University of Arizona, and INAF-Padova.
The images selected include detailed views of polar layered deposits, the dynamic nature of dunes, and the surface effects of converging dust devils. The stereo images bring the scenes alive by providing an extra insight into elevation differences, which is essential for deciphering the history in which different layers and deposits were laid down.
Colour-composite images are processed to better highlight the contrast of surface features. Combined with data from other instruments, this allows scientists to trace out regions that have been influenced by water, for example. These images can also be used to help guide surface exploration missions and provide broader regional context for landers and rovers.
“The InSight landing site image is just one of many really high quality images that we have been receiving. The ones in the ESA Gallery represent some of the best from recently. The digital terrain models also look really nice”, said Nicolas Thomas.
“This stunning image showcase really demonstrates the scientific potential we have with TGO’s imaging system,” says Håkan Svedhem, ESA’s TGO project scientist. “Over the course of the mission we’ll be able to investigate dynamic surface processes, including those that might also help to constrain the atmospheric gas inventory TGO’s spectrometers are analysing, as well as characterise future landing sites.”
Support of the SERI / Swiss Space Office
CaSSIS is a project of the University of Bern and funded through the Swiss Space Office via the European Space Agency's PRODEX programme. The instrument hardware development was also supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), INAF/Astronomical Observatory of Padova, and the Space Research Center (CBK) in Warsaw.
It must be noted that, for all instruments developed in Switzerland and under the lead of the University of Bern, significant work and/or supplies have come from Swiss industry. The PRODEX programme under which scientific instruments or sub-systems are provided requires an industrial share of at least 50% of the overall project. This condition enables a knowledge- and technology transfer from and to industry and provides the Swiss workplace with a structural and competitive advantage -- this includes spill over effects to the non-space sector of the involved companies.
Swiss contributions to ESA programmes enable swiss scientists and industry to participate in selected missions.
Bernese space exploration: working together with the world's elite for 50 years
When viewed in terms of figures, Bernese space exploration reveals an impressive balance sheet: Instruments have flown into the upper atmosphere and ionosphere with rockets 25 times (1967-1993), into the stratosphere on balloon flights 9 times (1991-2008), 33 instruments have accompanied space probes on their missions, and a satellite has been built (CHEOPS, start of the 2nd half of 2019).
The successful work of the department of Space Research & Planetology (WP) from the Physics Institute of the University of Bern was consolidated by the founding of a university competence center: the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH). The Swiss National Fund also awarded the University of Bern the national research focus (NRF) PlanetS, which they manage together with the University of Geneva.
Its real name is the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter but it will forever be known as Ziggy after this joint project of the European Space Agency and Roscosmos sent to search for methane (a sign of life) on Mars instead peered through the stardust and spotted a giant blue spider, which is actually a row of smaller spiders, which makes it … you guessed it … Ziggy’s band! So where were the spiders before Ziggy arrived and what exactly are they?
“The Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) on board the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) was developed by an international team led by Prof. Nicolas Thomas of the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern. The TGO launched three years ago today, on 14 March 2016. It arrived at Mars on 19 October that year, and spent over a year demonstrating the aerobraking technique needed to reach its science orbit, starting its prime mission at the end of April 2018.”
The announcement was made in a press release from the University of Bern where the fabulous color camera on the TGO was developed. Demonstrating the difficulties and precision required to obtain high-quality 3D and 2D photographs and scientific scans of the Martian surface, the TGO needed over a year to brake its speed and adjust its orbit to just the right spot. In this case, that spot is over the Elysium Planitia region of Mars where NASA’s InSight lander touched down in November 2108 and is now busy hammering the surface of the planet — drilling holes, stirring up dust and attracting sandworms. This is the first time an ESA orbiter has located any Martian lander, so it was a big deal to its controllers, who are working with NASA to beam data from InSight back to Earth.
The panchromatic image showcased in parts on the press release (see them here) and the ESA announcement (see it here) was taken March 2, 2019, and covers an area of about 2.25 x 2.25 km (1.4 by 1.4 miles) and shows a dark spot burned by the lander’s retro rockets just before touchdown as well as its discarded heat shield and backshell. Also in the gallery are previous photos of unusual craters, polar layered deposits and dynamic dunes.
You promised spiders.
Yeah, yeah, yeah … so where were the spiders?
“This remarkable ‘Dust devil frenzy’ image was taken in the Terra Sabaea region of Mars, west of Augakuh Vallis. This mysterious pattern sits on the crest of a ridge and is thought to be the result of dust devil activity – essentially the convergence of hundreds or maybe even thousands of smaller Martian tornadoes.”
This image was taken in the Terra Sabaea region of Mars, west of Augakuh Vallis. This mysterious pattern sits on the crest of a ridge, and is thought to be the result of dust devil activity – essentially the convergence of hundreds or maybe even thousands of smaller martian tornadoes. This image is a colour-composite representation where features that are bluer compared to the average colour of Mars are shown in bright blue hues. In actual colour, the streaks would appear dark red.
This false-color image of what looks like blue spiders in the Terra Sabaea region were caused by dust devils, a common Martian weather activity. The “false color” technique was used to highlight the spiders, which in fact would be a harder-to-see dark red because they’re simply exposed areas of deeper Martian soil.
Like the Spiders from Mars, this band of spiders will eventually break up, but not because of the kids killing the man. Martian windblown dust devils created the swirls and new dust devils will blow them away. The good news is, this means there are plenty of other spiders on Mars to discover with CaSSIS and future high-res space cameras.
In 2010, the British artificial intelligence research firm DeepMind Technologies began developing AI networks capable of defeating humans at games such as chess, Pong, and Space Invaders. In 2014, DeepMind’s research was successful enough to catch the attention of Google parent company Alphabet, which purchased the AI laboratory for $500 million dollars. Shortly after the purchase, Google formed a mysterious artificial intelligence ethics board to oversee DeepMind’s research – a board which has yet to disclose the scope of its mission or the names of its members. A few years later, DeepMind expanded its ethics board and gave it an official title: DeepMind Ethics and Society. While the company has stated that the board’s aims are to explore the ethical and societal questions raised by the existence of its incredibly powerful AI, the board is still mostly shrouded in secrecy.
This month, though, The Economist published a report outlining the events surrounding the creation of the DeepMind Ethics and Society Board. It turns out that before Google agreed to purchase the AI laboratory, they first dictated that both sides draw up an agreement stating that Google will immediately take control of DeepMind’s AI if or when it ever achieves artificial general intelligence, or AGI – the holy grail of AI research. AGI is broadly defined as any artificial intelligence network which can successfully complete any intellectual task a human can, although given the massive amounts of processing power AI networks can harness, these systems will likely be more human than human.
Of course, as Sam Shead at Forbes points out, DeepMind might not take too kindly to any ethics board which attempts to control it and could even go rogue as so many science fiction stories have predicted. It’s not that far out of the realm of possibility; so far, DeepMind has already proven itself capable of defeating the best human players at some of the most sophisticated games in the world such as Go and even the strategy video game StarCraft 2. Last year, DeepMind even surprised its creators by successfully creating neural pathways that resemble human neural networks entirely on its own. How much longer until DeepMind achieves true general intelligence?
Some of the world’s foremost scientists and entrepreneurs have urged caution in AI research, warning that we may soon find ourselves under the boot of an immortal AI dictator. Will Google’s Ethics and Society Board be able to control DeepMind before it takes over the globe? Are all of these fears of AI baselessly grounded in science fiction and neo-Luddism, or are we indeed actively creating our future overlords?
The scariest part to me is the fact that no matter how many of the world’s greatest minds urge against the creation of AI, money-hungry corporations keep marching ceaselessly towards the machine takeover we all know is coming, all in the name of creating value for the shareholders. Who really wants the machines to make important decisions for us? Who’s reallypulling the strings at Google?
A recent study found a bigdust ring of previously undiscovered asteroids located in Mercury’s orbitthat’s similar to the dust halo near Venus. Marc Kuchner, who is the co-author of the Venus study and an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said, “It’s not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system. This is right in our neighborhood.”
While Earth and Venus have both collected co-orbiting dust rings due to their gravitational pulls, Mercury wasn’t believed to have been a part of that since it’s so small and close to the sun that capturing a dust ring seemed highly unlikely. The magnetic forces and solar wind from our sun was believed to have blown any dust away from Mercury’s orbit.
Mercury
However, after researchers studied pictures taken by one of NASA’s twin Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), they noticed a lot more dust around Mercury than they had expected. Russell Howard, who is a solar scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory and co-author of the study, explained, “All around the sun, regardless of the spacecraft’s position, we could see the same 5 percent increase in dust brightness, or density. That said something was there, and it’s something that extends all around the sun.” The dust ring is approximately 9.3 million miles wide according to calculations done by the team.
And that’s not the only news in relation to asteroids. As for Venus’ halo of dust, it is 6 million miles across and 16 million miles from top to bottom, but if all the dust was to be packed tightly together, it would only create an asteroid 2 miles across. Kuchner, and another NASA Goddard astrophysicist named Petr Pokorný, attempted to figure out where the dust in Venus’ orbiting ring originated from, and while they thought it could have came from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, their theory didn’t work.
They now believe that a population of undiscovered asteroids are what’s orbiting around the sun and Venus. “We thought we’d discovered this population of asteroids, but then had to prove it and show it works,” said Pokorný, “We got excited, but then you realize, ‘Oh, there’s so much work to do.’”
Venus
The two scientists created a model of 10,000 hypothetical Venus-orbit asteroids from the last 4.5 billion years of our solar system and 800 of those are still surviving, which means that it’s very possible that an asteroid population exists in Venus’ orbital path. And since the sun has such a blinding glare which makes it very hard to see anything near it, it’s quite possible that these previously undetected asteroids have been there all along.
“We should be able to find it,” Pokorný said in reference to the possibility of an asteroid population existing in Venus’ orbital path, and they hope that NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope will be able confirm it for them. You can read Pokorný and Kuchner’s study which was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by clicking here.
UFO appears above ancient Inca site of Machu Picchu, Peru
UFO appears above ancient Inca site of Machu Picchu, Peru
A tourist visiting Machu Picchu has accidentally taken an image of a UFO in the sky above the ancient ruins located in the Andes Mountains in Peru.
The photographer who has submitted the image to Mufon said: I was visiting Machu Picchu with around 20 people of the company I used to work for at that time.
We programmed the travel to Cuzco and Machu Picchu. Most of the people of the company was with their wife. I was with my wife also.
We were following the guide and all taking pictures to the same directions and locations during the visit. It went well and nobody detected anything weird until we arrived to the hotel that night.
When we went for dinner, a member of the team said "have you saw the UFO?". We all laughed and thought it was a joke. He showed us a photo that he took at 10.58 am in which we clearly sees an object flying over the ruins.
Machu Picchu is not only a popular tourist attraction in Peru but also known for its many UFO sightings that have been reported over the years.
Besides, the enormous structure raises questions about the ability of humans to build such a structure at the time, like the bottom level which has massive, gigantic megalithic blocks as big as railway wagons.
According to Ancient Astronaut expert Giorgio Tsoukalos aliens might be the only feasible explanation to build such a structure.
The fact that UFOs still appear above Machu Picchu could be a proof that this ancient site has more secrets than we know.
UFO Seen By Air Ambulance Helicopter Over Las Vegas, Nevada, Listen To Recording! March 2019, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Seen By Air Ambulance Helicopter Over Las Vegas, Nevada, Listen To Recording! March 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 16, 2019
Location of sighting: Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
At 9PM on Saturday (yesterday) an air ambulance helicopter called Mercy Air 21 was 15 miles west of Las Vegas when the pilot noticed an strange object ahead of him. He was wearing a night vision visor which allowed him to see the object in better detail. When he told the control tower, they respond saying they saw nothing on radar. Balloons do reflect radar waves and can be seen on radar if a cluster of them are together or they are silver reflective material, but this one sounds big, it should have been visible regardless of the material it was made from. That means it was not a giant balloon. Also, its a well known fact that there is an alien base of Tall Whites as some call them, behind the old firing range at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas. Yeah, the base is part of the city. I will put the video of the Nellis AFB aliens at the bottom of this post.
The pilot and control tower can be heard on the recording describing the large unlit round object at about 7,000 feet.
Helicopter pilot: "Just to advise. It looks like I have some sort of object over the southern hills area. It looks to be about 7,000 feet. It could be a balloon or something along those lines. Its just unlit so be advised.
Control Tower: "Ok. Uh, I'm not seeing anything in that area, but its not to say, like your saying theres something out there."
Helicopter pilot: "Yeah, I can only see it...I got the night vision goggle on. I can only see it through the goggles."
I found many alien structures on the moon today in a NASA Clementine map. This map was made back in 1994 and it was a time before editing software was available. The above photo shows a giant dome city in a crater. From a distance, it looks like just a another crater, but close up, its absolutely a dark shiny semi transparent material made to let only a fraction of the light inside. There is an alien species who like the darkness so much they genetically changed themselves to have sunglasses second eyelids cover their eyes at will. The greys. They clearly created this dome city. Of course other newer photos will not show this, because they it was edited out already. But here its obvious what we see.
I also found a black triangle structure with triangle walls...which is impossible for a meteor to have caused.
Then there was another structure or structures strewn out across a large crater (two photos down). The buildings are in a large L shaped pattern and stretch over 20 miles long. Yes there is two other smaller domes visible, one green and one black. But I just want to focus on the one large one at the top of this post.
I think if the greys have control of our moon, it should be easy to convince them to donate one of their dome structures to humanity if we offer something valuable to them.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
16-03-2019
Nieuwe stofring ontdekt in ons eigen zonnestelsel
Nieuwe stofring ontdekt in ons eigen zonnestelsel
Vivian Lammerse
De planeet Mercurius baant zich een weg door deze tot voor kort onbekende stofring.
Net zoals stof zich in hoekjes in huis en op boekenplanken ophoopt, verzamelt stof zich ook in het heelal. Maar wanneer dit in ons zonnestelsel gebeurt, hoopt het stof zich vaak op in ringen. Rond de zon cirkelen meerdere van dit soort stofringen, die de banen van planeten volgen. Onderzoekers zijn nu op een nieuwe stofring gestuit in het binnenste van ons zonnestelsel. Zo ontdekten ze een stofring die de baan van Mercurius volgt.
Meer over stofringen Het stof uit stofringen bestaat uit puin dat overbleef na de vorming van ons zonnestelsel zo’n 4,6 miljard jaar geleden. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan overblijfselen van botsingen en kometen. Het stof verspreidt zich door het hele zonnestelsel, maar verzamelt zich in stoffige ringen. Door dit stof te bestuderen – zoals waar het van gemaakt is, waar het vandaan komt en hoe het door de ruimte beweegt – proberen wetenschappers te gaan begrijpen hoe planeten geboren zijn en waar alles wat we in ons zonnestelsel zien, uit bestaat.
Mercurius De onderzoekers vonden de stofring per ongeluk; ze waren eigenlijk op zoek naar stofvrije gebieden rond de zon. Maar in plaats daarvan zagen ze ineens een toename van de dichtheid in de baan van Mercurius. Iets dat ze toch moeilijk konden negeren. Toen ze beter keken, zagen ze een fijne waas van kosmisch stof dat zich in de baan van Mercurius bevindt. Dit stof vormt een ring van ongeveer 15 miljoen kilometer breed. Mercurius – die zelf maar klein van stuk is – baant zich een weg door deze enorme stofring. Een bijzondere ontdekking. “Het is niet elke dag dat je iets nieuws ontdekt in het binnenste van het zonnestelsel,” zegt onderzoeker Marc Kuchner. “En dit bevindt zich gewoon bij ons in de buurt.”
Onopgemerkt Wetenschappers hebben nooit gedacht dat er een stofring in de baan van Mercurius zou bevinden. Dat is waarschijnlijk ook de reden dat de ring zo lang onopgemerkt is gebleven. “Men dacht dat Mercurius – in tegenstelling tot de Aarde of Venus – te klein, en te dicht bij de zon zou staan om een stofring te kunnen hebben,” zegt onderzoeker Guillermo Stenborg. “Zonnewind en magnetische krachten van de zon zou het overtollige stof wegblazen.” Maar dat blijkt toch anders te zitten.
Aarde en Venus Het is trouwens niet de eerste keer dat wetenschappers op stofringen in ons zonnestelsel stuiten. Vijfentwintig jaar geleden ontdekten wetenschappers dat ook onze Aarde zich een weg baant door een dikke stofring. Ook in de baan van Venus bevindt zich er een. Maar waar komt dit stof precies vandaan? Onderzoekers hebben vastgesteld dat de stofring die zich in de baan van de Aarde bevindt, grotendeels afkomstig is uit de planetoïdengordel; een regio in het zonnestelsel dat zich ruwweg tussen de planeten Mars en Jupiter bevindt. De rotsachtige planetoïden botsen voortdurend op elkaar, waardoor stof opwaait en wegdrijft. Lang dachten wetenschappers dat de stofring in de baan van Venus op dezelfde manier is ontstaan. Maar dat blijkt niet het geval te zijn. Zo constateren de onderzoekers nu dat het stof afkomstig is van nog nooit eerder gedetecteerde planetoïden die naast Venus in een baan rond de zon draaien (zie video hieronder).
Stofringen kunnen onderzoekers ook helpen om exoplaneten te vinden. Zo zijn stofringen veel gemakkelijker te herkennen dan een exoplaneet. Hierdoor kunnen de stofringen gebruikt worden om het bestaan van verborgen planeten – en zelfs hun orbitale eigenschappen – aan te tonen. Echter moeten we niet op de zaken vooruit lopen. “Om stofringen rond andere sterren te herkennen, moeten we eerst de fysica van het stof in ons eigen zonnestelsel begrijpen,” zegt Kuchner. “Door naburige stofringen zoals die van Mercurius, Venus en de Aarde te bestuderen, kunnen we technieken ontwikkelen om ze beter te gaan herkennen, zowel dichtbij als ver weg.”
Europese sonde spot voor het eerst een lander op Mars
Europese sonde spot voor het eerst een lander op Mars
Vivian Lammerse
En levert ook nog eens wat fraaie kiekjes af.
De ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (kortweg TGO) arriveerde in oktober 2016 bij Mars en nestelde zich – zoals gepland – in een ovaalvormige baan rond de rode planeet. En nu komt het team met een aantal mooi plaatjes op de proppen, die laten zien waar de Europese sonde toe in staat is. Het zijn prachtige foto’s van het bijzondere Marslandschap en er zit zelfs een kiekje van Marslander Insight tussen.
Insight De plaatjes zijn genomen met de Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) aan boord van de Europese Marsorbiter. Op één van de afbeeldingen is Marslander Insight te zien, die sinds eind november 2018 op de rode planeet vertoeft en druk bezig is met onderzoek. Het plaatje van Insight is best bijzonder: het is namelijk de eerste keer dat een Europees instrument een lander spot op Mars.
De foto van marsover Insight. ook de instrumenten die deze Marslander al op de rode planeet heeft gezet, zijn aangeduid.
Afbeelding: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS
Foto Op de foto hierboven is Insight te herkennen als een klein helder puntje middenin het donkere vlak (stof dat door de landing omhoog sprong). Het beeld bestrijkt een gebied van ongeveer 2,25 x 2,25 kilometer. Op het moment van de foto was Insight druk met een hamerboor in de weer, waarmee onderzoekers meer inzicht willen krijgen in hoeveel warmte er uit Mars zelf komt zetten.
Ondersteuning Van CaSSIS wordt verwacht dat het Insight zal ondersteunen door het gebied rondom de lander scherp in de gaten te houden. Als de seismometer van Insight een signaal opvangt, moet TGO ook aan de bak. Zo’n signaal kan namelijk wijzen op een meteorietinslag. TGO moet dan mee helpen zoeken naar de plek waar de meteoriet op Mars insloeg. Bovendien is TGO ook een goed communicatiemiddel. Zo zal de orbiter ook gebruikt worden om gegevens van Insight naar de aarde te sturen.
Meer mooie plaatjes Dat de Europese sonde ook wel raad weet met een camera, laten onderstaande afbeeldingen goed zien. Op de foto’s zijn de gelaagde afzettingen in de poolgebieden, de dynamische aard van de Marsduinen en andere prachtige oppervlaktekenmerken van Mars te zien. Op de foto’s zijn ook de verschillen in hoogte goed zichtbaar; iets dat heel belangrijk is om de geschiedenis van de verschillende lagen en afzettingen in kaart te brengen.
Deze afbeelding toont de rand van een gelaagde heuvel in de krater van Burrough op Mars. Het ligt ongeveer 200 km ten noordwesten van de zuidpool van de planeet.
Afbeelding: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS
Deze foto is genomen in de regio Terra Sabaea, ten westen van Augakuh Vallis. Het mysterieuze patroon wordt verondersteld het resultaat te zijn van een ‘stofduivel’ : een kleine wervelwind waarbij stof en zand in een spiralende luchtstroom wordt gebracht. Het zou hier kunnen gaan om wel honderden of misschien wel duizenden kleinere martiaanse tornado’s.
Afbeelding: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS
Deze foto beslaat een deel van de 100 km brede Columbus-krater in Terra Sirenum op het zuidelijk halfrond van Mars. Op de foto zijn sulfaatzouten die wit uitslaan op de rotsen.
Afbeelding: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS
Stofduinen over de rand van Green Crater in Noachis Terra.
Afbeelding: ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS
Een 480 kilometer brede vulkaan. Het is de op een na hoogste piek op de rode planeet, met een tophoogte van 18,1 km. De vulkaan bestaat uit enkele duizenden basaltachtige lavastromen.
‘De zomer is een dodelijk seizoen aan het worden voor leven op aarde’
‘De zomer is een dodelijk seizoen aan het worden voor leven op aarde’
Vivian Lammerse
Door klimaatverandering moeten we rekening gaan houden met extreme hittegolven.
Klimaatverandering wordt vaak besproken in termen van gemiddeldes. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan het Parijsakkoord, waarin landen hebben toegezegd er alles aan te doen om de opwarming van de aarde tot 2 graden Celsius te beperken. Maar klimaatverandering zal echter niet alleen de gemiddelde wereldwijde temperatuur verhogen; er komen ook extreme hittegolven op de loer te liggen. En dat terwijl hittegolven nu al schade toebrengen aan mens en dier.
HITTEGOLF VAN 2003
Herinner je je de hittegolf van 2003 nog? Destijds had Europa te kampen met uitzonderlijk heet en droog weer. De zomer van 2003 was een van de heetste Europese zomers ooit, die zelfs in sommige landen een gezondheidscrisis teweeg bracht. In totaal overleden er zo’n 70.000 mensen in Europa aan de gevolgen van de hittegolf. De hoogste officiële temperatuur tijdens de hittegolf in Nederland werd op 7 augustus in Arcen (Noord-Limburg) gemeten: 37,8 graden Celsius.
Extreem Om een uitgebreid beeld te krijgen van de effecten van toekomstige hittegolven, verzamelden de onderzoekers informatie uit meer dan 140 wetenschappelijke studies. En uit de bevindingen blijkt dat hittegolven extremer zullen worden en ook vaker voor zullen komen. Dit komt omdat kooldioxide en andere broeikasgassen in de atmosfeer warmte vasthouden, waardoor de gemiddelde temperatuur van de aarde stijgt. Het zou kunnen betekenen dat de hittegolf uit 2003 tegen het einde van deze eeuw vier keer zo lang zou kunnen duren. “Dit suggereert dat – in sommige jaren – de hele zomer warmer zal zijn dan wat we in 2003 ervoeren,” zegt onderzoeker Jonathon Stillman. “De zomer is een dodelijk seizoen aan het worden voor het leven op aarde.”
Effecten Hittegolven leiden op dit moment al tot massale sterfte bij dieren. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan verbleekt koraal in delen van het Great Barrier Reef, of de grote paardensterfte in Australische zomers. Volgens de onderzoekers hebben hittegolven ook subtiele effecten op het lichaam van dieren. Zo neemt de hoeveelheid gespecialiseerde eiwitten die andere moleculen beschermen tegen hitte toe. “Als dieren meer gevaarlijk hoge temperaturen gaan ervaren, kun je verschuivingen zien in hun fysiologie,” legt Stillman uit. “Ze zullen misschien niet gelijk het loodje leggen, maar in hun lichaam kun je zien dat ze wel dicht bij dit punt in de buurt komen.” Ook mensen lopen gevaar als het extreem heet wordt. Vooral ouderen vormen een risicogroep.
Infrastructuur Er zijn manieren om met de hittegolven om te gaan, maar dat is niet voor iedereen op aarde weggelegd. Dit komt omdat een gebrek aan infrastructuur het voor kwetsbare menselijke gemeenschappen bemoeilijkt om naar koelere klimaten te migreren, wat grootschalige conflicten kan veroorzaken. Ook versperren veel menselijke bebouwingen de weg voor dieren om naar koelere klimaten te trekken.
Wanneer de extreme hittegolven gaan gebeuren en hoe extreem deze precies zullen zijn, varieert in de modellen. “We kunnen niet zeggen dat het volgend jaar gaat gebeuren,” zegt Stillman. “Maar als we doorgaan met onze huidige emissies, zullen we tegen het einde van deze eeuw hittegolven ervaren die heftiger zullen zijn dan de hittegolven die we al hebben gezien.”
De interplanetaire missie is niet langer enkel het domein van grote, logge satellieten: de CubeSat wil ook mee.
Rond de millenniumwisseling wordt de allereerste nanosatelliet of CubeSat gelanceerd. Inmiddels zijn we bijna 20 jaar verder en hebben al meer dan 1000 van deze piepkleine satellieten het luchtruim gekozen. Het merendeel ervan bevindt zich in een baan rond de aarde. Maar ook voor interplanetaire missies lijken de kleine satellieten heel geschikt. Het is dan ook een kwestie van tijd voor deze satellieten – die vaak niet veel groter zijn dan een aktetas – het zonnestelsel gekoloniseerd hebben.
Afbeelding: Rasmus G. Sæderup AAUSAT Team (University of Aalborg, Denmark).
Wat is een CubeSat? Een CubeSat of nanosatelliet is een kleine satelliet die is opgebouwd uit één of meerdere eenheden die slechts 10 bij 10 bij 10 centimeter groot zijn. De kleine satellieten hebben verschillende voordelen ten opzichte van de grote satellieten die de mensheid al decennialang inzet om bijvoorbeeld de aarde en andere hemellichamen te monitoren. Het ontwikkelen van de kleinere satellieten kost minder tijd en is veel goedkoper. Maar wat nog veel belangrijker is, is dat de lanceerkosten heel laag liggen. Dat heeft twee redenen. Allereerst wegen de CubeSats heel weinig (en bij een lancering betaal je per kilo). Daarnaast is het vanwege de geringe omvang van de CubeSats heel goed mogelijk om deze tegelijkertijd met andere satellieten te lanceren. Zo heeft de Indiase ruimtevaartorganisatie het gepresteerd om meer dan 100 nanosatellieten tegelijkertijd te lanceren!
Hoe het begon In eerste instantie werden CubeSats voornamelijk geprezen om hun educatieve waarde. Doordat ze in vrij korte tijd ontwikkeld en goedkoop gelanceerd kunnen worden, bieden CubeSats studenten de kans om hun eigen satelliet te ontwikkelen, lanceren en daadwerkelijk in de ruimte te testen en zelfs data te laten verzamelen. Maar hoewel studenten wereldwijd nog altijd aan CubeSats knutselen, begint de nanosatelliet zijn studentikoze karakter langzaam van zich af te werpen. Ook ruimtevaartorganisaties en -bedrijven zien namelijk grote mogelijkheden voor de CubeSat. En niet alleen in een baan rond de aarde…
Naar Mars Vorig jaar toonde NASA al aan dat CubeSats ook ingezet kunnen worden tijdens interplanetaire missies. De ruimtevaartorganisatie lanceerde in mei 2018 niet alleen Marslander InSight, maar ook de allereerste twee interplanetaire CubeSats: MarCO-A en MarCO-B. Beide CubeSats maakten zich kort na de lancering los van InSight en vlogen vervolgens op eigen houtje naar de rode planeet, waar ze de landing van InSight monitorden. De missie van de twee CubeSats verliep geheel volgens het boekje: ze overleefden de lange reis, maakten onderweg foto’s en stuurden die naar de aarde, waren getuige van InSights landing en vlogen nog maandenlang verder alvorens zich in radiostilte te hullen.
Beelden gemaakt door één van de twee CubeSats die recent op Mars afstevenden.
Afbeelding: Afbeelding: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Naar een planetoïde Het succes van die missie smaakt naar meer. En inmiddels worden verschillende ruimtemissies ontwikkeld waarbij er plek is voor een extra, kleine verstekeling. Zo werkt ESA momenteel aan de Hera-missie die naast een ruimtesonde uit twee CubeSats zal bestaan. Het gezelschap moet in 2023 afreizen naar het Didymos-systeem: een 780 meter grote planetoïde waar een 160 meter grote maan omheen cirkelt. Beide CubeSats zullen worden uitgerust met verschillende instrumenten en uitgebreid onderzoek doen naar het Didymos-systeem en zelfs op één van de twee planetoïden landen.
Een artistieke impressie laat zien hoe Hera en twee CubeSats rond Didymos cirkelen. Afbeelding: ESA – ScienceOffice.org.
Europa En ook NASA speelt met het idee om CubeSats in te zetten tijdens een toekomstige interplanetaire missie. Zo zouden er in 2023 enkele mee kunnen liften met de Europa Clipper: een ruimtesonde die onderzoek gaat doen naar Jupiters maan Europa. De kleine satellieten zouden onder meer ingezet kunnen worden om dwars door Europa’s geisers te vliegen en meer inzicht te geven in de samenstelling van Europa’s ondergrondse oceaan.
Verlengstuk De CubeSat lijkt het dus steeds verder te schoppen. Maar blijft daarbij wel een verlengstuk van een veel grotere ruimtesonde. Dat is niet zo gek; de ruimte die zo’n CubeSat te bieden heeft, is maar beperkt. En als je eenmaal miljoenen kilometers hebt afgelegd om een bepaald hemellichaam te bereiken, wil je daar natuurlijk wel de beschikking hebben over een breed scala aan instrumenten. De CubeSat maakt de grote ruimtesondes en satellieten dus zeker (nog) niet overbodig. Of dat in de toekomst gaat veranderen? De tijd zal het leren.
Sprite: een satellietje dat slechts enkele centimeters groot is.
Mag het nog ietsje kleiner? Terwijl de CubeSat langzaam maar zeker zijn grenzen verlegt, sleutelen onderzoekers ook nog aan nóg kleinere satellietjes die het uiteindelijk mogelijk nog veel verder gaan schoppen dan de CubeSat: de Sprites. Deze satellietjes lijken meer op een chip en zijn ongeveer 3,5 bij 3,5 centimeter groot. Ze kunnen wel eens heel geschikt zijn voor interstellaire reizen. Doordat ze piepklein en licht zijn, kunnen ze aangedreven door bijvoorbeeld zonnezeilen enorme snelheden bereiken en afstanden afleggen. Onder meer het Breakthrough Starshot-project – dat een ruimtemissie naar het dichtstbijzijnde stersysteem Alpha Centauri op poten wil zetten – zou met zo’n piepkleine ruimtesonde geholpen kunnen zijn.
Ook voor satellieten geldt dus: klein, maar fijn. En terwijl CubeSats ons zonnestelsel verkennen, lijken nog kleinere satellieten zich aan de interstellaire ruimte te gaan wagen. Grote kans dus dat er straks enkele opzienbarende ontdekkingen op naam van deze satellieten komen te staan. Niet slecht voor zulke kleintjes!
Bronmateriaal:
ESA
NASA
Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: ESA - ScienceOffice.org
Aarde werd bijna 2700 jaar geleden getroffen door zeer zware zonnestorm
Aarde werd bijna 2700 jaar geleden getroffen door zeer zware zonnestorm
Caroline Kraaijvanger
“Als deze zonnestorm vandaag de dag zou plaatsvinden, zou deze ernstige gevolgen hebben voor onze high tech society.”
Aan het woord is Raimund Muscheler, werkzaam aan de Lund University en één van de wetenschappers die bewijs hebben gevonden voor een uitzonderlijk zware zonnestorm die de aarde rond 660 voor Christus moet hebben getroffen. De bevindingen van Muscheler en collega’s zijn terug te vinden in het blad Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Zonnestorm Onze planeet wordt continu bekogeld met kosmische deeltjes. Maar zo af en toe is die aanhoudende stroom van kosmische deeltjes extra krachtig. En wel wanneer er op het oppervlak van de zon beroering ontstaat en een zonnestorm wordt geboren. Zo’n zonnestorm is eigenlijk niets anders dan een enorme verzameling hoogenergetische deeltjes. Waartoe zo’n zonnestorm in staat is, hebben we in de afgelopen decennia kunnen zien. Zo leidde deze in 1989 tot stroomuitval in Quebec (Canada) en in 2003 tot stroomuitval in Malmö (Zweden). Door die waargenomen zonnestormen te bestuderen, hopen onderzoekers een beter beeld te krijgen van waartoe de zon in staat is. Maar een nieuw onderzoek suggereert nu dat zonnestormen nog veel heftiger kunnen zijn dan directe, recente waarnemingen doen vermoeden.
IJskern De onderzoekers trekken die conclusie nadat ze zich bogen over ijskernen afkomstig van Groenland die een periode van zo’n 100.000 jaar besloegen. In die ijskernen vonden ze bewijs voor een krachtige zonnestorm die rond 660 voor Christus zou hebben plaatsgevonden. Deze zonnestorm was veel krachtiger dan de zonnestormen die in 1989 en 2003 zijn waargenomen. En de zonnestorm uit 660 voor Christus staat niet op zichzelf; Muscheler heeft in ijskernen en groeiringen van bomen ook aanwijzingen gevonden voor zeer krachtige zonnestormen die in 775 en 994 hebben plaatsgevonden.
Het onderzoek laat twee dingen zien. Allereerst zijn superkrachtige zonnestormen vrij zeldzaam. Ten tweede horen ze echter wel bij onze zon en kunnen we er maar beter op voorbereid zijn dat de geschiedenis zich vroeg of laat herhaalt en een zeer krachtige zonnestorm acte de présence geeft. “Daarom moeten we de samenleving beter beschermen tegen zonnestormen,” aldus Muscheler. Wanneer men op dit moment de risico’s die een zonnestorm met zich meebrengt, in kaart brengt, wordt vaak gekeken naar recente zonnestormen. Maar het lijkt Muscheler verstandig als ook de drie super-zonnestormen die in het eerste millennium voor en eerste millennium na Christus plaatsvonden, worden meegenomen. “Ons onderzoek suggereert dat de risico’s momenteel onderschat worden. We moeten ons beter beschermen.”
The Beginning: UFOs Encounters over Washington D.C.
Welcome to Open Minds Magazine. In this new monthly UFO news magazine show (view above), we will take a closer look at the mystery posed by Unidentified Flying Objects, in hopes to gain a better understanding of the nature of the phenomenon and how the government, including the military, and the public react to it.
Perhaps the most thorough examination into the UFO issue was conducted by the U.S Air Force. They began their investigation in 1948. It was called Project Sign, then changed its name to Project Grudge, and finally changed its name once again to Project Blue Book.
As a result of these investigations and studies and experience gained from investigating UFO reports since 1948, the conclusions of Project BLUE BOOK are:(1) no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security;(2) there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as “unidentified” represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and(3) there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” are extraterrestrial vehicles.
However, upon closer examination of the thousands of files released regarding the Blue Book investigations, it becomes apparent that the Air Force’s conclusions were not shared by everyone involved in the investigation, and that there were some truly fascinating cases that remain unsolved.
Often people say they will not believe in UFOs until they land on the White House lawn. Well, one of the most famous and mysterious Blue Book cases came close.
UFO sightings over Washington, DC in July 1952 made worldwide headlines and left the U.S. Air Force dazed and confused. The events spanned several days and included multiple radar identifications of unknown aircraft, some of which were correlated by witnesses on the ground. Many of the sightings caused the air force to scramble jet fighters, and in each of these cases, the UFOs outmaneuvered the jets. This all culminated into what may be the most important official U.S. Air Force UFO investigation of all time.
The U.S. Air Force’s investigation of the events in Washington, DC is best explained in a book written by the lead air force investigator, Captain Edward Ruppelt. Ruppelt—who was the head of the U.S. Air Force’s official UFO investigation department, Project Blue Book, from its inception in early 1952 until late 1953—published The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects in 1956.
The summer of 1952 was a busy time for the Blue Book investigators; Ruppelt referred to this period as, “The Big Flap.” Some of the most credible reports were coming from the Washington, DC area.
On July 10, a National Airlines crew reported a UFO over nearby Quantico, Virginia. They described the object as, “too bright to be a lighted balloon and too slow to be a big meteor.”
Then, on July 13, another commercial airline crew reported a UFO sixty miles southwest of Washington, DC. The crew was flying at 11,000 feet when they spotted a light below them. The object came up to their level, and when they turned on their headlights, it shot up in a steep climb.
The next day, on July 14, yet another commercial airline crew reported a UFO. This time it was during a flight from New York to Miami. While flying in the area of Newport News, Virginia, approximately 130 miles south of Washington, DC, the crew reported seeing eight UFOs.
Two days later, on the night of July 16, at around 9:00 p.m., a “high-ranking” scientist from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Laboratory at Langley Air Force Base reported seeing a UFO with a friend. They were standing near the ocean when they saw two amber-colored lights off to their right. The lights were silently moving to the north. The scientist said they were “much too large to be aircraft lights.”
Ruppelt and his investigators had decided that this object would have been too big to be a plane given the description of the lights, and they could not find an answer as to what the scientists and his friend had seen. Ruppelt said it was a moot point, however, because the scientist “was a very famous aerodynamicist and of such professional stature that if he said the lights weren’t airplanes they weren’t.”
On July 20, Ruppelt was flying to Washington, DC on unrelated business. His plane landed at Washington National Airport in the morning, and he grabbed a paper to catch up on the latest news. There he found in big, bold, capitalized font, “INTERCEPTORS CHASE FLYING SAUCERS OVER WASHINGTON, D.C.”
Washington National Airport control tower.
(Credit: Jack Delano/Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)
Ruppelt immediately called his superior officer at the Pentagon, Major Dewey Fournet, who told Ruppelt there was an investigation happening at Bolling Air Force Base. Rupplet headed there and received a briefing from the intelligence officer. At the meeting, they learned that at 11:40 p.m. the previous night, seven objects were caught on radar at Washington National Airport. At first, the radar operators thought the objects were a formation of planes, but nothing like that was scheduled. The objects moved slowly at about 100 to 130 miles per hour, but then would streak across the scope in sudden bursts of speed. The targets had moved all over the area, including over prohibited areas, such as the airspace over the White House and the U.S. Capitol building. One of the objects was clocked at speeds of more than 7,000 miles per hour.
The targets appeared to have flown near commercial airliners, and soon thereafter reports of strange lights were being reported by pilots. The first sighting from a pilot was from a Capital Airlines flight leaving Washington National Airport. The control tower asked the pilots of that airplane to keep an eye out for strange lights. During the flight, the pilot yelled, “There’s one—off to the right— and there it goes.” The radar correlated that an object had been tracked on the plane’s right side. The pilot reported seeing six more lights in the next fifteen minutes.
Several similar incidents took place that night. However, one of the more notable incidents was when the Washington National Airport traffic controller called the Andrews Air Force Base tower to tell them they were tracking an object south of the base. The tower operators looked out of their windows to see what they described as a “huge fiery-orange sphere” hovering in the sky.
F-94 Starfire. One of the types of jets scrambled to intercept the unknown objects.
(Credit: United States Air Force)
At the beginning of the excitement, once the Washington National Airport radar operators had determined their equipment was working properly, they began calling the air force to ask them to investigate. However, they didn’t receive a response. They called over and over, but the air force didn’t respond until daybreak the next morning. One interceptor checked out the area, but by then the UFOs were gone.
The events and the subsequent press coverage sent the U.S. Air Force into a state of pure confusion, complicated by bureaucratic bumbling. It was decided that Ruppelt would stay in Washington, DC to further investigate and formulate a response for the press, who was growing steadily impatient with the air force’s official “no comment” response. However, the USAF finance department would not improve the extension to his stay and sent him home.
Back in his office in Dayton, Ohio, Rupplet says he was too swamped with other UFO sightings to investigate the Washington DC incident. Several of these sightings also included jets being scrambled to check out the UFOs.
Then, exactly one week after the first major Washington, DC event, at about 10:00 p.m., Ruppelt received a call from Life Magazine’s UFO expert asking what the air force was going to do about that night’s UFOs. Ruppelt said, “I have no idea what the Air Force is doing; in all probability it’s doing nothing.”
He had heard anything about a new UFO event and guessed no one else in the air force had either. He called air force intelligence and the Pentagon, and he found out he was right. Several people from the Pentagon hurried out to Washington National Airport including the air force’s press chief Al Chop, Major Fournet, and a U.S. Navy electronics specialist assigned to the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence. All of them had a front row seat to the evening’s spectacular performance.
From left: Fournet, Chop, and Ruppelt.
Ruppelt had to wait until 5:00 a.m. the next morning to hear what had taken place. He was told at about 10:30 p.m. that Washington National Airport had once again picked up the slow-moving targets. The objects were in an arc surrounding the Washington, DC area. The objects spanned from Herndon, Virginia to Andrews Air Force Base. The same radar operators were present from the prior event, so they were prepared and worked quickly to mark and track the UFOs. They contacted Andrews Air Force Base who confirmed they were also tracking the objects.
At 11:30 p.m., it was decided to call in interceptors to check out the objects. Again they were slow to respond, but two Lockheed F-94 Starfires were in the air by midnight. At this point, reporters and photographers were asked to leave the radar room.
Ruppelt says the radar room was cleared because some of the air force officers thought this might be the night they got a good up-close look at a UFO.
Visibility that night was good. However, when the jets approached the targets, the objects disappeared from the radar screens. The jets returned to their base; however, a few minutes later, strange lights were seen near Langley Air Force Base. The lights were described as “rotating and giving off alternating colors.” The radar tower operators also saw the lights, so they called in an F-94 jet to check it out.
The jet pilot spotted the UFO’s lights and began moving towards it when the light disappeared. The pilot continued to fly around the area, and achieved a radar lock on an object, but whatever it was sped away. The same thing happened two more times.
Soon after the events near Langley Air Force Base, objects were again observed above Washington National Airport. Jets were scrambled again, but this time the objects stayed on radar as the jets approached. The tower controllers gave the jets the coordinates of the objects, but each time a jet closed in the objects would speed away.
This interaction continued for a few minutes until one object did not speed off. The F-94 pilot saw a bright light and hit his afterburners to try to pursue the object. However, as he got closer, the light just disappeared, and he could not get anything on his radar set.
The jets stayed in the area for twenty minutes, but finally ran low on fuel and had to return to the base. Dawn began to break, and soon the targets all disappeared.
The next day the press reported that fighter pilot, Lieutenant William Patterson, said,
I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet, but [the radar controllers] vectored us around. I saw several bright lights. I was at my maximum speed, but even then I had no closing speed. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them. I was vectored into new objects. Later, I chased a single bright light which I estimated about 10 miles away. I lost visual contact with it about 2 miles.
Ruppelt was informed that “everybody in the radar room was convinced that the targets were very probably caused by solid metallic objects. There had been weather targets on the scope too, he said, but these were common to the Washington area and the controllers were paying no attention to them.”
The papers were once again packed with headlines about the UFO chase. Ruppelt flew to Washington, and when he got to his hotel he was mobbed by reporters and photographers. With the help of a colleague he pushed his way to an elevator without making any comments.
According to Ruppelt, the U.S. Air Force was in a state of confusion. They all agreed that the UFO event should be investigated, but no one actually did anything about it. Unable to dodge the public’s fascination with the Washington events, on July 29, Major General Samford notified the press that he would have a press conference on the Washington UFO incidents. Ruppelt felt it a bit odd that none of the men in the radar room at Washington National Airport were involved in the press conference. Instead, the press conference was held by Major General Samford and another officer, neither of whom had been fully briefed.
Samford told the press that the UFO investigations had turned out to be mostly misidentifications, but that the other twenty percent of the reports that came in were from “credible observers of relatively incredible things.”
Edward Ruppelt (standing center) at July 29, 1952 Pentagon UFO press conference. Also pictured, Major Generals Roger Ramey (seated left), USAF operations chief, and John A. Samford (seated right), USAF director of intelligence.
(image credit: Wikipedia)
He said the air force would continue to investigate those reports, but they suspect that the Washington, DC events may have been false radar readings due to temperature inversions.
According to Ruppelt, the actually investigation ruled out temperature inversions. In fact, he discovered that every single night of the UFO sightings in Washington, DC, there was indeed a temperature inversion but none of these had previously been mistaken for UFOs.
Ruppelt also discovered that UFOs were a common occurrence in Washington, DC that summer. On May 23, from 8:00 p.m. until midnight, fifty unknown targets had been tracked on radar. There were several similar incidents throughout the summer, including the night of the press conference. As a result, to Ruppelt the objects could only be designated as “unknowns.”
Alleged pictures and videos of this event can be found on the internet. However, they are all either reflections or recreations of the events. No pictures or video was actually captured. However, the cases remain unsolved.
Image often mistaken for 1952 UFO encounter. The lights in the sky are actually reflections from the lights on the posts.
Ruppelt says this case convinced many that that UFOs were interplanetary spaceships.
If the objects over Washington DC in 1952 could not be explained, it seems obvious that an incursion of this sort would pose a threat to national security.
In the government’s UFO files there is a memo that claims the cases that posed a real threat were not included in the Blue Book files, and researchers have been tracking where those cases went.
They have discovered that the U.S. Air Force has taken UFO incidents seriously after the closing of Blue Book in 1969. And the cases that made it to this high-level reporting system are even more fascinating and alarming than the events in 1952.
We’ll take a look at this reporting system and the cases that have been discovered to have prompted its use in the next episode of Open Minds UFO Magazine.
Public interest in the possibility of unusual objects flying around in American airspace may be experiencing a resurgence thanks to the revelation that the Pentagon had been secretly funding investigations into the phenomena as recently as 2012, but the American military has already had a long and storied history of playing cat and mouse with mysterious lights in the sky (and elsewhere).
From sightings of “Foo Fighters” over the European theater in World War II to reports of Air National Guard P-51 Mustangs chasing lights through the skies of North Dakota in 1948, it’s clear that the United States military has had an interest in unexplained sightings reported by trained aviators dating back decades, and some would contend that this interest is justified. All professional pilots develop a keen understanding of norms in the sky, but military aviators—perhaps better than any—have been trained to look for and identify potential threats on the horizon. They know better than most what is and isn’t actually there, despite the sky’s propensity for weather-system-based tomfoolery.
It’s because of that trust in the judgment of military aviators that many of the most intriguing and long-lasting UFO-related mysteries tend to revolve around such reports. The eyewitness account of now-retired Navy Commander David Fravor regarding a series of attempted intercepts over the USS Nimitz carrier battle group in 2004, for instance, has served as an interesting—and troubling—addition to FLIR footage captured from the nose of his F/A-18 Super Hornet as he and another fighter attempted to intercept the unusual object that seemed to toy with them in the airspace around their carrier. The combination of video evidence, official Navy reports, and the clear and sober recollection of a fighter pilot have made the Nimitz incident perhaps the most prominent UFO sighting in modern history…but then, there have been some spectacular sightings in the past that seem to fall away from the American consciousness over time. That includes some that have involved scrambled fighters, official reports, and credible eyewitness accounts.
Back in July of 1952, while (it’s important to note) America was gripped by both the pop-culture phenomenon of “flying saucers” and a growing concern for Soviet aggression, a series of unusual blips appeared on the radar screens of Washington National Airport in the nation’s capital. These seven radar signatures were first spotted by controller Ed Nugent, who quickly got the attention of his supervisor, Harry G. Barnes.
“Here’s a fleet of flying saucers for you,” Nugent recalls kidding with his boss. Soon after spotting the strange readings on their radar screens, however, the humor in Nugent’s joke began to wain.
“Look at that bright light,” another flight controller, Joe Zacko, recalled interjecting in a 2002 interview. “If you believe in flying saucers, that could sure be one.”
Radar at two nearby military installations, Andrews Air Force Base and Bolling Air Force Base, both tracked the same objects. Soon, two Air Force F-94 fighter jets were scrambled to intercept these aircraft flying over the nation’s capital.
Lockheed F-94C Starfire at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. (U.S. Air Force photo)
“They acted like a bunch of small kids out playing,” Barnes, the head controller, wrote in a piece for a New York newspaper days after the incident. “It was helter-skelter, as if directed by some innate curiosity. At times, they moved as a group or cluster, at other times as individuals.”
The lights and radar returns promptly vanished. Unusual as it was, some may have been happy to forget about the incident and move on…but then it happened again the following weekend.
This time, it was a dozen blips on the radar screen and F-94s were promptly scrambled to intercept. As the fighters closed with the radar readings, a number of their pilots reported seeing lights in the sky that coincided with the technical data.
“I tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet,” pilot William Patterson later told investigators. “I was at my maximum speed but…I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them.”
Not all the pilots dispatched that night saw similar lights, however. One B-52 pilot passing through the airspace looked in the vicinity of one of the radar returns but saw only a small passenger boat bobbing along in the Potomac River—certainly nothing that could provide a return on radar screens from three separate airstrips.
These two incidents now had the nation, and its president, concerned. Headlines across the country brought the sightings to the nation’s attention. Stories out of Washington included “Radar Spots Air Mystery Objects Here” in the Washington Post and “Air Force ‘Saucer’ Expert Will Probe Sightings Here” in the Washington Daily News. The Cedar Rapids Gazette ran the headline, “SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL.”
“We have no evidence they are flying saucers,” an unnamed Air Force official reportedly told reporters. “Conversely, we have no evidence they are not flying saucers. We don’t know what they are.”
President Truman dispatched his Air Force aide, Brig. Gen. Robert B. Landry, to find out what these unusual objects were that kept flying over his house. Landry returned touting what would become the official Air Force line: The sightings were the result of a weather-related mirage.
The radar returns and the lights witnessed by pilots were formally attributed to a naturally occurring phenomenon known as temperature inversions.
“It’s very much like when you’re riding down the highway and it’s very hot out and you see a mirage on the highway,” explained Bruce Press of National Capital Area Skeptics, a group dedicated to debunking reports of the paranormal. “As you drive toward it, it doesn’t get any closer, so you assume that because it doesn’t get any closer, it’s moving away from you at the same speed you’re driving.”
Some aren’t as eager to dismiss the 1952 sightings, however, arguing that fighter pilots are trained observers that wouldn’t be so easily fooled by a weather system. Others, like Robert Swiatek of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) contend that the radar operators believed “the anomalous signals were good, solid targets, as though they were being reflected from the surface of metallic aircraft.”
Bruce Maccabee, a civilian physicist who worked for the U.S. Navy, counters those claims with another government report produced in 1969 called the “Quantitative Aspects of Mirages.”
“They proved in their own study that there wasn’t enough temperature inversion to cause this effect,” he says. “The Washington sightings cannot be explained as a radar mirage.”
Ultimately, for believers, the most frustrating thing about this pair of sightings over the nation’s capital in the summer of 1952 has been how quickly the American public forgot all about it. Some UFO sightings, like the infamous Roswell incident of 1947 or the “Phoenix Lights” of 1997, manage to worm their way into the American cultural identity, regularly resurfacing in discussion or debate. Somehow, though, the Washington incident of 1952 just never developed that level of notoriety.
Among believer and skeptic circles, however, the debate regarding this incident rages on as it does for every supposed sighting.
“You have dueling experts and dueling reports,” said Kevin D. Randle, who wrote the book “Invasion Washington: UFOs Over the Capitol.” “One expert says it was temperature inversion. Another says it wasn’t. In that situation, you have to refer back to the air traffic controllers and the pilots who actually saw the objects.”
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A startup with alumni from MIT and Yale says it's made a breakthrough in creating a next-generation material that should make it possible to 3-d print literally anything out of thin air.
New York-based Mattershift has managed to create large-scale carbon nanotube (CNT) membranes that are able to combine and separate individual molecules.
"This technology gives us a level of control over the material world that we've never had before," said Mattershift Founder and CEO Dr. Rob McGinnis in a release. "For example, right now we're working to remove CO2 from the air and turn it into fuels. This has already been done using conventional technology, but it's been too expensive to be practical. Using our tech, I think we'll be able to produce carbon-zero gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels that are cheaper than fossil fuels."
CNTs have been identified as holding promise for a number of potential applications, from better golf clubs, fuels and medicines to far-out concepts like space elevators. A study published this week in the journal Science Advances confirms that Mattershift's large CNT membranes perform as well as the small prototypes we've seen so far.
The company says their breakthrough brings down the difficulty and cost of manufacturing the material, which should allow the technology to burst out of the confines of university labs.
"It should be possible to combine different types of our CNT membranes in a machine that does what molecular factories have long been predicted to do: to make anything we need from basic molecular building blocks," said McGinnis. "We're talking about printing matter from the air. Imagine having one of these devices with you on Mars. You could print food, fuels, building materials, and medicines from the atmosphere and soil or recycled parts without having to transport them from Earth."
A molecular factory is a long-predicted technology that, in theory, should be able to accomplish some of what the Replicator from "Star Trek" does, although not nearly as cleanly as on the show. Mattershift's approach is more about separating and combining molecules to form new raw materials, which is why working on creating fuels is a logical place to start.
But as McGinnis points out, if it works well there's no reason that more complex molecular factories can't be combined to become the future of manufacturing, and yes, maybe eventually serve up a drink out of thin air at some point by simply asking a future version of Alexa for "tea, earl grey, hot."
To jack in to my brain and get more on the latest in science, tech and innovation, follow me on Twitter @ericcmack
We don't understand the concept of time much at all.
Everyone experiences time — literally every day — but rigorous and comprehensive understanding of the topic is … lacking. Then again, we do know some things, especially when we look at time through the lens of specialandgeneral relativity. Einstein's work taught us many things: that space and time are connected, that you can never travel faster than light, that our universe has a finite age and that different observers experience different lengths of time.
All these revelations lead to some interesting questions. It's time (pun intended) for a roundup.
Our universe is 13.77 billion years old, according to our current best estimates, which are very good, thank you very much. But when special relativity is invoked, we also understand that everyone measures time differently, depending on their speed. We, on Earth, whizzing around the sun, with the sun spinning around the Milky Way, and the Milky Way blasting through the intergalactic vacuum, should have a different perspective on the flow of time than someone else on a different planet around a different sun in a different galaxy. That said, how can we possibly pin down a "real" age of the universe?
Here's the trick. Yes, according to special relativity, different observers have different measures of time. But our whole entire universe is not fully described by special relativity. The tools that we use to understand matters cosmological are provided by its bigger brother, general relativity. And when we look at the history of the universe from general relativity's viewpoint, we find that the cosmos … well, has a history.
Our universe expands with time. It was smaller in the past, and it will be bigger in the future. There's a direct connection between a particular moment in time and a particular size of the universe. This allows us to construct what amounts to a universal clock, a timepiece that has been ticking away for over 13 billion years.
Yes, the motion of Earth through the universe changes that clock slightly, but with the tools of general relativity, we can essentially subtract that out and work out the "real" age of the universe … and so can any other observer in the cosmos (assuming that they've also cracked general relativity, but that's on them)
Does light experience time?
Moving clocks run slow. The faster you move in space, the slower you move in time. This is one of the most amazing results from Einstein's special relativity theory, and it's one way of visualizing the unique relationship between time and space. This "time dilation" effect is totally unnoticeable at speeds you'll typically encounter (hopefully) in everyday life. It's only once you get up close to the speed of light that time seems to go a little wonky.
So, if time slows down for you the faster you get to the speed of light, what about light itself? It's moving at the maximum posted speed limit of the universe. Does light … not experience time at all?
Kind of, but also not quite. Our knowledge of the relationship between time and space rests in what's wrapped up in special relativity. And while the theory produces all sorts of crazy results, it's grounded in some very simple ideas, the most important of which is the concept of the universality of physical laws: What goes for one observer, at a fundamental level, goes for all.
And one thing we know in physics, via Maxwell's equations, is that the speed of light is constant. Every observer, no matter their speed, will measure the exact same speed for light.
So, if we want to apply our knowledge of special relativity to movement at the speed of light, we run into a little sticking point. In order to ask the question, "How does light experience time?" you have to put yourself in a frame of reference that rides along with a beam of light. But in that frame of reference, light would appear to be stationary to you.
That's not allowed by our laws of physics. So there is no such frame of reference that rides along with light. And with no frame of reference, special relativity breaks down. And with no special relativity, you have no way of gauging the relationship between space and time.
The end result of all this twisting? It's not so much that light doesn't experience time. It's that our very concept of time doesn't even apply to light.
Light doesn't even know what time is.
Which twin is right?
One twin jets off close to the speed of light. The other stays at home. The faster of the pair blasts around the galaxy, having a ball, before returning to the boring ball of Earth. The other … does laundry.
According to the rocket twin, maybe a few weeks or months elapsed on ship time. A long trip, for sure, but nothing serious. But the ground-bound twin suffered years, even decades, of agonizing solitude.
This part's not surprising. Moving clocks run slow and all that. According to the twin left on Earth, the rocket twin moved close to the speed of light — and thus had a slower clock.
But wait. The twin on the rocket could rightly claim that they were the stationary one, and the whole universe, including the Earth twin, were the ones to move. Relativity is relativity, after all. Nobody's perspective is especially special. So according to that twin, the one on Earth should've barely aged at all.
Who wins the age argument?
The lonely, unadventurous, Earth-bound twin does, and they do because theydidn't turn around. As long as the rocket-loving twin stayed moving in a single direction, their perspectives were exactly symmetric, with each having their own unique perspective that they could rightly call correct. But once that rocket slowed, stopped and reversed, the symmetry broke. Their perspectives were no longer mirrors. The twin on the rocket would see the horrible reality catch up to him in a blink: The Earthbound twin had aged, too much, and there was nothing they could do about it.
Learn more by listening to the episode "What happens when galaxies collide?"on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to Kandi M., Mihail E., Men B., Carlos D., Alan P., Derrick M., Rose J., Kirk B., Rueben F., Chris F., Diego S., and R. S.for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.
Future spaceships could use black holes as powerful launch pads to explore the stars.
A new study envisions firing laser beams that would curve around a black hole and come back with added energy to help propel a spacecraft to near the speed of light. Astronomers could look for signs that alien civilizations are using such a "halo drive," as the study dubs it, by seeing if pairs of black holes are merging more often than expected.
Study author David Kipping, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, came up with the idea of the halo drive through what he calls "the gamer's mindset."
"Sometimes, in a computer game you find an 'exploit,' a hack which allows you to do something overpowered that would otherwise be forbidden by the rules of the game," Kipping told Space.com. "In this case, the game is the physical world, and I tried to think about exploits that would allow a civilization to achieve relativistic flight back and forth across the galaxy without the vast energy expense that one might naively assume."
A key challenge to using rockets to fly through space is that the propellant they carry with them has mass. Long trips need a lot of propellant, which makes the rockets heavy, which in turn requires more propellant, making the rockets even heavier, and so on. That problem gets exponentially worse the bigger the rocket gets.
Instead of carrying propellant for propulsion, however, spacecraft equipped with mirror-like sails could rely on lasers to push them outward. The $100 million Breakthrough Starshot initiative, announced in 2016, plans to use powerful lasers to propel swarms of spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own, at up to 20 percent the speed of light.
The spacecraft that Breakthrough Starshot aims to launch are each only about the size of a microchip. In order to accelerate larger spaceships to relativistic speeds — to a significant fraction of light speed — Kipping sought the aid of gravity.
Spacecraft now regularly use "slingshot maneuvers," in which the gravity of a body, such as a planet or moon, hurls the vessels across space and boosts their speed. In 1963, famed physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that spaceships of any given size could rely on slingshot maneuvers around compact pairs of white dwarfs or neutron stars to fly at relativistic speeds. (Dyson came up with the notion of what became known as a Dyson sphere, a megastructure that encapsulates a star to capture as much of its energy as possible to power an advanced civilization.)
However, a "Dyson slingshot" runs the risk of damaging a spacecraft through extreme gravitational forces and hazardous radiation from those pairs of dead stars. Instead, Kipping suggests that gravity might assist spaceships by increasing the energy of laser beams fired at the edges of black holes.
Black holes possess gravitational fields so powerful that nothing can escape them once it gets close enough, not even light. Their gravitational fields can also distort the paths of photons of light that do not fall into the holes.
In 1993, physicist Mark Stuckey suggested that a black hole could, in principle, act like a "gravitational mirror," in that the black hole's gravity could slingshot a photon around so that it flew back at its source. Kipping calculated that if a black hole was moving toward a photon's source, the "boomerang photon" would siphon away some of the black hole's energy.
Using what he called a "halo drive" — named for the ring of light it would create around a black hole — Kipping found that even spaceships with the mass of Jupiter could achieve relativistic speeds. "A civilization could exploit black holes as galactic waypoints," he wrote in a study accepted by the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and detailed online Feb. 28 in the arXiv preprint server.
The faster a black hole moves, the more energy a halo drive could draw from it. As such, Kipping largely focused on using pairs of black holes spiraling toward each other before a merger.
Astronomers could look for signs that alien civilizations are exploiting pairs of black holes for travel with such an engine. For example, halo drives would effectively steal energy from such binary black hole systems, increasing the rates at which pairs of black holes merge above what one would expect to see naturally, Kipping said.
His findings were based on boosts from pairs of black holes orbiting each other at relativistic speeds. Although there are an estimated 10 million pairs of black holes in the Milky Way, Kipping noted that few of those likely orbited at relativistic speeds for long, since they would merge rather quickly.
Still, he noted that isolated, spinning black holes could also launch halo drives at relativistic speeds, "and we already know of numerous examples of relativistic, spinning supermassive black holes."
The major drawback of a halo drive would be that "one has to travel to the nearest black hole," Kipping said. "It's akin to paying a one-time toll fee to ride the highway system. You have to pay some energy to reach the nearest access point, but after that, you can ride for free as a long as you like."
The halo drive works only in close proximity to a black hole, at a distance of about five to 50 times the black hole's diameter. "This is why you have to travel to the nearest black hole first and [why you] can't simply do this across light-years of space," Kipping said. "We still first require a means to travel to nearby stars to ride the highway system.
"If we want to achieve relativistic flight, it takes immense energy levels no matter what propulsion system you use," he added. "One way to get around this is to use astronomical objects as your power source, since they possess literally astronomical levels of energy within them. In this case, the black-hole binary is essentially a giant battery waiting for us to tap it. The idea is to work with nature and not against it."
Kipping is now investigating ways to exploit other astronomical systems for relativistic flight. Such techniques "may not be quite as efficient or fast as the halo-drive approach, but these systems possess the deep energy reserves needed for these journeys," Kipping said.
The stellar spinner is a magnetar, which is a type of neutron star — a Manhattan-size remnant of a larger star, and the densest type of object besides black holes that we've detected anywhere in the universe.
This particular magnetar is called XTE J1810–197. It's one of only 23 magnetars and one of just four radio magnetars ever discovered, and it first turned up in 2004. Then, in late 2008, it went dormant and no longer emitted radio waves. On Dec. 8, 2018, it woke up again, and it's a bit changed. The researchers who spotted its awakening reported their finding in a paper uploaded March 6 to the preprint server arXiv.
Astronomers have long believed such magnetars carry magnetic fields more than a million times more intense than typical neutron stars and more than a quadrillion times more powerful than Earth's own. Those magnetic fields seem to be the source of intense flashes of electromagnetic energy we can detect from Earth as the magnetar spins. [7 Surprising Things About the Universe]
(Other neutron stars also emit regular flashes of energy, which gives them their second name, pulsars.)
Even so, scientists don't know why XTE J1810–197's radio emissions went to sleep or why they woke up; magnetars are among the rarest and least-well-understood objects in humanity's stellar catalog. But in the two months since its reappearance, it's behaved significantly differently than it did between 2004 and 2008.
When XTE J1810–197 last flashed across human telescopes, it acted erratically, wildly shifting its pulse profile over relatively short time periods. Now, its behavior is more stable, the astronomers reported. At the same time, the torque spinning the star has seemed to increase significantly — a trait the researchers said is common to pulsars after their dormant periods.
One remarkable aspect of XTE J1810–197's reappearance is that astronomers might have missed it. From the perspective of Earth, the magnetar is in the same part of the sky as the sun is right now. So the soft pulses announcing its reawakening were too soft to trip any general-purpose detectors watching the sky at that time. Against the sun's bright electromagnetic blast, XTE J1810–197 was barely a blip.
But a team of astronomers led by Lina Levin of the University of Manchester in the U.K. had tasked a radio telescope with periodically observing the pulsar ever since it went silent. And, more than a decade later, that close scrutiny has paid off. Levin and her team noticed what others had missed.
The researchers also reported oscillations in the radio signal that might be the result of waves rushing across the surface of the distant magnetar.
Historyhas given the greenlight toUnidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, a six-part docuseries that the network says will expose new evidence about the U.S. government’s secret program investigating the UFO phenomenon. The series will premiere sometime in May.
Unidentified, from A&E Originals, will be executive produced by Tom DeLonge, co-founder and president of To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, who along with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Intelligence Chris Mellon and their team will provide new information about UFO encounters and embark on new investigations.
It will include the first interview with former military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who in 2017 in a New York Times report confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a hidden Pentagon government unit that he directed. He eventually resigned after expressing to the government that the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena the program investigated could pose a major threat to national security.
“With this show, the real conversation can finally begin,” said Delonge of the series, which will reveal newly authenticated evidence and footage, as well as interviews from eyewitnesses and former military personnel. “I’m thankful to History for giving the To The Stars Academy team of world-class scientists, engineers and intelligence experts the opportunity to tell the story in a comprehensive and compelling way. I think everyone that watches the show will walk away with questions answered and a feeling of, ‘Wow, I get it now.’ “
Steve Ascher, Kristy Sabat and Anthony Lappé are executive producers for A+E Originals. Mike Stiller serves as executive producer for History.
DeLonge is repped by APA, Management 360 and Jackoway Austen.
BILL CLINTON AND UFOS: DID HE EVER FIND OUT IF THE TRUTH WAS OUT THERE?
BILL CLINTON AND UFOS: DID HE EVER FIND OUT IF THE TRUTH WAS OUT THERE?
In 1999, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would have required across-the-board cuts to most federal agencies and departments, including the Department of Education, which President Clinton learned about as he was about to meet with a delegation of educators. The budget cuts also meant that teachers would probably not be getting any raises, something that irked Clinton to the point where, in an impromptu and unscripted remark, he said, channeling Ronald Reagan’s famous statement, “If we were being attacked by space aliens, we wouldn’t be playing these kinds of games.” Funny how when Ronald Reagan said the same thing to the United Nations, folks commented that Reagan sure knew how to illustrate a point. When Clinton made his statement, Rush Limbaugh thundered into his microphone, “What’s he going to do, arrange one?”
Just three years earlier, while on a trip to Ireland where he was visiting a very troubled Belfast, Clinton read a letter he received from a child named Ryan, who had asked him about what he knew regarding stories of a UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico. Clinton hadn’t come to talk about UFOs. He was trying to make a point regarding how children can be victimized by political violence. In front of his Belfast audience, Clinton said to Ryan, “No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.” But then he added, to the delight of his audience, “and Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it, either, and I want to know.”
Clinton did want to know, Webster Hubbell, Clinton’s associate attorney general, wrote in his own memoir. As AAG, Hubbell claimed that President Clinton asked him to find out all that he could about two things: who killed JFK and what the government knew about UFOs. He reported to the president after being stonewalled by the relevant agencies that there was a secret government that closely holds secrets to which the president doesn’t even have access.
Bill Clinton talks about UFOs and Area 51 again
Even though it is Jimmy Carter who famously had a UFO sighting, Bill Clinton seems to be the one who talks the most about them, and he is open to the idea of extraterrestrial visitation. He has a long history of association with the UFO subject and Area 51 that spans back throughout his presidency.
UFO buffs, and reporters, where poised at their televisions last night, ready to find out if Jimmy Kimmel would keep his promise when the other night he said he would ask Clinton about UFOs when he came on the show. Kimmel kept his promise, and in typical Kimmel fashion, in a light hearted and funny way. However, he did get some interesting and heartfelt comments from the former president.
Kimmel brought up the subject by saying that if he were president he would immediately go find out about UFOs. He said, “I probably wouldn’t even finish the oath. I would run to the White House. I’d demand to see all of the classified files on the UFOs because I want to know. I want to know what has been going on. Did you do that?”
Clinton replied, “Sort of.”
Clinton said he began looking into it at the beginning of his second term, during the 50thanniversary of the alleged Roswell UFO crash. Kimmel was surprised he waited so long. Clinton also said he looked into Area 51.
Clinton says there was a sci-fi movie that about an alien being held in Area 51. So he says he first had people look into Area 51 to find out if there really was an alien down there. He says he found out it was a secret base and the people who worked there even had to wear special clothing, but they were dealing with secret stealth technology, not aliens.
As for Roswell, he says he knew they were going to receive “zillions” of letters about it for the anniversary, so he had all of the Roswell papers reviewed. Clinton didn’t get into the results of that inquiry before Kimmel’s next question, but we do know from previous comments that Clinton says he found no evidence of aliens at Roswell either. More on the later…
As soon as Clinton mentioned he had the Roswell files reviewed, Kimmel asked, “If you saw that there were aliens there would you tell us?”
Clinton replied that he would, to which the crowd clapped. He then said:
What do we know now? We know we live in an ever expanding universe. We know that there are billions of stars and planets, literally, out there, and the universe is getting bigger. We know from our fancy telescopes that just in the last two years more than 20 planets have been identified outside of our solar system that seem to be far away enough from their suns and dense enough that they might be able to support some form of life. So, it makes it increasingly less likely that we are alone.
Kimmel suggested, “Oh, you are trying to give me a hint that there are aliens.”
Clinton replied, “No, I am trying to tell you I don’t know, but if we were visited some day I wouldn’t be surprised. I just hope it’s not like Independence Day the movie. “
Finally, Clinton embarked some sentiments, similar to those given by Reagan in the 80s and repeated several times, that if there was an alien threat that humans would need to unite and forget our petty difference. He noted that was the point behind the Independence Day movie.
Clinton’s UFO History
Clinton wasn’t kidding when he says he looked into UFOs during his presidency. In fact, a story that would make Kimmel proud was printed in a book by Clinton’s friend William Hubbell.
Hubbell was a friend of the Clintons from Arkansas, and was actually indicted for fraud in the Whitewater scandals. Before his indictment he was assigned to the Attorney General’s office as the Associate Attorney General. Hubbell wrote in his book Friends in High Places:
Clinton had said, ‘”If I put you over at Justice, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me,” Hubbell recounts. “One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs?” Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting.
In a speech he gave in Belfast in Northern Ireland in 1995, Clinton brought up Roswell. He said, “I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you’re out in the crowd tonight, here’s the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it, either, and I want to know.”
Someone else who wanted to know was Laurence Rockefeller. Laurance, one of the Rockefeller heirs, worked diligently during Clinton’s administration to fund research into UFOs, and to get official government information released.
Laurance, who passed in 2004, was by no means a black sheep of the powerful Rockefeller family. He held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and was the founding trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for forty-two years. He was a venture capitalist who was involved with, among other things, the rise of the computer era. He helped shape history, and before he passed he wanted the public to be informed about UFOs.
Researcher Grant Cameron, who runs the website HillaryClintonUFO.net, was able to retrieve documents through the Freedom of Information Act that showed Rockefeller was soliciting help from Hillary’s staff on drafting a document to President Bill Clinton in 1995. The title of the document was Lifting Secrecy on Information About Extraterrestrial Intelligence as Part of the Current Classification Review.
The Clintons never did publicly involve themselves with Rockefeller’s quest for UFO truth, but like he told Kimmel, Clinton did make his own inquiries. Another time when he discussed his Area 51 and Roswell investigation was after his presidency in Hong Kong in 2005.
Clinton took part in a Q and A session with an audience for CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, a large independent equity broker and financial services group. The moderator asked Clinton if there was a list that was passed from president to president with a list of secrets like “’Where is Jimmie Hoffa?” and “What really happened at Roswell?” He added, “Is there something for us to look forward to that will be released that will make the National Inquirer required reading?”
Clinton chuckled, and although he wasn’t asked about it, his answer mostly referenced Area 51:
Well, I don’t know if you all remember this, but there was actually, when I was president in my second term, there was an anniversary observance of Roswell. You Remember that? People came to Roswell, New Mexico from all over the world. And, um… and there is also a site in Nevada where people were convinced that the government had buried a UFO and perhaps an alien deep underground, because we wouldn’t allow anybody to go there. And um… I can say now, because it has now been released into the public domain, I actually had so many people in my own administration convinced that Roswell was a fraud, but this place in Nevada was really serious, there was an alien artifact there. So, I actually sent someone there to figure it out, and it was actually just a secret defense installation, alas, doing boring work that we just didn’t want anybody else to see.
This wasn’t the first time Clinton referenced Area 51. He was forced to do so in 1994. Due to the burning of unknown chemicals at Area 51, several civilian contractors got sick and two of them died. Five of these employees, who remained unnamed, and the families of two of the deceased sued the US Air Force and the EPA in 1994.
The Air Force had a difficult time denying the existence of the base to the media, while at the same time acknowledging the law suit existed. Because of its secret nature, the Air Force said they could not reveal the chemicals that were being burnt at the base, and President Clinton reinforced this decision with a Presidential Determination which exempted “The Air Force’s Operating Location Near Groom Lake, Nevada” from environmental disclosure laws. Thus, the victims’ case was dismissed due to a lack of evidence. The determination requires being reviewed and renewed every year, and every president since Clinton has done so.
The determination did not include the name Area 51, because the name of the base was officially classified until recently. In fact, President Obama had the honor of being the first president to speak the name of the base. Clinton’s appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel may, in fact, be the first time he has uttered those words in public.
Clinton’s UFO Buddy
Johh Podesta was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and aided in Obama’s transition into the White House in 2008, and is currently a White House advisor. He is also known to be a sci-fi enthusiast, and has been involved with efforts to get the government to disclose all it knows about the UFO phenomenon.
John Podesta (Image from www.americanprogress.org)
Podesta served on Clinton’s staff from 1993 until Clinton left office. His final position was as Clinton’s Chief of Staff. He has remained influential in politics through a liberal think tank that he founded called the Center for American Progress.
It has always been known that Podesta is a big sci-fi buff. He made headlines during his tenure in the White House when he had an X-files themed birthday party. He was especially keen on that TV series. For a man at his level to have an interest in sci-fi is not that unusual. However, the depth of his interest in UFOs was revealed when he spoke at a press conference at the National Press Club asking the government to release its secret files on UFOs so that scientists can determine the nature of the phenomena.
In 2002 the Coalition for the Freedom of Information headed by journalist Leslie Kean, along with the Sci-Fi channel (now SyFy), held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. to address the issue of secrecy regarding the subject of UFOs. At that meeting Podesta stated, “It is time for the government to declassify records that are more than 25 years old, and to provide scientists with data that will assist in determining the real nature of this phenomenon.” He made this comment in front of several major media representatives in attendance. The video can be seen below.
Clinton by far, more than any other president, has demonstrated the biggest presidential interest in UFOs. Every time he has talked on the subject he has left open the possibility that there could be more to the subject than we know. It seems he has been open to the idea of alien visitation for some time, even before it was cool. And yes, it is now very cool to believe in aliens.
For the first time, scientists made a successful in situ collection of bacteria living in hot springs in Yellowstone National Park and using an unconventional source – electricity – for food and energy
Pools of hot water like this one – in Heart Lake Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming – are the home to bacteria that can eat and breathe electricity.
Bacteriaare some of the most diverse and adaptable organisms on Earth. They can be found in harsh environments where few other living creatures can survive. They’re known to use a wide range of sources for energy and sustenance. This month (March 5, 2019), scientists at Washington State Universitydescribedthe first-ever successful in situ collection of a little-known species of bacteria that eats and breathes electricity.
They successfully captured the enigmatic electricity-eating bacteria last August in the Heart Lake Geyser Basinarea of Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park. Their work took them on long hikes to four pristine hot springs in that area. WSU graduate student Abdelrhman Mohamed, who is first author on the study, commented:
This was the first time such bacteria were collected in situ in an extreme environment like an alkaline hot spring.
He added that temperatures in the springs ranged from about 110 to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit (43 to 93 degrees Celsius).
Image via uri Gorby/Rensselaer Polytechnic institute.
The research team was able to coax the bacteria out of hiding by inserting a few electrodes – electric conductors – into the edge of the water in the hot spring.
Thirty two days later, the researchers returned to retrieve the electrodes, which had attracted the bacteria from the water. Mohamed and postdoctoral researcher Phuc Ha analyzed the results. Their statement exclaimed:
Voila! They had succeeded in capturing their prey — heat-loving bacteria that ‘breathe’ electricity through the solid carbon surface of the electrodes.
It sounds a bit like something out of science fiction, but it’s another example of how microorganisms can adapt to a wide range of extreme environments, using whatever resources are available for energy and as nutrients.
Similar bacteria have been cultivated before, but not taken in-situ from this kind of extreme environment – in this case an alkaline hot spring pool of water. Their statement explained more about them:
Most living organisms — including humans — use electrons, which are tiny negatively-charged particles, in a complex chain of chemical reactions to power their bodies. Every organism needs a source of electrons and a place to dump the electrons to live. While we humans get our electrons from sugars in the food we eat and pass them into the oxygen we breathe through our lungs, several types of bacteria dump their electrons to outside metals or minerals, using protruding hair?like wires.
Observing these bacteria in a laboratory isn’t easy, these scientists said, which is one reason the team wanted to study then in their own habitat. According to Haluk Beyenal of WSU, who supervised the research:
The natural conditions found in geothermal features such as hot springs are difficult to replicate in laboratory settings. So, we developed a new strategy to enrich heat-loving bacteria in their natural environment.
In order to collect the bacteria in such a challenging location, Mohamed used a cheap portable potentiostat, an electronic device to control the electrodes submerged in the hot springs for long periods of time.
Geobacter, another kind of bacteria that uses electricity.
Image via Science Photo Library/Corbis.
These scientists said:
These tiny creatures are not merely of academic interest.
They might also provide clues to solutions to some of humanity’s biggest environmental problems, including pollution and sustainable energy. These bacteria could literally “eat” pollution, converting toxic pollutants into less harmful substances. And, in the process, they might even generate electricity. As noted by Beyenal:
As these bacteria pass their electrons into metals or other solid surfaces, they can produce a stream of electricity that can be used for low-power applications.
How cool is that?
Some bacteria can use a rather unconventional source for food and energy – electricity.
As also reported back in 2015, some bacteria can even live on electrons alone. According to Annette Rowe, a postdoc researcher at the University of Southern California:
It’s a crazy phenomenon. I’ve kept some of these bugs for over a month with no addition of carbon.
As Rowe noted, they must have been subsisting solely on electricity from the electrode, because there was nothing else available as an energy source.
Bacteria were among the first known life forms to appear on Earth, and can be found in soil, water, hot springs, radioactive waste and the deep portions of Earth’s crust. There is even evidence for them existing the deepest part of the ocean – the Marianas Trench – according to a study in 2013. They also live in symbiotic and parasitic relationships with plants and animals.
These new findings show just how resilient and adaptable some species of bacteria can be. They can survive and flourish in hot springs and also make use of an unconventional source for their food and energy: electricity. Perhaps they will aid scientists looking for new ways to combat environmental pollution and provide sustainable energy for humanity in the future.
Bottom line: For the first time, scientists made a successful in situ collection of bacteria living in hot springs in Yellowstone National Park and using an unconventional source – electricity – for food and energy.
There are at least 200 billion stars in our galaxy, and perhaps even a greater number of planets. Now a new study suggests there could be an additional 50 billion rogue planets, not orbiting any stars.
Based on findings from space- and ground-based telescopes in recent years, astronomers now estimate there are billions of exoplanets – planets orbiting distant stars – in our galaxy alone. But what about planets that don’torbit stars? How many rogue, or free-floating planets wander the depths of space unbound? Some have already been found, and earlier this year astronomers at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands announced results of their new study, suggesting there are some 50 billion free-floating planets in our Milky Way galaxy.
Only a dozen or so rogue planets have been discovered. How did these astronomers’ research determine there might be 50 billion more?
They ran computer simulations of 1,500 stars in the Trapezium star cluster, a well-known region of star formation located some 1,300 light-years away in the Orion Nebula, in the direction of our constellation Orion.
The simulation included 2,522 planets orbiting 500 stars within the Trapezium cluster and showed that 357 of them would become free-floating planets within the first 11 million years of their evolution.Simon Portegies Zwart, an astronomer at the University of Leiden, recently told Bruce Dorminey of Forbes:
Of these, 281 leave the cluster, others remain bound to the cluster as free-floating intra-cluster planets.
View of the Orion Nebula – a well-known region of star formation – via the Hubble Space Telescope. The Trapezium star cluster is the bright area just left of center. It contains about 2,000 known stars, but there may be more as well. It is a young open cluster where the stars are all roughly the same age.
Image via NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope.
So 281 of 2,522 newly born planets would leave their original star-forming cluster altogether, to roam the space between stars and star clusters, according to this computer simulation. The researchers then extrapolated those numbers to the rest of the galaxy, based on estimates of 200 billion stars in our galaxy. After all, the Trapezium star cluster is just one of thousands of known star clusters. All of the Milky Way’s stars are thought to have originated in vast star-forming clouds like those in the Orion Nebula, and to have started life in star clusters much like the Trapezium star cluster.
If, as calculated, about a quarter of the Milky Way’s stars have lost one or more planets, as many as 50 billion planets should be rogue or free-floating, in our galaxy alone!
Bound exoplanets likely outnumber stars in the galaxy; our single sun has eight major planets, and we’ve now seen thousands of planets orbiting single stars in multiple-planet systems. The estimates for the total numbers of planets in our Milky Way – both bound to stars, and rogue – is staggering.
Just a few decades ago, it wasn’t yet known if any exoplanets existed. Now, current observations suggest there are hundreds of billions. Combine that with the billions of galaxies, and the implications are mind-blowing.
Closer view of the Trapezium star cluster in the Orion Nebula (bright stars near center of photo).
Image via ESO/M.McCaughrean et al. (AIP).
Here is another question. Might any of those free-floating planets collide with other planets or with their stars? They can and do, according to these astronomers’ recent computer simulation. Zwart said in Forbes:
Collisions among planets and between planets and their host star are common. This happens in more than three percent of planetary systems.
Zwart also thinks that our own solar system might have lost one or two planets – probably less massive than Neptune – earlier in its youth. He said:
But who knows what happened very early on, when Jupiter and Saturn had just formed and the rocky planets just started to emerge.
Artist’s concept of exoplanet Kepler-186f. Most exoplanets – as might be assumed – orbit their own stars, but there may be billions more in our galaxy alone that do not.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle.
The ejection of planets from their home planetary systems might be more common in denser star clusters (the Trapezium star cluster is considered a “looser” cluster), since more frequent encounters between stars in dense clusters will make the planetary systems unstable. But the study of the Trapezium cluster shows that planets leave their home systems in looser clusters as well.
Rogue planets are not easy to detect, but as astronomers learn more about them, they’ll be able to find more in the coming years. If this new study is any indication, there are many of them awaiting discovery.
Bottom line: The existence of 200 billion stars in our galaxy – and an even greater number of planets – is difficult enough to wrap our minds around. The idea of another 50 billion planets just floating around, not bound to any stars, is even more incredible. It might sound like science fiction, but, if astronomers at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands are right, these 50 billion rogue planets do exist.
UFO Researcher Says Space Force Running Secretly Since The 1960s
UFO Researcher Says Space Force Running Secretly Since The 1960s
A wry smile was what Dr Steven Greer gave when told he was being interviewed on World UFO Day on July 2.
From his home in Virginia, Greer said that two things are going on. One is the silly seasons of the UFO subject, and the other one are the critical operations that are going on. He said that the silly stuff gets more attention because it is silly.
Greer revealed that he had been involved in providing information on UFOs to at least two presidents of the United States since 1993.
He had an insider’s perspective when President Trump announced in June that he planned to make a Space Force that would be a new military branch.
Greer said that Trump is somewhat calling for acknowledging something that has existed in black project, an unacknowledged special access project, that has been operational since the mid to late ‘60s.
Greer continued that he knows someone who is a Pentagon’s very top secret technology management office whistleblower. This man, Greer said, has acknowledged to him that they have operating systems on satellites in space that can track, target, and destroy any object in space. The whistleblower further told that these systems have been fully operational for many years.
Efforts of Greer to gain disclosure on secretive government topic can be explored on YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon.
Greer does not fault President Trump for not knowing on secretive projects conducted for over 50 years, saying that the White House is a bubble in which disinformation is funnelled.
Greer said that the unacknowledged extra access projects are run in a way that leaders in Congress and the presidency rarely have full access. Greer believes this is something that needs correcting as soon as possible.
According to data from the National UFO Reporting Center, UFO sightings around the world have reached an all-time high. Statistics show individuals in the US are more likely to witness a UFO
Video – A compilation of stunning UFO footage from NASA’s archives – NASA’s Alien Anomalies caught on film
Video – A compilation of stunning UFO footage from NASA’s archives – NASA’s Alien Anomalies caught on film
This compilation includes many of my favorite NASA UFO encounters/sightings that I have archived over the years. All of these examples (with the exception of the second-to-last one) were captured on film by NASA astronauts or Russian Cosmonauts over the past half-century – showing many amazing examples from different eras – Gemini, Apollo, Apollo/Soyuz Test Project, Skylab, STS, the ISS, plus a couple Russian-source additions from their unmanned Zond and Mir Space Station programs as well thrown in to round things out.
The second last example is the only one in the compilation that features footage that was not taken in space and is not official-source (NASA or Soviet/Russian Space Agency). That clip shows an LTP (Lunar Transient Phenomenon) event captured through a camera connected to the eyepiece of a terrestrial-based telescope that luckily was being focused on the Moon at the time. In this case, the LTP manifests as an object transiting across the face of the lunar disc. Many thanks to amateur astronomer Alberto Mayer of Italy for doing a wonderful job of filming this stunning event (and for stacking the footage for us all to see).
While the examples you will see here captured on film can all be “officially” classified as “unidentified” objects, that absolutely does NOT mean that NASA, the DoD, and certain elements within the scientific community worldwide are completely in the dark as to what these things you are seeing are. Make no mistake: The Powers That Be are indeed aware of far more about our mysterious Universe than they are ever willing to admit to us. We, the plebeian masses of this planet, are being held in a state of enforced ignorance, deemed not worthy of knowing the full truth by those who are REALLY “running the show” down here on Earth. As this video shows over and over again however, there are indeed snippets of that amazing truth that have been left scattered about the official government archives over the decades, there for us to find so we may begin to educate ourselves about what is the most monumental coverup in human history – where the only thing more incredible than the lies is the truth! Also, be sure to check out Jose Escamilla’s new motion picture documentary “MOON RISING”, where we go into much further depth about what is, without exaggeration, the most monumental coverup in human history. You have NO idea what you have been missing!
Video – Stunning NASA UFO Anomalies Captured On Film
Video – Stunning NASA UFO Anomalies Captured On Film
After receiving such a positive response to my first “NASA Alien Anomalies” compilation video, I decided I would do a follow-up effort, presenting a few more of my favorite anomalous audio soundbites, videos, and still images that I have archived during my years of research and investigation into this most monumental of all cover-ups.
Hopefully, you will see some new evidence here in this video that you were not aware of, as I made sure to include a few less-publicized (though in my opinion still highly compelling) images in this presentation.
I also include audio portions of another radio interview with Doctor Edgar Mitchell , Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 14 mission and the sixth man to walk on the Moon. This particular interview is from July of 2008, and as you will hear, Mitchell is VERY candid about the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life and of the long-term and on-going effort to conceal this information from the public. In addition to his fame as an Apollo astronaut, here is a brief look at some of Doctor Mitchell’s other very impressive credentials. He is not exactly some “crazy hick farmer talking about swamp gas”, now is he?
Edgar Mitchell – BIOGRAPHY
US Naval Aviator (carrier/research/test-qualified)
Instructor at the Navy’s research pilot school.
Astronaut selection – 1966
Backup LMP for Apollo 10
LMP for Apollo 14 – lunar landing (Fra Mauro highlands)
Bachelor of Science in Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon University, Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Doctor of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT,
Honorary Doctorates in engineering from New Mexico State University,
the University of Akron,
Carnegie Mellon University,
and a Doctor of Science from Embry-Riddle University.
Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the United States Navy Distinguished Medal,
three NASA Group Achievement Awards.
Inducted into the Space Hall of Fame in 1979
and the Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1998.
Nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.
Member of Kappa Sigma fraternity
Advisory Board Chairman of the Institute for Cooperation in Space,
Co-founder of The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to encourage and conduct research on “human potentials”.
Also, I may as well draw attention to the fact that more than once in this interview, Dr. Mitchell mentions a “60-year” timeframe for this coverup (The “Roswell Incident” was in 1947 remember), and he confirms that the reverse-engineering of advanced alien technology has been going on since then. This is VERY important for many reasons, and knowing this, you must also realize and accept that what you think may be “State Of The Art” technology in the public realm is in fact DECADES behind the true “Beyond State Of The Art” technology the military industrial complex have covertly developed and have been playing with (paid for by all of you of course!).
Also, be sure to check out Jose Escamilla’s new motion picture documentary “MOON RISING”, where we go into much further depth about what is, without exaggeration, the most monumental coverup in human history. You have NO idea what you have been missing!
Video – Was Baalbek – Lebanon, a landing pad for 10,000 years old aircrafts?
Video – Was Baalbek – Lebanon, a landing pad for 10,000 years old aircrafts?
The history of settlement in the area of Baalbek dates back about 9,000 years, with almost continual settlement of the tell under the Temple of Jupiter, which was a temple since the pre-Hellenistic era.
HITTING THE GAS ‘Oumuamua had its foot on the accelerator as it left the solar system. Some astronomers think the object was spewing jets of gas, as shown in this artist’s illustration, although there’s no evidence of that. Others think it was pushed by radiation from the sun.
NASA, ESA, STSCI
The first known interstellar visitor to the solar system is keeping astronomers guessing.
Ever since it was spotted in October 2017, major mysteries havedogged the object, known as ‘Oumuamua(SN Online: 10/27/17). Astronomers don’t know where it came from in the galaxy. And they’ve disagreed over whether ‘Oumuamua is an asteroid, a comet or something else entirely.
One of the strangest mysteries is how ‘Oumuamua sped up after it slung around the sun and fled the solar system, a motion that can’t be explained by the gravitational forces of the sun or other celestial bodies alone. The most natural explanation is that ‘Oumuamua spouts gas like a comet, which would have given the object an extra push away from the sun — except astronomers saw no signs of such outgassing.
In November, Harvard University astronomers Shmuel Bialy and Avi Loeb sparked a firestorm of media coverage when they suggested that the acceleration could be explained if ‘Oumuamua is an alien spaceship, in a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. In particular, the duo suggested, the object could be a solar sail: a large flat sheet less than 1 millimeter thick that uses pushes from starlight to navigate the galaxy (SN: 9/10/11, p. 18). Loeb is part of an organization called the Breakthrough Initiative that has suggested sending solar sails to visit a nearby planet orbiting the star Proxima Centauri (SN Online: 8/25/16). Maybe some other spacefaring civilization sent a similar sail to visit us, Loeb argues.
Since then, astronomers have been kicking around other origin stories to explain ‘Oumuamua and its bizarre behavior. “Jumping to the conclusion that it has to be produced by extraterrestrial intelligence, I think we don’t have evidence for it yet,” says astronomer Amaya Moro-Martín of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “There are other natural explanations that can be explored.”
Here are three such possibilities.
1. Fluffy ice fractal
To get a push from starlight, an object needs to have a large surface area — to provide more surfaces for particles of light called photons to nudge — and a small mass, so that even tiny amounts of photon pressure can make a difference.
A flat sheet, such as a solar sail, isn’t the only way to harness this radiation pressure, Moro-Martín says. A fluffy, porous structure that resembles a fractal, a geometric pattern that repeats itself on smaller and larger scales, could also be propelled by light, she argues. “Physically it would be the same idea, just the geometry would be different.”
FEELING FLUFFY ‘Oumuamua could have the same porous structure as this interplanetary dust particle, but on a larger scale, researchers say.
H. VOLTEN ET AL/ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS 2007
Dust particles collected in Earth’s stratosphere can have this sort of fluffy fractal form, Moro-Martín says. She also sees similar structures in computer simulations of the way planets grow up in the dusty planet-forming disks astronomers see around other stars. As ice grains in the distant, frigid regions of those disks stick together, the particles develop into fractals.
“If ‘Oumuamua were to have such an origin, it will be very interesting because it will be the first time that we have evidence for what this intermediate stage is,” Moro-Martín says. “We don’t know how the planet formation process proceeds. All we can see are the smallest particles, the dust particles, or the very largest, planets.”
But could a fluffy fractal survive the journey from another star’s planet-forming disk, all the way into the solar system and out again?
To accelerate as much as ‘Oumuamua did, the object must have a density of just 0.00001 grams per cubic centimeter, Moro-Martín estimates. In comparison, graphene aerogel — the lowest-density artificially produced material — is at least 10 times as dense. “It tells you [the object] must be very fragile,” Moro-Martín says.
“The idea that ‘Oumuamua is a fluffy fractal of ice, pushed by radiation pressure from sunlight, is an interesting scenario,” Loeb says. “But there are major challenges that it faces,” including how such a fragile object would survive, he says.
2. Comet skeleton
Planetary scientist Zdenek Sekanina of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., agrees that a fluffy structure could account for ‘Oumuamua’s strange speedup. But he doesn’t think ‘Oumuamua was born with it. Instead, the object is a desiccated comet that lost most of its water and gases when it swooped close to the sun, he proposes in a paper posted January 30 at arXiv.org.
“It’s like a skeleton of the original body, with all the ice out,” Sekanina says.
SKY SKELETON Maybe ‘Oumuamua was a comet that was destroyed as it approached the sun, like this image of comet LINEAR shattering into mini-comets in 2000. If that’s the case, only the skeleton of the original comet was left by the time astronomers spotted ‘Oumuamua.
HAL WEAVER/JHU, NASA
Comets that fly close to the sun often do not survive. But some of these doomed objects have left observable fragments behind, like comet LINEAR. That comet came within 0.7 times the Earth’s distance to the sun in 2000 and left a cloud of mini comets behind, which were observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. ‘Oumuamua faced a harsher situation: It swooped closer to the sun, about 0.25 times Earth’s distance.
Like Loeb and Moro-Martín, Sekanina thinks solar radiation pressure is the best explanation for how ‘Oumuamua sped up. And a fluffy structure is the best way to accelerate with radiation pressure without invoking “little green men sending a sail,” he says. Although ‘Oumuamua is denser in Sekanina’s estimates than Moro-Martín’s, that’s still “just unbelievable,” he says. “It’s like a fairy castle type structure, or gossamer.”
If ‘Oumuamua were a fully solid, icy comet when it approached the solar system, and developed that gossamer structure only after flying close to the sun, that could explain how the object survived a trip through interstellar space.
3. Weird comet or ice shard?
When the Spitzer Space Telescope checked ‘Oumuamua for signs of a cometlike tail, the instrument saw none, meaning only minuscule amounts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide gas would have been expelled, if any. And if you assume ‘Oumuamua’s composition is similar to comets in the solar system, Spitzer’s data suggest that the object must not have been spewing out much water, either.
But if ‘Oumuamua is a strange sort of comet, it could spew water vapor or other noncarbonated gases that Spitzer didn’t detect, which could explain how the object sped up. “‘Oumuamua is made of still water, not Perrier,” quips astronomer Gregory Laughlin of Yale University.
Laughlin and colleagues are working on a study that suggests that ‘Oumuamua releases a nozzlelike jet of gas whose source migrates across the object’s surface, following the warmth of the sun. That migration would let ‘Oumuamua tumble through space without spinning so fast that it breaks apart. Other comets, including one visited by the Rosetta spacecraft (SN: 11/11/17, p. 32), exhibit this sort of sun-tracking jet.
“The weirdness is that [‘Oumuamua] would have to be made of pretty pure ice” to explain such outgassing, Laughlin says. It’s not clear if a comet, even a weird one, could be made of pure ice. So it’s possible that it ‘Oumuamua could be an ice shard of a larger body, such as if an icy planet came too close to a larger neighbor and was ripped apart, he says.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to check how ‘Oumuamua is structured now — it’s too far away to make any more observations. The ultimate test will come when — and astronomers think it’s a matter of when, not if — another interstellar visitor comes calling.
“If [‘Oumuamua] was representative of a population, there will be opportunities to get an up-close look at them,” Laughlin says.
Naturally, I encounter a lot of skepticism on a daily basis regarding mybelief in aliens. One thing that I have noticed though is that there are always a few facts that these nonbelievers ignore. I think that if everyone understood any one of these few ideas, then they would be a lot less rigid about accepting the fact that we are not alone on this planet.
1. Aliens Are Way More Advanced Than We Are
Many times I have heard a person try and dismiss an alien story because of something that they believe is “impossible“. Alien visitors are so much smarter than we are that they have mastered sciences that we haven’t even scratched the surface of. Our small brains can not even comprehend their technology. They have obviously mastered many things such as long distance space travel, telepathy and mind control just to name a few. It is important to remember that we have no idea what is or isn’t possible for these space guests. Things that seem impossible to us may be very easy for them.
2. Thousands of Really Smart People Believe in Aliens
When I say tens of thousands of really smart people believe in aliens, I am not talking about the average Joe that considers himself clever. I am talking about people with certified genius I.Q.’s and P.H.D.’s. How do I know all of these really smart people believe in aliens? Because they all work in fields that are associated with UFOlogy. These people include top level government officials, scientists of all types, historians etc. Organizations such as S.E.T.I. and MUFONare full of highly intelligent people that have devoted their lives to alien research. Groups like these exist all over the world. Not to mention the U.S. Government and N.A.S.A.. If they didn’t believe aliens existed then why would they put messages for them on the side of our space probes. Stephen Hawking believed in aliens. He even thought it might not be such a great idea to look for them because they could be hostile. If someone thinks that you are stupid for believing in aliens just agree and be like, yeah, as stupid as Stephen Hawking.
3. Aliens Do Exist
Most scientists now agree that when you consider the size of the Universe there is probably advanced life flourishing in many places. There is no question about if aliens exist. There is a question of where the aliens are. We think that movies like “Star Wars” are fiction but there really could be galaxy wars between advanced races going on somewhere in the Universe. Right this second, there could be massive alien wars going on between factions on some distant world.
4. UFO Sightings Have Been Happening for Thousands of Years
Because of the popularity of shows like “Ancient Aliens“, almost everyone has heard of the Ancient Alien Theory. Personally, I agree with some of the theory but I think that they make some stretches just for ratings. Let’s just assume that this theory is 99% false. Well that still means that there is some evidence that aliens have been visiting the Earth for thousands of years. Even if only .000001% of the theory is true then it still means aliens visited ancient humans! I don’t think that it is far fetched, at all, to believe that aliens visited ancient man and were confused with gods. I think the aliens would have played into our natural belief in god, if they didn’t create the belief themselves.
5. Aliens Could Be Thousands of Years Older Than Humans
Try to imagine how advanced humans will be in 10,000 years. You won’t even be able to comprehend the advancements that will be made over that amount of time. What about 20,000 or 100,000 years. Maybe even a million. It is very possible that our alien visitors are that much older than humans. We can’t even begin to imagine what their culture and technology is like. That is why it is so hard for us to get proof of aliens. If they don’t want us to have proof of them then we won’t get proof. An alien space ship could be parked directly over your house without you even knowing it! Find that hard to believe? Don’t forget point number one.
This is By No Means A Complete List
I could talk for hours about why I believe in aliens. I enjoy doing that with fellow believers. This is just a short list of facts that always come to my mind when people question my beliefs. If a person can open their mind enough to accept that just one of these facts are true, then they will realize aliens are real! People are entitled to their own beliefs and I am fine with that, but when someone seems interested in really wanting to know why we believe, I want to be ready. Each believer added is one step closer to getting to the truth!
Our latestextraterrestrialUFO sighting comes from Amherst,Massachusetts. This UFO sighting occurred at 10:30pm local time 3/13/2019. The event was witnessed by 4 people.
A Normal Night Turns Into a Nightmare
The witnesses were watching T.V. when they saw a bright light coming from the woods across from their house. The light was changing colors slowly. It was rotating from blue, white, and orange. The 4 people tried ignoring the lights at first, thinking that there was some logical explanation for them.
After sitting there watching the lights from inside their house for a few minutes, the witnesses decided to go to the woods and see what was going on. As they started walking into the woods the lights suddenly stopped. They decided to keep walking to see if the object was still there.
They Never Imagined that the Lights Were Coming From A UFO
When the witnesses got to where the lights were coming from, they were astonished to see a saucer-shaped UFO hovering about a foot off of the ground. The UFO wasn’t very big. It was about ten feet in diameter and about four feet tall. All four of the witnesses stood there about fifteen feet from the UFO, not knowing what to do next.
One of the witnesses decided to to walk towards the UFO and try to touch it. When they were about three feet away from it a bright blue light came out of the top of the craft. With the light came some kind of energy pulse. The pulse knocked all four of the people to the ground and caused them to lose consciousness.
The UFO Escaped While The Witnesses Were Unconscious
When the four witness regained consciousness, the UFO was gone. The group decided to head back home as quick as they could. They didn’t want to stick around to investigate. Understandably, they were all really shaken up by the experience. When they got home they were shocked to find out that it was 4:00am.
The UFO witnesses didn’t know what to do at this point. They sat around for hours trying to make sense of the experience. Three of them decided that they just wanted to go to bed and act like it never happened. The fourth decided to report the UFO sighting in hopes that it would help him come to terms with what happened to him.
Many People’s Lives Are Changed Forever By Experiencing A UFO
Unfortunately, all we could do is remind him that he is not alone. People’s lives are changed every day by experiencing a UFO.We offered to get him in contact with some people that could relate to his experience. Luckily, no one was harmed by this experience. We don’t think that the UFO intended on harming them, it just didn’t want them touching it.
The XQ-58A Valkyrie, a stealth UAV designed to demonstrate a radical new concept in modern air warfare successfully completed its inaugural flight on March 5 at Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona. It was in the air for 76 minutes during its inaugural flight.
XQ-58A Valkyrie is a runway independent long-range, high subsonic unmanned air vehicle. Kratos Unmanned Aerial Systems (KUAS) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) partnered on the development of the XQ-58A Valkyrie.
The XQ-58A Valkyrie is being developed by AFRL in its latest ‘loyal wingman’ endeavor
The ‘loyal wingman’ concept describes a low-cost, unmanned aircraft designed to provide support to other piloted planes such as the F-35A to expand the combat capacity of theses fighters.
The XQ-58A Valkyrie can carry payload including weapons or surveillance tools, and will be used for lower cost strike, surveillance, and electronic support in the skies. It has a range of more than 2,000 miles.
An international team wants to make drones fly for longer — by teaching them how to land.
Examples of various perching and resting actions. Image credits Hang et al., (2019), Sci. Robot.
Drones today are really awesome gadgets, but they’re still severely limited by their short flight time. Despite a lot of effort being expended into improving their batteries or energy efficiency, drones can still only last minutes in the air.
Now, a new study reports that we don’t need bigger, better batteries to keep drones aloft for longer; it’s as simple as sticking landing gears on them.
Take a breather
The team says they’ve taken inspiration from birds, bats, and their impressive biological landing gears.
Many birds fly in short bursts and perch on elevated positions between bouts, they explain. By taking these elevated positions, they are able to conserve energy while keeping tabs on their surroundings for food or threats. Bats fly in a similar manner, but instead of perching, they simply hang upside down.
So the researchers set to work on incorporating similar abilities into our drones. The design they came up is reminiscent of a hawk’s talons. Drones equipped with this landing gear can land on flat or semi-flat surfaces like a bird, or perform a leaning landing on objects such as window sills.
An Xbox One Kinect sensor built into the design allows drones to automatically find and navigate perches, the team adds. After landing, the drone can turn down its rotors, thus saving battery power and prolonging its ability to fly. Other onboard devices such as cameras can be kept operational, allowing landed drones to keep performing their intended tasks.
The landing gear has only been tested under laboratory conditions so far. Although the results are encouraging, the team says they still need to tweak their design further to get the drones to land and take off autonomously. With some more work, however, they’re confident we’ll soon see drones perching atop buildings and other high surfaces.
The paper “Perching and resting—A paradigm for UAV maneuvering with modularized landing gears” has been published in the journal Science Robotics.
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Are We Really the Smartest Kid on the Cosmic Block?
Are We Really the Smartest Kid on the Cosmic Block?
by Abraham Loeb (scientificamerican.com)
• The human species is not particularly smart. We fight among ourselves in “lose-lose” situations; we do not promote long-term solutions over short-term fixes; and we have been broadcasting our existence to the galaxy with radio waves for over a century without worrying whether about whether there are any predators or competitors in outer space.
• Mainstream scientists box themselves in under an arrogant presumption that extraterrestrials and alien artifacts do not exist, and go from there. They can only conceive of a civilization or a technology that is based upon our own environment, geology and technology. The human race as a whole suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which those with mediocre abilities insist that they’re unusually talented or smart.
• The only way that our species will mature is to get off this planet and see what’s out there. When an artefact such as Oumuamua passes through our solar system, we need to observe it with an open mind. Could it be technological debris from another civilization? We need to get past the “giggle factor” to explore the unexpected.
• We can only hope that we have not become the laughingstock of our galactic neighborhood by now. But even if we have, we can still get our act together and do better. We should find out first who is on our street by searching with our best telescopes for unusual electromagnetic flashes, industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres, artificial light or heat, artificial space debris or something completely unexpected.
• [Editor’s Note] Accolades to Harvard Professor Avi Loeb (pictured above) for breaking away from mainstream scientists’ intellectual cul-de-sac. Loeb either knows more than he’s letting on, or has great intuition about the strange cigar-shaped “asteroid”, Oumuamua, that passed through our solar system in 2017 with very unusual transit properties. In a recent ExoNews article, “Alliance War Against Deep State – Major Updates Coming”, Corey Goode recounts how he was debriefed on a U.S. Air Force secret space program mission where astronauts entered, investigated, and video recorded the ancient derelict spaceship months before it was detected moving through our solar system. Corey points out that Linda Moulton Howe has now brought forward two military men who have independent knowledge of this USAF-SSP Oumuamua mission, confirming exactly what Corey first revealed.
It is unclear how many intelligent civilizations have arisen in the Milky Way galaxy so far, but if some have, a pressing question comes to mind: were they or are they more intelligent than we are?
When reading the morning newspaper, it is difficult to avoid the thought that our own intelligence bar is not particularly high nor difficult to surpass. We fight among ourselves in “lose-lose” situations; we do not promote long-term solutions over short-term fixes; and we have been broadcasting our existence to the galaxy with radio waves for over a century without worrying whether about whether there are any predators or competitors in outer space. (If it’s the latter, they might have been ignoring us because we appear so incompetent.)
If other civilizations do exist, one key in becoming aware of them is whether we are intelligent enough to adequately interpret their signals or to identify a piece of their technology if it should appear in our solar system. One fact is clear: if we assign a zero prior probability for such evidence coming our way, as some scientists did in the case of ‘Oumuamua by invoking the principle “it’s never aliens,” we will indeed never find any. We will be like ostriches burying our heads in the sand.
In fact, this attitude may be one sign that our intelligence isn’t very impressive—that the human race as a whole suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which those with mediocre abilities insist that they’re unusually talented or smart.
How can our civilization mature? The same way kids do: by leaving home, going out into the neighborhood, meeting others and comparing notes with them. In other words, we can develop a balanced perspective on our current technological accomplishments by engaging in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Since our own technological development accelerates exponentially with an e-folding time of a few years, it is difficult to imagine what a much more advanced technology crafted by a civilization that had lived for a cosmic timescale—billions of such e-folding times—would look like.
As natural as this suggestion to search might seem, however it is evident that SETI faces a hostile mainstream culture in astronomy. The simple proposal to consider the possibility that ‘Oumumua is technological debris as an explanation for its unusual properties, for example was met with controversy on social media.
New Alien Abduction Documentary 2019 So Real, They Will Make You Question Everything!
New Alien Abduction Documentary 2019 So Real, They Will Make You Question Everything!
These people regularly report “missing time”—not being able to account for the elapsed time during which they later learn their visitation occurred. These are the most convincing alien stories that are not well known and that the media has not covered.
The encounters reported by the contactees were overwhelming friendly, their aliens benevolent. So, why did things change? What do they want with us?
My experience was with the tall grays, was not terrible at all, I was sleeping , then I heard what sounded like load thumping sound kinda like air pressure waves hitting me and I felt weightless, then I blacked out, I came too at the piont where I felt a long skinny arms holding me and put me back into my bed and then I woke up and remember everything that I just said. Tim Holmes
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
NASA MAAKT BUITENAARDS LEVEN BEKEND
NASA MAAKT BUITENAARDS LEVEN BEKEND
De tijd is nu gekomen dat de wereld eindelijk kan accepteren dat er intelligent buitenaards leven bestaat.
En het is niet zomaar iemand die bewijst dat buitenaards leven bestaat, want het is niemand minder dan de ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA.
Dit bericht moet eigenlijk het leven, ook in ons land, voorgoed veranderen. Nooit zal iemand meer belachelijk kunnen doen als het onderwerp buitenaards leven ter sprake komt. Nooit zal iemand meer verplicht hoeven giechelen als het woord ufo valt, want het bewijs dat buitenaards leven bestaat is geleverd door NASA.
Ze hebben dat gedaan door het vrijgeven van een foto. Een opname die is gemaakt door de Curiosity Rover op Mars en waar niemand omheen kan.
Op de NASA foto zie je een grote kale vlakte met her en der wat kleine rotsblokken en heuvels in de verte. Het is een mooie opname van het Mars landschap, maar hij wordt nog veel mooier.
Want, ergens op die kale vlakte ligt een object dat er uitziet als een stuk metaal met in het midden een perfecte cirkel. Een object dat nooit of te nimmer natuurlijk kan ontstaan en er als volgt uit ziet.
Het maakt niet uit wat je gelooft. Het maakt niet uit of je wel of niet gelooft in ufo’s of buitenaardse wezens.
Het enige dat je moet geloven is je eigen waarnemingsvermogen en je gezonde logische verstand. Het waarnemingsvermogen dat zegt dat er een vreemd object te zien is op het oppervlak van Mars en je logische denkvermogen dat zegt dat een dergelijk object alleen gemaakt kan zijn door een intelligent wezen. Ergens, ooit.
Net zoals de volgende piramide en talloze andere objecten op Mars nooit of te nimmer natuurlijk ontstaan kunnen zijn en dat de enige logische verklaring is dat deze zijn gemaakt door intelligente wezens.
Deze week worden er in de Privé 24 pagina’s gewijd aan de ex voetballer Wesley en de Golddigger die er met miljoenen vandoor dreigt te gaan.
Wat als er nu eens 1 van die 24 pagina’s werd besteed aan de ontdekking op Mars? Zou dan de bevolking zich niet in de ogen wrijven en blij zijn dat ze een keer echt nieuws voorgeschoteld krijgen?
Nieuws dat zo wereldschokkend is dat vervolgens alle televisieprogrammering wordt omgegooid en er avondvullende programma’s komen waarin dieper wordt ingegaan op wat de ontdekking van buitenaards leven nu werkelijk betekent voor ons mensen.
Misschien zouden politici wakker schrikken en zich niet langer laten kopen op de Marktplaats van de elite (Bilderberg Conferentie) en beseffen hoe fout ze bezig zijn geweest de afgelopen jaren.
Nieuws dat echt is, geen fake, wat door iedereen kan worden aanschouwd op de door NASA gemaakte foto’s.
En NASA zelf die eindelijk door het stof zou gaan en zich verontschuldigen voor het feit dat ze jarenlang bewijs van buitenaards leven op Mars hebben verdoezeld.
Maarja, wat kun je verwachten met een naam als deze. NASA deceives, misleidt.
En de moraal is dat NASA of ze het willen of niet, eindelijk buitenaards leven bekend heeft gemaakt.
Wat als er nu een foto is van NASA uit 2013, genomen door één van de NASA rovers op Mars, waarop duidelijk een gebouw is te zien?
Het gaat om een zwart/wit foto die is genomen op 6 september 2013 en waarop je in de verte duidelijk een soort (flat)gebouw ziet staan, achter de heuvels.
Wanneer je wat verder inzoomt, dan wordt duidelijk dat daar iets staat wat niet anders omschreven kan worden dan als een constructie, een gebouw.
Wie de originele foto wil bekijken, kan dat hier doen. Dan wordt er enkele jaren later opnieuw een foto gemaakt van hetzelfde gebied op Mars en de datum op de foto is dan 11 februari 2017.
Dit keer is het een kleurenfoto en ziet er als volgt uit.
En wanneer we hier wat inzoomen, dan blijkt opeens het gebouw uit de foto van enkele jaren geleden te zijn verdwenen.
Wie deze originele foto wil bekijken, kan dat hier doen. Er bestaat geen enkele twijfel over de locatie en er bestaat ook geen enkele twijfel over dat er in de zwart/wit foto’s een soort gebouw is te zien. Ook in het geval het gebouw op de slooplijst heeft gestaan.... iemand heeft het dan dus gesloopt, Mars is dan bewoond en dat weet NASA dan ook.
“Magnetar” sounds like it could go either way as a comic book superhero or villain but it’s actually one of the rarest kinds of celestial objects – a neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field. Only 23 have ever been discovered and only four of those are of the type whose rapidly decaying magnetic field is sending out radio waves. A distress signal? If it is, it seemed we were too late in receiving from magnetar XTE J1810–197, which suddenly stopped sending radio waves ten years ago. Now, just as unexpectedly, it’s sending them again. Should we respond?
“These bizarre objects are neutron stars possessing magnetic fields a million billion times more powerful than Earth’s field, or some 1,000 times greater that those of normal neutron stars.”
As explained in Sky & Telescope, magnetars are not something you want to approach while wearing a steel belt buckle. Actually, you may not want to get close at all. Here’s what Scientific American says will happen:
“X-ray photons readily split in two or merge. The vacuum itself is polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal. Atoms are deformed into long cylinders thinner than the quantum-relativistic de Broglie wavelength of an electron.”
Without knowing what any of those things mean, it still sounds pretty bad. However, astronomers were excited to discover XTE J1810–197 in 2004 because it was the first magnetar to have detectable radio pulsations or waves. The waves were highly variable and continued until late 2008 when they suddenly stopped. Astronomers are a patient and persistent bunch, so a group led by Lina Levin of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester kept on watching the magnetar using the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory. After squinting into the eyepiece for ten years (figuratively, of course), Levin was rewarded for her perseverance on December 8, 2018, when she detected a pulsed radio signal at 1.52 GHz from XTE J1810–197.
After the high-fives had ended and the champagne was gone, they noticed that something had changed with XTE J1810–197.
“The pulse variations seen so far from the source have been significantly less dramatic, on timescales from hours to months, than seen in 2006.”
Artist’s depiction of a magnetar with magnetic field lines (NASA)
The magnetism of a magnetar is a mystery, although the most likely cause is its dense mass spinning at hundreds to thousands of times per second. The equally massive and mysterious radio waves seem to come from starquakes caused by movement in the magnetar’s crust that realigns its magnetic field.
So, the radio waves aren’t being sent by a dying alien race looking for a place to send their child to live and start their species anew while becoming an indestructible superhero whose arch-enemy is ironically named Magnetar … even if it would make a great movie.
For now, we have to be content with reading Levin’s new study and waiting for future observations.
Octopuses are beautiful sea animals that can change their skin color and texture in order to avoid predators, sneak up on prey, and to communicate with other octopuses. But do they dream? A new video has surfaced that shows an octopus sleeping, but what’s strange is that it changes colors in a dramatic way.
Footage that’s been circulating online shows a Caribbean two-spot octopus (or Octopus hummelincki) that’s sleeping in an aquarium at Butterfly Pavilion, which is a non-profit invertebrate zoo located in Westminster, Colorado. Since the aquarium was very well lit, it was easy to see the octopus’ skin color changing from light to dark and then back again to light. Rebecca Otey, who was a science and conservation intern for the zoo, shot the video in October of 2017 before posting it to YouTube.
The beginning of the video shows the sleeping octopus as a pearly-white color, but as the nap went on, its skin turned into a dark pattern that pulsed with its breath, followed by a completely dark color that covered its entire body before slowly fading back to white. The question on everyone’s mind is “why?”
Sara Stevens, who is an aquarist with Butterfly Pavilion, told Live Science that the color changes on octopuses are caused by chromatophores which are specialized pigment cells that either expand or contract to create the colors and patterns on its body. Iridophores and leucophores are the other two types of cells which are believed to detect the colors that the octopus’ skin then turns into. Since octopuses are colorblind, these cells are very important factors in how they end up changing colors to blend into their surroundings.
“The exact processes of how they match colors is still not fully understood, though it’s being very thoroughly studied,” Stevens said, adding, “But current research suggests that the actual cells themselves can match colors.”
Since cephalopods normally alter their colors because of the conditions changing around them (like a predator approaching), why did the octopus in the video change colors while sleeping? One possibility is that it was dreaming about a threat. While research has been conducted into what goes on in the brains of cephalopods while they are asleep, it remains unclear whether they dream the same way that humans do. “It’s been hypothesized that octopus species can exhibit something very similar to REM cycles in humans – but the jury’s still out on whether they’re achieving REM sleep,” Stevens explained.
While humans only have one brain, octopuses have nine of them – one central brain in its nervous system, and the other eight are at the base of each of its arms that controls its movements. They also have tons of neurons in its body – around 500 million. Stevens also mentioned that while octopuses have great control over the color-changing cells, they may not have complete control all the time.
So, was the octopus dreaming of a predator coming to attack, or was the color change completely out of its control while it was sleeping? We may never know the answer, but it’s still very interesting to witness the remarkable features of this beautiful sea animal.
Octopuses change colour while they SLEEP! Footage offers a rare glimpse of the creature's skin switching from light to dark and back as it slumbers - but is it dreaming of an enemy?
Octopuses change colour while they SLEEP! Footage offers a rare glimpse of the creature's skin switching from light to dark and back as it slumbers - but is it dreaming of an enemy?
The octopus' body is seen turning from pale white to a dark brown-green colour
All the while it is asleep on a coral reef it seemingly matches its skin colour to
Octopuses have very precise control over their skin colour in response to threat
It might be camouflaging itself during sleep because of a threat in its dreams
An octopus has been seen changing the colour of its skin on its entire body from light to dark while it sleeps - and experts say it may be dreaming of a predator.
Footage shows the pale white creature pulsing as vein-like patterns emerge on its skin, becoming increasingly darker and spreading over its entire body.
Octopuses are well known for their advanced abilities to camouflage their bodies in response to threat.
One researcher believes the clip shows evidence of an octopus equivalent of REM sleep, with the marine animal responding to some imagined creature.
In an interview with LiveScience, Sara Stevens, a specialist with Butterfly Pavilion zoo in Colorado discusses her thoughts on the footage.
'The exact processes of how they match colors is still not fully understood, though it's being very thoroughly studied, Ms Stevens said.
'Current research suggests that the actual cells themselves can match colors. But the jury's still out on whether they're achieving REM sleep.'
Octopuses can actively change their skin colour to either make themselves either invisible, or stand out, with a striking pattern depending on their surroundings.
They have thousands of colour-changing cells called chromatophores that lie just under the surface of the skin.
These specialised pigment cells expand and contract and push the pigment to the surface.
The creature's skin colour temporarily changes thanks to this mechanism.
This process is triggered in the wild by a changing environment or by an emerging threat.
On top of chromatophores, two other types of cells - iridophores and leucophores - are involved in the camouflaging process.
Iridophores have layers of reflecting plates that create iridescent greens, blues, silvers and golds, while leucophores are cells which can detect what colours best match the animal's surrounding.
This allows octopuses to appear inconspicuous whatever their environment and change their skin tone to match their surroundings.
Given that octopuses have very precise control over the system by which their skin colour changes, it is rare for them to trigger the response while sleeping.
In footage captured the octopus at a zoo in Colorado - looking pale white at the start of the video and changing its skin colour over a minute to match the coral reef it is lying on
Octopuses can actively change their skin colour to either make themselves invisible, or stand out with a striking pattern depending on what their environment is. They have thousands of colour-changing cells called chromatophores that lie just under the surface of the skin
These specialised pigment cells are effectively ink sacs can expand and contract and push the pigment to the surface. Through this mechanic, the creature's skin colour temporarily changes
Unlike humans, octopuses have multiple brains rather than just one central nervous system.
Instead of being in one place, their brain cells are spread all over the body, which gives the creature very precise control to each part of the body.
Changing the colouration over its skill is an active process that requires the octopus to activate specific bundles of neurons, and depends on a complex array of nerves and muscles controlling the expansion and contraction of the pigment sacs.
But these controls may be activated while the octopus sleeps, if its unconscious mind is sensing a threat.
One hypothesis is that it may sense threat in its sleep - it could have something to do with what the creature is dreaming about.
It may be inconclusive, but octopuses species may also experience a dreamlike state like that achieved during REM cycles in humans.
Butterfly Pavilion announced a naming contest for the new Octopus vulgaris (pictured), also known as the common octopus. The zoo is asking visitors to submit names to the new octopuses residing on its website.
Octopuses live for one to two years on average and adopt a unique biological defence system in the wild - ejecting a thick cloud of ink that dulls its predator's sense of smell.
They are also known for their intelligence and even collect shells to decorate their dens knowns as octopus gardens.
Talking about the octopuses at the zoo, of which there are a few new additions from the octopus from Florida, Butterfly Pavilion aquarist Sara Stevens, said: 'People are able to relate to octopuses in a way that is unrivalled by any other invertebrate'.
'Due to their intelligence and almost childlike way in which octopuses interact with the world, our guests seem to connect and fall in love with them very easily.
'It's an animal that instantly creates a sense of awe and wonder, making them fun and important ambassadors for ocean conservation.'
The Butterfly Pavilion announced a naming contest for the new Octopus vulgaris, also known as the common octopus.
The Colorado zoo is asking visitors to submit names to the new octopuses residing on its website.
HOW DO OCTOPUSES DEFEND THEMSELVES?
One of the most effective ways octopuses avoid predation is by camouflaging with their environment.
They have special pigment cells allow them to control the colour of their skin, much like chameleons.
As well as colour change they can manipulate the texture of their skin in order to blend in with the terrain.
As well as camouflage they can escape predators by using a 'jet propulsion' method of escape, where they rapidly shoot out water to propel them through the water rapidly.
The jet of water from the siphon is often accompanied by a release of ink to confuse and evade potential enemies.
The suckers on the tentacles of the eight-legged beasts are extremely powerful and are used to drag prey towards a sharp beak.
As well as protection from other animals, it has been recently found that octopuses can detect the ultrasonic waves that preempt a volcanic eruption or earthquake, giving them enough time to escape.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … a comet! It’s an asteroid! It’s an alien spaceship! Not plane, nor bird, nor even frog, it’s just little old me … ‘Oumuamua
With apologies to Superman and Underdog, ‘Oumuamua seems to be becoming the description-defying, interstellar, possibly super-powered unidentified aerial phenomena of the 21st century. “Unidentified” because the arguments over what it is have changed continuously since it was first spotted in October 2017 after it had already looped around the Sun and continue to this day as it streaks past Saturn on its estimated 10,000 year solar orbit. One new theory, presented this week in apaper published on the preprint server ArXiv, is that it may be made of the same stuff as Earth because rapidly-forming planets may be seeded by objects like ‘Oumuamua that are spewed out into space until they find a young star, settle into its cosmic dust disk and grow into a planet. A second theory to be published inThe Astrophysical Journal Letterssuggests that the puzzling movement of Oumuamua is not a spin like a comet but a rocking motion like a pendulum.
At this point, even Superman might pause and think, “Until someone tells me what it is, I’m not touching it. Go for it, Underdog.”
“It’s not a very efficient process, but you’re starting out with so many of them that you still end up with plenty.”
Study co-author Susanne Pfalzner of Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Center explained the theory in New Scientist. A big object like ‘Oumuamua could attract planet food faster than a ball could form randomly. Co-author Michele Bannister, an astrophysicist at Queens University Belfast, thinks it’s a little heartwarming.
“A fraction of planets could have had an ‘Oumuamua at their heart. You’re not going to have any trace of it anymore, but it’s a lovely thought.”
The second theory could explain how a cigar-shaped object like ‘Oumuamua might bump into and assimilate a lot more planetary debris than other objects because of its unusual movement. While most astronomers now agree that ‘Oumuamua is accelerating through space because it’s emitting gases, Yale astronomy professor Gregory Laughlin, an author of the study coming soon in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, told Yale News that the lack of a tail indicated this outgassing is different than a normal comet.
“In the model we’re proposing for ‘Oumuamua, the venting gas does not erupt from a single fixed point on the surface. Instead, the jets migrate along the surface, following the warmth and tracking the direction to the Sun.”
Instead of spinning like a top, ‘Oumuamua is rocking like a pendulum. This movement and other rocks like ‘Oumuamua may not be that unusual. The researchers say nearly every star in the galaxy may eject them during planet formation and they could have been passing through our solar system for a long time.
Long enough to have planted the seed that spawned the Earth? Maybe the authors of these studies need to get together and talk. Is there a Tinder for astronomers?
In far more than a few cases of alien abduction, witnesses – or victims – report something very strange, but which can be found all across the planet. They have seen what they describe as a giant-sized owl staring at them. Then, there follows a typically weird and mysterious event, one in which the witness suddenly finds themselves aboard a UFO, and subjected to intrusive procedures. For some ufologists, the most obvious explanation is that the owl isa screen-memorycreated by the aliens, as they seek to obscure and obfuscate what really happened to the abductee. A screen-memory is one of a non-threatening nature that the mind and subconscious creates to mask and bury a frightening, stressful event. It is not at all implausible, or impossible, that a highly advanced extraterrestrial species might possess the ability to create extremely visual hallucinations in the mind of the targeted abductee, as part of a concerted effort to ensure that the truth of the matter never surfaced. The image of the eerie owl would overwhelm the reality of the situation, thus ensuring that the aliens’ desire to stay in the shadows remained intact. Make no mistake, such cases are everywhere.
Whitley Strieber is the author of what is probably the most widely recognized book on the alien abduction phenomenon: the bestselling Communion, which was published in 1987, the cover of which displays a near-hypnotic image of an alien entity. It may not be a coincidence that immediately after the first abduction experience that Strieber recalled, on December 26, 1985, his mind was filled owl-based imagery. Strieber’s sister had her own experience with an anomalous owl in the early 1960s. Strieber said, in his 1987 book, Communion, that as she drove between the Texas towns of Comfort and Kerrville, “…she was terrified to see a huge light sail down and cross the road ahead of her. A few minutes later an owl flew in front of the car. I have to wonder if that is not a screen memory, but my sister has no sense of it.”
This all brings me to something else – a creature that has become a staple part of a completely different subject: cryptozoology, which is the study and search for unknown animals, such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Or, based on what I’m about to say now, maybe they are not so unconnected, after all. In 1976 the dense trees surrounding Mawnan Old Church, Cornwall, England became a veritable magnet for a diabolical beast that was christened the Owlman. The majority of those that crossed paths with the creature asserted that it was human-like in both size and design, and possessed a pair of large wings, fiery red eyes, claws, and exuded an atmosphere of menace. No wonder people make parallels with the Mothman.of Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
It all began during the weekend of Easter 1976, when two young girls, June and Vicky Melling, had an encounter of a truly nightmarish kind in Mawnan Woods. The girls were on holiday with their parents when they saw a gigantic, feathery “bird man” hovering over the 13th Century church, Jon Downes notes in his book, The Owlman and Others. Since that fateful day, a handful of additional reports of the so-called Owlman have surfaced – collectively suggesting the presence in the area of a somewhat-Mothman-like beast of cryptozoological or supernatural proportions, or possibly a combination of both. But now, however, there is a new angle to the mystery.
In 2016, I received an email from a woman now living in the English town of Lowestoft, but who previously lived very close to Mawnan, and specifically in the small Cornwall village of Gweek, the distance between which, by car, is approximately six and a half miles. It transpires that in 1998 she had a profound UFO encounter while taking the road from Mawnan to Gweek. It was after 11:00 p.m. and the woman was driving home after visiting a friend in Mawnan. She had barely left the little village when she saw what she could only describe as a UFO, one that appeared at the side of the road – around the size of a large beach-ball and glowing bright orange. The next thing she knew, she was parked at the side of the road, with what she was able to determine was around two hours of time unaccounted for.
But there was something else: as she came out of her groggy state, she caught sight of a huge owl-like creature, but which had somewhat humanoid characteristics attached to it, too. It was hovering in the air, at a height of around fifteen feet, but was not employing the use of its wings to keep it aloft. Given the fact that this was practically on the doorstep of where the Owlman was seen back in 1976 (and since, too), the idea that the two issues are unconnected is highly unlikely. The witness admitted she knew of the Owlman legend. Living so close to Mawnan, it would be more astonishing had she not heard of it. There was little more she could tell me, beyond the facts surrounding the sighting of the curious ball of light, the period of missing time, and the appearance of a “humanoid owl,” as I term it.
This particular encounter – which has not been publicized before – set me thinking. What if the Owlman of Cornwall is not a beast of cryptozoological proportions, after all? What if, instead, it is some strange manifestation of the UFO phenomenon, one that is designed to trick the witnesses into thinking they have encountered a large owl, when, in reality, the event was of an otherworldly nature? This neatly dovetails into another aspect of the controversy and a pair of questions that are highly relative, even integral, to the theme of this article: what if the so-called alien Greys are not creating screen-memories, as a means to try and confuse them with regard to the true nature of their experiences? What if they have the ability to literally shapeshift, from the form of a black-eyed extraterrestrial into that of a large owl? And, by and large, we are talking about creatures that the witnesses suggest are usually between four- and five-feet in height.
While some of the cases, such as that 1998 incident highlighted above, do indeed smack of a screen memory, others do not. One such encounter which falls solidly into the second category involves a Scottish woman who we shall refer to as “Maxine,” who I met in 2004. She lives in the Scottish town of Inverness, which is located only a very short distance from the site of yet another famous mystery: Loch Ness, the home, of course, to long-necked Nessie. On a clear summer day in 2007, Maxine was walking her dog along the hills that overlook Loch Ness when she saw what, from her description, can only be described as an alien Grey. When she first saw it, at a distance of a couple of hundred feet, she assumed it was a young child – chiefly because of its short height. As she got closer, and as her dog froze to the spot, she could see that not only was it not a young boy: it wasn’t even human. Maxine and the Grey stared at each other for just a few seconds, after which is stretched its arms out and, in an instant, transformed into what Maxine described as an impossibly large owl: it was practically man-sized. It immediately took to the skies and headed across the loch at a fast rate. Maxine continue to watch, with astonishment, as the alien-owl thing vanished into the trees on the opposite side of the loch.
The most important aspect of Maxine’s encounter is that she is one hundred percent sure that she did not experience missing time. She does not have any vague memories of being taken aboard some kind of futuristic, alien craft. She is not plagued by graphic nightmares involving extraterrestrials. In fact, she is completely sure that what she recalls is exactly what she saw: a small, alien creature literally shapeshifting into the form of an owl. Interestingly, since her experience took place, Maxine has come up with an intriguing theory to try and explain and rationalize the situation. She now believes that the Greys have the ability to transform their physical appearances. This, she also suggests, means that the Greys can spy on us whenever, and wherever, they choose, without being noticed for what they really are. If we see an owl, a black cat, a German Shepherd dog – the list goes on – we may actually be seeing something very different: a shapeshifted E.T. using a piece of brilliant camouflage.
A similar report comes from “Gary,” of Newport Beach, California, who I spoke with in 2014 at the Joshua Tree, California-based Contact in the Desert conference. Unlike Maxine – who has experienced just one UFO-themed incident in her entire life – Gary has had numerous encounters. His, however, are not of the alien abduction type. For Gary, a manager at a Target store, his experiences have been of the Contactee variety: face to face interaction with very human-looking, long-haired aliens and a wealth of interaction and discussion of a mind, body and spirit nature.
As for Gary’s experience with an owl, it occurred out at Giant Rock, California. Close to the town of Landers, Giant Rock is where, from the 1950s to the late 1970s, a famous Contactee named George Van Tassel held yearly outdoor conferences on UFOs. Gary maintains that in November 2001 he rendezvoused at the old rock with an alien name Capsona – a blond-haired, beautiful woman, dressed in a long white gown. The two spent several hours discussing the precarious state of the human race. After which, and with the sun starting to set on the desert, Capsona told Gary to back away, which he did, to a distance of about forty feet. Capsona was suddenly bathed in a white light and was transformed into a roughly four-foot-tall, brilliantly white owl, which took to the skies and that was quickly lost from view. Again, and as with Maxine’s experience, there was no hint of a suggestion of a screen memory. Only that of an extraterrestrial with the stunning ability to shapeshift.
Streetcap1, AKA George Graham UFO researchers 1st and last ever interview on Russia TV Found, UFO Sighting News.
Streetcap1, AKA George Graham UFO researchers 1st and last ever interview on Russia TV Found, UFO Sighting News.
I was sent this video clip by a Russian UFO research this week. In it is the long lost interview of UFO researcher George Graham AKA Streetcap1. He died suddenly a few months after doing this interview with RT News. He was very proud of doing this TV interview and I'm sure he would like it to be shared with the world. Streetcap1 first came to be famous when I published his videos and discoveries on my UFO Sightings Daily site several years ago. Since then, he has become a legend in the area. I can't help but think that I did warn him not to invite the RT News agency into his home. He didn't listen, and a few months later...he died suddenly. Here is the link to our chat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85Oul-lL8k
So, here below is his interview video. This for you Streetcap1, RIP. Scott C. Waring
Date of photo: March 7, 2017 Here is an interesting find. There is a moon of Saturn that looks just like the classic flying disk. Planet Saturn has 53 moons at the moment...I say at the moment, because advances in tech make new information available daily. More may be found in coming years. This disk moon doesnt appear to be a moon at all, but probably a space station that orbits Saturn. Notice the Saturn ring that is attached to it? This ring is 100% proof that aliens on Saturn created this artificial moon to be a space station in orbit around the planet. Why hide it and make it appear as a natural moon? To help protect it. Aliens can calculate the odds of events happening before they happen, and apparently space is still a dangerous place, so much so that even advanced alien cultures need to hide and protect their ships, space stations, buildings and bases using camaflage to mask their existence. That would defiantly effect theodds of survival, and those are the odds they care most about. Look at it this way. If you were an alien species who's planet existed in the universe for the last 10-12 billion years (Earth only 4.5 billion), then your species may have existed on that planet for over a billion years. Meaning your life span may also be infinite due to your technology. Thus, only unpredictable events like accidents could end your life. You may avoid all instances where there is even a 1% chance of death, or even as low as .01% depending on the aliens preferences. Life for them is more valuable since in is much longer than our own. So they hide the best they can. Check out Youtuber WhatsUpInTheSky37 video below. Its enlightening. Scott C. Waring
This map shows the new location of the magnetic North Pole (the white star).
NOAA NCEI/CIRES
Earth's magnetic North Pole has drifted so fast that authorities have had to officially redefine the location of the magnetic North Pole. The extreme wandering of the North Pole caused increasing concerns over navigation, especially in high latitudes.
Earth's magnetic field is known to have wandered and flipped in the geologic past. Earth's magnetic field is a result of spinning molten iron and nickel 1,800 miles below the surface. As the constant flow of molten metals in the outer core changes over time, it alters the external magnetic field.
What we've seen in the past hundred years is that the location of the magnetic North Pole has moved northward. That migration of the magnetic North Pole was switched into overdrive in the past few years, causing the pole to rapidly move. The increased speed with which the magnetic North Pole has moved prompted authorities to officially update its location. The official location of the magnetic poles is specified by the World Magnetic Model, which acts as the basis for navigation, communication, GPS, etc. around the globe.
The New Location Of Earth's Magnetic North Pole
On Monday, the World Magnetic Model updated their official location of the magnetic north. The model is typically updated every five years and was last updated in 2015. However, the recent rapid movement of the magnetic north prompted scientists to update the model early. In the recent past, the magnetic North Pole has moved 34 miles a year toward Russia. Just a half-century ago, the magnetic North Pole was wandering about 7 miles each year.
Movement of Earth's magnetic pole over time
NOAA
Earth's magnetic North Pole is quickly moving from the Canadian Arctic toward Russia. The model update ensures the accuracy of work in governmental agencies around the world. Specifically, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. Forest Service use the magnetic poles in their daily operations from mapping to air traffic control. On a more individual level, smartphones use the magnetic north for GPS location and compass apps.
Is Earth's Magnetic Field About To Flip?
While the rapid movement of Earth's magnetic North Pole may cause concern over the potential flip of magnetic poles, there is no evidence that such a flip is imminent. Geologists can interpret magnetic minerals in rocks around the world to reveal the history of magnetic reversals on Earth.
Earth's magnetic poles have flipped many times in its history, with the latest reversal occurring 780,000 years ago and 183 times in the past 83 million years. When Earth's magnetic poles do flip, it won't be a catastrophic "end of the world" scenario. From examining fossil records, there is no evidence that a magnetic field reversal causes increased extinctions, volcanic activity, etc.
However, one big issue will lie in the extensive use our technology relies on the magnetic poles. A reversal would upend navigation and communication systems around the globe. Thankfully, a pole reversal in the past typically takes thousands of years to flip. This will give us ample time to develop mitigating plans. In reality, when Earth's magnetic field does flip, who knows what planet our descendants will be living on?
Bats are a common source of inspiration for roboticists. For the elegance of their wingspan and their effective use of sonar to get around, they’ve even been called the “holy grail of aerial robotics.” Most recently, researchers have also shown how looking to bats may help engineers develop drones that are significantly more energy efficient.
The secret is mimicking how the winged animals can take a load off pretty much anywhere they want. This is according to Kaiyu Hang, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University, and the inventor of a new kind of retrofitted quadcopter that uses its own pair of legs to roost. Hang tells Inverse it could offer a way to help develop drones that are far more impervious to issues around battery life.
So how can we teach drones to take rest-stops with the efficient effortlessness of a bat? Hang’s drone uses three long gripper fingers, which kind of resembles a hawk’s talon, to allow the new drones to “perch” and “rest” on ledges, poles, and scaffoldings.
Perching is an existing technique that allows a given drone to land on an object and power down while continuing to record video, say, or waiting to receive a package.
Hang tells Inverse that this new version of resting takes that concept a step further by allowing the drone to partially shut off sooner and for longer, enough to conserve between 40 and 70 percent of its energy. These bat-like drones, as you can see in the video below, do not require a flat, even surface on which to land.
ORIGINAL IMAGE: YALE UNIVERSITY/HONG KONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY/RPL, KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY/OREBRO UNIVERSITY/UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
Hang's drone uses its claw-like landing gear to "perch" like a bat.
“Resting has not been investigated before and this is the first time being proposed,” he explains. “Comparing to perching, this new capability has enabled the unmanned autonomous vehicle to make use of a much larger range of common structures in the environment, and made it possible for it to more flexibly interact with the environment to achieve many more different tasks.”
It’s a (deceptively) small seeming tweak that could make a huge difference. Drone battery life, which lasts roughly 30 minutes tops, is one of the main limitations standing in the way of drones that can engage in more exciting use cases, from better helper drones in industries like construction, to drones that can engage in search and rescue. Hang’s experimental drone has already showed great promise for pulling off these kinds of tasks, and his findings were published in the journal Science Robotics Wednesday.
In the study, Hang shows how his aircraft was able to hook itself to a clothesline-like pole and hang upside down like a bat. It was also able to make use of various types of specialized feet that let it lean on building corners and prop itself up on poles. It’s a big leap toward drones that are much more suited to long-term use in urban settings.
Examples of various perching and resting actions.
Pulling off these maneuvers in the real world won’t only improve flight time, but Hang said it could also improve safety, making delivery drones more commercially viable.
“While resting at the edge of a windowsill, a drone will be able to deliver objects to someone inside, without the need of keeping the rotors at the window side still working,” he said. “So as to reduce the risk for humans to interact with it.”
There’s still work to be done before Hang’s experiment makes it into the real-world. As it stands, the drone in the experiment still relies in part on human assistance to rest.
The next version of these bio-inspired drones will need to have the capability to scan the area around them with an on-board sensor to find these resting opportunities on their own. But Hang says he thinks this should be relatively simple to pull off (the sensor used in his experiment was hardly cutting-edge: an Xbox One Kinect sensor.)
Drone perching on a ledge.YALE UNIVERSITY/HONG KONG UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY/RPL, KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY/OREBRO UNIVERSITY/UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
Drones with resting capabilities would also need to account for wind and other physical disturbances that could cause them to crash. But that could be accounted for by creating a joint between the drone and its legs that soaks up the any brisk motion that could damage the landing gear or the drone. Hang plans to begin working on this next component later this year.
“We plan to design a tilt-pan connector between the main body of the UAV and the modular landing gear,” he explained. “By mechanically decoupling the movement of the drone’s main body from the landing gear or by actively compensating the disturbances at the connector the pose stability can be further improved.”
If he’s able to showcase an example of a drone being able to land on its own and deal with gusts of wind, then drone based deliveries no longer will seem like all that much of a stretch.
Other animal-inspired research is also helping pave the way for delivery drones, including efforts to develop drones that can flock like birds. This, researchers think, may offer the key to preventing the delivery bots of the future from colliding over our heads. Hang’s research is yet another example of avian-inspired robots could soon become an important part of everyday life.
Media via Hang et al., Sci. Robot. 4, eaau6637 (2019), Credit: Hang et al., Sci. Robot. 4, eaau6637 (2019), Yale University
On a distant space rock being explored by a NASA probe, days are slowly shortening — and scientists are still trying to figure out why.
Right now, the asteroid known as Bennu is spinning once every 4.3 hours. But scientists working onNASA's OSIRIS-REx missionto the space rock have used data gathered before the probe's arrival to calculate that Bennu's rotation rate is speeding up over time — by about 1 second each century.
"As it speeds up, things ought to change, and so we're going to be looking for those things and detecting this speed up gives us some clues as to the kinds of things we should be looking for," Mike Nolan, lead author on the new research and a geophysicist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, who is also head of the OSIRIS-REx mission's science team, said in a statement released by the American Geophysical Union, which published the new research. "We should be looking for evidence that something was different in the fairly recent past and it's conceivable things may be changing as we go."
The new research, despite the ties to the OSIRIS-REx mission, isn't based on measurements from that probe; instead, it looks at data collected by two ground-based telescopes between 1999 and 2005 and by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2012. That last data caught scientists' eyes because it didn't line up with predictions astronomers had calculated with the ground-based data.
"You couldn't make all three of them fit quite right," Nolan said. "That was when we came up with this idea that it had to be accelerating."
It's not an unknown phenomenon, but it is rare, and scientists only confirmed their first example of an asteroid's rotation speeding up in 2007. Even at Bennu, the observations leave the mystery of what's causing it.
One possible explanation is that material moving around on the surface of Bennu or leaving the asteroid entirely could be allowing the rotation rate to speed up. The other explanation is more complicated, the Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack (YORP) effect. That effect is caused by sunlight bouncing off the asteroid and slightly tweaking the spin rate faster or slower depending on the shape of the object. For particularly weak asteroids, the YORP effect can actually tear space rocks apart.
The scientists behind the new research suspect it's the YORP effect that Bennu is experiencing. And over the course of the next two years, OSIRIS-REx will provide more data, including detailed boulder analysis and gravitational measurements. Scientists can use those observations to confirm what's going on at Bennu and pin down local YORP levels.
Those numbers can also help scientists understand the behavior of other asteroids, ones that will never see a dedicated spacecraft.
The research is described in a paper published Jan. 31 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
A 'time machine' that moves tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past was built in Russia, scientists have claimed.
It may not rival Dr Who's Tardis but researchers have described it as being able to move the smaller-than-atom sized objects in the opposite direction of 'time's arrow'.
The experiments involved electrons - negatively charged particles that make up an atom - found in the realm of quantum mechanics, the study of sub-atomic particles.
They gave the analogy of a break for a game of pool, in which the balls are substitutes for the electrons.
After the break the 'balls' are scattered in what should be a haphazard way, according to the laws of physics.
But researchers managed to make them reform in their original triangle 'break' order - appearing as if they were turning back time - using a special quantum computer.
Scroll down for video
A 'time machine' that moves tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past has built in Russia, scientists have claimed. The team gave the analogy of a break for a game of pool. The 'balls' scattered and should have appeared to split in a haphazard way. But researchers managed to make them reform in their original order in the snooker triangle (pictured)
WHAT IS THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS?
The Second Law of Thermodynamics deals with transition of energy within a system from usable to unusable.
It is the reason our phones and laptops need to be charged, and that our sun will one day die out.
It states that energy cannot repeat in an infinite loop within a closed system, and so we must replenish what is lost.
The Second Law profoundly sets the limits for what is possible in our universe, defining why everything within it must one day decay.
Researchers, from the Laboratory of the Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT), say that they have effectively defied the second law of thermodynamics with the experiment.
This is a rule within physics that governs the direction of events from the past to the future, stating that everything in our universe tends towards decay.
The 'time machine' is built from a basic quantum computer, which is made up of 'qubits'.
These are units of information described by a 'one', a 'zero', or a mixed 'superposition' of both, that can be stored on an electron.
In the experiment an 'evolution program' was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones.
During this process, order was lost - just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue. Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved 'backwards', from chaos to order.
The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point.
To an outside observer, it looks as if time is running backwards, said lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik, who heads the laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information.
'We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.'
The 'time machine', described in the journal Scientific Reports consists of a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electron 'qubits'.
In the experiment an 'evolution program' was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones.
During this process, order was lost - just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue.
Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved 'backwards', from chaos to order.
It may not be the Tardis, a fictional time machine that appears in Doctor Who, pictured here, but physicists have loosely described as moving in the direction of 'time's arrow'. The team worked with electrons in the realm of quantum mechanics
The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point.
The scientists found that, working with just two qubits, 'time reversal' was achieved with a success rate of 85 per cent.
When three qubits were involved more errors occurred, resulting in a 50 per cent success rate.
The experiment could have a practical application in the development of quantum computers, the scientists said.
'Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors,' said Dr Lesovik.
WHAT IS A QUANTUM COMPUTER AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
The key to a quantum computer is its ability to operate on the basis of a circuit not only being 'on' or 'off', but occupying a state that is both 'on' and 'off' at the same time.
While this may seem strange, it's down to the laws of quantum mechanics, which govern the behaviour of the particles which make up an atom.
At this micro scale, matter acts in ways that would be impossible at the macro scale of the universe we live in.
Quantum mechanics allows these extremely small particles to exist in multiple states, known as 'superposition', until they are either seen or interfered with.
A scanning tunneling microscope shows a quantum bit from a phosphorus atom precisely positioned in silicon. Scientists have discovered how to make the qubits 'talk to one another
A good analogy is that of a coin spinning in the air. It cannot be said to be either a 'heads' or 'tails' until it lands.
The heart of modern computing is binary code, which has served computers for decades.
While a classical computer has 'bits' made up of zeros and ones, a quantum computer has 'qubits' which can take on the value of zero or one, or even both simultaneously.
One of the major stumbling blocks for the development of quantum computers has been demonstrating they can beat classical computers.
Google, IBM, and Intel are among companies competing to achieve this.
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CIA REMOTE VIEWING PROGRAM DISCOVER ANCIENT CIVILIZATION ON MARS
CIA REMOTE VIEWING PROGRAM DISCOVERS ANCIENT CIVILIZATION ON MARS
DECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REMOTE VIEWING CIA DOCUMENTS REVEAL THE DISCOVERY OF AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION THAT ONCE INHABITED THE RED PLANET.
It’s hard to fathom the number of esoteric programs that the CIA has or is currently funding and researching. The clandestine organization has been known to explore myriad outlets for conducting its operations, ranging from sinister to strange. But often the strange ones, particularly those that become declassified because the general populace finds them too bizarre to actually be true, are the most intriguing. When certain programs come to light, it always begs to ask the question, what else are they doing that they aren’t telling us about and what else haven’t they disclosed?
During the Cold War, the CIA conducted several experimental programs involving the human psyche. MKUltra was one of the more malevolent programs aimed at mind control using drugs and other techniques for torture and interrogation purposes. One element of the program involved administering LSD surreptitiously to subjects with the goal of turning them into robot agents that they could then control. The horrific intent of the program eventually came to light and was exposed, despite an attempted cover-up and destruction of all evidence pertaining to it.
But one of the more intriguing (and humane) programs that produced some interesting results was one known as Stargate, which trained operatives in astral projection and remote viewing. These psychic abilities that allow for perception and, if you’re well-practiced, the ability for your astral body to travel anywhere, including distant planets, has cultivated striking imagery and details that often have been confirmed.
Secrets of Remote Viewing
A PSYCHIC JOURNEY TO MARS
During the Cold War, one of the members of Stargate, Joseph McMoneagle, was able to perceive details, which were later confirmed by satellite imaging, of a new type of Russian nuclear submarine being constructed, based simply on coordinates provided to him. The submarine was one of the largest ever built and when he described its magnitude to military engineers, he was scoffed at. It turned out that McMoneagle’s impression was right.
McMoneagle was one of a key group of remote viewing in CIA’s participants that focused on military targets, missing persons and occasionally attempts to see into different time periods. But those attempts were all mundane compared to an unexpected, otherworldly astral journey he would take in 1984. One day he was awoken from a nap and given a sealed envelope that couldn’t be opened until the end of a subsequent viewing session, during which his colleague dictated coordinates for him to view. Soon McMoneagle found himself astral projecting to an unfamiliar locale.
Somewhat recently, the CIA released the transcript of McMoneagle and an agent conducting the viewing. When McMoneagle went into his viewing state, he described a world inhabited by a civilization in dire shape. He described seeing an infrastructure consisting of intersecting roads, aqueducts, channels and pyramids. The transcript is interesting and describes a baffled McMoneagle who often struggles to report the ‘raw data’ his colleague consistently reminds him to stay focused on. Throughout the viewing his astonishment overtakes him leading to tangential periods, sometimes as long as 30 minutes, trying to maintain his focus.
When McMoneagle eventually reports contact with living entities his colleague tells him to initiate communication with them. He describes their situation as being in a critical state, seemingly on the brink of apocalypse. Having purportedly sent members of their civilization on a mission to find a new place to inhabit, these tall shadowed figures appear to be in a state of hibernation awaiting the return of their search party. When he asks if these entities can perceive him, they describe him as something of a hallucination. At the end of the viewing McMoneagle opened his envelope to see where he supposedly projected to – Mars, approximately 1 million years B.C.
Skeptics have written off Stargate and other programs of its ilk as diversionary tactics to steer the Soviets in the wrong direction during the Cold War. The logic being that if the U.S. could subversively convince the Soviets that they were having success in phony psychic programs, the Soviets might then waste time and resources funding similar programs. And of course, there’s no way to know if McMoneagle’s account has any validity without sending a manned mission to Mars to explore the coordinates he was viewing. This probably isn’t going to happen very soon, but McMoneagle said he’d be willing to go, though he is in his 70s.
Whatever the CIA’s original intent may be, many of the members of the Stargate program still practice remote viewing or are willing to talk about it an all seriousness. With the program now having been disclosed and that era of the Cold War being over, it seems there would be no need to continue to maintain secrecy or continue playing along. We would also be remiss to think that the Russians weren’t researching remote viewing long before the U.S. There’s even evidence that they were researching it before Stalin’s reign.
There are other declassified remote viewing CIA documents that were once deemed ‘top secret’ by the CIA, including some that resulted in accurate descriptions of secret Soviet bases on an esoteric island in the middle of the Indian Ocean and another in the middle of the Ural Mountain range. The viewer described details of the bases and their geographic locations in details that were later confirmed. Though the evidence surrounding these particular sessions is somewhat conflicting, the reports affirming the results show astonishment from agents analyzing the program at the amazing accuracy of some of these viewings. And while astral projection and remote viewing are similar in nature, but much different in their scope, the confirmation of results from the remote viewing CIA sessions increases the likelihood that astral projections could have significant accuracy.
NASA snapped unique plane-to-plane photos of supersonic shockwave interaction.
Image credits: NASA.
When Physical Scientist J.T. Heineck of NASA’s Ames Research first got hold of the long-awaited images, he was thrilled. It was the product of 10 years’ worth of technical development, a long-term project which culminated with the high-quality imagery of shockwaves — areas of rapid pressure changes produced when an aircraft goes supersonic (flies faster than the speed of sound).
Shockwaves produced by aircraft merge together as they travel through the atmosphere. These shockwaves can also propagate to the ground, where they can be heard as a sonic boom.
“I am ecstatic about how these images turned out,” said Heineck. “With this upgraded system, we have, by an order of magnitude, improved both the speed and quality of our imagery from previous research.”
“We never dreamt that it would be this clear, this beautiful,” he added.
Image credits: NASA.
Supersonic travel means that an object exceeds the speed of sound — and, as it passes that speed limit, it ‘breaks the sound barrier’ i.e. produces shock waves. Normally, as an airplane is flying, it pushes its way through the air, pushing molecules in the atmosphere. However, at the speed of sound, the molecules just can’t get away from the plane fast enough — they can only move as fast as sound — and therefore begin to compress, increasing the pressure at the front of the plane.
This increased pressure acts like a barrier on the plane. When the plane accelerates beyond the speed of sound, it bursts through this barrier, causing a rapid change in pressure, producing a shockwave. These shock waves are not conventional sound waves, having different physical properties, and producing a loud “crack” or “snap” noise.
Taking this type of image, where shockwaves are interacting, is extremely challenging. You need two T-38 planes flying at supersonic speeds approximately 30 feet (9 meters) away from each other, as well as another one close by, with a specialized camera capable of operating under these extreme conditions.
“We’re looking at a supersonic flow, which is why we’re getting these shockwaves,” said Neal Smith, a research engineer with AerospaceComputing Inc. at NASA Ames’ fluid mechanics laboratory.
“What’s interesting is, if you look at the rear T-38, you see these shocks kind of interact in a curve,” he said. “This is because the trailing T-38 is flying in the wake of the leading aircraft, so the shocks are going to be shaped differently. This data is really going to help us advance our understanding of how these shocks interact.”
A visual concept presenting the Lockheed X-59.
Image credits: NASA.
The results provide more than just a few pretty pictures — they will allow researchers to better understand how these shockwaves interact with the planes and with each other, ultimately enabling NASA to better understand some of the finer aspects of supersonic flight, which is particularly important for the X-59 — an experimental supersonic aircraft being developed by Lockheed for NASA’s Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator program.
Ruimtetelescoop Hubble maakt haarscherpe foto van botsende sterrenstelsels - HLN.be
Ruimtetelescoop Hubble maakt haarscherpe foto van botsende sterrenstelsels - HLN.be
NASANGC 6052 bestaat feitelijk uit twee sterrenstelsels die met elkaar in botsing zijn.
WETENSCHAP NASA’s ruimtetelescoop Hubble heeft een foto gemaakt van twee sterrenstelsels in botsing. De beide sterrenstelsels werden in 1784 al ontdekt, maar werden ondanks hun vreemde vorm lang aangezien voor een enkel systeem. De ongelooflijke beelden van Hubble laten in detail zien hoe de twee ruimtereuzen in elkaar schuiven.
De stelsels, die in astronomische kringen bekendstaan onder de gezamenlijke naam NGC 6052, staan zo’n 230 miljoen lichtjaar van de aarde in het sterrenbeeld Hercules. Ontdekker William Herschel (1738-1822) dacht onterecht dat het om één enkel sterrenstelsel ging. “Lang geleden trok de zwaartekracht de twee sterrenstelsel naar elkaar toe en bracht ze in de chaotische toestand die we nu waarnemen”, schrijft ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA op haar website. “De sterren van de oorspronkelijke stelsel volgen nu nieuwe banen, die worden veroorzaakt door de effecten van de zwaartekracht.”
NASADe botsende stelsels werden eerder met Hubbles Wide Field-camera 2 gefotografeerd. De nieuwe beelden zijn gemaakt met diens opvolger, nummer 3.
Vooral lege ruimte
NASA laat weten dat de chaos in NGC 6052 nauwelijks tot problemen leidt. “Botsingen tussen sterren zelf zijn zeer zeldzaam, omdat sterren in verhouding tot de afstanden tussen hen erg klein zijn. Het grootste deel van een sterrenstelsel is lege ruimte.” Uiteindelijk zullen beide stelsels compleet samenvloeien tot een stabiel systeem.
De ruimtevaartorganisatie meldt ook dat ons melkwegstelsel te langen leste in botsing zal komen met het Andromeda stelsel. Wie zich afvraagt of ze dat nog bij leven zullen meemaken, stelt NASA gerust. Het duurt nog zeker nog vier miljard jaar voordat dat gebeurt.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Onderzoekers van de universiteit van het Zweedse Lund hebben bewijzen gevonden van een de sterkste zonnestormen die de aarde ooit heeft bereikt. De zonnestorm vond al bijna 2.700 jaar geleden plaats, maar de wetenschappers waarschuwen voor de mogelijke gevolgen van zo’n nieuwe, gigantische zonnevlam.
Astronomen waarschuwden vorig jaar in een rapport van persbureau Bloomberg voor onze overmatige afhankelijkheid van satellietgegevens, die kan verstoord worden door een zogenaamde zonnestorm. Zelfs de Deense Saxobank voorspelde dat dit jaar een verhoogde zonneactiviteit zware schade zou kunnen aanrichten aan satellieten, telecommunicatie en stroomnetten. Maar zover zijn we gelukkig nog niet.
Wat is een zonnestorm eigenlijk? En hoe ontstaat die?
De zon produceert regelmatig zonnevlammen en plasmawolken, en slingert daarbij magnetische velden en allerlei geladen deeltjes de ruimte in. Meestal merken we weinig van deze zonnestormen, behalve door het kleurrijke Noorderlicht rond de polen, veroorzaakt door geladen deeltjes die botsen met de bovenste atmosfeer.
EPA
Vaak zijn de zonnevlammen en plasmawolken niet op de aarde gericht. En zelfs als dat wel het geval is, hebben we altijd het beschermende aardmagnetisch veld nog. Maar dat aardmagnetisch veld kan ons niet beschermen tegen ‘een perfecte zonnestorm‘: een samenloop van omstandigheden die leidt tot extreem, op de aarde gericht, ruimteweer. En dat zeldzame fenomeen zou dus ook GPS-systemen, communicatiemiddelen en zelfs de elektriciteit kunnen verstoren.
Zo vond in 1859 zo’n merkwaardige gebeurtenis plaats: de zon zorgde ervoor dat de telegraafverbinding tussen Europa en Amerika door kortsluiting uitviel. Die storm werd de ‘Carrington-gebeurtenis’ genoemd. Het noorderlicht kon zelfs tot in het huidige Cuba en Hawaii worden waargenomen.
Zes miljoen mensen zonder stroom
In 1989 zorgde een plasmawolk ervoor dat een elektriciteitsnetwerk in Canada werd uitgeschakeld waardoor zes miljoen mensen meer dan negen uur zonder stroom zaten. En in 2003 werd de stroom in het Zweedse Malmö een uur onderbroken door een zonnestorm. Datzelfde jaar moesten de astronauten in het internationaal ruimtestation ISS zich beschermen tegen de verhoogde stralingsniveaus.
Volgens een nieuwe studie zou zich in 660 voor Christus een zonnestorm hebben voorgedaan die nog tien keer krachtiger was dan de ‘Carrington-gebeurtenis’ van 1859. De onderzoekers konden de sporen van die zonnestorm achterhalen in ijskernen op Groenland die al 100.000 jaar oud zijn. “Als die zonnestorm nu zou plaatsvinden, zou hij zware effecten op onze hoogtechnologische samenleving, navigatiesystemen, ruimtevaart en luchtvaart kunnen hebben”, aldus Raimund Muscheler, professor geologie aan de universiteit van Lund.
Nog twee andere zonnestormen
Er zouden ook in 775 en 994 na Christus nog twee andere gigantische zonnestormen hebben plaatsgevonden. Die werden ontdekt in zowel ijsringen als groeiringen van bomen. Volgens Muscheler is er dan ook nood aan een grotere bewustwording van de mogelijkheid van zeer zware zonnestormen, en van de kwetsbaarheid van onze samenleving.
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Wetenschappers ‘draaien tijd terug’ met kwantumcomputer. Wat je moet weten over hun baanbrekende onderzoek
Wetenschappers ‘draaien tijd terug’ met kwantumcomputer. Wat je moet weten over hun baanbrekende onderzoek
Wetenschappers hebben de tijd teruggedraaid met behulp van een kwantumcomputer. Hun baanbrekende studie lijkt in strijd te zijn met de natuurkundige wetten.
Met behulp van elektronen en de kwantummechanica konden onderzoekers de tijd terugdraaien.
Het experiment is te vergelijken met biljartballen die na de start van het spel weer hun oorspronkelijke plek innemen.
Tijdmachine
De Russische, Zwitserse en Amerikaanse onderzoekers hopen de techniek nu verder te verbeteren.
De ‘tijdmachine’ wordt beschreven in het tijdschrift Scientific Reports en bestaat uit een kwantumcomputer die is opgebouwd uit qubits.
Qubits zijn eenheden informatie die worden aangeduid met een ‘één’ of een ‘nul’, of een ‘superpositie’ van beide staten.
Oorspronkelijke staat
Tijdens het experiment veranderde het patroon van nullen en enen. Op dezelfde manier schieten de biljartballen na de start van het spel alle kanten op.
Met behulp van een programma werd de staat van de kwantumcomputer op een dusdanige manier veranderd dat de tijd als het ware werd teruggedraaid: van chaos naar orde.
De qubits werden op deze manier in hun oorspronkelijke staat teruggebracht.
85,5 procent
Tijdens het experiment rolden de ballen als het ware terug naar hun oorspronkelijke positie.
Met twee qubits was het terugdraaien van de tijd in 85,5 procent van de gevallen succesvol. Toen er drie qubits gebruikt werden, traden er meer fouten op.
Those who survived the panic caused by the less-trouble-than-expected Y2K orMillennium Bug that was supposed to shut down computers when they tried to move their clocks from 12/31/1999 to 1/1/2000 may scoff at the new April 6, 2019 bug that many predict will wreak havoc with the GPS systems drivers, pilots and many major industries depend on. Those who profited from the Y2K Bug (COBOL and assembler language programmers dragged out of retirement to fix old software) may be upset that no one told them about this one sooner. Those planning a flight or a road excursion on 4/6/2019 may suddenly be considering a postponement. The rest of us are wondering … what the heck is the April 6, 2019 bug?
“The GPS Internal Navigation Time Scale “GPS Time” is based on the weighted average of GPS satellites and ground station clocks. GPS Time is used for user navigation solutions. A nanosecond error in GPS Time can equate to one foot of position (ranging) error. The WN parameter is provided via a ten (10) bit parameter – or “counter.” The valid range of values for the WN parameter is 0 to 1023 (or 1024 total values). The WN parameter is incremented by one each week. At the end of the 1024th week, the counter experiences a rollover (resets) to 0. Each WN rollover event defines a new GPS Time Epoch. The WN value is referenced to the start of the current GPS Time Epoch. The last WN rollover was August 21, 1999. GPS Time is currently in the second Epoch. The next WN rollover is April 6, 2019.
GPS Time is adjusted by the U.S. Air Force GPS Directorate to maintain alignment with UTC as provided by the U.S. Naval Observatory. A GPS device that provides UTC time does so by converting GPS Time to UTC using multiple parameters – including WN – conveyed in page 18 of GPS sub-frame.
GPS devices with a poorly implemented GPS Time-to-UTC conversion algorithm may provide incorrect UTC following a WN rollover. Additionally, some GPS devices that calculate the WN value from a device-specific date rather than the start of the current GPS Time Epoch may provide incorrect UTC at some other device-specific date.”
That explanation came from a memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in April, 2018. A one-year warning doesn’t seem like much time to fix old programs dependent on an antiquated 10-bit counter that bumps up one per week until it reaches binary 1111111111 (1023) and resets to zero, does it? DHS points out that this happened once before on August 22, 1999 and nothing bad happened then. Of course, that could be because most people were still folding paper maps in 1999 when GPS was still a new and much less used innovation.
On the other hand, in 2019 it seems that every cell phone, vehicle, watch and just about anything with a chip in it has GPS. Will we all go spinning aimlessly on 4/6/2019? Here’s an answer from FalTech GPS, a company specialized in GPS repeater technology.
“Who will be affected? The list is long and varied; some industries come to mind immediately as they are known to use the accurate timing information provided by the GPS constellation. Financial markets, power generating companies, emergency services and industrial control systems may be affected, as well as fixed-line and cellular communications networks. GPS tracking devices installed in a fleet management system to schedule and monitor deliveries could cause system errors if they start to provide location data that is potentially up to 20 years out of date.”
All together now …. ahhhh! Why isn’t someone doing something about this? Well, the government and GPS makers have been for a while. Most modern GPS receivers shouldn’t be affected. Older devices that have been getting regular firmware updates should also be OK. A lot of GPS devices can run without UTC or can get it from other sources. And don’t forget – GPS systems survived August 22, 1999, just as we survived January 1, 2000.
And yet … Tom’s Guide reports that a security expert at the recent RSA Conference 2019 (RSA is a computer and network security company) said in a presentation:
“I’m not going to be flying on April 6.”
Does that sound like a warning? Is someone keeping things quiet? Who? This is no April Fool’s joke. If you survive April 1, make it to April 7 by being extra careful just in case on April 6.
One of America’s most mysterious archaeological sites is finally being returned to its rightful owners after 200 years. In the small town of Franklin, North Carolina, a small mound of earth can be found alongside US Highway 441. The grassy mound today stands just just a dozen or so feet high (4 meters) and occupies the space of roughly a city block. While the mound may be easily overlooked by the untrained eye, it remains one of the most unknown structures in the United States and predates even the oldest known oral histories of indigenous American peoples. Who built the Nikwasi Mound?
The mound today. US 441 can be seen in the right of this image.
When the earliest European settlers encountered the Cherokee nation in what is now Western North Carolina, they inquired about the mound. Cherokee tribal elders told the explorers that the mound predates their tribe’s history and was already ancient when the Cherokee arrived. The original builders of the mound remain unknown, and it is believed the mound was once part of a sprawling tribal town which thrived around 1,000 CE. Despite the mystery surrounding the Nikwasi Mound, the Cherokee people have revered the mound as a spiritual and ceremonial place for centuries and consider it to be one of the last known structures built by their mysterious predecessors.
The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI) has worked for years to reclaim ownership of the mound and are finally poised to regain it. The Franklin City Council will soon vote to pass control of the mound to the nonprofit Nikwasi Initiative in the next few months, and the votes are expected to go in favor of the EBCI. “What this will do is allow the Cherokees — finally, after 200 years — to have some representation in the management of the mound,” Franklin Vice Mayor Barbara McRae told council members before the vote. “We have an opportunity to do something really historic, and to reverse that wrong.”
Main Street, Franklin NC. Make sure to check out Lazy Hiker Brewing if you’re ever in the area.
While it’s unknown who exactly built the Nikwasi Mound, it is believed that the Southern Appalachian Mississippians likely constructed it at some point nearly a thousand years ago. The Mississippian people were the predecessors to modern American Indian nations and inhabited what is now the eastern United States from the 9th century to the 15th century before European colonization.
Climate change at the end of the Little Ice Age, deforestation and overhunting, and the ensuing cultural collapse eventually brought about the decline of the Mississippian culture and the subsequent development of the Native American Indian nations and culture we know today. Because the Mississippian people left behind no writing system, little is known about this ancient culture outside of archaeological artifacts, mounds like the Nikwasi Mound, and the oral histories passed down through indigenous peoples for centuries.
The Nikwasi Mound is believed to have once been the site of a townhouse which served as the seat of Cherokee tribes in the area.
Because of its sacred status, the Nikwasi Mound has never been excavated, and the Cherokee people request that no one even climb on it in order to preserve it. Who knows what mysteries lie in the earth of the mound? Luckily, we may never know. Some mysteries are worth preserving.
Around 2,600 years ago, a huge solar storm hit Earththat was approximately ten times more powerful than any solar storm recorded in modern times. According to a new study, these massive solar storms were actually quite common in the history of the Earth. Unfortunately, with how many of us rely on technology and electricity, if one of those storms hit our planet today, our daily lives would nearly become unmanageable.
The sun could attack our planet with explosions of immensely energetic particles that are called solar proton events, and if these “proton storms” were to hit Earth, it could even damage electronics located in the air and in space. Raimund Muscheler, who is an environmental physicist at Lund University in Sweden, told Live Science, “Today, we have a lot of infrastructure that could be badly damaged, and we travel in air and space where we are much more exposed to high-energy radiation.”
When a proton storm hits Earth’s magnetosphere, our planet’s magnetic field traps it and when there is an interruption in our magnetosphere, that’s called a geomagnetic storm and that can destroy power grids all across the planet.
One example of this happening was in 1989 when a large solar storm put the entire Canadian province of Quebec in complete darkness, with the effects being felt all the way in New Jersey where some of their transformers were damaged. In fact, power grids in the United States from the mid-Atlantic to the Pacific Northwest were very close to shutting down.
A much more massive storm – approximately ten times more powerful than the one in Quebec – happened in 1859 and it’s called the Carrington Event. If a massive solar storm like the Carrington Event happened now, power outages could last weeks, months, or years, as we would have to wait for specific parts of the power grids to be replaced.
But wait, the massive Carrington Event may have been nothing compared to a solar storm that may have hit Earth in ancient times. Researchers have recently discovered radioactive atoms that were trapped in ice located in Greenland that seem to suggest that a gigantic proton storm hit our planet around 660 BC. Scientists studied two samples of ice from Greenland and noticed a spike of radioactive beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 from around 2,610 years ago. An even more interesting fact is that these findings coincide with tree rings that had a spike of carbon-14 around that same time period.
Two other major solar storms happened – one was around 993-994 AD, while the other happened around 774-775 AD – with the latter being the biggest-known solar eruption to have ever occurred.
“These enormous events are a recurring feature of the sun – we now have three big events during the past 3,000 years,” Muscheler said, adding, “There might be more that we have not yet discovered.” You can read the scientists’ findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by clicking here.
Solar flares are a common trait of the sun, but let’s hope that a massive storm like the ones mentioned above do not hit Earth anytime soon.
While many in the U.S. are still dealing with the after-effects of ‘springing forward’ one hour for Daylight Saving Time, a group of Russian scientists is celebrating falling back – not just by spinning their clocks but by actually resersing the forward trek of time. Does this mean do-overs are actually possible? Is Doc Brown’s DeLorean revving its engine? Is HG Wells begging for a trip back to Earth to change the ending of his novel?
“This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time from the past to the future.”
Gordey Lesovik, a quantum physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and lead author of the new study published in the journal Science Reports, describes in simple terms how his team apparently broke the second law of thermodynamics by returning a quantum computer to a state in its past life. And not just once, but a reliably reproducible 85 percent of the time. Lesovik’s Russian team worked with quantum researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois using the public domain IBM Q System Hub, a universal quantum computing system with 20 superconducting qubits.
The second law of thermodynamics: an isolated system either remains static or evolves toward a state of chaos rather than order.
Phys.org gives a good, layman’s explanation of this discovery using billiard balls. When a triangle of 15 billiard balls is hit by a cue ball, they scatter into a chaotic state, never to return to that orderly triangle. What the Moscow team has done is returned two qubits (quantum bits) on the quantum computer back to their previous state after chaos and dispersion had begun. Sure, it’s just two qubits and not 15 colorful billiard balls, but it’s never been done before, and the fact that they could do it repeatedly puts the second law of thermodynamics on a walk of shame out of the physics books.
Or does it? We’re talking electrons here, not objects, cars or humans. The quantum computer couldn’t replicate the reverse time travel with three qubits, failing over half the time. And technically speaking, this was not really time travel but returning a machine to a previous state in time, akin to returning an adult to the body and mind they had as a teen or reverse aging. Except the machine could only return to the state or age it was in a fraction of a second ago.
Is this still a big deal?
“Time reversal can help—we do time-reversal of the final state of the computer and run the same quantum program again. If the computation was correct we will arrive to the initial state of the computer.”
That’s a physicist’s “yes” from Gordey Lesovik, who sees this as a tool for testing programs on quantum computers. It won’t return a billiard table to its previous pre-break state, it’s not a time machine or even an age-reversing picture of Dorian Gray. For now, we have to take Lesovik’s word that it’s indeed a big deal.
The Internet can be a pretty wild place, a badlands of rumors, hearsay, tall tales, fake videos, and straight up misinformation at times, all unregulated and seeming a bit like the Wild West. Through this din of off-the-wall stories and outlandish accounts, every once in a while one will stand tall as particularly bizarre and absurd, yet managing to get picked up and talked about to the point that it takes on a life of its own. Surely one such tale is the story of a man who came forward with his experiences that deal with super soldiers, Martian bases, and intergalactic war, which he claims are all completely true. So strap yourself in and maybe put on your tinfoil hat, because we are about to blast off on a wild ride into the orbit of the truly odd.
In 2006, a man calling himself “Captain Kaye” (later found to be Randy Cramer but Captain Kaye sounds cool so we’ll stick with that) stepped from the shadows of top secrecy, claiming to be a member of the United States Marine Corps (USMC) and with quite the incredibly bizarre tale to tell. It began, he said, when he was just a very small child of just 3 or 4 years old, when members of a shadowy organization came to him in the night to covertly recruit him into a program called “Project Manequin.” According to him, this was an ultra-secretive government program designed to create super-soldiers who would be stronger, more efficient, and more obedient killers on the battlefield. Children were chosen because their young minds were seen as more malleable and easily warped, their bodies abler to withstand and adapt to the rigors of what awaited them, and he would claim of the whole training process:
The techniques used to make me have been described to me as a “with-the-grain” style of programming as opposed to most “against-the-grain” styles of programming that try to force Super Soldiers to kill anything, anytime, anywhere – and as human animals, most of us just aren’t made that way, so we resist – and the main function then becomes ‘suppressing’ the urge to resist. Rather than creating the best Super Soldier you can, you only create the most compliant. The “with-the-grain” style programming doesn’t try to create something that kills on command, but, rather, it creates a deep seated instinct to protect its tribe and its territory when threatened. So, as long as you can explain the threat credibly, the soldier will use all of its strength and cunning to destroy any that would harm those it’s genetically predisposed to protect.
To engage in this training, he says that these agents would whisk him away from his home in the middle of the night and take him to a secret base off-planet, where he was trained and indoctrinated for days or weeks at a time. In order to make sure that no one knew he was gone, time travel was used to bring him back to the exact moment he had been abducted, leaving the memories within his mind like a dream. Kaye, along with the 300 child recruits, would also take part in a program called “Project Moon Shadow,” which was next stage and according to him an offshoot of the government mind control program called MK Ultra.
When he turned 17 his training was considered complete, and he was supposedly sent to join what he calls the “Mars Defense Force “(MDF) part of the U.S. Secret Space Program (SSP), which had been established for the purpose of protecting Earth’s five Mars colonies and claiming Mars as a U.S. territory, as well as providing a safe place to retreat in the event of some world-ending cataclysmic event on Earth. Interestingly, this was purportedly a joint program run by the United States, China, and Russia, who were secretly working together to make everything run smoothly behind the scenes. These colonies had apparently been on the planet since the 1960s(!) and that the moon landings had been a cover to divert public attention from the real aims of NASA, which was Martian colonization and planetary defense.
In order to get to Mars, he claims that he was first taken to a cutting edge facility on our moon, after which he was whisked away to the Red Planet aboard a special shuttle and stationed at the colony he calls Aries Prime, at a secret MDF base called Forward Station Zebra. There were also teleport jump pads available, but at the time these were supposedly still seen as risky. Of his actual arrival on Mars he says that he was surprised that the atmosphere was breathable, and he says of his experience of disembarking:
We touched down at Aries Primus, HQ of the MCC (Mars Colony Corporation) and the MDF (Mars Defense Force). To my surprise, we walked down the gangplank and right out into the Martian air. The air was thin and cool, but the sun was beating down enough to feel it. Even though it’s dimmer, the sun can still be quite hot and bright in the direct light. We walked, in a line, to personnel with scanners in their hands who would scan your transfer packet, and then direct you to whichever shuttle pad was to take you to your duty station.
He would also be surprised to learn that humans were not alone on Mars, and that there were in fact two indigenous alien species on the planet. Stay with me now. One of these is described as an insectoid species, rather imaginatively called the “Insectoids,” which lives underground in elaborate hives, while the other is more reptilian in nature, and you don’t get any points if you guessed they are called the “Reptoids.” These two species had had a rather hit and miss relationship with the humans who had inhabited their world, going from indifference, to occasional skirmishes, to peace again on several occasions.
Captain Kaye would be stationed here for the next 17 years, during which time he claims he underwent flight training and he also says he participated in some of these battles himself, often wearing a powered suit, because hell yeah! Peace only truly came when the humans, Insectoids, and Reptoids joined forces to fight a race of evil alien invaders called the Draconians (MU Editorial Dept.- Hi Brent, could you change the references to Draconians to “Dracoids” from here on out? Our research shows that people respond to “oids” Thanks.) People, seriously, I am not making this up. Shortly before his two decades of duty were up, he says that there was a massive battle against the Dracoids that drove them off but left hundreds dead. Shortly after this Kaye’s tenure came to a close and he was moved back to the moon, where the story gets possibly even weirder than it already is.
At the moon base, Kaye says he went through a drawn out reverse-aging process of regressing him back to his younger self, and then sent back through time to Earth in 1987, at a point before he had even left. Before being sent back, there was a ceremony to honor the occasion, attended by none other than former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld himself. Again, I am not making this up. It would then take him years to regain the lost memories, that had either been disrupted by the time travel process or intentionally wiped, but come back they did, and left him in a state of shock.
Right about now you might be wondering just why Captain Kaye felt that he could safely come forward with this world-changing information, and you might be surprised to know that according to him he was told to blow the whistle on the whole thing by his own superior officer. Kaye says that a mysterious Brigadier General Smythe, one of the top guys in the program, came to him with the permission to let the lid off of everything, and he says of this:
When he personally gave me the go-ahead (he said, and I quote, “I’m giving you the go-ahead to go public with everything you know…”), I asked, “Everything?” and he said, “EVERYTHING!”, and then we had a deal. As long as I had the assurance that my direct chain of command was behind me and that I had no restrictions on truthful content, I knew it was for real – and that HE was for real. No one – not even an enemy – would want me to do that, or tell me to do that. He even said I could use his name, which I just did, to let the people who need to know, that I answer to him, and only to him… and if they didn’t like it, they could take it up with him, or the CMC.
It all sounds completely and totally off the rails, and it is, but Captain Kaye has continued to assert that this is not some bad science fiction pulp story, but all very, seriously real. He has continued to write of his experiences, give interviews about it all, and even has his own newsletter devoted to it. While I have only covered the basics here there is much more to it all, about which he goes into incredibly, meticulous detail. His stories go as far as to explain the exact layouts of rooms, the equipment used, and the colors of all of the uniforms, and even what type of carpet the moon base has, and his story is so tight that he never contradicts himself. Adding to this, he tells his tale with such earnestness and at times raw emotion that rather than some hoax it is hard to think of it as anything other than that he either really did experience these things or that he is severely, deeply delusional.
Unbelievably, there have been other individuals who have come forward claiming to have been a part of the Mars Defense Force as well, spinning their own tales of sci-fi insanity, and one is left to wonder what to make of it all. Also rather incredible is the large number of people who seem to actually believe it all, coming to the conclusion that there really are moon and Mars bases and that these tales are true. Are these the ravings of disturbed individuals or a giant hoax? Do they really believe what they are talking about? Is there anything to it at all? No matter what camp you are in or what you believe, one thing I think most of us can agree on is that it is all a wild roller coaster ride of weirdness, and entertaining at the very least.
Something big happened along Florida’s storied Space Coast, and seismologists are currently clueless about what it may have been. On the evening of Friday, March 8, homes throughout east Central Florida were shaken by a powerful tremor around 10:45 pm local time. Residents reported doors shaking or walls vibrating for minutes, but luckily no severe damage or injuries were reported by what seismographs in the town of Century, Florida recorded as a 2.6 magnitude earthquake.
Florida is one of the least seismically active states, so geologists and seismologists aren’t exactly sure if the tremor was an earthquake per se. Some meteorological events can cause the ground to shake, and there are plenty of man-made phenomena which can rattle the ground forcefully enough to be recorded by seismographs; hundreds of such events have been recorded over the past few years. Is this event related to the mystery boom phenomenon I’m currently obsessed with?
It’s possible, especially given that due to the area’s proximity to space launch facilities and Air Force installations, many Florida residents suspected the tremor could have been caused by aerospace activity. “It could be something like a hypersonic jet, munitions…or a sonic boom,” says Paul Earle, a seismologist with the USGS. “Unfortunately, we can’t give a definitive answer on exactly what it was.”
Naturally, a spokesperson for Patrick Air Force Base gave a statement claiming there were no military air exercises that day which could have caused the tremor:
We’ve been informed that there have been reports of a rumbling noise in the Space Coast area this past Friday. Having checked with our local organizations within the 45th Space Wing, it does not appear to have come from us. So I cannot comment at this time as to its origin.
With little other information to go on, this mysterious tremor will be thrown on the already massive and still growing pile of evidence suggesting a mysterious natural or unnatural phenomenon is shaking the Earth throughout the United States. Will we ever know what’s behind these unexplained booms and tremors?
A very rare piece of rock art dating back 12,250 years old depicts odd carvings not typical for that time during the Paleolithic Period. In fact, it has several oddities that make it quite different from other Late Upper Paleolithic art pieces. This rock in particular featured carvings of birds rather than deer, goats, and bison that were normally seen in drawings. The fact that rock is portable is also quite rare.
In addition to the birds drawn on the rock, it appears to show an actual scene instead of just individual figures of animals and/or humans. That would mean that it’s one of the earliest forms of narrative art ever discovered in Europe.
The limestone art piece, which measures 11.8 inches wide, was found at the Hort de la Bequera archaeological site in Spain in 2011. And it’s the only piece of its kind to have been discovered at the site even though they’ve been excavating that location for fourteen years.
Ancient carving from the Paleolithic Period (not the one discussed in this article)
Whoever created the art piece used a flint tool to engrave the lines into the soft limestone and the artist was very neat as there were no messy stroke marks which had been previously found in other art pieces from that time. There are five images engraved onto the rock: two humans, one large bird (probably a crane), and a chick. As for the fifth motif, there is a strange image close to the second human-like figure that can’t be identified. You can see pictures of this fascinating rock art by clicking here.
Photorealistic 3D model with 2D digital drawings superimposed.
Image: Ine´s Domingo et al., 2019
Image: University of Barcelona
In addition to the great, well-preserved condition the rock was in, researchers also created a 3D digital model of the art piece. While it’s hard to say for sure what the image represents, it is believed that it’s in reference to hunting and motherhood.
Inés Domingo from the University of Barcelona, and who is the lead author of the new study, described the rock art in a press release, saying in part, “This is one of the few found scenes so far which suggest the birth of a narrative art in Europe, and this theme is unique… In the represented scene the birds catch the attention, they are copied or chased by two human figures. We do not know the meaning of the scene for prehistoric peoples, but what it says is that not only they [the birds] were regarded as preys but also as a symbol for European Paleolithic societies.”
Ancient rock art (not the one discussed in this article)
The details of this discovery were published in the science journal L’Anthropologie which can be read here.
The art piece indicates that the artists during that time were a lot more sophisticated than previously thought, as they were able to create stories on rocks for people to find and admire thousands of years later. Now that’s remarkable.
This metallic looking object on the surface of Mars is Not from the Curiosity Mars Rover!
This metallic looking object on the surface of Mars is Not from the Curiosity Mars Rover!
A strange piece of what looks like to be a manufactured item has been spotted on the surface of Mars.
The metallic looking object which has a perfect circular hole in the middle has been spotted by Neville Thompson who posted it on hisGigapan page. The object can also be found onSOL 2013.
It's clearly not a part of the rover since there are no tracks around the object which is twisted up and almost destroyed. It is possible that the object originates from a vehicle or craft that was present at that location in the past?
NASA has announced yesterday that they would open up sealed boxes of moon rocks to study them more deeply. They said the tools today were not available back in the 1970s, so they could learn so much more...or so they said.
I of course throw that excuse in the garbage. You see NASA has been saying those rocks are really from the moon, however all evidence available to the public points to them being fake.
Lets go back to Aug 2009, when the world news announced that the Dutch National Museum has in its possession and on display...a fake moon rock. This moon rock was tested and found to simple petrified wood. Now unless the moon had ancient forests...LOL, this should be impossible. This moon rock, which is fake, is 100% proof that the Apollo missions were faked to make other countries perceive America as a world power.
The rock was first given to Prime Minister Willem Drees who received it back in Oct 6, 1969 from US Ambassador William Middendorf during a visit from the three Apollo 11 astronauts.
Since the NASA has done everything in its power to steal back the moon rocks from those who were given them. They would even go so far as to get court papers stating that those moon rocks who astronauts families own, were property of NASA and must be given back. Why? Because they were all fake moon rocks. Yes, its true.
I have to admit I am curious at what the scientists are actually doing opening those boxes? Perhaps NASA has purchased meteorites that were from the moon and are going to replace them with those to be tested? A simple switch behind closed doors and nobody would be the wiser.
Here is a another true fact. We no longer need NASA. They are obsolete and fail to give the public what they promised. Now we have Ellon Musk, who delivers on his promises in mere weeks. Its time to close down NASA and stop wasting the tax payers money on an organization with so much falsehood and lies behind it.
Remember the Dragon capsule Ellon Musk made in just a two weeks after NASA asked him to make it? Well it docked at the space station a few days ago, the video SpaceX uploaded to Youtube was HD quality. I saw the same footage on the NASA Internet live cams which was horrible quality...like that of an iPhone 3. So I ask you, what has NASA really done for us lately? Who has inspired the generations of kids and adults to take a new interest in science and space? Yeah, Ellon Musk of course.
BLASTS FROM THE PAST Swift, powerful bursts of charged particles emitted by the sun can be strong enough to breach Earth’s magnetosphere (blue bubble in illustration). To see how common such emissions have been in Earth’s past, scientists look for telltale data in tree rings and ice cores.
As the sun’s magnetic field shifts, it occasionally releases bursts of charged particles into space. In the most extreme solar storms, called solar proton events, these charged particles are dramatically sped up by interactions with other solar emissions: solar flares or coronal mass ejections. Even Earth’s protective magnetic field can’t deflect such swift, energetic particle streams. The radiation is particularly hazardous to modern technology and astronauts.
It’s unclear how common such extreme events are; satellite- and ground-based instruments have tracked them for only about 70 years. To look farther back in time, researchers hunt for spikes in cosmogenic radionuclides such as carbon-14 — recorded in tree rings — or beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 — preserved in ice cores. Such radionuclides form when cosmic rays interact with molecules in Earth’s atmosphere.
In 2017, scientists identified a sudden spike in tree ring carbon-14 dating to about 660 B.C. that might indicate a solar proton event. But a carbon-14 spike can also signal a supernova or a solar flare.
In the new study, researchers led by geologist Paschal O’Hare, then at Lund University in Sweden, examined two Greenland ice cores. O’Hare, now at Heathgate Resources in Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues found spikes in beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 dating to the same time.
The relative abundance of the radionuclides in the ice suggested that the 660 B.C. event was about 10 times more powerful than a 1956 event, the strongest solar storm recorded by instruments. The only known solar storm to rival the ancient storm’s power occurred in A.D. 774–775, an event also recorded in tree rings and ice cores.
Scientists have debated whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before a massive asteroid impact finished them off 66 million years ago. New research shows they were thriving in their final days.
Dinosaurs once reigned on Earth, until a cataclysmic event– now thought to have been a massive asteroid impact, or possibly intense volcanic activity – wiped them out about 66 million years ago during theMaastrichtianage at the end theLate Cretaceousepoch. This mass extinction event was sudden and brutal, powerful enough to wipe out the largest creatures to ever walk on the Earth – and countless others as well.
There has, however, been some debate as to what was happening before the mass extinction. Some scientists thought the dinosaurs were flourishing right up until their demise, while others suggested that they had already been in decline before they were finished off.
So which scenario is correct? A new study by researchers from Imperial College London, University College London and University of Bristol shows that it was the former.
Illustration of a late Maastrichtianpalaeoenvironment in North America, where dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, Edmontosaurus and Triceratops roamed the floodplains 66 million years ago. The Maastrichtian was the latest age of the Late Cretaceous epoch.
Dinosaurs were likely not doomed to extinction until the end of the Cretaceous, when the asteroid hit, declaring the end of their reign and leaving the planet to animals like mammals, lizards and a minor group of surviving dinosaurs: birds.
The results of our study suggest that dinosaurs as a whole were adaptable animals, capable of coping with the environmental changes and climatic fluctuations that happened during the last few million years of the Late Cretaceous. Climate change over prolonged time scales did not cause a long-term decline of dinosaurs through the last stages of this period.
According to the researchers, previous studies had underestimated the number of living species at the end of the Cretaceous period – when the asteroid hit – due to changing fossilization conditions. This led to the erroneous conclusion that some species had already been in decline or gone extinct before the asteroid collision.
The study focused on North America, where some of the most well-known dinosaurs used to roam, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops.
A massive asteroid impact – or possible intense volcanic activity – caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, according to current research.
Image via James Thew/iStockphoto.
Way back then, North America was split into two halves by an inland sea. The Rocky Mountains in the western half were forming at this time, and sediment from the mountains created ideal conditions for preserving dinosaur bones. Conditions in the eastern half were far less conducive to preservation, however. Fossils in the western half, along with some mathematical predictions, had been used to suggest that dinosaur populations were in decline before the asteroid hit. Paper co-author Philip Mannion, from University College London, explained:
Most of what we know about Late Cretaceous North American dinosaurs comes from an area smaller than one-third of the present-day continent, and yet we know that dinosaurs roamed all across North America, from Alaska to New Jersey and down to Mexico.
The researchers used a method called ecological niche modelling – or species distribution modelling – that takes into account different environmental conditions, such as temperature and rainfall, which each species needs to survive. When they mapped these conditions, both across the continent and over time, they were able to determine where different dinosaur species could most easily survive changing conditions – before the asteroid impact occurred.
Global map showing distribution of surface temperature on the Earth in the Late Cretaceous period. Warmer colors show higher temperatures while colder colors indicate lower temperatures.
Instead of being in decline, they found that many species were actually more widespread than previously thought. Those species, however, were in locations where fossils were less likely to be preserved and those locations were smaller than initially estimated. The lesser numbers of fossils in these areas had previously led scientists to the conclusion that those species were already in decline, when they actually were not.According to the researchers:
The results of our study suggest that dinosaurs as a whole were adaptable animals, capable of coping with the environmental changes and climatic fluctuations that happened during the last few million years of the Late Cretaceous. Climate change over prolonged time scales did not cause a long-term decline of dinosaurs through the last stages of this period.
Bottom line: These findings make this tale all the more tragic – dinosaurs were thriving at their peak on this planet in the Late Cretaceous. They had taken over the world, and survived other potential calamities, only to have a random chunk of rock from space – or unprecedented volcanic eruptions – seal their ultimate fate.
Back in December of 2018, we reported on a mysterious chaff cloud thatemerged over the Midwest. Just days later, we were first to point out a number of other similar and highly persistent formations that popped upacross the eastern United States. In the first case, we were able to get the USAF to tell us where that cloud of metallic radar reflective material came from, at least according to them, but in the other cases we didn't have as good of luck. Now, a new radar clip shows the formation of a big chaff cloud near Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico.
The event occurred on March 5th, 2019 at around 19:20 UTC, which equates to roughly 12:20pm local time. Over a swath of sky beginning to the west of Cannon Air Force Base, the plume first appears, covering roughly 30 miles over a couple hours time. Cannon AFB is used by Air Force Special Operations Command and is home the 27th Special Operations Wing and its MC-130s, AC-130s, CV-22s, MQ-9s, U-28s, C-146s and other propeller-driven aircraft, some of which could have deployed the chaff from their expendable countermeasures systems.
GOOGLE EARTH
Cannon AFB continues to expand after being converted to a master base for USAF Special Operations Command aircraft.
See the radar recording below. The weather was very mild at the time. With partly cloudy conditions and no precipitation whatsoever.
NEXLAB
There is the 'Pecos' cluster of Military Operating Areas (MOAs) just to the west of Cannon AFB that extends out nearly 100 miles, it seems as if this may have been where the release began from an aircraft. It took roughly two hours for the chaff to cross the state line into Texas. Like other chaff plumes we have seen as of late, it stayed remarkably cohesive over a long period of time.
SKYVECTOR
VFR sectional shows the Pecos MOAs located to the west of Cannon AFB. Even though the release may have begun there, it spread all across the county and into Texas.
We watched the aviation activity over the area at the time and didn't see anything out of the ordinary or a culprit that could have released the chaff as part of a test or other unique operation. Keep in mind that most military aircraft aren't tracked using the software. We also listened to radio recordings from the time period and didn't hear Albuquerque Center communicate with an aircraft about the chaff release.
We have reached out to Cannon AFB about the peculiar chaff cloud, but after 24 hours they haven't gotten back to us yet. We will update this post if they do.
Author's note 1:15pm PST 3/7/19: The time stamp was read wrong, which means the deployment wasn't nearly as fast. Changes have been made to the text to reflect this.
Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 6052, a pair of colliding galaxies that lies in the constellation of Hercules, about 230 million light-years away from Earth.
A new image from the venerable Hubble Space Telescopeshows what happens when two galaxies collide. That's relevant for us residents of the Milky Way, because our own galaxy is expected to collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in about four billion years.
The image captures a scene some 230 million light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Hercules. (One light-year is the distance that light travels in a year — about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion kilometers.) Here, Hubble zooms in on the merging galaxies, a double object known as NGC 6052.
When NGC 6052 was first cataloged in 1784 by William Herschel, it was classified as a single, irregular galaxy with an odd shape. Now, however, we know that shape is odd because two galaxies are coming together.
Scientists study mergers such as NGC 6052 to better understand galactic evolution, and to get an idea what our own collision will look like a few billion years from now. Galactic mergers are very common in the universe; we know, for example, that Andromeda devoured one of the Milky Way's siblings long ago. The Milky Way-Andromeda collision isn't expected to pose any threat to Earth, because the distances between individual stars in galaxies are so vast, but scientists are still interested in the mechanics of how these interactions happen.
"A long time ago, gravity drew the two galaxies together into the chaotic state we now observe," European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in a description of the new photo. (Hubble is a joint mission of NASA and ESA.)
"Stars from within both of the original galaxies now follow new trajectories caused by the new gravitational effects," they added. "However, actual collisions between stars themselves are very rare, as stars are very small relative to the distances between them — most of a galaxy is empty space. Eventually, the galaxies will fully merge to form a single, stable galaxy."
Hubble launched to Earth orbit in April 1990. The iconic telescope received multiple visits from astronauts over the years, to maintain or replace its components. The last visit, in 2009, installed the Wide Field Camera 3, which obtained the new image. Hubble also took an image of NGC 6052 with an older instrument, Wide Field Camera 2; scientists released that one in 2015.
Hubble is expected to keep operating well into the 2020s. Its successor, the $8.9 billion James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch in 2021.
New fuel cell could help fix the renewable energy storage problem
Novel fuel cells can help store electricity from renewables, such as wind farms, by converting it into a chemical fuel for long-term storage and then changing it back to electricity when needed.
ISTOCK.COM/RON_THOMAS
New fuel cell could help fix the renewable energy storage problem
If we want a shot at transitioning to renewable energy, we’ll need one crucial thing: technologies that can convert electricity from wind and sun into a chemical fuel for storage and vice versa. Commercial devices that do this exist, but most are costly and perform only half of the equation. Now, researchers have created lab-scale gadgets that do both jobs. If larger versions work as well, they would help make it possible—or at least more affordable—to run the world on renewables.
The market for such technologies has grown along with renewables: In 2007, solar and wind provided just 0.8% of all power in the United States; in 2017, that number was 8%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But the demand for electricity often doesn’t match the supply from solar and wind. In sunny California, for example, solar panels regularly produce more power than needed in the middle of the day, but none at night, after most workers and students return home.
Some utilities are beginning to install massive banks of batteries in hopes of storing excess energy and evening out the balance sheet. But batteries are costly and store only enough energy to back up the grid for a few hours at most. Another option is to store the energy by converting it into hydrogen fuel. Devices called electrolyzers do this by using electricity—ideally from solar and wind power—to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, a carbon-free fuel. A second set of devices called fuel cells can then convert that hydrogen back to electricity to power cars, trucks, and buses, or to feed it to the grid.
But commercial electrolyzers and fuel cells use different catalysts to speed up the two reactions, meaning a single device can’t do both jobs. To get around this, researchers have been experimenting with a newer type of fuel cell, called a proton conducting fuel cell (PCFC), which can make fuel or convert it back into electricity using just one set of catalysts.
PCFCs consist of two electrodes separated by a membrane that allows protons across. At the first electrode, known as the air electrode, steam and electricity are fed into a ceramic catalyst, which splits the steam’s water molecules into positively charged hydrogen ions (protons), electrons, and oxygen molecules. The electrons travel through an external wire to the second electrode—the fuel electrode—where they meet up with the protons that crossed through the membrane. There, a nickel-based catalyst stitches them together to make hydrogen gas (H2). In previous PCFCs, the nickel catalysts performed well, but the ceramic catalysts were inefficient, using less than 70% of the electricity to split the water molecules. Much of the energy was lost as heat.
Now, two research teams have made key strides in improving this efficiency. They both focused on making improvements to the air electrode, because the nickel-based fuel electrode did a good enough job. In January, researchers led by chemist Sossina Haile at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, reported in Energy & Environmental Science that they came up with a fuel electrode made from a ceramic alloy containing six elements that harnessed 76% of its electricity to split water molecules. And in today’s issue of Nature Energy, Ryan O’Hayre, a chemist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, reports that his team has done one better. Their ceramic alloy electrode, made up of five elements, harnesses as much as 98% of the energy it’s fed to split water.
When both teams run their setups in reverse, the fuel electrode splits H2 molecules into protons and electrons. The electrons travel through an external wire to the air electrode—providing electricity to power devices. When they reach the electrode, they combine with oxygen from the air and protons that crossed back over the membrane to produce water.
The O’Hayre group’s latest work is “impressive,” Haile says. “The electricity you are putting in is making H2 and not heating up your system. They did a really good job with that.” Still, she cautions, both her new device and the one from the O’Hayre lab are small laboratory demonstrations. For the technology to have a societal impact, researchers will need to scale up the button-size devices, a process that typically reduces performance. If engineers can make that happen, the cost of storing renewable energy could drop precipitously, helping utilities do away with their dependence on fossil fuels.
Solar storms can be even more powerful than what our measurements so far have indicated — and we’re still very unprepared.
Image via Pixabay.
Although our planet’smagnetic fieldkeeps us blissfully unaware of it, the Earth is constantly being pelted with cosmic particles. Sometimes, however — during events known as solar storms, caused by explosions on the sun’s surface — this stream of particles turns into a deluge and breaks through that magnetic field.
Research over the last 70 years or so has revealed that these events can threaten the integrity of our technological infrastructure. Electrical grids, various communication infrastructure, satellites, and air traffic can all be floored by such storms. We’ve seen extensive power cuts take place in Quebec, Canada (1989) and Malmö, Sweden (2003) following such events, for example.
Now, new research shows that we’ve underestimated the hazards posed by solar storms — the authors report that we’ve underestimated just how powerful they can become.
‘Tis but a drizzle!
“If that solar storm had occurred today, it could have had severe effects on our high-tech society,” says Raimund Muscheler, professor of geology at Lund University and co-author of the study. “That’s why we must increase society’s protection again solar storms.”
Up to now, researchers have used direct instrumental observations to study solar storms. But the new study reports that these observations likely underestimated how violent the events can become. The paper, led by researchers at Lund University, analyzed ice coresrecovered from Greenland to study past solar storms. These cores formed over the last 100,000 years or so, and have captured evidence of storms over that time.
According to the team, the cores recorded a very powerful solar storm occurring in 600 BCE. Also drawing on data recovered from the growth rings of ancient trees, the team pinpointed two further (and powerful) solar storms that took place in 775 and 994 CE.
The result thus showcases that, although rare, massive solar storms are a naturally recurring part of solar activity.
This finding should motivate us to review the possibility that a similar event will take place sooner or later — and we should prepare. Both the Quebec and Malmö incidents show how deeply massive solar storms can impact our technology, and how vulnerable our society is to them today.
“Our research suggests that the risks are currently underestimated. We need to be better prepared,” Muscheler concludes.
The paper “Multiradionuclide evidence for an extreme solar proton event around 2,610 B.P. (∼660 BC)” has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In a surprising new study, scientists claim that sound waves could theoretically carry mass, which implies that they’re also affected by gravity.
“You would expect classical physics results like this one to have been known for a long time by now,” Angelo Esposito from Columbia University, the lead author on the paper, told Scientific American. “It’s something we stumbled upon almost by chance.”
Previously, researchers at Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University showed that phonons could have mass in a superfluid — a liquid that flows without friction. Phonons are particle-like excitations which correspond to collective oscillations of atoms inside a molecule or a crystal.
It’s easier to understand phonons in relation to their cousins, the much more famous photons. We know from Newtonian physics that atoms and molecules vibrate away from their equilibrium positions, a motion that we recognize as heat. Basically, the more the atomic lattice vibrates, the higher the temperature. But this classical view doesn’t offer the full picture unless we also include quantum mechanics — the physics of the microscopic world.
‘Quantum’ refers to the smallest indivisible unit to things. For instance, a quantum of light is a photon — the smallest amount of light there is. Similarly, when you apply quantum mechanics to a lattice structure, there’s a ‘smallest packet of lattice vibration’ called a phonon.
The word phonon is derived from ‘phonos’, which is greek for sound. This is because long-wavelength phonons can be interpreted as single waves of sound propagating through the lattice.
In their new study, Esposito and colleagues used approximations known as effective field theory to show that phonon could not only have mass in a superfluid, but in other types of materials as well, including room-temperature liquids and solids; even in air, the primary medium through which sound waves propagate.
The study not only contradicts that popular notion that phonons are massless, but also suggests that they carry negative mass. Something with negative mass also implies negative gravity, which means it would repel other matter around it. Likewise, if you’d push an object with negative mass, it would accelerate towards you. Phonons having negative mass implies that their trajectory would gradually move away from a gravitational field such as that of the Earth. For water, the researchers calculated that phonons traveling through such a medium would drift by about one degree over 15 kilometers, which makes it extremely challenging to measure.
“In a gravitational field phonons slowly accelerate in the opposite direction that you would expect, say, a brick to fall,” Rafael Krichevsky, a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, told Live Science.
Hover, this mass is extremely tiny — comparable with a hydrogen atom, about 10–24 grams. This is another measuring challenge, although it is still theoretically possible to do. According to the researchers, we do not currently have the necessary technology to measure the mass of phonons. However, they envision an experimental setup where super-precise clocks would detect the slight curvature of a phonon’s path.
Although sound waves carrying mass will not influence our daily lives, the notion carries certain important practical implications in science. For instance, in the dense cores of neutron stars, sound waves move at nearly the speed of light — that’s a lot of energy, meaning that an anti-gravitational sound wave should pose significant effects on the star’s behavior.
What Scientists Found After Sifting Through Dust in Our Solar System
What Scientists Found After Sifting Through Dust in Our Solar System
Just as dust gathers in corners and along bookshelves in our homes, dust piles up in space too. But when the dust settles in the solar system, it’s often in rings. Several dust rings circle the Sun. The rings trace the orbits of planets, whose gravity tugs dust into place around the Sun, as it drifts by on its way to the center of the solar system.
The dust consists of crushed-up remains from the formation of the solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago — rubble from asteroid collisions or crumbs from blazing comets. Dust is dispersed throughout the entire solar system, but it collects at grainy rings overlying the orbits of Earth and Venus, rings that can be seen with telescopes on Earth. By studying this dust — what it’s made of, where it comes from, and how it moves through space — scientists seek clues to understanding the birth of planets and the composition of all that we see in the solar system.
Two recent studies report new discoveries of dust rings in the inner solar system. One study uses NASA data to outline evidence for a dust ring around the Sun at Mercury’s orbit. A second study from NASA identifies the likely source of the dust ring at Venus’ orbit: a group of never-before-detected asteroids co-orbiting with the planet.
“It’s not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system,” said Marc Kuchner, an author on the Venus study and astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is right in our neighborhood.”
In this illustration, several dust rings circle the Sun. These rings form when planets’ gravities tug dust grains into orbit around the Sun. Recently, scientists have detected a dust ring at Mercury’s orbit. Others hypothesize the source of Venus’ dust ring is a group of never-before-detected co-orbital asteroids.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith
Another Ring Around the Sun
Guillermo Stenborg and Russell Howard, both solar scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., did not set out to find a dust ring. “We found it by chance,” Stenborg said, laughing. The scientists summarized their findings in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on Nov. 21, 2018.
They describe evidence of a fine haze of cosmic dust over Mercury’s orbit, forming a ring some 9.3 million miles wide. Mercury — 3,030 miles wide, just big enough for the continental United States to stretch across — wades through this vast dust trail as it circles the Sun.
Ironically, the two scientists stumbled upon the dust ring while searching for evidence of a dust-free region close to the Sun. At some distance from the Sun, according to a decades-old prediction, the star’s mighty heat should vaporize dust, sweeping clean an entire stretch of space. Knowing where this boundary is can tell scientists about the composition of the dust itself, and hint at how planets formed in the young solar system.
Scientists think planets start off as mere grains of dust. They emerge from giant disks of gas and dust that circle young stars. Gravity and other forces cause material within the disk to collide and coalesce. (illustration)
Credits: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
So far, no evidence has been found of dust-free space, but that’s partly because it would be difficult to detect from Earth. No matter how scientists look from Earth, all the dust in between us and the Sun gets in the way, tricking them into thinking perhaps space near the Sun is dustier than it really is.
Stenborg and Howard figured they could work around this problem by building a model based on pictures of interplanetary space from NASA’s STEREO satellite — short for Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory.
Ultimately, the two wanted to test their new model in preparation for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which is currently flying a highly elliptic orbit around the Sun, swinging closer and closer to the star over the next seven years. They wanted to apply their technique to the images Parker will send back to Earth and see how dust near the Sun behaves.
Scientists have never worked with data collected in this unexplored territory, so close to the Sun. Models like Stenborg and Howard’s provide crucial context for understanding Parker Solar Probe’s observations, as well as hinting at what kind of space environment the spacecraft will find itself in — sooty or sparkling clean.
Two kinds of light show up in STEREO images: light from the Sun’s blazing outer atmosphere — called the corona — and light reflected off all the dust floating through space. The sunlight reflected off this dust, which slowly orbits the Sun, is about 100 times brighter than coronal light.
“We’re not really dust people,” said Howard, who is also the lead scientist for the cameras on STEREO and Parker Solar Probe that take pictures of the corona. “The dust close to the Sun just shows up in our observations, and generally, we have thrown it away.” Solar scientists like Howard — who study solar activity for purposes such as forecasting imminent space weather, including giant explosions of solar material that the Sun can sometimes send our way — have spent years developing techniques to remove the effect of this dust. Only after removing light contamination from dust can they clearly see what the corona is doing.
The two scientists built their model as a tool for others to get rid of the pesky dust in STEREO — and eventually Parker Solar Probe — images, but the prediction of dust-free space lingered in the back of their minds. If they could devise a way of separating the two kinds of light and isolate the dust-shine, they could figure out how much dust was really there. Finding that all the light in an image came from the corona alone, for example, could indicate they’d found dust-free space at last.
Mercury’s dust ring was a lucky find, a side discovery Stenborg and Howard made while they were working on their model. When they used their new technique on the STEREO images, they noticed a pattern of enhanced brightness along Mercury’s orbit — more dust, that is — in the light they’d otherwise planned to discard.
“It wasn’t an isolated thing,” Howard said. “All around the Sun, regardless of the spacecraft’s position, we could see the same five percent increase in dust brightness, or density. That said something was there, and it’s something that extends all around the Sun.”
Scientists never considered that a ring might exist along Mercury’s orbit, which is maybe why it’s gone undetected until now, Stenborg said. “People thought that Mercury, unlike Earth or Venus, is too small and too close to the Sun to capture a dust ring,” he said. “They expected that the solar wind and magnetic forces from the Sun would blow any excess dust at Mercury’s orbit away.”
With an unexpected discovery and sensitive new tool under their belt, the researchers are still interested in the dust-free zone. As Parker Solar Probe continues its exploration of the corona, their model can help others reveal any other dust bunnies lurking near the Sun.
Asteroids Hiding in Venus’ Orbit
Ths isn’t the first time scientists have found a dust ring in the inner solar system. Twenty-five years ago, scientists discovered that Earth orbits the Sun within a giant ring of dust. Others uncovered a similar ring near Venus’ orbit, first using archival data from the German-American Helios space probes in 2007, and then confirming it in 2013, with STEREO data.
Since then, scientists determined the dust ring in Earth’s orbit comes largely from the asteroid belt, the vast, doughnut-shaped region between Mars and Jupiter where most of the solar system’s asteroids live. These rocky asteroids constantly crash against each other, sloughing dust that drifts deeper into the Sun’s gravity, unless Earth’s gravity pulls the dust aside, into our planet’s orbit.
At first, it seemed likely that Venus’ dust ring formed like Earth’s, from dust produced elsewhere in the solar system. But when Goddard astrophysicist Petr Pokorny modeled dust spiraling toward the Sun from the asteroid belt, his simulations produced a ring that matched observations of Earth’s ring — but not Venus’.
This discrepancy made him wonder if not the asteroid belt, where else does the dust in Venus’ orbit come from? After a series of simulations, Pokorny and his research partner Marc Kuchner hypothesized it comes from a group of never-before-detected asteroids that orbit the Sun alongside Venus. They published their work in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on March 12, 2019.
“I think the most exciting thing about this result is it suggests a new population of asteroids that probably holds clues to how the solar system formed,” Kuchner said. If Pokorny and Kuchner can observe them, this family of asteroids could shed light on Earth and Venus’ early histories. Viewed with the right tools, the asteroids could also unlock clues to the chemical diversity of the solar system.
Because it’s dispersed over a larger orbit, Venus’ dust ring is much larger than the newly detected ring at Mercury’s. About 16 million miles from top to bottom and 6 million miles wide, the ring is littered with dust whose largest grains are roughly the size of those in coarse sandpaper. It’s about 10 percent denser with dust than surrounding space. Still, it’s diffuse — pack all the dust in the ring together, and all you’d get is an asteroid two miles across.
Using a dozen different modeling tools to simulate how dust moves around the solar system, Pokorny modeled all the dust sources he could think of, looking for a simulated Venus ring that matched the observations. The list of all the sources he tried sounds like a roll call of all the rocky objects in the solar system: Main Belt asteroids, Oort Cloud comets, Halley-type comets, Jupiter-family comets, recent collisions in the asteroid belt.
Asteroids represent building blocks of the solar system’s rocky planets. When they collide in the asteroid belt, they shed dust that scatters throughout the solar system, which scientists can study for clues to the early history of planets. (illustration)
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
“But none of them worked,” Kuchner said. “So, we started making up our own sources of dust.”
Perhaps, the two scientists thought, the dust came from asteroids much closer to Venus than the asteroid belt. There could be a group of asteroids co-orbiting the Sun with Venus — meaning they share Venus’ orbit, but stay far away from the planet, often on the other side of the Sun. Pokorny and Kuchner reasoned a group of asteroids in Venus’ orbit could have gone undetected until now because it’s difficult to point earthbound telescopes in that direction, so close to the Sun, without light interference from the Sun.
Co-orbiting asteroids are an example of what’s called a resonance, an orbital pattern that locks different orbits together, depending on how their gravitational influences meet. Pokorny and Kuchner modeled many potential resonances: asteroids that circle the Sun twice for every three of Venus’ orbits, for example, or nine times for Venus’ ten, and one for one. Of all the possibilities, one group alone produced a realistic simulation of the Venus dust ring: a pack of asteroids that occupies Venus’ orbit, matching Venus’ trips around the Sun one for one.
But the scientists couldn’t just call it a day after finding a hypothetical solution that worked. “We thought we’d discovered this population of asteroids, but then had to prove it and show it works,” Pokorny said. “We got excited, but then you realize, ‘Oh, there’s so much work to do.’”
They needed to show that the very existence of the asteroids makes sense in the solar system. It would be unlikely, they realized, that asteroids in these special, circular orbits near Venus arrived there from somewhere else like the asteroid belt. Their hypothesis would make more sense if the asteroids had been there since the very beginning of the solar system.
The scientists built another model, this time starting with a throng of 10,000 asteroids neighboring Venus. They let the simulation fast forward through 4.5 billion years of solar system history, incorporating all the gravitational effects from each of the planets. When the model reached present-day, about 800 of their test asteroids survived the test of time.
Pokorny considers this an optimistic survival rate. It indicates that asteroids could have formed near Venus’ orbit in the chaos of the early solar system, and some could remain there today, feeding the dust ring nearby.
The next step is actually pinning down and observing the elusive asteroids. “If there’s something there, we should be able to find it,” Pokorny said. Their existence could be verified with space-based telescopes like Hubble, or perhaps interplanetary space-imagers similar to STEREO’s. Then, the scientists will have more questions to answer: How many of them are there, and how big are they? Are they continuously shedding dust, or was there just one break-up event?
Dust Rings Around Other Stars
In this illustration, an asteroid breaks apart under the powerful gravity of LSPM J0207+3331, a white dwarf star located around 145 light-years away. Scientists think crumbling asteroids supply the dust rings surrounding this old star.
The dust rings that Mercury and Venus shepherd are just a planet or two away, but scientists have spotted many other dust rings in distant star systems. Vast dust rings can be easier to spot than exoplanets, and could be used to infer the existence of otherwise hidden planets, and even their orbital properties.
But interpreting extrasolar dust rings isn’t straightforward. “In order to model and accurately read the dust rings around other stars, we first have to understand the physics of the dust in our own backyard,” Kuchner said. By studying neighboring dust rings at Mercury, Venus and Earth, where dust traces out the enduring effects of gravity in the solar system, scientists can develop techniques for reading between the dust rings both near and far.
Since the early 1970’s numerous reports of a humming nose have been reported across theworld. Original reports began in the United Kingdom and spread to the US in the early1990’s. Reports include a type of diesel engine noise heard at a low-frequency indicating some type of electromagnetic energy noise that some people hear due to sensitivity, while others do not. People have speculated that the sound could be due to cell-towers, delusions, local noises in the area, HAARP, UFO’s, and more. But most of the research has led people to dead ends….until now!!!
A geoscientist by the name of David Deming has done some intense research on this subject and may just have the answer you’re longing to know. The video below dives through some of Deming’s research and I believe you will be shocked when you find out the true source…..
Every claimed alien abduction case is weird by default, but the 1973 abduction of Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson in Pascagoula, Mississippi is weird even by those standards. The two men were fishing on the west bank of the Pascagoula river when, they said, a UFO appeared hovering above the ground. Three creatures disembarked from the craft, paralyzed Parker and Hickson, and brought them aboard. According to the men, the creatures were pale with remarkably wrinkled skin, “lobster-like” claws for hands, and carrot-shaped growths where their eyes and ears should have been. The creatures seemed to each have one thick leg, like two legs had been fused together. On the ship, the creatures allegedly performed medical procedures and levitated them back to their original position 20 minutes later.
The story drew international attention and became one of the most well-known alien abduction cases. Through the course of the investigation, some of the big guns of the UFO world were brought out, with Hickson and Parker being interviewed by James Harder and J. Allen Hynek (of Project Blue Book fame), who concluded that Parker and Hicks had “a very real, frightening experience.” While some small details changed over the course of time, neither man ever recanted their stories. Charles Hickson passed away in 2011, and to the end of his life he maintained that the story was true.
Now 46 years later, a couple from the Pascagoula area has come forward claiming that they too saw something that night, but never before went public with their testimony for fear of ridicule. According to the Sun, Maria and Vernon Jerry Blair were sitting in their car looking out over the Pascagoula river, on the opposite bank from Parker and Hickson, when they saw strange blue lights begin circling around the area. Maria Blair says:
“I thought was an aeroplane because of its bright lights flashing. And it just kept going back and forth across the sky. I told my husband there’s something wrong with that plane, it’s like he doesn’t know where he wants to go.”
The couple allegedly watched the lights for approximately 40 minutes, before stepping out of their car and walking down the pier towards the water. Maria says that’s when she saw one of the creatures emerge from the water:
“We started walking down the pier and something came up out of the water. It was like a person. I told Jerry ‘There’s somebody out there’. They came up out of the water, then went back down. So I’m standing there waiting for this person and the water rippled out.
[Jerry] said ‘Come on – there’s nobody out there’. I know I saw it.
I walked down to the boat and it was about 11.30pm to 12pm before I came back down the pier. I was by myself. I ran back to the car.”
The impetus for the Blairs coming forward was apparently the recently published book Pascagoula-The Closest Encounter by Calvin Parker, who had previously remained largely hidden from media attention since the incident. Calvin Parker met with Maria and Vernon last Wednesday for the first time and says he felt an immediate connection to the couple:
“It was a very emotional meeting from the beginning. It started out with both of us tearing up and automatically bonding. I felt like I had known [Maria] for years. It started off with her telling me that she saw the abduction on October 11, 1973, but didn’t know who was involved until the following day.
Mrs Blair then set out on a quest to find me so she could see if we were okay. But she had no luck because I was in hiding away from the media attention. Her husband told her she would be a fool for coming forward and that everyone would make her out to be crazy.
So, she kept this to herself telling me she would think about it every night and worry about me. Just like me – she had secrets that would haunt us for the rest of our lives.
Thank God I wrote the book as it has helped us come together. Although we have just met we have had a connection for over 45 years.”
It’s a weird case. The aliens are weird. The witness testimony is weird. There are weird holes in the descriptions of events. And everyone involved is weirdly earnest. Witness testimony is never proof of anything, but it’s yet another layer in one of the strangest encounters with the paranormal that’s ever been recorded.
UFOs have always been paradoxical — viewed from the corridors of power as a tangible national security concern warranting decades of secret investigations, they are also frustratingly impalpable cultural artifacts. As real phenomena, they continue to flit in and out of our perception, sometimes profoundly affecting individual lives. Meanwhile, they permeate our culture as iconographic entertainment products. UFOs are real, and they are unreal. This dichotomy demands some focused attention.
Art by Andreas M. Wiese.
The literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin saw in the cinematic medium a “unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.” Benjamin died in 1940, seven years prior to the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon. Had he lived to experience the age of the flying saucer, and of saucer movies, his observation would likely have been extended to include the “alien.”
The transcendent, actualizing power of cinema has been similarly noted by the artist Valie Export, who suggests that films are “expansions of our structures of time and space, of our experiential structures… they are expansions of our reality and our independent consciousness.” Through cinema, says Export, “the past is made visible, space and time can be transported… the boundaries between artificial and natural reality, between actual and possible reality… between man and object are transcended.”
The spectacle and the hyperreal
The social theorist Guy Debord spoke of the “spectacular society,” in which “the real world changes into simple images… and the simple images become real.” In our spectacular society, said Debord, “the image matters more than the object, in fact, much more so than mere objective truth.” The image replaces the truth – it is truth, it is reality. The resultant state, in postmodern theory, is “hyperreality.”
An inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies… [it is] a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
Something that is hyperreal, then, is simultaneously real andunreal, fact and fantasy.
The key words in the above definition are “technologically advanced.” Technologies of reproduction (mechanical and digital) have ushered in the age of the hyperreal, an age where simulations of reality threaten to dissolve the boundaries between “fact” and “fantasy,” between “true” and “false,” “real” and “imaginary.” It is my contention that cinematic simulations of UFOlogical history have all but consumed the history itself through the process of replication, just as humans were consumed and replicated as pod people in genre classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).
The power of cinema
Cinema has an essential mystical ability to completely detach us from our physical environment and transport us to another, more vivid, realm of perception; a realm where everything is at once illusory, yet strangely real.
In film studies, anything that exists within the world of the film is known as diegesis. The cinema screen separates their fictional world from our “real” world. But, actually, the diegesis seeps through the screen into our world, into our subconscious. It becomes part of our reality.
Key to cinema’s power is that movies, in their slick, neatly packaged, self-contained way, serve to narrativize and contextualize the events, debates, and processes that constitute our frustratingly non-narrative world. Life rarely makes sense, but movies usually do, and in that we take comfort and, therein lies the problem: movies, no matter how realistic they are in the events they depict, are not real life. They are, at best, reflections of our reality, snapshots of it, simulations of it, skewed and distorted through the ideological framework of those who have made them.
Movies masquerade as the final word on a given topic. No matter what the subject, and regardless of how much that subject has already been written about and debated, once it is committed to film – once it has received the full Hollywood treatment – it is embedded firmly and forever into the popular consciousness. Imprinted on our psyche. Plunged into the deep wells of memory and imagination.
UFO reality
Unidentified Flying Objects are “real,” which is to say they exist independently of cinema, and of pop-culture more broadly. UFOs have been investigated by governments around the world for seven decades. What the phenomenon represents is open for debate, and various theories have been propounded, from secret military aircraft, to natural phenomena, otherworldly intelligences, and even untapped human potential. The point is that even in a world without movies, people would continue to report UFOs. People were reporting UFOs, and flying saucers specifically, long before Hollywood got in on the act.
UFOlogy informs Hollywood more than Hollywood informs UFOlogy, which is to say that Hollywood engages with UFO lore in a parasitic fashion, sucking dry the pulsing veins of a seventy year old subculture. The industry grabs hold of fringe ideas and popularizes them through the science-fiction genre: Men in Black, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fourth Kind, Area 51. Hollywood didn’t create these terms, they were all part of the common language of UFOlogy decades before Hollywood lifted them.
In Hollywood’s UFO movies, broadly speaking, art imitates life. If the opposite were true, then following the release of James Cameron’s Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time, we might reasonably have expected thousands of people to have begun reporting ten-foot-tall blue aliens. This did not happen; just as Hollywood’s forceful projection of the ‘little green men’ meme has failed to result in mass sightings of little green men (although reports of such entities do lightly pepper the UFO literature).
When it comes to UFOs, Hollywood produces depictions, albeit not entirely faithful ones, of what people actually report. This is not to say that what’s reported is necessarily true or accurate, but merely that Hollywood sees dramatic potential in these reports.
My position is this: Hollywood draws extensively from fact-based discourse on UFOs – a phenomenon whose existence is already rejected by consensus reality. The presentation of this UFO discourse onscreen — and particularly within the context of the sci-fi genre — serves to blur the boundaries between UFO fact and fantasy.
UFOs and the hyperreal process
Cinematic simulations of UFOlogical history (UFO movies and TV shows) simultaneously actualize and fictionalize their underlying subject matter – it becomes hyperreal, both real and unreal. We can unpack this concept into what I consider to be the three phases of UFOlogical hyperreality:
Phase one
SIMULATION
In which a film or TV show is produced that reflects a basic UFOlogical reality.
Phase two
RECEPTION
In which the basic UFOlogical reality is screened as spectacle for mass consumption, and, in the process, is masked and perverted through the cultural value of the medium (in this case film or TV, but we could also extend it to video games, comic books, etc.).
Phase three
HYPERREALITY
In which reality and simulation are experienced as without difference, or rather, the image has come to mean more to us than any underlying reality.
Essentially, then, the hyperreality of the UFO phenomenon has arisen primarily through processes of mass media simulation. The blurring of true and false, real and imaginary, through that most magical of mediums (cinema), and within the context of that most fantastical of genres (science fiction), engenders our acceptance of the UFO as just that: a fictional media construct with little or no grounding in our lived historical reality. And yet, thanks to their permanent residency in the popular imagination, UFOs are no less real to us as a result.
UFO tourism: The Little A’Le’Inn near Area 51 in Nevada.
It boils down to this…
In our hyperreal world, a world where Roswell is better understood as a plot device and Area 51 is a tourist attraction – a UFOlogical Disneyland – debates surrounding official “Disclosure” of UFO reality (whatever that reality might be) are meaningless. How does one Disclose what is already hyper-real? The hyperreality of the UFO phenomenon in the popular imagination nullifies its potential to be either real or unreal, because it is now, and perhaps always will be, both.
Of course, this hyperreality model does not offer a solution to the UFO enigma, because it does not address what UFOs are at an ontological level. But it does, I believe, go a very long way towards explaining why UFOs continue to defy acceptance within our consensus reality.
And so, again, if you care about UFOs, you should care a great deal about UFO movies. They have shaped your perceptions of the phenomenon, often without conscious intent, but sometimes wilfully. With this in mind, when next we encounter a silver screen saucer, let us all take a moment to peer up from our popcorn, and to separate the fact from the fantasy. We can but try.
Pareidolia: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.
Mars: a red planet covered in pareidolia.
The Opportunity Mars rover may be dead, but the phenomena it helped propagate is alive and well and continuing to cause odd news stories about creatures, humanoids and strange out-of-place objects on the surface of the fourth rock from the Sun. The latest can be seen in aphotographmaking the usual romp across the paranormal and weird news side of the Internet showing what appears to be a piece of metal with a perfectly round hole cut into it lying on the surface of Mars as if it: a) fell off of an alien spaceship; b) was left by humans who secretly visited the planet; c) is part of an abandoned alien city slowly rising up as the soil is blown away. Or it could be a rock.
Credit: NASA
The photo was the star of a video uploaded this week on the WhatsUpInTheSky37 YouTube channel, which attributes it to a “Shamus” who apparently found it at a really cool site called Gigapan for SOL 2013 which shows panoramic views of the Martian surface that can be moved and zoomed. All of that could be more impressive than the object itself, which indeed looks like a triangular piece of metal with a perfect circle cut out that skeptics know from looking at other pareidolia-fied photos from Mars and the Moon could very well be a rock whose image is distorted by shadows and angles.
Or it could be something else.
On the “piece of a human Martian probe” side, commenters point out that it could be debris from the lander that brought Curiosity to Mars or it could have fallen to the surface from another successful or failed Mars mission. Adding a little imagination, it could be a piece of a spaceship or vehicle or other equipment from a secret mission – you know, the NASA missions to land humans on Mars that no one can talk about. There are no tire tracks or footprints around the piece, but those could easily have been blown away by the strong Martian winds, although they somehow didn’t cover up or pile sand against the object, which seems to be resting unobstructed on the Martian ground.
Going full pareidolia-plus-enhanced-imagination, commenters speculate it could be from an alien spacecraft – assuming their spacecraft crash or fall apart like ours do, even after successfully navigating accident-free for light years. Again, that panoramic view from Gigapan shows no other objects in the immediate area. Yes, that’s the case with many fossils found on Earth, but those are tissue that can deteriorate, decay and disintegrate … this is allegedly a piece of metal that survived a trip of light years.
Or a rock.
In the end, unless a rover with an arm, a robot with an arm or a human astronaut with an arm can pick up the object, inspect it closely or bring it back to Earth, we’re unarmed to do more than just speculate what this thing might be. For now, the needle on the meter is very close to ‘rock’.
Over the years there have been numerous investigators of the Men in Black phenomenon, such as UFO researchers Gray Barker, Jim Keith,and Harold Fulton – all of whom are now long gone. None of them, however, came anywhere close to Albert K. Bender. He was the man without whom our knowledge of the MIB and their agenda would be sorely lacking, and who created the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). Born in 1922, Bender was someone who served his country during the Second World War in the United States Army Air Corps. Post-World War Two, Bender lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in a somewhat creepy-looking old house that stood at what was, at the time, the junction of Broad Street and North Frontage Road. Today, the house is no more, the secrets it once held now being just memories and stories in books.
Adding to the creepy atmosphere, Bender lived in the attic. Of course! Where else? As a fan of the worlds of sci-fi-, fictional horror (H.P. Lovecraft was one of Bender’s favorites), and the real world of the paranormal, Bender radically altered his attic-room into what he termed his “Chamber of Horrors.” Paintings of grotesque monsters filled the walls. Imagery of skulls and black cats abounded. A Gothic-style painting of an old cemetery dominated the room. And, plastic spiders hung from the ceiling. Then, there was Bender’s altar – it was at the foot of that unsettling place of worship that Bender would engage in infernal rites designed to provoke a supernatural response from…well…who knew what? Bender didn’t care what “it” was, he just wanted that reply. He got it, alright. He opened the kind of door that it’s never, ever wise to open. And, something came through.
As Albert Bender noted in his 1962 book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, in practically no time after he called forth something supernatural from the other side, he was paid a visit. Yes, the Men in Black had picked up on Bender’s request for communication – and they responded in kind. Bender was replying to a mountain of mail from the readers of the latest issue of his Space Review magazine when he received his first visit of what, finally, amounted to several. It was late one night in 1953 when the MIB turned up. There was no slow, loud, knock at the door, though. Nor were any U.S. Government ID cards flashed. Bender’s Men in Black walked through the walls and door of the attic. They were shining-eyed, pale monsters. Their mode of dress was black suits, black fedoras, skinny black-ties, black shoes, and crisp white shirts. Imagine a 1950s-era member of the Mafia mixed in with a liberal amount of a resurrected zombie that has seen better days, and the image swirling around your mind won’t be too far off what it was that Bender encountered.
As the Men in Black got closer, so Bender got weaker. His energy levels plummeted like those of a diabetic who has missed breakfast, lunch and dinner. He was freezing cold and the shakes had suddenly set in. Even in his hazy, sickly state, Bender couldn’t fail to see something which chilled him to the bone: the weaker he got, the brighter and more fiery the eyes of the terrible trio got. Weaker, brighter. Weaker, brighter. You get the picture. Bender certainly did. In a macabre and terrifying way…Albert Bender was, bit by bit, being eaten; devoured, even.
With Bender sprawled out on the bed, and as helpless as a newborn puppy, the Men in Black telepathically warned him to leave the UFO subject well alone. If he didn’t only something terrible would befall the man himself. The three turned on their heels (black, of course) and dematerialized as mysteriously as they had first appeared. Bender was no fool: he knew that if he didn’t quit chasing flying saucers that the MIB were surely likely to turn his life into a living hell. But, the allure of the space-beings and their silvery, saucer-shaped craft was way too strong. So, it was all but inevitable that Bender would get another visit. And another. He did. Things got worse and worse: like those ghoulish drivers who can’t keep their eyes off of a fatal car accident on the highway, the MIB couldn’t keep away from Bender: they would always arrive at night and hover over the bed, as Bender fell into that same state of sudden illness and weakness that hit him on the first occasion.
By the second visit, Bender’s health was suffering significantly: he had gotten progressively weaker. He started to develop stomach problems. From his descriptions, it may have been ulcers and a dose of ulcerative-colitis. His energy levels had fallen off the scale and he lost weight. He was constantly out of breath. And migraines plagued him day and night. As for those MIB? Well, their eyes just proceeded to get brighter and brighter with every visit. It didn’t take Bender long to realize that he was effectively being bled dry. It was, in a strange way, very similar to the actions of those black-cloaked vampires who drained bevies of buxom babes of their blood in the likes of Universal Studios’ 1931 version of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. In a very strange state of twisted irony, the movie was one of Bender’s all-time favorites.
Come the third visit, Bender was not in a good condition at all: he was now seeing the MIB in the darkened streets of town. They would stand on the street-corner, leering at him – entities that no-one but Bender could see. The stomach problems were getting worse. He was losing more weight. Bender knew he had to do something. And, he did. Bender, albeit somewhat reluctantly, walked away from UFOs and closed down Space Review. Bender shut the doors on the International Flying Saucer Bureau, too, and quit the subject. He made a very brief reappearance in 1962, to write the aforementioned Flying Saucers and the Three Men, after which he left the subject behind and never returned. From the 1960s, and until his death in 2016, Bender was, when it came to UFOs, permanently AWOL.
Your GPS Devices May Stop Working on April 6, 2019
Your GPS Devices May Stop Working on April 6, 2019
Your GPS devices may stop working on April 6, 2019 and if If that sounds familiar, it’s because the situation is basically the same as the “millennium bug” behind the infamous Y2K scare.
April 6 is the day millions of GPS receivers will literally run out of time, rolling over their time counters back to zero, thanks to limitations in timekeeping for older GPS devices. Many navigation systems may be affected, such as on ships or older aircraft, although your smartphone will be fine.
But because GPS satellites are also crucial to digital timekeeping used by websites, electrical grids, financial markets, data centers and computer networks, the effect of April 6 may be even more wide-ranging.
Although an information-security expert during a presentation at the RSA 2019 security conference in San Francisco said "I'm not going to be flying on April 6," thankfully, no one is hyping the GPS bug to an exaggerated degree - but it could still cause problems.
I found this alien structure near the edge of crater in an old NASA photo today. The structure looks like an oval sphere with two thick arms coming out of it. It also appears to have a few antennas or thin structures coming out of its top center. The shininess indicates it is absolutely a metallic surface.
The NASA photo loads slowly, its 21MB in size, so give it a few minutes to load.
The main question on most peoples minds is probably how big is it? Thats a bit tough, but I would estimate to be close to 1.5-3 miles across. How can they hide such a large object? Come on guys, its NASA, we only see photos that NASA or other organizations who are secretly controlled by NASA (ESA & JAXA & world wide network of telescopes funded by...who else...NASA). So we only know and trust what NASA says. It mental manipulation. We only know what they tell us, what they teach us, what they chose to tell us about. But have you ever asked yourself...what does NASA chose to not tell us about?
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Ten Mythological Creatures in Ancient Folklore
Ten Mythological Creatures in Ancient Folklore
Mythical creatures, legendary beasts, and supernatural, mystical, and god-like beings have fascinated us since ancient times. They have filled folklore, stories, songs, and works of art. Sometimes living animals or fossils have inspired these mythological creatures. Even today, these beings, from the powerful dragon to the soaring phoenix, continue to thrill, terrify, entertain, and inspire us. Some, such as the Loch Ness Monster or Sasquatch, continue to be "sighted" and sought out. While the origins of fabulous creatures are varied, and often disputed, they have played significant roles in human society, and have served to stimulate the imagination and desire that is ingrained in human nature to experience more than this physical world. Whether they truly exist in physical form is indeed secondary to their existence in the minds of so many people throughout the world and history.
According to Scandinavian mythology, the Kraken is a giant sea creature (said to be 1 mile (1.61 km) long) that attacks ships and is so huge that its body could be mistaken for an island. It is first mentioned in the Örvar-Oddr, a 13th century Icelandic saga involving two sea monsters , the Hafgufa (sea mist) and the Lyngbakr (heather-back). The Hafgufa is supposed to be a reference to the Kraken. The existence of the Kraken was even acknowledged in scientific texts , including the first edition of Systema Naturae [1735], a taxonomic classification of living organisms by the Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist Carolus Linnaeus. He classified the Kraken as a cephalopod, designating the scientific name Microcosmus marinus. Although any mention to Kraken was omitted in later editions of the Systema Naturae, Linnaeus described it in his later work, Fauna Suecica [1746], as a "unique monster" that "is said to inhabit the seas of Norway”. Accounts of the Kraken are believed by many historians to have originated from sightings of the giant squid, which can reach 59 feet (18 meters) in length.
Beowulf is an Old English heroic epic poem set in Scandinavia and cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature of all time. Dated between the 8th and early 11th century, the epic poem tells the story of Beowulf, a hero who comes to the aid of Hroðgar, the king of the Danes, by defeating a beast known as Grendel who had been terrorizing the great mead hall built by Hroðgar and threatening the entire kingdom. Archaeological research has verified that the great hall commissioned by Hroðgar did indeed exist, and was located in the country’s earliest royal capital, Lejre, 23 miles (37.01 km) west of modern Copenhagen. Whether Grendel (meaning quite literarily ‘the destroyer’) originally existed in some less legendary form – perhaps symbolizing a malevolent spirit responsible for disease and death, or a particularly fierce-looking human enemy – is as yet unknown.
In ancient Japanese folklore, the Kappa is a water demon that inhabits rivers and lakes and devours disobedient little children. The Kappa, a word meaning ‘river child’, is usually depicted with the body of a tortoise, a beak, and the limbs of a frog, and has a hole filled with water on top of his head. While they are primarily water creatures , they are believed to occasionally venture onto land. According to legend, the head cavity must be kept wet when the Kappa ventures out of the water, or he will lose his powers. The Kappa is one of the most well-known folk legends in Japan and many believe the mythical creature to be real. In fact, there are signs near some lakes in Japan warning people of their presence. However, others maintain it is much more likely that the legend of the Kappa is connected with sightings of the Japanese Giant Salamander, or ‘hanzaki’, which is known to be aggressive and to grab its prey with its powerful jaws.
According to tales and legends, the beginning of Chinese New Year started with the fight against a mythical beast called Nian, which had the body of a bull and the head of a lion. It was said to be a ferocious animal that lived in the mountains and hunted for a living. Towards the end of winter when there was nothing to eat, Nian would come on the first day of New Year to the villages to eat livestock, crops, and even villagers - especially children. To protect themselves, the villagers would put food in front of their doors at the beginning of every year. It was believed that after the Nian ate the food they prepared, it wouldn’t attack any more people. The villagers would live in terror over the winter, but over time they learned that the ferocious Nian was afraid of three things: the color red, fire, and noise. So when the New Year was about to come, the villagers would hang red lanterns and red spring scrolls on windows and doors. They also used firecrackers to frighten away the Nian.
From then on, Nian never came to the villages again. According to legend, the Nian was eventually captured by Hongjun Laozu, an ancient Taoist monk, and Nian became Hongjun Laozu's mount. After Nian was captured, everyone had a big celebration and the ritual involved in banishing him was repeated the following year - and so the ritual was passed down from generation to generation and the custom of celebrating the New Year with firecrackers, noise, and the color red has persisted to this day.
The naga is a legendary aquatic, serpentine creature that resides in oceans, rivers, lakes, or waterfalls. Nagas are said to have black scales and can grow to hundreds of feet in length. Nagas are traditionally worshipped as personifications of water deities and considered bringers of rain and clouds. They are guardians of temples and holy places. Most Kaliyatran believe that the superior God directs the actions of the nagas, and these sea serpents are honored with many titles such as the "Maharaja Sarpa" and the "Naga who is God". It is commonly believed that nagas live in underground cities , are capable of speech, and can use their heavenly powers to control weather and assume humanoid form at will.
The legend of the Piasa Bird dates back to long before European explorers came to region. It has been traced to a band of Illiniwek Indians who lived along the Mississippi in the vicinity north of present-day Alton. This tribe, led by a chief named Owatoga, hunted and fished the valley and the river and lived a contented life until the "great beast" came, described by French missionary priest Jacques Marquette in 1673 as follows: “it is as large as a calf, with horns like a roebuck, red eyes, a beard like a tiger and a frightful countenance . The face was something like that of a man, the body covered in scales, and the tail so long that it passed entirely around the body, over the head and between the legs, ending like a fish.”
As with the Illini tribes, there can be found traditions of similar large birds and dragons throughout the world. The Dacotah tribe believed that thunder was a monstrous bird flying through the air and claimed that these birds were large enough to carry off human beings. In the ancient Buddhist caves of India there can be found a number of carved and painted dragons that easily fit with the descriptions of Piasa. Some have questioned whether the so-called mythical creature could have been an ancient species of bird that actually existed. That so many cultures and groups of people separated by thousands of miles and years have similar tales of immense flying creatures is curious to say the least.
In Hawaiian mythology , the Menehune are said to be an ancient race of small-stature people who lived in Hawaii before settlers arrived from Polynesia. Many scholars attribute ancient structures found on the Hawaiian Islands to the Menehune. However, others have argued that the legends of the Menehune are a post-European contact mythology and that no such race existed. The mythology of the Menehune is as old as the beginnings of Polynesian history. When the first Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, they found dams, fish-ponds, roads, and even temples - all said to have been built by the Menehune who were superb craftspeople. Some of these structures still exist and the highly-skilled craftsmanship is evident.
According to legend, each Menehune was a master of a certain craft and had one special function they accomplished with great precision and expertise. They would set out at dusk to build something in one night, and if this was not achieved, it would be abandoned. To date, no human skeletal remains of a physically small race of people have ever been found on Kaua’I or on any other Hawaiian islands. While this does not disprove that a race of small people existed, it does draw the truth behind the legend into question. Nevertheless, there is compelling evidence, both archaeological and in the numerous legends passed down over generations, that suggests that there was indeed an ancient race of highly-skilled people who inhabited the Hawaiian islands long before the Polynesians arrived.
The Aztecs of Mexico held the belief that the Earth was created from the destruction of a large sea demon, created by and known to the gods as Cipactli. Cipactli was described in many fashions: a crocodile with toad and fish characteristics, a sea demon , or a monster. Regardless of the description, the Aztecs considered this asexual sea being as the source of the cosmos. Cipactli’s appetite was insatiable and each joint of the creature bore a mouth. As the gods began the process of creation, they soon realized that their other creations would fall into the void and be devoured by the demon, so they decided to destroy Cipactli. Tezcatlipoca lured the monster in and lost a foot to its insatiable appetite before the gods were able to defeat it. Cipactli put up a fight, but in the end the gods prevailed. They pulled Cipactli’s body in four directions and freed the universe from it. Then Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl created the heavens and the Earth and everything therein from Cipactli’s body. The creature’s head became the thirteen heavens, its tail the underworld, and its midsection the Earth.
The griffin is a legendary creature with the head and wings of an eagle, and the body, tail, and hind legs of a lion. As the eagle was considered the ‘king of the birds’ , and the lion the ‘king of the beasts’, the griffin was perceived as a powerful and majestic creature. During the Persian Empire, the griffin was seen as a protector from evil, witchcraft, and slander. While griffins are most common in the art and mythology of ancient Greece, there is evidence of representations of griffins in ancient Persia and ancient Egypt dating back to as early as the 4th millennium BC. On the island of Crete in Greece, archaeologists have uncovered depictions of griffins in frescoes in the ‘Throne Room’ of the Bronze Age Palace of Knossos dating back to the 15th century BC.
In ancient Chinese astronomy , the sky ecliptic was divided into four sections. Each of these sections contained seven mansions, and together they formed the 28 Mansions. The 28 Mansions may be considered to be equivalent to the zodiacal constellations in Western astronomy, although they reflect the movement of the Moon through a sidereal month rather than the Sun in a tropical year. This enabled the ancient Chinese to mark the traveling positions of the Sun and the Moon, as well as to determine the time and seasons. Each section of the sky is assigned to a mythological creature, collectively known as the Four Symbols . These creatures are the Azure Dragon of the East, the White Tiger of the West, the Black Tortoise of the North, and the Vermillion Bird of the South. Apart from their astronomical significance, each of the Four Symbols is surrounded by various mythological associations.
Water molecules are hopping around the moon as the lunar surface warms and cools throughout the day, new research suggests.
That research is based on observations gathered byNASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying our planet's close companion since 2009. A recent upgrade to an instrument onboard the orbiter called Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) has allowed scientists to keep a closer eye on where the moon's surface shows signs of water.
"This is an important new result about lunar water, a hot topic as our nation's space program returns to a focus on lunar exploration," Kurt Retherford, a co-author on the new research and the principal investigator of the LAMP instrument at Southwest Research Institute in Texas, said in a NASA statement.
Water on other planetary bodies could be a valuable resource not just for human explorers to drink, but also to serve as fuel for future robotic exploration, since water can be split to form rocket fuel, saving missions from having to carry that fuel from Earth.
But it was only in 2009 that scientists were able to confirm that there was water locked up in ice on the moon's surface. Now, they have tracked how individual water molecules bind and release from the rocky regolith as temperatures change over the course of the moon's monthlong daylight cycle.
According to the researchers' observations, water molecules remain stuck to the surface throughout the lunar morning. As the neighborhood warms up around lunar noon, some of the molecules lift off into the moon's puny atmosphere and migrate around the moon's surface until they stumble upon someplace cold enough that they can settle back down to the surface.
"More work is needed to fully account for the complexities of the lunar surface, but the present results show that [this] work is definitely worth doing!" Michael Poston, a co-author on the new research and a research scientist on the LAMP team at Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.
The research was described in a paper published Feb. 21 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
What does this idiom mean and who did we inherit it from?
Image via Pixabay.
Some idioms weather the years with grace. Their meaning keeps them relevant even after cultural context leaves them in the dust. We advise our friends against “beating a dead horse”, for example, or point out that you can take it to water but not make it drink — despite the fact that almost nobody today has even interacted with a horse.
Then there are those idioms that aren’t only removed from the modern way of life but are also factually incorrect. Yet they persist. “Sailing the seven seas” is one such idiom. Today, we’ll take a look at how it came to be and which seas, exactly, it harkens to.
Nowadays the term “seven seas” is a shorthand for “all the seas and oceans”; sailing the seven seas, then, means you’re quite the accomplished sailor. But, these “seven seas” carried various meanings throughout history and across cultures. Each civilization understood it differently, through the lens of their religion, culture, and the places they knew. Keep that in mind as we delve into the seven depths of this idiom.
Seven degrees of mystical seas
The earliest use (that we know of) is religious in nature. It comes from the ancient Sumerians, the first people to inhabit Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq. Enheduanna, a high priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna from the city-state of Ur, and the first poet to have their name recorded in history, refers to ‘seven seas’ in a hymn written around 2300 BC. Betty De Shong Meador provides a translation of these hymns in Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (University of Texas Press, 2000, page 73), which reads (note that I’ve added all the commas and breaks between verses based on how I interpret the text):
“[….] O, house / Your shining face is the great snake of the reed marsh / Your foundation, o, shrine / The fifty abzu’s, the seven seas, has plumbed the inner-workings of your prince / Decision maker / Crown of wide heaven / He, Ashimbabbar, king of heaven, o , Ur / Shrine has built this house on your radiant and placed his seat upon your dais.”
Ashimbabbar seems to be a normalized, alternative spelling of Nanna’s name; Nanna was a moon god and “the tutelary deity of the city of Ur”, according to Oracc. In this context, abzu’s — from ‘ab’ meaning waters and ‘zu’ meaning deep in Akkadian — are probably fresh underground waters, such as those from springs or dug wells. The Sumerians believed underground waters came from the primordial sea and held an important religious significance.
Ok, hardhats on, it’s time to go on a limb here. In the Babylonian creation epic, Abzu morphs into a key deity. It’s possible they/it has been so all along. But, the fact that Enheduanna cites ‘fifty’ abzu’s suggests to me that this wasn’t the case while she lived, or that the two concepts were similar but already separated. Abzu, as a deity, represents a primordial freshwater ocean which, after coupling with Tiamat, a primordial saltwater ocean, essentially leads to the creation of the Universe. The two birth younger gods, who eventually usurp & murder them and create the world as we know it from their corpses.
Fresh- and salt-water seem to play a central part in the Sumerian religion and culture. The fifty abzu’s (which are fresh, Abzu’s domain) and the seven seas (seas tend to be salty, Tiamat) may have symbolized the primordial, raw stuff of which reality was born from in Enheduanna’s eyes. These ‘seven seas’, then, may have symbolized knowledge, creation, or the essence of both the mundane and the godly — not a stretch of the map. Possibly; that’s my take on it.
Seven western seas
Western cultures likely inherit the idiom from the ancient Greeks and Romans (who basically exported Greek culture throughout Europe). NOAA states that “the Seven [Greek] Seas were the Aegean, Adriatic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Caspian seas, with the Persian Gulf thrown in as a ‘sea'”. This fits well with the world as known to the ancient Greeks, who were quite the accomplished sailors themselves. Although they never moved out of the Mediterranean and its connected seas in large numbers, that still places them within a reasonable distance of Mesopotamia, its culture, and our known source for the idiom.
Another reference to the seven seas comes from Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer and admiral. Writing in his book The History of the World (the quote below is taken from Chapter 16, or ‘XVI’ in Roman numerals) these ‘seas’ were, in fact, the navigable salt marshes that the river Po forms when it meets the Adriatic sea.
“And there is not a river againe, that in so little a way, groweth to a greater streame [than the Po]: for over-charged it is and troubled with the quantitie of water, and therefore worketh it selfe a deepe channell, heavie and hurtfull to the earth under it, although it be derived and drawne into the other rivers and goles, betweene Ravenna and Altinum, for 120 miles: yet because he belcheth and casteth them out from him in so great abundance, he is said to make seven seas.”
“[….] All those rivers and trenches afore-said, the Tuscanes began to make first out of Sagis, carrying the forcible streame of the river acrosse into the Atrian meeres, which are called the seven seas, and made the famous haven of Atria a towne of the Tuscanes; of which the Adriaticke sea tooke the name afore time, which now is called Adriaticum.”
Here too we see that the ‘seas’ themselves weren’t necessarily seas per se, but the idiom has at least moved firmly into the realm of geography by this time.
The ‘seas’ in seven seas change over time, keeping pace with the most up-to-date maps. NOAA goes on to explain that in medieval European literature, “the phrase referred to the North Sea, Baltic, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Arabian seas”. On the Arabian side of the cultural divide, these seven seas were the waters on the Eastern trading routes — the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Khambhat, the Bay of Bengal, the Strait of Malacca, the Singapore Strait, the Gulf of Thailand, and the South China Sea, according to LiveScience.
As Europe crawled out of the middle ages and reached for cultural dominance through exploration (and sadly, colonization), the seven seas changed to mean the Arctic, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico (when Europeans first reached the Americas), and then the Banda Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Timor Sea as trade in spices and tea between Europe and Asia intensified.
In other words, the ‘seven seas’ idiom evolved over time to mean ‘a faraway place’ rather than a particular area or group of seas — probably under the combined efforts of sailors and captains looking to impress land-locked ladies. Maybe it’s an old-timey equivalent to ‘in a galaxy far, far away.’
But this still leaves one part of the puzzle unanswered:
Why is it always ‘seven’?
This is a trickier question to handle.
It may be a vestige of Enheduanna’s hymns. Ancient Sumerians regarded the heavens as being formed of seven domes, each made of a different type of precious stone. It’s possible, then, that each of the seas she refers to could have spawned one of the domes, and the wording just stuck.
Another possible explanation, in my view, has to do with the number itself. One of the most cited papers in psychology today, published in 1956 by George A. Miller, a Harvard psychologist, reports that the average memory span of young human adults is approximately 7 items. Whether this is the cause or not, I cannot say for sure — but the number seven pops up time and time again in all manners of places and contexts.
Rome was built on seven hills, and the world, according to Christian mythos, was made in seven days — although technically the last one was a cheat-day. Christian traditions also tell us of seven deadly sins and seven virtues, of Noah being told to bring seven pairs of every animal aboard his ark, of Jericho’s walls falling on the seventh day after seven priests with seven trumpets march around it seven times. Hinduism tells of seven different chakras, Islam of seven hells and seven heavens, and Mahatma Gandhi lists Seven Blunders of the World — to name a few. A massive poll carried out by writer, mathematician, and broadcaster Alex Bellos a few years ago found that 7 was the most-voted ‘favorite number’ (10% out of some 44,000 voters).
Do I believe that the number 7 is magic? Of course not — the only magic I believe in is Santa Claus and that booze can make me dance. But, seeing the number pop up so often definitely suggests something is special about it.
“Seven is the only number among those we can count on our hands that cannot be divided our multiplied within the group [it’s a prime number]. [It] is the only number between two and ten that is neither a multiple nor a factor of the others. In this way, “lucky number seven” stands alone—and we grasp this implicitly,” Bellos told Brandon Specktor for Reader’s Digest.
“It’s unique, a loner, the outsider. And humans interpret this arithmetical property in cultural ways.”
“By associating seven with a group of things, you kind of make them special too. The point here is that we’re always sensitive to arithmetical patterns, and this influences our behavior—even if we’re not conscious of it.”
One voter from New Zealand even told Bellos in his comments that “People don’t usually tend to pick 7, and I like to be different,” humorously supporting his hypothesis.
'I KNOW I SAW IT' - New witnesses emerge in infamous 1973 ‘alien abduction’ case of two fishermen ‘taken by creatures with lobster claws’
'I KNOW I SAW IT' - New witnesses emerge in infamous 1973 ‘alien abduction’ case of two fishermen ‘taken by creatures with lobster claws’
The witnesses claim they saw a UFO and a strange figure emerge from the water the night two fishermen were allegedly "abducted".
EXCLUSIVE
By Emma Parry, Digital US Correspondent
NEW witnesses to one of the most infamous "alien abductions" ever have come forward to tell their story for the first time.
Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were fishing on the banks of the Pascagoula River, Mississippi, in 1973, when they claim a UFO landed nearby and three alien creatures kidnapped them.
JONNY DILLON
Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, pictured, were left traumatised by the 1973 encounter
Police audio files obtained by Sun Online last year showed the pair were highly agitated by the alleged incident but they never wavered from their story - even when cops left them alone and secretly taped them.
And now, 45 years later, a couple have come forward to verify their story after seeing a strange UFO on the same night and location as the fishermen.
Maria and Vernon Jerry Blair were sat in their car looking out across the river when they saw strange blue lights in the sky.
Maria, now 69, said: "I thought was an aeroplane because of its bright lights flashing.
JONNY DILLON
A sketch of the creatures which allegedly "abducted" by Calvin and Charles
ANGELA BLAIR/ PHILIP MANTLE
Vernon and Maria have come forward after 45 years
"And it just kept going back and forth across the sky. I told my husband there’s something wrong with that plane, it’s like he doesn’t know where he wants to go.”
They watched the strange lights for around 40 minutes before getting out of their car and walking down the pier towards a boat.
However events took a sinister turn as Maria spotted a strange figure emerging from the water.
She recalled: "We started walking down the pier and something came up out of the water. It was like a person. I told Jerry 'There’s somebody out there'.
"They came up out of the water, then went back down. So I’m standing there waiting for this person and the water rippled out.
ARTISTS SEBASTIAN WOSCYK COURTESY PHILIP MANTLE
An artists impression of the alleged abduction
“He said 'Come on - there’s nobody out there'. I know I saw it.
"I walked down to the boat and it was about 11.30pm to 12pm before I came back down the pier. I was by myself. I ran back to the car."
Unbeknown to the couple, Charles and Calvin were on the opposite river bank having a terrifying close encounter with the UFO and its occupants.
They claim they were captured by three alien creatures, who came out of a door on the oval shaped "craft".
The men said the creatures had "lobster-like claws" at the ends of their arms, "carrot-like" growths for their nose and ears and their heads also appeared to connect directly to their shoulders, with no discernible neck.
The creatures' skin was described as pale in colour, wrinkled, with no eyes and slits for mouths.
JONNY DILLON
The creatures had carrot-like noses and ears, according to the pair
Onboard the UFO, Hickson claimed that he was examined by what looked like a large football-shaped mechanical eye, about 6 to 8 inches in diameter, that seemed to scan his body.
Calvin claimed that he could not recall what had happened to him inside the craft, although later, during hypnotic regression he offered some hazy details. Now, 45 years later, Calvin has written a book about his experiences called Pascagoula - The Closest Encounter, published by British UFO expert and author Philip Mantle.
Calvin, 64, also met Maria and Vernon for the very first time in person on Wednesday this week after only speaking to them on the phone.
He said: "It was a very emotional meeting from the beginning.
"It started out with both of us tearing up and automatically bonding.
PHILIP MANTLE
Calvin Parker in 1973 shortly after the incident
PHILIP MANTLE
Calvin, pictured now, met the two witnesses for the first time
"I felt like I had known her for years. It started off with her telling me that she saw the abduction on October 11, 1973, but didn’t know who was involved until the following day. This was of course me and Charles Hickson.
"Mrs Blair then set out on a quest to find me so she could see if we were okay.
"But she had no luck because I was in hiding away from the media attention. Her husband told her she would be a fool for coming forward and that everyone would make her out to be crazy.
"So, she kept this to herself telling me she would think about it every night and worry about me.
"Just like me - she had secrets that would haunt us for the rest of our lives.
"Thank God I wrote the book as it has helped us come together. Although we have just met we have had a connection for over 45 years."
Maria, who lives in Theodore, Alabama, said: "I enjoyed meeting Calvin, it was like we have always known each other for ever. He is truly a wonderful person."
Calvin has written a book about his paranormal experiences
Philip Mantle, of Pontefract, West Yorks, who runs Flying Disc Press, has appealed to any new witnesses to contact him at philip.mantle@gmail.com.
He added: "I have little doubt that there were other witnesses to this remarkable event."
Charles died in 2011, aged 80, but never backed away from his alien abduction story despite ridicule.
The Earth’s magnetic field is responsible for blocking dangerous and deadly solar winds, radiation and cosmic winds from reaching the atmosphere and surface of the Earth. It has been noted that since early 2014, the magnetic field has been decaying at least ten times faster than usual. Not only is it decaying at a very rapid rate, but it is also experiencing many anomalies and is shifting.
The magnetic pole has been moving away from Canada and towards Serbia and it has been moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts to take action. All of this will lead to many severe changes on a global scale, including the weakening of the Earth’s atmosphere as solar winds will strip it away. Weather patterns will change and hurricanes, tornadoes and thunderstorms will become more severe. The Earth will absorb more solar and cosmic particles which will further destabilize it’s geological structure and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will become far more prevalent. Massive amounts of radiation will cause cancers and sterility. Power outages and damages to electronics and EMPs will occur. Overall, nearly all life on Earth will die off from the magnetic field weakening.
Mysterie rond de Roswell-crash ontrafeld. Wat is er gebeurd met de wrakstukken en de lichamen?
Mysterie rond de Roswell-crash ontrafeld. Wat is er gebeurd met de wrakstukken en de lichamen?
Burgemeester van Roswell Del Journey neemt ons mee naar Walker Air Force Base, waar de wrakstukken van de UFO en lichamen van aliens naartoe zouden zijn gebracht na de Roswell-crash.
Hij vertelt dat de wrakstukken en de lichamen daarna overbracht zouden zijn naar Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
Onderzoekers beweren dat de overheid er ook voor heeft gezorgd dat getuigen van het incident al die tijd hun mond hebben gehouden.
Verfrommelen
Toch zijn velen van hen later alsnog naar buiten getreden. Eén van hen was de eerste legerofficier die op de plek van de crash aankwam, majoor Jesse Marcel.
Zijn kleinzoon zegt dat hij zijn ervaringen deelde met de rest van de familie. Hij nam zelfs een aantal wrakstukken mee naar huis.
Die leken te bestaan uit een vreemd soort metaal, dat gemakkelijk vouwbaar was. Je kon het verfrommelen als een stuk papier, maar zodra je het losliet, nam het zijn oorspronkelijke vorm weer aan.
Bevelen geeft
Marcel zei dat het metaal niet het materiaal was dat is te zien op de beroemde foto die werd verspreid na het incident.
Op die foto kijkt de majoor niet naar de camera, maar omhoog, naar iemand die bevelen geeft, aldus de kleinzoon.
SLECHT NIEUWS VOOR AANHANGERS PLATTE AARDE THEORIE ( VIDEO )
SLECHT NIEUWS VOOR AANHANGERS PLATTE AARDE THEORIE ( VIDEO )
Al jarenlang is er een discussie gaande over de vorm van de aarde en de groep mensen die gelooft dat de aarde plat is, groeit gestaag.
Echter, voor deze groep is er slecht nieuws, want een platte aarde aanhanger die probeerde te bewijzen dat de aarde plat is, bewees het tegenovergestelde.
Het volgende verhaal zal de fervente aanhangers van de platte aarde waarschijnlijk niet afschrikken en zij zullen blijven geloven dat de aarde plat is. Echter, voor veel aanhangers van de ronde aarde is het volgende verhaal een overtuigend bewijs dat de aarde wel degelijk een ronddraaiende bol in het heeal is.
Voor de duidelijkheid: Wij hangen niet een specifieke mening aan over de vorm van de aarde en brengen nieuws op dit gebied wanneer het zich voor doet. Tenslotte is onze complete 3D wereld een illusie en als zodanig is uiteraard ook iedere vorm mogelijk.
Bob Knodel is een bekend figuur binnen de wereld van de platte aarde theorie en zegt dat hij een achtergrond heeft als ingenieur en piloot. Vanuit die ervaringen is hij ervan overtuigd dat de aarde zo plat is als een pannenkoek en loopt hij al een tijd te piekeren over hoe hij dit kan bewijzen.
Knodel en zijn volgelingen slaagden erin om 20.000 dollar bij elkaar te krijgen om een zeer nauwkeurige lasergyroscoop aan te schaffen. Met een dergelijke gyroscoop kan zonder enige twijfel worden aangetoond of de aarde om haar eigen as draait of niet.
Wanneer dit wel het geval is dan draait de aarde in 24 uur 360 graden rond, hetgeen betekent dat er per uur 15 graden wordt afgelegd.
Wanneer de aarde plat is en niet om haar eigen as draait, zal de gyroscoop geen drift (verschuiving) vertonen, wanneer de aarde wel in 24 uur om haar eigen as draait, dan zal de gyroscoop een drift van 15 graden per uur registreren.
Met andere woorden, Bob Knodel en zijn volgers waren ervan overtuigd dat deze nieuwe dure gyroscoop voor eens en voor altijd zou bevestigen dat de aarde plat is en niet om haar as draait.
Wat er vervolgens gebeurde zie je in de volgende video:
Duidelijk is dat dit geen goed nieuws is voor de aanhangers van de platte aarde theorie en het is misschien ook veelzeggend dat het populaire videokanaal van Bob Knoder, Globebusters genaamd, opeens geen video’s meer bevat.
In de achtergrond zijn ze nu waarschijnlijk druk bezig met het zoeken naar bewijs dat er iets niet goed zou zijn met de test of de gyroscoop of een verklaring waarom de gyroscoop ook met een platte, niet roterende aarde een drift laat zien van 15 graden per uur.
Maar vooralsnog is dat nog niet gelukt en het wachten is nu of Bob Knodel alsnog een konijn uit de hoge hoed kan toveren of dat het vanaf nu stil blijft bij Globebusters.
Remember when astronomers found Tabby’s Star and said they’d never seen anything like it? Now there’s another one … maybe
Artist’s concept of Tabby’s Star. It’s possible that dust causes its mysterious dips in brightness, which are similar to those in a newly found star, called VVV-WIT-07.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Remember Tabby’s Star? It periodically dims in a sporadic and mysterious way. For a while, astronomers thought it might have an alien-builtDyson spherearound it, but nowthey think not. Astronomers have now found another mysteriously dimming star, perhaps similar to Tabby’s Star!
Tabby’s Star – aka Boyajian’s Star – created a lot of public interest last year and earlier this year when it started to “act up” again, periodically dimming in brightness in ways that astronomers still haven’t fully explained. It even brightened significantly more than usual sometimes. Although astronomers now know that fine dust near Tabby’s Star is at least part of the answer, they don’t yet know where this dust might come from, or why it is behaving the way it does. So the mystery of Tabby’s Star continues.
This month (November 2018), astronomers have been hashing over what may be a newly discovered second star similar to Tabby’s Star. At least, the new-found star displays some similar characteristics. The star – called VVV-WIT-07 (for “What is this?”) – was found by astronomers in Chile using the VISTA telescope in the Atacama Desert. Roberto Saito of the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil, and his colleagues first reported the star’s odd flickering November 6, 2018, in a peer-reviewed paper on arXiv.org. The findings were then reported in Science News on November 16. As Saito simply put it:
We don’t know what the object is, and that’s interesting.
Artist’s concept of VVV-WIT-07, which has been observed dipping in brightness in a manner similar to Tabby’s Star.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The team wasn’t actually looking for something like VVV-WIT-07, rather they were searching for supernovas – exploding stars – part of a larger survey of the center of the galaxy called the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea, or VVV.
But this star, like Tabby’s Star, suddenly dimmed. The star had been observed to periodically dim and brighten again before, between 2010 and 2018, with no set pattern, similar to Tabby’s Star. But while Tabby’s Star has been seen dimming as much as about 22 percent, this star was observed to suddenly dim as much as 80 percent! According to astronomer Tabetha Boyajian of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who Tabby’s Star is named after:
If this phenomenon is the same as what’s happening with Tabby’s star, then we can’t invoke an elaborate explanation for what’s happening in both systems. If you’re starting to see stars similar to this all over the place, then it’s got to be a really common thing that happens in nature. That’s really cool.
Light curve of VVV-WIT-007 from 2010-2018. The star dipped in brightness an incredible 80 percent in 2012 (shown in more detail in inset).
Image via R. K. Saito et al.
If other stars could be found which dim in a similar manner, then they may be fairly common.
Astronomers are still not even exactly sure what type of star VVV-WIT-07 is. It lies in the plane of the galaxy from our viewpoint, so there is a lot of dust that partially obscures it. If it’s a young variable star, then the dimming might simply be internal to the star itself. But if it’s not, then it is still a largely open question. As Boyajian noted:
Pretty much everything’s on the table for it right now. We need more data.
There is also another star – J1407 – that may be an even closer match to Tabby’s Star. that star has been observed to periodically dim by up to a whopping 95 percent. Astronomer Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester in New York and his colleagues reported the discovery in 2012. Astronomers think that J1407 hosts an orbiting young giant planet or brown dwarf with an enormous ring system – much larger and heavier than Saturn’s – that periodically eclipses the star.
False-color image of VVV-WIT-007.
Image via R. K. Saito et al.
According to Mamajek:
This planet is much larger than Jupiter or Saturn, and its ring system is roughly 200 times larger than Saturn’s rings are today. You could think of it as kind of a super Saturn.
The details that we see in the light curve are incredible. The eclipse lasted for several weeks, but you see rapid changes on time scales of tens of minutes as a result of fine structures in the rings. The star is much too far away to observe the rings directly, but we could make a detailed model based on the rapid brightness variations in the star light passing through the ring system. If we could replace Saturn’s rings with the rings around J1407b, they would be easily visible at night and be many times larger than the full moon.
VVV-WIT-07 may also turn out to be more similar to J1407, where a giant young planet or brown dwarf with a gigantic ring system orbits the star.
Image via Ron Miller.
Figuring out what is causing the weird dimming of VVV-WIT-07 – as with Tabby’s Star – will require further observations. Saito and his colleagues are hoping to be able to follow up using bigger telescopes, like the twin 8.1-meter Gemini telescopes or the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, both in Chile. Until then, astronomers can mostly just make educated guesses and come up with theories to explain the star’s behavior.
Bottom line: The mystery of Tabby’s Star still hasn’t been solved yet, and now there is another star that seems to be behaving in a similar manner – VVV-WIT-07. The findings made about one of them may help to solve the enigma of both – or it may turn out that there are two different exotic explanations for why these stars suddenly dip in brightness so much. Either way, what we learn about them should be very interesting.
Astronomers Puzzled by Yet Another Mysteriously Dimming Star
Artist’s concept of Tabby’s Star. It’s possible that dust causes its mysterious dips in brightness, which are similar to those in a newly found star, called VVV-WIT-07.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Astronomers Puzzled by Yet Another Mysteriously Dimming Star
Aside from the curious interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua and the ongoing quest to identify fast radio bursts, one of the most mysterious astronomical stories of the past few years has been the saga of Tabby’s Star. In 2016, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian spotted bizarre light patterns coming from the distant star KIC8462852. Something appeared to be causing the star to periodically dim, leading to speculation that it may be surrounded by amassive alien “megastructure.”In the nearly three years since then, astronomers have gathered enough data to now believe that the more likely reason for the dimming behavior is that the star issurrounded by dense clouds of cosmic dust.
An artist’s depiction of Tabby’s Star
Artist’s concept of VVV-WIT-07, which has been observed dipping in brightness in a manner similar to Tabby’s Star.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
That doesn’t mean all astronomers are ready to give up on the hope that Tabby’s Star might be home to an alien civilization. SETI astronomers are currently scanning the planet for any signs of laser activity. While none has been found, the study has provided scientists with a wealth of data and methodologies for carrying out similar research in the future in the search for alien life.
To add to the growing body of data concerning mysteriously dimming stars, an international team of astronomers has just published a study of a new star, EPIC 204376071, found a galactic stone’s throw from Earth just 440 light-years away. EPIC 204376071 has been observed to dim by up to 80 percent for an entire day. The researchers still aren’t sure what may be making the star’s light dim, but their leading suspicions are a cloud of dust or a ring of cosmic debris.
Could star-sized alien megastructures actually exist? Given the unimaginable size of the universe, it would be foolish to rule out any possibility.
Naturally, alien megastructures have already been ruled out, because how dare scientists acknowledge the possibility, however small, that there may yet be truly awesome left things to discover in the universe? While neither EPIC 204376071 nor Tabby’s Star are the extraterrestrial smoking gun we’ve all been waiting for, their discoveries suggest that any day now, we may stumble across the one to change everything in a strangely dimming star far across the universe. Will it be written off as cosmic dust, stuck in an academic journal somewhere, and forgotten about? It’s time we take the search for extraterrestrial life seriously, and studies like this one are just the site for such bold thinking.
Light curve of VVV-WIT-007 from 2010-2018. The star dipped in brightness an incredible 80 percent in 2012 (shown in more detail in inset).
Alien Abductee talks about UFOs, Mantis Beings and Shadow People
Alien Abductee talks about UFOs, Mantis Beings and Shadow People
Paul Shishis had dreams of being abducted as a child that at the time he shrugged off as just nightmares but throughout the years his increasing UFO sightings began to indicate to him that perhaps he had been in touch with extraterrestrials his whole life and that they weren't, in fact, dreams but real alien abductions.
In recent years he has begun trying to document them with his camera. Most of Paul's sightings have occurred in and around Scarborough Ontario, Canada.
More on his abduction dreams in Part 2, the Mantis Beings and Shadow People.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Three Mile Long UFO Over Mount Fuji Volcano, Japan On March 10, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Three Mile Long UFO Over Mount Fuji Volcano, Japan On March 10, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 10, 2019
Location of sighting: Mount Fuji, Japan
Wow, its not often you see a UFO of this size. This is about three to four miles across! Its huge. This awesome UFO was caught over Mount Fuji two days ago. The UFO has actually left a cloud trail behind it moving from the horizon, then zig zagging its way to the Mountain. This UFO is creating and controlling the smoke around it so that it appears like a cloud. However the the UFO outline is becoming very apparent here giving away its hiding place.
It has long been believed by me that most aliens that created bases on Earth did so under the floors of the ocean and under volcanos. Why? Because those are the two places that humans are least likely to bother or even discover them. The less humans, the less chance of being discovered.
Awesome video of a large UFO near Mount Fuji. I only wish that the 51 seconds of footage was a bit longer so that we could see how the UFO left the area. Absolute evidence here that aliens do in fact visit volcanos.
Antarctic Mountain Rumoured to be 'Earth's Oldest Pyramid' Built By Aliens
Antarctic Mountain Rumoured to be 'Earth's Oldest Pyramid' Built By Aliens
While adherents of the “alien builders” theory speculated that the Antarctic peak might be some kind of “master pyramid” or even a node in an energy-generating network of pyramids spanning the globe, at least one geologist proposed a much more mundane explanation.
While some conspiracy theorists and UFO hunters explore theories about aliens building pyramids in ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, others now claim that the oldest pyramids in existence may have been erected by extraterrestrials amid the frozen wastes of Antarctica, the Daily Express reports citing the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens TV show.
As the newspaper notes, one Antarctic geological feature in particular draws the attention of conspiracy theorists: a "pyramid-like structure" located near the Shackleton mountain range, whose "four steep sides" make it look somewhat like the Great Pyramid of Giza.
David Childress, an American author and the owner of Adventures Unlimited Press, even speculated that this so called "Shackleton pyramid" might be "the oldest of its kind" on the planet.
"If this gigantic pyramid in Antarctica is an artificial structure, it would probably be the oldest pyramid on the planet and in fact it might be the master pyramid that all the other pyramids on planet Earth were designed to look like," he said.
Dr Michael Salla, an ET research expert and author of the "Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence", even ventured a guess that this rocky formation may be merely one node in a "global network of power-generating pyramids strategically places around Earth".
"One of the theories is that pyramids are power generators and so, if you have these pyramids strategically placed around the world generating a charge, it’s possible to create a general standing wave around the world that is a wireless transmission of energy," he noted.
However, Dr Mitch Darcy, a geologist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, offered a much less exciting explanation, arguing that the “pyramid” in question is merely a nunatak – an exposed rocky peak or element of a ridge, some of which can be natural pyramidal peaks.
"The peaks are clearly composed of rock, and it’s a coincidence that this particular peak has that shape. It’s not a complicated shape, so it’s not a special coincidence either. By definition, it is a nunatak, which is simply a peak of rock sticking out above a glacier or an ice sheet. This one has the shape of a pyramid, but that doesn’t make it a human construction," he said.
Bevindt de oudste piramide ter wereld zich op Antarctica? Onderzoekers doen opvallende beweringen
Bevindt de oudste piramide ter wereld zich op Antarctica? Onderzoekers doen opvallende beweringen
Sommigen beweren dat er op Antarctica piramides kunnen worden gevonden. Al jaren circuleren hierover berichten in de media.
Zo zou er onder meer een piramideachtige structuur zijn te vinden bij de Shackleton-berg, die zou lijken op de Grote Piramide.
Schrijver David Childress heeft zelfs gesuggereerd dat de zogeheten Shackleton-piramide mogelijk de oudste van zijn soort is op aarde, schrijft persbureau Sputnik.
Stroom
“Als deze gigantische piramide op Antarctica een kunstmatige structuur is, zou het waarschijnlijk de oudste piramide op de planeet zijn,” zei hij.
Dr. Michael Salla zei dat het bouwwerk mogelijk onderdeel is van een ‘wereldwijd netwerk van piramides die energie opwekken en die allemaal op strategische plaatsen zijn neergezet’.
“Volgens één van de theorieën werden de piramides gebruikt om stroom op te wekken,” zei hij.
Nunatak
“Wellicht zijn de piramides op strategische plaatsen gebouwd om een staande golf te creëren en de wereld draadloos van energie te voorzien,” voegde hij toe.
Geoloog Mitch Darcy van het Duitse onderzoekscentrum voor geowetenschappen in Potsdam stelde dat de piramide in werkelijkheid een nunatak is, een blootgestelde top van een berg.
Toeval
“De toppen bestaan duidelijk uit rots en het is toeval dat deze specifieke top de vorm van een piramide heeft,” zei hij.
“Dat de bergtop de vorm van een piramide heeft, hoeft niet te betekenen dat het een door mensen gemaakt bouwwerk is,” klonk het.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) just spotted “moving water molecules” on the near side of the Moon — which could be a big deal for future human missions to the Moon.
Scientists observed water molecules moving around as the lunar surface heated up during the Moon’s day cycle. Researchers had previously assumed that the main source of water — hydrogen ions from solar wind — would be cut off when the Earth travels between the Moon and the Sun. But the new findings didn’t see any decrease when the Earth cut off solar wind to the Moon, suggesting that it could harbor a more sustainable source of water than previously believed.
Hot Topic
The discovery is described in a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by researchers from the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The data was collected by the LRO’s Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), an ultraviolet spectrograph that was built to map ultralight wavelength reflections on the lunar surface.
“This is an important new result about lunar water, a hot topic as our nation’s space program returns to a focus on lunar exploration,” said Kurt Retherford, principal investigator of the LAMP instrument from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said in a statement. “We recently converted the LAMP’s light collection mode to measure reflected signals on the lunar dayside with more precision, allowing us to track more accurately where the water is and how much is present.”
The Shape Of Water
A groundbreaking 2017 study from Brown University suggested that there may be substantial amounts of waterinside lunar rocks. At the time, the discovery was a major shift from the consensus view that most water on the Moon is located near its poles.
This year’s results discovered by LAMP seem to underline that the lunar water cycle could make water far more accessible to us during future missions to the Moon than we previously thought — the more water already exists on the Moon, the less time and resources we have to spend in trying to get it there.
Stay overnight on an Antarctic ice shelf, and you might feel the shaking from thousands of tiny quakes as the ice re-forms after melting during the day.
In a recent study on Antarctica’sMcMurdo Ice Shelf, scientists used seismometers to record hundreds of thousands of tiny “ice quakes” that appear to be caused by pools of partially-melted ice expanding and freezing at night.
University of Chicago glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal is co-author of the study, published in the Annals of Glaciology on December 17, 2018. MacAyeal said in a statement:
In these areas we would record tens, hundreds, up to thousands of these per night. It’s possible that seismometers may be a practical way for us to remotely monitor glacier melting.
The team set up seismometers for 60 days during the melt season in two locations near seasonal meltwater lakes on the McMurdo Ice Shelf. One location was drier; the other was slushier, with pools of melted water forming and refreezing. The wetter location, they found, was alive with seismic activity at night. MacAyealexplained:
In these ponds, there’s often a layer of ice on top of melted water below, like you see with a lake that’s only frozen on top. As the temperature cools at night, the ice on the top contracts, and the water below expands as it undergoes freezing. This warps the top lid, until it finally breaks with a snap.
The energy vibrates out into the surroundings, where it’s picked up by seismometers. Some of the cracks re-heal, but some do not, MacAyeal said. He suggested that the phenomenon might explain why icebergs actually break off more frequently during colder times of the year.
Researchers plant a seismometer on the McMurdo Ice Shelf. Image via Alison Banwell/University of Chicago.
Bottom line: Scientists recorded hundreds of thousands of tiny ice quakes on an Antarctic ice shelf that appear to be caused by pools of partially melted ice expanding and freezing at night.
Egypt REVELATION: Great Pyramid of Giza's ‘correlation to Orion PROVED'
Egypt REVELATION: Great Pyramid of Giza's ‘correlation to Orion PROVED'
EGYPT’s Great Pyramid is at the centre of a pseudo-scientific hypothesis that shows the Giza-Orion correlation theory is accurate, the "New Egyptologist" has claimed.
Conventional archeology tells us the great pyramids at Giza were built as tombs for the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Constructed during the Old Kingdom’s fourth dynasty 4500 years ago, the monuments have been shrouded in mystery for millennia. Built with incredible accuracy and containing many puzzling features, the true purpose of the pyramids has inspired endless speculation.
In the 1980s, an extraordinary theory emerged that attempted to explain why the pyramids were built with such accuracy.
The theory claims there is a correlation between the position of the three largest pyramids at Giza and the three stars comprising the belt in the constellation of Orion.
It is thus claimed that there is a purposive relationship between the pyramids of the 4th Dynasty on the Giza Plateau and the alignment of three stars comprising, which is commonly referred to as Orion’s belt.
The theory, originally proposed by the "New Egyptologist" Robert Bauval in 1983, noted how the smallest of the three pyramids at Giza – The Pyramid of Menkaure, was offset slightly from the other two.
Great Pyramid Giza's ‘correlation to Orion PROVED’
(Image: Getty)
Publishing his findings in a book in 1994, "The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids", Mr Bauval said the similarity between this and the offset in the third star of Orion’s Belt.
Mr Bauval overlaid the stars of Orion over an aerial view of the pyramids and was astonished to discover they matched almost exactly.
He said: “It substantiated my theory that the three pyramids of Giza were symbols of Orion’s Belt.
“My next step was to find further visual evidence. I had a good photograph of the three stars of Orion’s Belt and was able to place it against the aerial shot of the three Giza pyramids.
“The correlation was stunning. Not only did the layout of the pyramids match the stars with uncanny precision but the intensity of the stars, shown by their apparent size, corresponded with the Giza group.
A correlation between the position of the three largest pyramids at Giza and the three stars
(Image: Getty)
“There were three stars, three pyramids, three Osiris-Orion kings."
Not only did the three pyramids match Orion’s Belt, Mr Bauval argued that the Great Sphinx mirrored the constellation of Leo, and the monument’s alignments to the Nile matched the stars positions relative to the Milky Way.
Using astronomical computer programs, Mr Bauval dialled back the skies over Giza to the supposed date of the construction of the Pyramids – 2500BC. Disappointingly they could find no match.
But 2500BC was during the astronomical Age of Taurus – represented by a bull.
Dialling the starfields back thousands of years, Robert Bauval was able to find an amazing match — in 10500BC, whilst the pyramids matched Orion's belt, the Sphinx was looking directly at the constellation of Leo.
10500BC marked the dawning of the Age of Leo and, even more astonishingly, the date the pyramids and Sphinx’s position relative to the nearby River Nile matched Orion and Leo’s position relative to the Milky Way.
Project Blue Book deals with the UFO “Flap” of 1952. In July of that year, a fleet of UFO’s was spotted on radar above the White House. Is this the proof of what Hynek has been searching for?
Project Blue Book ends its illustrious first season with an adaptation of the 1952 UFO “Flap” over Washington, D.C. A flap is a rush of sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) in a short period of time.
The Background
On July 19, an air traffic controller at the Washington National Airport reported seeing seven blips on his radar screen that were definitely flying away from civilian or military aircraft. While this was occurring, the controller’s colleagues were peering out of the tower window. They noticed a hovering light in the distance traveling at an unprecedented speed.
Andrews Air Force Base was also tracking the bogies and a commercial airline pilot radioed in his description of the UFOs. Something was definitely occurring over the District’s skies that night. However, when Captain Edward Ruppelt, (the character on which Captain Michael Quinn is based) tried to investigate for Project Blue Book, he was denied access.
Mass hysteria was abounding as newspaper headlines chased the sensational with “Saucers Swarm over Capital.” So, to mitigate the potential panic that was brewing, the Air Force held a press conference stating the whole incident was not an alien invasion. It was just the after effects of a temperature-inversion.
Even though a military pilot came forward and reported that he had chased the mysterious objects, it was easier to cover up what had really happened with a meteorological event that would be easier for the public to handle. According to History.com:
“A temperature inversion occurs when a layer of warm air forms in the low atmosphere, trapping cooler air beneath. Radar signals can bounce off this layer at shallow angles and mistakenly show near-ground objects as appearing in the sky.”
The Truth Will Set You Free
At the end of last week’s episode, the Man in Black gave Dr. J. Allen Hynek a plane ticket to Washington so that he wouldn’t miss the proof that he has been seeking. And that turns out to be more than anyone bargained for when the lights in the sky are back. This time they are in the nation’s capital.
Generals Harding and Valentine are very concerned because this is something that they weren’t anticipating. Neither was Captain Quinn. The Man in Black is amazed because even though Quinn has witnessed actual UAP’s, he still refuses to believe that the possibility exists for extraterrestrial visitations.
Everything that Quinn and Hynek have experienced has led up to this penultimate episode. I still can’t shake the feeling that the Generals are somehow aware of the alien agenda. Maybe our questions and Allen’s will be answered.
Watch the Project Blue Book finale this Tuesday at 10 p.m. on the History Channel.
What was your favorite Project Blue Book episode? Let us know in the comments. We want to hear from you.
In November of last year, UFOs were caught hovering over the Outer Banks by a fisherman late at night. What were those mysterious lights?
UFOs are a hot topic again thanks to the extremely popular History Channel show, Project Blue Book. People want to believe, they really do. That is why whenever a sighting is reported, it usually turns into a viral news story.
Last November, a fisherman on Cape Lookout caught strange lights hovering over the ocean late at night. According to the Charlotte Observer, this is not an unusual occurrence for residents of the area. The phenomenon has been occurring for more than two decades.
In the fall of 2018, we reported on a North Carolina man that supposedly captured an unusual craft on his cell phone. This account later turned out to be debunked. It was deemed an optical illusion.
However, the sighting on the Outer Banks is something else entirely. At first, you see two glowing orange orbs in the distance. But then, out of nowhere, two other lights join. These smaller ones are white in color and then turn the same hue as the original pair.
After a bit of hovering together, one pair drops out of sight leaving one remaining. It is fascinating to watch. Check out the clip courtesy of C.R. Larkin, ViralHog and the Charlotte Observer.
Theories Abound
Much like the Phoenix Lights incident, some viewers commented on the video claiming that it was probably parachute flares. Although, as everyone knows, flares flicker. These particular lights did not.
Also, if they were distress flares and anyone that has watched Deadliest Catch on the Discovery channel can attest, they arc into the sky. Others felt that more than likely, the orbs were flames off the top of an oil rig. While there was a proposal by the Trump administration to “open the entire coastline of the lower 48 United States to oil and gas drilling, starting in 2019,” North Carolina chose preserving their ocean habitat over this initiative.
Interesting to note, Cape Lookout is home to a lighthouse but this doesn’t seem to be an explanation for the hovering lights above the ocean. Also, car headlights were mentioned more than once. While feasible that doesn’t seem to be the answer either.
There is a Marine Corps air station at New River and one viewer commented that these lights were “turning for approach to landing.” He also stated that the orange tint of the lights suggests atmospheric effects.
Playing devil’s advocate, what if weren’t any of the above-mentioned theories? While not necessarily intelligent craft driven by extraterrestrials, could the lights possibly be something that our military might be testing? Maybe drone technology?
But would they do a test late at night? Since these types of sightings have been occurring over several decades in the same area, what if it is something from another world?
What do you believe? Do you think the lights are a hoax or is there a logical explanation? Could they be UFOs? Let us know in the comments. We want to hear from you.
BOSTON — Earth's vast magma oceans, roiling deep beneath our feet, seem to be pumping oxygen into the planet's liquid core. And that oxygen is shaping earthquakes and volcanoes all over our planet.
That's the conclusion of a body of research University College London physicist Dario Alfe presented Tuesday (March 5) here at the March meeting of the American Physical Society. Though it's impossible to observe oxygen in the Earth's core directly — thousands of miles of hot rock impede that view — Alfe and his collaborators used a combination of seismological data, chemistry and knowledge about the ancient history of our solar system to draw their conclusions.
The main bit of evidence that something like oxygen is hiding out in the iron core? Earthquakes. The rumblings we feel on the surface are the result of waves that move throughout our entire planet. And the behavior of those waves offers clues to Earth's contents — almost like an ultrasound of the whole planet.
When earthquake waves bounce off the core and back to the surface, their shape indicates that the liquid iron outer core is significantly less dense than the pressurized solid iron core inside it. And that density difference impacts the shape of earthquakes and the behavior of volcanoes on the surface. But that's not how pure iron should behave, Alfe told Live Science after his talk. [In Photos: Ocean Hidden Beneath Earth's Surface]
"If the core was pure iron, the density contrast between the solid inner core and the liquid [outer core] should be on the order of 1.5 percent," he said. "But seismology tells us it's more like 5 percent."
In other words, the outer core is less dense than it should be, suggesting there's some non-iron element mixed in, making it lighter.
So that raises the question: Why would the lighter element be mixed in with the outer core but not the solid inner core?
When atoms are in a liquid state, they flow freely past each other, making it possible for a mixture of different elements to coexist, even in the extreme environment of the inner Earth, Alfe said. But as extreme pressures force the inner core into a solid state, the atoms there form a more rigid lattice of chemical bonds. And that stricter structure doesn't accommodate foreign elements as easily. As the solid core formed, it would have spat oxygen atoms and other impurities into its liquid surroundings like toothpaste shooting out of a squeezed tube.
"You see a similar effect in icebergs," he said.
When salt water in the ocean freezes, it expels its impurities. So icebergs end up as chunks of solid freshwater floating over the sodium-rich ocean.
There's no direct evidence that the lighter element in the liquid core is oxygen, Alfe said. But our planet formed from the dust clouds of the early solar system, and we know what elements were present there. [Photo Timeline: How the Earth Formed]
The research team ruled out other elements, like silicon, that might theoretically be present in the core based on the makeup of that cloud but don't explain the observed effect. Oxygen was left as the most likely candidate, he said.
Further, the levels of oxygen theoretically present in the core seem lower than what chemistry would predict based on the oxygen contents of the mantle. That suggests more oxygen is probably getting chemically pumped into the outer core even today from the more oxygen-rich mantle surrounding it.
Asked what the oxygen in the core looks like, Alfe said not to imagine bubbles or even the rust that forms when iron bonds directly to oxygen. Instead, at those temperatures and pressures, oxygen atoms would float freely among iron atoms, creating buoyant clumps of liquid iron.
"If you take a parcel of liquid that has 90 iron atoms and 10 oxygen atoms, this parcel will be less dense than a parcel of pure iron," and so it will float, Alfe said.
To help confirm these results, Alfe said he's looking forward to the results of efforts to measure neutrinos formed in our planet and radiating out toward the surface. While "geoneutrinos" are very rare, he said, they can offer a lot of information about what specifically is going on in the planet when they do turn up.
But without any way of directly accessing the core, physicists will always be stuck making their best possible judgments about its makeup from limited, secondary data.
Would-be explorers have high hopes that caches of water scattered throughout the solar system willfuel future rockets.
In new estimates, scientists grapple with just how much water might be out there, looking specifically at near-Earth asteroids as a potential resource. Astronomers have spotted nearly 20,000 such space rocks, and we even have up-close observations of a handful: Japan's Hayabusa2 mission and NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission are each currently orbiting such an object. Not all of them necessarily carry water — but some do.
"We know that there are minerals with water in them on asteroids. We know that from meteorites that have fallen to the ground," lead author Andrew Rivkin, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said in a statement. "It's also possible that Earth's water came largely from impacts."
In addition to the scientific drive behind understanding how life came to be on Earth, mapping water across the solar system is important because water — which can be split into hydrogen and oxygen — might also be used to make rocket fuel. If that scenario becomes common, it would dramatically reduce the price tags of round-trip journeys to space, since rockets leaving Earth would no longer need to be powerful enough to lift the weight of their homebound fuel.
To make their calculation, the team relied on ground-based telescope observations of these asteroids. But those observations are tricky, because the signature of water in Earth's atmosphere can interfere with asteroid measurements. So, the team used a slightly different signature — one that doesn't actually represent water but has only been found in conjunction with the signature that does.
By combining those observations with other measurements as well as data about meteorites that have fallen to Earth from asteroids, the team calculated a basic estimate for how much water could be trapped inside near-Earth asteroids. According to that estimate, there may be between 100 billion and 400 billion gallons (400 billion to 1,200 billion liters) of water spread among these space rocks.
Ideally, the team would like to run similar calculations based on data gathered from space, where Earth's atmosphere won't interfere with the direct signature of water. But those measurements would rely on the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently planned for 2021.
The research is described in a paper published in December in the journal JGR Planets.
Scientists from Japan, one of the most seismically active regions of the globe, claim that a new earthquake detection method based on gravity could provide an earlier warning than traditional methods.
Contour maps depict changes in gravity gradient immediately before the earthquake hits.
Credit: Kimura Masaya.
In 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake hit eastern Japan, along a subduction zone where two of Earth’s tectonic plates collide. The tremor came as a one-two punch, generating a huge tsunami in the process which led to the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The effects of the powerful quake were devastating, with more than 120,000 buildings left in rubble and $235 billion-worth of incurred damage.
Japan handled the onslaught bravely and admirably. Thanks to its sophisticated network of sensors, Tokyo residents were given a minute warning via texted alerts on their cell phones before the city was hit by strong shaking. These sensors also recorded a wealth of data that is still keeping researchers busy with work that might lead to improved earthquake detection.
Exactly 8 years after the Tohoku earthquake, a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) used some of this data to argue that a new detection method based on gravimeters could theoretically detect earthquakes earlier than seismometers.
Gravimeters are sensitive devices for measuring variations in the Earth’s gravitational field. They’re typically employed by industries to prospect subterranean deposits of valuable natural resources, including petroleum and minerals, but also by geodesists who study the shape of the earth and its gravitational field.
When an earthquake occurs at a point along the edge of a tectonic plate, it generatesseismic waves that radiate outward at up to 8 kilometers per second. These waves transmit energy through the earth, thereby altering the density of the subsurface material they pass through. Denser material has a slightly greater gravitational attraction than less dense material, and since gravity waves propagate at the speed of light, it’s possible to measure these changes in density before the arrival of a seismic wave.
The Japanese researchers combined gravimetry and seismic data, which they fed into a complex signal analysis model. The results scored 7-sigma accuracy, meaning that there’s only a one-in-a-trillion chance that they are incorrect.
“This is the first time anyone has shown definitive earthquake signals with such a method. Others have investigated the idea, yet not found reliable signals,” ERI postgraduate Masaya Kimura said in a statement. “Our approach is unique as we examined a broader range of sensors active during the 2011 earthquake. And we used special processing methods to isolate quiet gravitational signals from the noisy data.”
TOBA prototype.
Credit: Ando Masaki.
At the moment, the researchers are working on a new kind of gravimeter called the torsion bar antenna (TOBA), which aims to be the first instrument specifically designed to detect earthquakes by gravity. A network of such devices could theoretically warn people 10 seconds before the first seismic waves arrive from an epicenter 100 km away. These precious extra seconds could mean the difference between life and death in many situations.
“SGs and seismometers are not ideal as the sensors within them move together with the instrument, which almost cancels subtle signals from earthquakes,” explained ERI Associate Professor Nobuki Kame. “This is known as an Einstein’s elevator, or the equivalence principle. However, the TOBA will overcome this problem. It senses changes in gravity gradient despite motion. It was originally designed to detect gravitational waves from the big bang, like earthquakes in space, but our purpose is more down-to-earth.”
To make this image appear in 3D, stare "through" the computer screen and then focus on the ghostly image that should pop up between the two halves of this picture.
The mission team has released a new 3D image based on photographs the New Horizons spacecraft snapped while it was as close as 4,100 miles (6,600 kilometers) to the Kuiper Belt object, which is officially known as 2014 MU69. The images are part of the team's continuing work to better understand the object and how it may have formed.
If you prefer Kuiper Belt objects appearing to dance across your screen, New Horizons has you covered there, too.
"These views provide a clearer picture of Ultima Thule's overall shape," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said in a statement, "including the flattened shape of the large lobe, as well as the shape of individual topographic features such as the 'neck' connecting the two lobes, the large depression on the smaller lobe, and hills and valleys on the larger lobe."
If you have a pair of red-blue 3D glasses, this image should pop.
To fully appreciate the 3D nature of the images, you'll need to track down a pair of red-blue 3D glasses or prepare for some eyeball gymnastics. (In addition to the options available here, there's a version tailored to those who can cross their eyes available on NASA's website.)
Although the New Horizons spacecraft completed its flyby in the wee hours of Jan. 1, the probe will need about 20 months to transmit all of its data back to Earth and the scientists who are eagerly awaiting it.
Near the bottom of Earth's mantle lie two continent-sized blobs of hot, compressed rock. They are called large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) because seismic waves slow down as they pass through them, but geologists usually just call them "the blobs."
About halfway between your feet and the center of Earth, two continent-size mountains of hot, compressed rock pierce the gut of the planet — and scientists know almost nothing about them.
Technically, these mysterious hunks of rock are called "large low-shear-velocity provinces" (LLSVPs), because seismic wavesshuddering through Earth always slow down when passing through these structures.
A mesmerizing image, featured in an article on Eos (the official news site of the American Geophysical Union, or AGU), gives us one of the most detailed views yet of these rocky anomalies — which most scientists simply call "the blobs." [Earth's 8 Biggest Mysteries]
Geophysicists have known about the blobs since the 1970s but aren't much closer to understanding them today.
"They're among the largest things inside the Earth," University of Maryland geologist Ved Lekic told Eos reporter Jenessa Duncombe, "and yet we literally don't know what they are, where they came from, how long they've been around, or what they do."
This much is evident: The blobs begin thousands of miles below Earth's surface, where the planet's rocky lower mantle meets the molten outer core. One blob lurks deep below the Pacific Ocean, the other beneath Africa and parts of the Atlantic. Both are massive, stabbing up about halfway through the mantle and measuring as long as continents. According to Duncombe, each blob stretches about 100 times higher than Mount Everest; if they sat on the planet's surface, the International Space Station would have to navigate around them.
To get a better sense of their shape and scale, take a look at the stunning 3D map of the blobs that Lekic and University of Cambridge seismologist Sanne Cottaar created in 2016 (shown above). The blobs' vast, cascading plains have been likened to mountains of sand or interconnected pits of gravel, Duncombe wrote, but whether they're lower- or higher-density than the surrounding mantle remains a point of contention among scientists.
Equally mysterious is how, if at all, the blobs affect geological functions such as plate tectonics and volcanism. A more recent map of the structures, presented by University of Oxford doctoral student Maria Tsekhmistrenko at the 2018 annual meeting of the AGU, suggests that the tips of the blobs might branch into plumes of hot material that brush up against volcanic hotspots just below Earth's surface. What does this mean? Nobody knows. It may take many more decades to better understand the enigma near the heart of our planet. Luckily, the blobs don't seem to be going anywhere.
(Event Chronicle) Susan Schneider of the University of Connecticut and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton is one of the few thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction— that have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons. “I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological,” Schneider says. “The most sophisticated civilizations will be post-biological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien super-intelligence.”
Her recent study, Alien Minds, asks “How would intelligent aliens think? Would they have conscious experiences? Would it feel a certain way to be an alien?”
While we are aware that our culture is anthropomorphizing, Schneider imagines that her suggestion that aliens are supercomputers may strike us as far-fetched. So what is her rationale for the view that most intelligent alien civilizations will have members that are superintelligent AI?
Schneider offers three observations that together, support her conclusion for the existence of alien super-intelligence.
The first is “the short window observation”: Once a society creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm from biology to AI. This “short window” makes it more likely that the aliens we encounter would be postbiological.
The short window observation is supported by human cultural evolution, at least thus far. Our first radio signals date back only about a hundred and twenty years, and space exploration is only about fifty years old, but we are already immersed in digital technology, such as cell-phones and laptop computers.
Schneider’s second argument is “the greater age of alien civilizations.” Proponents of SETI have often concluded that alien civilizations would be much older than our own “…all lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence would be billions of years, specifically [it]ranges from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.
If civilizations are millions or billions of years older than us, many would be vastly more intelligent than we are. By our standards, many would be super-intelligent. We are galactic babies.
But would they be forms of AI, as well as forms of super-intelligence? Schneider says, yes. Even if they were biological, merely having biological brain enhancements, their super-intelligence would be reached by artificial means, and we could regard them as being “artificial intelligence.”
But she suspects something stronger than this: that they will not be carbon-based. Uploading allows a creature near immortality, enables reboots, and allows it to survive under a variety of conditions that carbon-based life forms cannot. In addition, silicon appears to be a better medium for information processing than the brain itself. Neurons reach a peak speed of about 200 Hz, which is seven orders of magnitude slower than current microprocessors.
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Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note: Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Do you think this article needs a correction or update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at sitsshow@gmail.com with the error, headline and url. Thank you for reading.
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Het Russische Roswell: werden op deze geheime militaire basis buitenaardse toestellen bestudeerd?
Foto: Mil.ru Wikimedia Commons
Het Russische Roswell: werden op deze geheime militaire basis buitenaardse toestellen bestudeerd?
In Astrachan in Rusland werden op 19 juni 1948, 11 maanden na het beroemde Roswellincident, onbekende objecten waargenomen op de radar bij de militaire basis Kapoestin Jar.
Op hetzelfde moment zag de piloot van een MiG-gevechtsvliegtuig een sigaarvormig object in de lucht.
De piloot vuurde een raket af, waarna de UFO de straaljager raakte met een soort lichtflits. Beide vaartuigen crashten.
Area 51
Het incident werd verdoezeld door de autoriteiten. Speciale teams werden ingezet om een dekmantel te verzinnen, terwijl het wrak naar een hangar werd vervoerd voor verder onderzoek.
Er gaan al lange tijd geruchten dat onder Kapoestin Jar gangen en ruimtes zijn waar gecrashte buitenaardse vaartuigen worden bewaard.
“We hebben het hier over het Area 51 van de Sovjet-Unie,” zegt historicus Richard Dolan in het televisieprogramma Ancient Aliens, dat wordt uitgezonden op History. “Het is heel erg afgelegen.”
CIA
Hij merkte op dat de basis werd gebruikt om buitgemaakte rakettechnologie te testen na de Tweede Wereldoorlog.
In 1959 begon de CIA de geheime basis te monitoren. Er werden onder meer luchtfoto’s gemaakt.
Graancirkels
Op die foto’s zijn allerlei vreemde patronen te zien in de omgeving van de basis die doen denken aan graancirkels.
Sommigen zeggen dat de patronen waren bedoeld om UFO’s aan te trekken.
There are a lot of things we’re uncomfortable talking about. Ritual child sacrifices is one of them. Giving children elongated skulls by binding their soft young heads is another. Yet any discussion of the Aztecs or the ancient pre-Inca culture known as the Chimú of Peru requires discussing these gruesome practices. A new study adds another uncomfortable talking point to this horrific yet historical discussion – climate change. Researchers studying the remains of over 140 children and 200 llamas found in northern Peru have determined that their sacrifice was the only way this culture could think of to stop a climatic event we now call El Niño.
“The Huanchaquito-Las Llamas mass sacrifice opens a new window on a previously unknown sacrificial ritual from fifteenth century northern coastal Peru.”
In a new study published in PLoS One, archaeologists Gabriel Prieto of the National University of Trujillo and John Verano of Tulane University offer a new explanation for the child sacrifices which occurred arounf 1450 CE at the site now known as Huanchaquito-Las Llamas (HLL) in the Province of Trujillo, 350 meters from the shore and 2 miles north of the ancient city of Chan Chan. At the time, this was the largest city in South America, the capital of the Chimú state and an area on its way down, as evidenced by other recent mass executions and human sacrifices. However, none were quite like what archeologists discovered in 2011.
“Stratigraphy, associated artifacts, and radiocarbon dating indicate that it was a single mass killing of more than 140 children and over 200 camelids directed by the Chimú state, c. AD 1450. Preliminary DNA analysis indicates that both boys and girls were chosen for sacrifice. Variability in forms of cranial modification (head shaping) and stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen suggest that the children were a heterogeneous sample drawn from multiple regions and ethnic groups throughout the Chimú state.”
Over 140 children from many different areas, some with elongated skulls from cranial binding, were found with broken bones indicating their hearts were removed while they were still alive. Buried in plain cotton shrouds in groups of three, their ages ranged from 5 to 14 with most between 8 to 12. In addition to the gruesome sight, the archeologists found something else they couldn’t explain: the bodies were buried in a thick layer of mud, which was a sign of massive rainfall and flooding. Could the sacrifices and the mud be linked?
“While the correlation between heavy rains and the sacrifice may be coincidental, it is tempting to hypothesize that the two events are associated, and that the mass offering of children and camelids may have been an attempt to appease the gods and mitigate the effects of a major ENSO event that occurred around 1400–1450 A.D. The sacrifice of such a large number of children and camelids constituted a significant investment of resources for the Chimú state, whose massive capital city Chan Chan lies less than a kilometer away from the Huanchaquito Las Llamas sacrifice site.”
This is at least three times more in number than any other child sacrifice ever found (and hopefully never found again) in the New World, so this El Nino must have been catastrophic. In addition to attempting to appease whatever god was causing it, the child sacrifice was meant to show the panicking populace that their leaders still had the power to order them to perform what had to be an emotionally wrenching task.
In the end, the sacrifice didn’t save the Chimú. Weakened by the catastrophe which affected both fishing and agriculture, and the loss of so many future warriors, the Chimú were conquered by the Inca emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui around 1470. If that hadn’t done them in, the Spaniards arrived just 50 years later with their diseases, destruction and dominance.
A desperate culture sacrificed a generation in an attempt to stop climate change. Isn’t it also sacrificing a generation if a culture ignores it?
I have in my files more than twenty reports from people who claim to have seen black helicoptersflying in complete silence, no less. If that was not weird enough, in most of those same cases the helicopters did something astounding and almost unbelievable. What that might have been? Well, I’ll tell you. Those same ‘copters morphed into (A) the shapes of classic 1950s-era flying saucers, (B) small balls of light, and (C) large, blinding balls of light. Such reports stretch credulity to the absolute max; even I have to admit that much. But, such reports are surprisingly widespread within the field of Ufology. You just need to know where to look for them. So, what on Earth is going on? I certainly don’t have the answer to that question, but, here is one such case, from my files, which dates from February 1982. It absolutely typifies the angle of the silent, shape-shifting helicopters:
The town of Dulce, New Mexico has become infamous in UFO circles, chiefly because it is said to be the home of a massive underground base. It is alleged to be manned by hostile, dangerous aliens who engage in nightmarish genetic experiments on human abductees. So the sensational and highly unlikely story continues, the U.S. Government knows all too well what goes on under Dulce, but lacks the sufficient power or ability to eject or destroy the alien hordes. That there has been an undeniable mass of so-called cattle-mutilations in the area is an issue which cannot be denied. Certainly, the FBI has declassified a sizeable number of reports of such mutilations from the very same area. There is good evidence to suggest that the Dulce tales were created by disinformation experts in the military. That doesn’t take away the fact, though, that high-strangeness and Dulce go together, hand in glove. They certainly do.
All of this brings us to that February 1982 story of a man named Bruno. On the day in question, he saw a squadron of black helicopters hovering over Dulce’s Archuleta Mesa – below which, so the story goes, the extraterrestrial installation is carefully hidden. As Bruno watched with amazement, the helicopters – yes, each and every one of them – inexplicably morphed into bright balls of light. It was a jaw-dropping situation which led Bruno to conclude that the E.T.s of Dulce can camouflage their craft to resemble our aircraft; thus ensuring that, for the most part, they are never seen by us for what they really are.
Another answer, of a very strange sort, has also surfaced. Back in 2007, I interviewed Ray Boeche, a priest and a former Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) State-Director for Nebraska. In 1993, Ray met with a pair of U.S. Department of Defense physicists who, at the time, were working on a classified program to contact what many of us would call aliens. The program, however, referred to them as something very different: as Non-Human Entities, or as NHEs. As the project continued at a steady pace, and as runs of bad luck, ill health and even death blighted the research, the members of the secret group came to believe that the NHEs were not E.T.s, after all. Rather, they concluded they were dealing with literal demons from an equally literal Hell. In 1994, one year after Boeche’s meeting, those same two DoD physicists stated the following: “Regarding the phantom helicopters, while many are direct NHE ‘productions’ (craft is not an appropriate term as they do not need to travel via a propulsion device) many are related to our program, especially regarding running checks and surveillance on mutilation sites and so-called abduction victims.”
It’s very difficult to understand (partially or completely!) what is afoot when it comes to the matter of silent, shape-shifting helicopters of the black variety. All I can say for sure is that despite the infinite weirdness that surrounds such cases, the witnesses are highly credible. They are genuinely mystified by what they have seen. All they want are answers. So far, there are no verifiable answers at all. Unless, that is, you buy into the claims of those two Department of Defense personnel who briefly surfaced in the nineties to give their views on the matter. The creations of supernatural entities? Of aliens? Of demons? Or, of the U.S. military, employing highly advanced “stealth”-type technology? All of those? Who knows? I can say something: that this is an all too real phenomenon, despite the fact that most people will probably ignore it or dismiss it out of hand. Unless, of course, those same people one day become exposed to the matter itself. Then, things take on a whole new angle. And a new appreciation of the morphing, silent mystery, too.
Security Cam captures Triangle UFO over Simi Valley, California
Security Cam captures Triangle UFO over Simi Valley, California
A security cam has recorded a strange triangular light anomaly that suddenly appears on the slope of a hill in Simi Valley, California. Then the anomaly moves upwards away from the hill.
The owner of the security cam said: It rained last night 3/5/19 at 7:30 pm. This is my backyard camera facing south/west in Simi Valley, Ca.
This is the night we had a big thunder and lightning storm. Look on the left behind the hill and you will see the light come up.
Weird shape and not a plane. Planes are a small dot. A plane that low would be crazy flying around in a lightning storm.
The camera time posted is not correct. I never set it. I got the time off my Blue Iris program.
When you find one alien artifact on Mars, its thought provoking, but when you find dozens of artifacts in the same photo...it becomes indisputable evidence. Well...that happened today. At first, I had only found one interesting object in this photo...a white object which could easily be...a living species...of the Mars. I believe the white object is actually a freshly made statue, which means a sparse population of this alien species still live here. Then...I let my eyes adjust to the photo and slowly I saw the doorway to the right of the white object. A few seconds later I noticed the pyramid...and then when I thought I had found it all...I noticed the lion face near the doorway. And yet a few seconds later I noticed the second doorway to the left of the white creature. Needless to say...I realized that I had just discovered an ancient city in this location. Further out in the photo were a lot of other alien artifacts, proof that aliens existed once on Mars, but they were scattered and often half buried in Mars soil. I'll put a few of the artifacts below. This one photo of Mars...is enough to change the beliefs of most non believers instantly and yet, most of the world will never get to see it. So I ask you, please share this post. Reposting it on any social site or news site you can find. We need to let the public know the truth...that intelligent life once existed on Mars. Scott C. Waring
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Mysterious Illuminating Object Baffles NASA Mission Control
Mysterious Illuminating Object Baffles NASA Mission Control
NASA Mission Control was left out of sensible words after a mysterious object flew past the International Space Station (ISS), according to conspiracy theorists.
On September 8 2000, NASA launched the STS-106 spacecraft from Kennedy Space Centre to fly Space Shuttle Atlantis to the ISS. The activity is in preparation to permanently man the low-orbit satellite.
However, two bright objects were seen flying across the screen during the Atlantis pass-by over Chicago, Illinois, which fuelled wild conspiracy theories after it appeared to startle the flight controller back at Mission Control in Houston.
The bizarre event left Jeff Challender, and some other conspiracy theorists convinced NASA had just caught something they shouldn’t have.
Mr Challender revealed that two strange objects were spotted flying below just as the shuttle was passing over Chicago.
He said that the first object seemed smaller and further away but the second one was very bright and flew at speed. Mission Control tried to follow its progress and zoom in until it was out of sight. According to Mr Challender, the Mission Control perhaps realised that the video goes out to the public.
Mr Challender believes the anomalies are not ice crystals sparkling in the sun as the announcer says the sun will rise in a few minutes. He thinks the objects were self-luminous as the sun has not even risen yet.
Mr Challender also revealed he spotted four more unusual objects appearing to fly in formation during the same mission.
Mars. A planet still full of life today. Vegetation, water, seas, lakes, rivers and many forms of life still present today. Many activities take place in the subsoil, but there is still oxygen outside to breathe even if not abundantly. On this celestial body millions of years ago there were peoples who later moved here on our world as on other worlds. Mars is still inhabited by different life forms, including humans. In this study image I found a head of an ancient monument present on this surface. Thanks for your patience.
MILIEUHoe zit het eigenlijk met onze kennis over klimaatverandering? Onze collega’s van de Nederlandse krant Algemeen Dagblad zetten de achttien meest prangende vragen op een rijtje. En de antwoorden natuurlijk.
1. Is het echt waar dat de aarde opwarmt?
Ja, daar bestaat geen twijfel over. Op de hele aarde is het sinds 1900 gemiddeld 1 graad warmer geworden. Die opwarming is niet gelijk verdeeld, blijkt uit metingen van duizenden weerstations op land en in zeewater. In Siberië is de temperatuur zelfs al 3 graden gestegen. Rond de tropen en boven de oceanen gaat de opwarming minder hard.
Wat ook onomstotelijk is vastgesteld: door die opwarming smelt het ijs rond de polen, vooral op Groenland. Zo is het oppervlak van de Noordelijke IJszee dat in de zomer bedekt is met ijs, sinds 1979 bijna gehalveerd.
Ook weten we zeker dat de zeespiegel stijgt: sinds 1880 met ruim 20 centimeter. Dat komt deels door het smeltwater van gletsjers en de ijskappen in de poolgebieden, deels doordat zeewater bij een hogere temperatuur uitzet.
2. Waar komt die opwarming door?
Door broeikasgassen. De concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer is sinds het begin van de industriële revolutie (1750) met 40 procent toegenomen. CO2 (koolstofdioxide) en andere broeikasgassen zoals methaan, lachgas en waterdamp vormen een deken om de aarde. De zonnestraling die de aarde opvangt, wordt daardoor niet meteen terug het heelal in gekaatst, maar blijft deels onder die deken hangen. Dat broeikaseffect is niks nieuws. Aan de broeikasgassen die van nature in onze atmosfeer zitten, danken we het dat deze planeet leefbaar is. Zonder zou het gemiddeld 33 graden kouder zijn. Naarmate de concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer stijgt, wordt de deken dikker. En wordt het op aarde warmer.
3. Klimaatverandering is toch van alle tijden?
Zeker. Maar dat betekent nog niet dat het argument ‘klimaatverandering is een natuurlijk proces, dus mensen hebben er geen invloed op’ klopt. Van grote klimaatveranderingen in het verre verleden is bekend dat ze samenhangen met CO2.
Bij de laatste grote ijstijd, zo’n 20.000 jaar geleden, zat bijvoorbeeld nog niet de helft van de huidige concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer. Een hevige opwarming 56 miljoen jaar geleden, rond de tijd dat de eerste aapachtige wezens rondliepen, werd waarschijnlijk veroorzaakt door een enorme bel van het sterke broeikasgas methaan dat vrijkwam uit de zeebodem. Daardoor steeg de gemiddelde temperatuur op aarde zo’n 5 graden.
Rond de polen was toen geen ijs te bekennen. Langs de Noordelijke IJszee groeiden palmen, zo bewijzen fossielen. De tropen werden zo warm, dat veel organismen het loodje legden. Die prehistorische warmte-uitbarsting had een natuurlijke oorzaak. Waarschijnlijk gaven vulkaanuitbarstingen de eerste zet: de CO2 die daarbij vrijkwam, zorgde voor een kleine opwarming, waardoor methaanhydraten in de zeebodem smolten. Uit die enorme ijskristallen ontsnapte het methaan, wat de verhitting verder aanjoeg.
De huidige temperatuurstijging gaat veel sneller dan alle opwarmingen die in de geschiedenis van onze planeet door dergelijke natuurlijke processen zijn veroorzaakt.
De concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer is de afgelopen eeuw al meer gestegen dan in de tienduizend jaar waarin de aarde na de laatste ijstijd ontdooide. “Dat klimaatverandering van alle tijden is, zou de zorgen erover juist moeten vergroten”, zegt de Nederlandse prehistorisch klimaatonderzoeker Appy Sluijs.
“We hebben ervan geleerd dat telkens wanneer de CO2-concentratie omhoog gaat, de planeet er heel anders uit gaat zien. Zelfversterkende effecten zoals enorme hoeveelheden methaan die vrijkomen uit de zeebodem en ontdooiende permafrost (bodems die nu nooit helemaal ontdooien, nvdr.), kunnen ervoor zorgen dat het leven hier op aarde sterk verandert.”
Van grote klimaatveranderingen in het verre verleden is bekend dat ze samenhangen met CO2
Hollandse Hoogte / Siebe Swart luchtfotografie
4. Waarom zou de mens dan nu de oorzaak zijn?
Aangetoond is dat de recente toename van CO2 in de atmosfeer grotendeels is veroorzaakt door verbranding van fossiele brandstoffen. Fossiele brandstoffen zoals steenkool, olie en aardgas ontstaan uit planten waarin koolstof (C) is opgeslagen. Bij verbranding komt dit vrij als CO2. Door het type CO2 te meten, is aangetoond dat de extra CO2 in de lucht niet afkomstig is uit bijvoorbeeld oceanen of vulkanen. De broeikasgassen zijn hoofdzakelijk afkomstig van de fossiele brandstoffen die sinds de industriële revolutie in hoog tempo door onze fabrieken, automotoren en cv-ketels zijn verbrand. Ook door ontbossing komt CO2 vrij.
De hoeveelheid methaan in de atmosfeer is sinds de achttiende eeuw eveneens flink toegenomen: met 150 procent. Methaan is na CO2 het belangrijkste broeikasgas. De extra uitstoot van methaan hangt ook samen met fossiele brandstoffen en met afvalverwerking, landbouw en veeteelt. Zo boeren koeien veel methaan op. Dat komt bij het verteren van gras vrij in hun pens en is als broeikasgas ongeveer 25 keer sterker dan CO2.
5. Over de invloed van de mens op het klimaat is toch veel twijfel?
Volgens het IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), het klimaatonderdeel van de Verenigde Naties dat onderzoek van duizenden wetenschappers uit de hele wereld samenvat, is het “extreem waarschijnlijk” dat menselijke broeikasgassen de dominante factor in de opwarming van de aarde zijn. Extreem waarschijnlijk is niet hetzelfde als 100 procent zeker.
Bij Nederlandse onderzoeksinstituten als het KNMI en het Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL) wordt door geen wetenschapper meer betwijfeld dat de mens verantwoordelijk is voor de huidige klimaatverandering. Alle andere mogelijke factoren zijn afgelopen decennia uitgebreid onderzocht, zegt klimaatonderzoeker Geert-Jan van Oldenburgh van het KNMI. “Voor wetenschappers is er geen grotere uitdaging dan een gat slaan in een bestaande theorie. Als je een nog onbekende oorzaak voor klimaatverandering vindt, sta je meteen in het toonaangevende wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Nature. Alle mogelijke oorzaken – veranderende sterkte van de zon, oceaanstromingen, schommelingen van de aardbaan, vulkaanuitbarstingen – zijn dus afgepeld. Telkens blijft maar één oorzaak overeind: de door mensen veroorzaakte CO2. Geloof me: er is geen verborgen x-factor in klimaatverandering.”
Zeker 90 procent van de wetenschappers wereldwijd is het daarover eens, blijkt uit metastudies. Onder de wetenschappers die het klimaat als vakgebied hebben, ligt dat percentage hoger dan onder wetenschappers die zich er zijdelings mee bezighouden.
Dat betekent niet dat onder klimaatwetenschappers geen onzekerheid bestaat. Integendeel. Hóe gevoelig het klimaat precies is voor CO2, is bijvoorbeeld nog de vraag. In modellen die voorspellen hoe sterk de aarde opwarmt, zit dan ook een behoorlijk grote onzekerheidsmarge.
6. CO2 zorgt toch juist voor een groenere aarde?
Klopt. Een kwart tot de helft van het aardoppervlak is de afgelopen 35 jaar groener geworden, blijkt uit onder meer satellietbeelden van de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA. Die vergroening is aanzienlijk: de extra blaadjes aan planten en bomen bedekken een gebied twee keer zo groot als de VS.
Dat komt deels door de verhoogde concentratie CO2 in de atmosfeer. Om te groeien halen planten immers CO2 uit de lucht, die ze omzetten in voedingsstoffen en zuurstof - zoals u zich misschien herinnert van de les biologie over fotosynthese.
Door de opwarming zijn groeiseizoenen bovendien langer geworden, vooral in het hoge noorden. Op toendra’s groeien bijvoorbeeld meer struiken.
Daarnaast zorgt de aanplanting van nieuwe bossen, bemesting en efficiëntere landbouwmethodes voor meer bladgroen. Ongeveer een kwart van de 10 miljard ton CO2 die de mens per jaar in de atmosfeer brengt, wordt tijdelijk opgeslagen in planten (en daarbij nog eens een kwart in de oceanen).
Andere effecten van klimaatverandering doen dat positieve effect deels teniet. Bij bosbranden en droogtes – die vaker voorkomen door klimaatverandering – komen juist veel broeikasgassen vrij. Zo deed de droge zomer van 2003 in Nederland de CO2-opname door bossen van vier jaar teniet, doordat bomen massaal hun blaadjes lieten vallen.
Hollandse Hoogte / Siebe Swart luchtfotografie
7. Wat merken we nu al van het broeikaseffect?
Eén hete zomer of ronduit lenteachtige februarimaand wijst nog niet meteen op een veranderend klimaat. Maar de langetermijnstatistieken zijn zonneklaar: er is sprake van een opwarmende trend. In Nederland is de gemiddelde temperatuur afgelopen honderd jaar al 1,9 graden gestegen - bijna dubbel zoveel als de gemiddelde opwarming wereldwijd. Het aantal zomerse dagen per jaar nam met bijna twintig toe, het aantal vorstdagen met ongeveer hetzelfde aantal af. De hoeveelheid neerslag is met ruim 20 procent gestegen; hevige stortbuien komen veel vaker voor.
Wereldwijd is de kans op droogte, hittegolven en overstromingen toegenomen. Dat zorgt nu al voor schade aan ecosystemen, meer mislukte oogsten en gezondheidsproblemen.
8.Wat kunnen de gevolgen zijn van grote temperatuurstijging?
Voorspellen is natuurlijk altijd gevaarlijk. Maar mocht het ergste doemscenario van het IPCC – 6 graden opwarming – uitkomen, dan duidt alles er volgens internationale klimaatwetenschappers op dat het leven op grote delen van de aardbol erg onaangenaam, zo niet onmogelijk, wordt. Weerpatronen raken compleet ontregeld. De zeespiegel stijgt in een paar eeuwen 10 tot 12 meter.
Subtropische gebieden en steppes zullen verwoestijnen. Grote delen van de wereldbevolking zullen kampen met watertekorten. In de tropen wordt de hitte ondraaglijk: wie zich bij temperaturen van meer dan 40 graden en hoge luchtvochtigheid enigszins inspant, kan binnen een paar uur sterven aan oververhitting.
Bij een temperatuurstijging van meer dan 2 graden sterven koralen op grote schaal af. Bij verdere opwarming sterven ook andere dieren en planten uit. In Zuid-Europa en andere gebieden richting de evenaar daalt de voedselproductie. Eten wordt duurder. Ondervoeding, infectieziekten, diarree, hart- en ademhalingsziekten nemen toe. Overstromingen en droogtes maken meer slachtoffers en leiden tot burgeroorlogen – met vluchtelingenstromen tot gevolg.
Positieve gevolgen zijn er ook: zo kan in het hoge noorden meer voedsel worden verbouwd. En scheepsroutes worden korter doordat de Noordelijke IJszee ijsvrij wordt.
Een grote zorg is wat er kan gebeuren als bepaalde keerpunten (‘tipping points’) worden overschreden. Boven een nog onbekende temperatuur kunnen Groenland en West-Antarctica zo snel smelten dat het proces niet meer te stoppen is. Ook dreigen uit de smeltende permafrost enorme hoeveelheden methaan vrij te komen, die opwarming kunnen versnellen. Net als CO2 die vrijkomt als het Amazonewoud zou afsterven door droogte. Waar sneeuw en ijs smelten, blijven donkere aarde en zwart zeewater over die zonlicht absorberen en niet reflecteren. Ook dat effect kan de opwarming aanjagen. Niemand weet precies bij welke temperaturen zulke processen optreden.
De afbeelding hieronder laten zien wat er gebeurt met Londen als de wereldwijde temperatuur met meer dan twee graden stijgt.
9. Kunnen we die gevaren nog afwenden?
Dat kan, volgens het IPCC. Maar dan moet de wereld nu wel heel snel in actie komen. Zonder klimaatbeleid kan de gemiddelde temperatuur in 2100 stijgen met 3 tot 6 graden ten opzichte van het pre-industriële niveau. Want de wereldbevolking, de welvaart en dus de verbranding van fossiele brandstoffen, groeien zonder ingrijpen nog wel even door.
Je hoort vaak dat de opwarming van de aarde beperkt moet worden tot “1,5 tot maximaal 2 graden”.
2 graden is de min of meer veilige bovengrens om de aarde zoals we haar kennen nog prettig leefbaar te houden, aldus de wetenschap. Inmiddels is het ook een politiek compromis. Bijna alle landen hebben zich drie jaar geleden aan dat doel gecommitteerd. Dat is vastgelegd in het Klimaatakkoord van Parijs.
Hollandse Hoogte / Sijmen Hendri
10. Kunnen we het tij sowieso nog wel keren?
Het zal in elk geval knap lastig worden. In het verleden leidden mooie woorden over een beter milieu er niet toe dat de wereldwijde uitstoot van broeikasgassen structureel daalde, integendeel. We zitten op recordhoogte. Traditioneel welvarende landen vinden het al moeilijk genoeg om hun eigen uitstoot stabiel te houden, laat staan terug te dringen. We zijn een luxe leven gewend: we vinden het normaal om te kopen en eten wat we willen, om te pas en onpas het vliegtuig te nemen.
En dan is er nog het vraagstuk van de verdeling van de koek: hebben opkomende economieën, die historisch veel minder hebben bijgedragen aan de opwarming van de aarde, in de toekomst recht op meer uitstoot? En is de gevestigde orde met al zijn miljardenbedrijven bereid om daarvoor een stapje terug te zetten?
Als we morgen per direct zouden stoppen met het uitstoten van broeikasgassen stijgt de temperatuur nog met 0,1 tot 0,3 graden door, verwachten wetenschappers. In landen als China en India, die bekend staan om hun vervuilde lucht, zal een schonere industrie in eerste instantie leiden tot een stuk hogere temperaturen. De luchtvervuiling dempt daar namelijk de kracht van de zon.
De opslag van CO2 zou een steuntje in de rug kunnen zijn om opwarming van de aarde tegen te gaan. Er wordt wereldwijd druk onderzoek gedaan naar deze ‘tussenoplossing’. CO2 wordt hierbij afgevangen en opgeslagen onder land of de zeebodem. De vraag is echter of er genoeg ruimte kan worden gevonden voor de enorme hoeveelheden CO2 die moeten worden afgevangen om de temperatuurdoelen te halen.
11. Wie zijn wereldwijd de grootste vervuilers?
De grote olie-, gas- en steenkolenreuzen, veruit. Internationaal onderzoek uit 2017 wijst uit dat honderd (staats-)bedrijven verantwoordelijk zijn voor 71 procent van de CO2-uitstoot sinds 1988, met als koplopers het Chinese staatssteenkolenbedrijf, Saudi Arabian Oil Company en het Russische Gazprom. Shell staat op plaats negen.
Bekijk je het per sector, dan wordt een kwart van de wereldwijde uitstoot veroorzaakt door opwekking van warmte en elektriciteit. Land- en bosbouw (24 procent) en industrie (21 procent) volgen op korte afstand, voor transport (14 procent). Gebouwen – en dan vooral het verwarmen daarvan – nemen 6 procent voor hun rekening.
Zo’n 64 procent van de totale uitstoot van broeikasgassen is CO2 die afkomstig is van verbranding van fossiele brandstoffen. 11 procent is het gevolg van bossen en andere natuurgronden die sneuvelen ten koste van met name de landbouw, waardoor de natuur minder CO2 kan ópnemen. Methaan zorgt voor 16 procent van de totale uitstoot, lachgas is de derde boosdoener met 6 procent.
Willem Kolvoort
12. Kan China niet beter wat minder kolen stoken?
Het is een schrikbarend percentage: de Chinese steenkolenbedrijven zijn sinds 1988 verantwoordelijk voor bijna 15 procent van de wereldwijde uitstoot van broeikasgassen. In 2017 nam het land ruim de helft (!) van de wereldwijde kolenconsumptie voor zijn rekening.
Sinds 2014 lijkt zelfs de schier onstilbare honger naar kolen in de volksrepubliek gestild. De Chinese overheid probeert kolen in elektriciteitscentrales te vervangen door het minder vervuilende aardgas. Er is bovendien geen land dat meer windmolens en zonnepanelen heeft. Ruim een derde van de windenergie ter wereld wordt geproduceerd in China. 60 procent van de fabricage van zonnepanelen is in Chinese handen.
Ruim een derde van de windenergie ter wereld wordt geproduceerd in China
13. Het is toch vooral aan de industrie om in actie te komen?
Dat is makkelijk gezegd. Je kan ook stellen dat bedrijven maken waar wij als consument om vragen. Een relatief beperkt deel van de broeikasuitstoot wordt direct veroorzaakt door consumenten. Een paar procent is het gevolg van het verwarmen van huizen, een groter deel komt door reisgedrag.
Daarom, zeggen economen, kunnen de belangrijkste slagen worden gemaakt bij de industrie en in mindere mate de landbouw. Maar moet de industrie zélf overgaan op milieuvriendelijker produceren? Is de overheid aan zet? De burger?
Iedereen een beetje, is het logische antwoord. Op de manier waarop Tata Steel in IJmuiden staal produceert, of Chemelot in Zuid-Limburg chemicaliën, hebben we weinig invloed. Die bedrijven zullen zelf de handschoen moeten oppakken, eventueel onder druk van belastingmaatregelen. Maar wat als pensioenfondsen hun miljarden vaker investeren in vernieuwende technologie in plaats van in producenten van fossiele brandstoffen? En als de automobilisten massaal overstappen op elektrisch rijden? Shell móet dan wel een omslag maken, en is daar ook al mee begonnen.
Zo is het ook in de veeteelt. Eet de consument minder vlees, dan zal de intensieve veehouderij vanzelf een stapje terug doen. Goed voor de methaanuitstoot, maar ook voor tropische regenwouden in de Amazone, die kleiner worden door oprukkende sojateelt.
De vijf kolencentrales in Nederland zorgen voor 10 procent van de CO2-uitstoot. Maar kunnen we dat een bedrijf als RWE kwalijk nemen? Zelf stelt RWE van niet, omdat er nog niet genoeg alternatieven zijn, mede door het versneld afbouwen van de aardgaswinning. In 2030 wil het kabinet overigens een verbod op het verbranden van kolen bij het winnen van elektriciteit instellen.
Willem Kolvoort
16. Niet meer vliegen of vegetariër worden?
Op wereldschaal is de klimaatschade van bosbouw, landbouw en veeteelt (bijna een kwart van de totale broeikasuitstoot) een stuk groter dan die van luchtvaart (zeker 2 procent). Maar dat is een vertekend beeld. Wereldwijd eten veel meer mensen vlees dan dat er vliegen. De topman van Boeing stelde in 2017 dat meer dan 80 procent van de wereldbevolking nog nooit het vliegtuig heeft gepakt. Conclusie: regelmatige vliegers zorgen voor grote milieuschade. In Nederland neemt de luchtvaart nu al 7 procent van de uitstoot voor haar rekening (bron: factsheet klimaat van het CBS). Wie een keer een retourtje Thailand neemt, moet volgens voorlichtingsorganisatie Milieu Centraal vijf jaar vegetarisch eten om dat te compenseren. Heen en weer vliegen naar Zuid-Frankrijk staat gelijk aan een jaar geen vlees. Deze vergelijkingen zijn glibberig. Over de precieze uitstoot van de veeteelt is bijvoorbeeld nog steeds veel discussie en de veeteelt leidt ook tot andere problemen zoals aantasting van de natuur. Maar ze geven wel een indicatie. De luchtvaart is een groot punt van zorg. Waarschijnlijk zal het aantal vluchten de komende tientallen jaren fors stijgen, vooral in China en India. En aangezien de kerosinemotoren maar mondjesmaat milieuvriendelijker worden en er nog geen concreet alternatief in zicht is, zal het aandeel van luchtvaart in de mondiale CO2-uitstoot fors stijgen, tot misschien wel 22 procent in 2050. Behalve minder vliegen, is met de trein naar je werk gaan ook een effectieve manier om CO2 te besparen. Ook met elektrisch rijden, het isoleren van spouwmuren en zonnepanelen op je dak valt veel te winnen. En met een waterbesparende douchekop compenseer je pas na ruim dertig jaar de trip naar Bangkok. Maar alle beetjes helpen.
17. Wat gaan de maatregelen kosten, en wie betaalt?
1000 miljard euro. Het is het bedrag dat Forum voor Democratie-politicus Thierry Baudet poneert in de klimaatdiscussie. Volgens Baudet zou het 1000 miljard euro kosten om in 2050 95 procent minder broeikasgassen uit te stoten, de doelstelling van het klimaatbeleid. Volgens de FvD-voorman zal het klimaatbeleid ‘onze hele economie ineen doen storten’.
Deskundigen weerleggen de berekening die Baudet op zijn partijwebsite heeft staan. Het Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL) stelt dat Baudet subsidies, belastingen en investeringen op een hoop gooit om zo hoog mogelijk uit te komen. Het PBL komt uit op een jaarlijks bedrag dat oploopt tot zo’n vijf miljard euro in 2030. In 2050 zouden de jaarlijkse kosten tussen de vijftien en vijftig miljard uitkomen, afhankelijk van de keuzes die worden gemaakt. Maximale CO2-opslag is bijvoorbeeld een stuk goedkoper dan het volledig terugdringen van de uitstoot aan de bron. Het PBL komt in totaal grofweg uit op ongeveer een derde van het door Baudet berekende bedrag. Andere schattingen komen hoger uit. Geen enkele benadert de 1000 miljard.
En, stellen deskundigen: het hele klimaatproject biedt ook grote economische kansen. Het bedrijfsleven kan oplossingen bedenken waarmee het (ook over de grens) veel geld kan verdienen. Niemand zal het echter aandurven om garanties af te geven bij de totale kosten van zo’n reusachtige langetermijnoperatie.
Hoe je het wendt of keert: het gaat veel geld kosten. De vraag is wie het gaat betalen. Een arm gezin betaalt nu in verhouding al 3,5 keer meer aan energiekosten dan een rijk huishouden, becijferde onderzoeksbureau CE Delft. Als toekomstige extra kosten op dezelfde manier worden verdeeld, zou een arm gezin in de toekomst tot 17 procent van het inkomen aan ‘klimaatkosten’ moeten uitgeven. Als een van de oorzaken noemt CE Delft het feit dat de industrie de dans ontspringt, terwijl ze relatief een groot aandeel hebben in de uitstoot van broeikasgassen.
Daarom pleit een groep van zeventig Nederlandse economen voor invoering van een CO2-heffing, waarbij bedrijven betalen voor de uitstoot die ze veroorzaken. Landen als Zweden en het Verenigd Koninkrijk hebben zo’n heffing al. Ons kabinet wil er nog niet aan. Premier Mark Rutte voelt meer voor het stimuleren van innovaties die de uitstoot terugbrengen, en het uitdelen van boetes als er niets gebeurt.
Rutte wil innovaties die de uitstoot terugbrengen stimuleren, en boetes uitdelen als er niets gebeurt
18. Hoe ziet de wereld eruit als we de doelen halen?
Nogmaals: een toekomst voorspellen is lastig. Wat warmer dan nu wordt het hoe dan ook; zelfs als we nú stoppen met uitstoten stijgt de temperatuur nog een jaar of dertig door en de zeespiegel zelfs nog een eeuw of wat langer. Ook warmt de aarde nog wat verder op doordat de luchtvervuiling minder wordt (fijnstofdeeltjes houden nu de zonnestraling deels tegen). Want de wereld wordt een stuk schoner. Zonder de uitstoot van kolencentrales, dieselmotoren en brommeruitlaten verdwijnt de vieze deken van luchtvervuiling die nu boven de steden ligt. Goed nieuws voor de zeven miljoen mensen die naar schatting van de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie (WHO) jaarlijks sterven aan gevolgen van luchtvervuiling.
Zwerfafval, vuilnisbelten en de hoeveelheid plasticsoep in de oceanen kunnen slinken als plastic niet meer wordt geproduceerd uit aardolie. Wat niet betekent dat ze verdwijnen: plastic uit biomassa is (nog) niet altijd afbreekbaar. Of ons landschap mooier wordt, hangt ook af van politieke keuzes: hoeveel windmolens en zonneparken gaan we plaatsen en waar?
In een broeikasgasvrije toekomst hebben we in ons land straks dus schonere luchten en een bijna Zuid-Europees klimaat. Dat klinkt nog best aangenaam. Met een kans van één op twintig jaar wordt de mogelijkheid dat we nog eens een Elfstedentocht meemaken weliswaar nóg kleiner. Maar áls de Tocht der Tochten komt, is-ie wel extra bijzonder.
Een kleurgecodeerde kaart van Nasa laat de verandering van temperatuur zien van 1880 tot 2018:
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Great Sphinx Riddle: Evidence of HIDDEN DOOR Beneath Legendary Monument Revealed
Great Sphinx Riddle: Evidence of HIDDEN DOOR Beneath Legendary Monument Revealed
According to the historian, there is something hidden underneath the Great Sphinx, and an ancient stele that was removed from there in the 19th century may help solve this mystery.
Matt Sibson, an historian and the person behind the “Ancient Architects” YouTube channel, has announced a surprising discovery which may hint at an ancient mystery related to one of the most famous monuments of Ancient Egypt – the Great Sphinx of Giza.
As Sibson explained, there were originally three stelae located in front of the Sphinx: the Dream Stela, built by King Thutmose between 1479BC and 1425BC, which still remains at the site; and two more stelae that were created by Ramesses the Great over two centuries later, which ended up being taken to The Louvre museum in Paris in the 19th century and “little has been spoken about them since”.
And after coming across an image of one of the two missing stelae, in a book penned by explorer Howard Vyce in 1837, Sibson made a surprising discovery.
"There’s a Sphinx on the top of a platform, with Rameses the Great next to it and giving an offering. The Sphinx is sitting on top of what looks like a doorway. On the Dream Stele, there is also a doorway beneath the Sphinx which backs it up," he told the Daily Star.
He also noted that Howard claimed in his book that “excavators found a doorway under the Sphinx, which could have pointed to a cavity underneath it”, adding, however, that the book only shows one of the stelae in detail.
"What does the other one show? It needs to be re-analysed and brought back to life. It could shed more light on the doorway," Sibson said. "I think there is something underneath there, there are loads lots of tunnels under the Giza plateau".
Er ligt iets verborgen onder de Sfinx van Gizeh. Historicus onthult bewijs voor verborgen deur
Er ligt iets verborgen onder de Sfinx van Gizeh. Historicus onthult bewijs voor verborgen deur
Volgens een historicus ligt er iets verborgen onder de Sfinx van Gizeh. Een stele die er in de 19e eeuw is weggehaald zou kunnen helpen om dit mysterie op te lossen, schrijft persbureau Sputnik.
Matt Sibson, oprichter van het YouTube-kanaal Ancient Architects, heeft een verrassende ontdekking aangekondigd.
Hij stelt dat er oorspronkelijk drie steles voor de Sfinx stonden: de droomstele van farao Thoetmosis IV en nog twee andere steles die zijn gemaakt door Ramses de Grote, en die in de 19e eeuw naar het Louvre zijn overgebracht.
Afbeelding
Sindsdien is er weinig meer vernomen over de archeologische voorwerpen.
Sibson deed een verrassende ontdekking toen hij op een afbeelding van één van steles stuitte in een boek dat in 1837 is geschreven door ontdekkingsreiziger Howard Vyse.
“Bovenop een platform bevindt zich een Sfinx, met daarnaast Ramses de Grote die een offer brengt,” zei de historicus tegen de Daily Star.
Doorgang
“De Sfinx bevindt zich boven iets wat op een doorgang lijkt. Op de droomstele is ook een doorgang onder de Sfinx te zien,” voegde hij toe.
Hij merkte verder op dat Howard in zijn boek schrijft dat ‘onder de Sfinx een doorgang is gevonden, die zou kunnen leiden naar een holte’.
Sibson zei dat de steles opnieuw geanalyseerd moeten worden. “Ik denk dat zich iets onder de Sfinx bevindt. Onder het plateau van Gizeh barst het van de tunnels.”
The Moon passed in front of the Sun, reversed course, and did it again!
The Moon passed in front of the Sun, reversed course, and did it again!
On March 6 to 7 the Moon crossed between NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Sun, a phenomenon called a lunar transit.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed an eclipse of the sun--a strange kind of eclipse that you can only see while orbiting Earth. The black disk of the New Moon passed in front of the sun, reversed course, and did it again.
During the eclipse, which lasted just over 4 hours, as much as 82% of the sun was covered. Technically, that makes it an annular solar eclipse, not total. At maximum, an annulus or "ring of fire" completely surrounded the Moon.
According to spaceweather the strange "double-dip" motion of the Moon across the sun is a result of orbital mechanics.
Both SDO and the Moon are orbiting Earth, but at different speeds. SDO's velocity of ~3 km/s is faster than the Moon's velocity of 1 km/s. SDO thus overtakes the Moon first in one direction, then the other, during the long eclipse.
This sheet metal with a perfect circle through it was posted on Youtube by the alien researcher WhatsUpInTheSky37. This object has the perfect appearance of sheet metal with a perfect circle in it. The circle has not been cut, but rather designed into it as we see the smooth edges. NASA has a photo editing team at the Johnson Space Center that edits out any anomalies that could have been created by aliens, however they miss this one. I can't say they missed it by accident, since its so obvious, but probably did this on purpose to sneak the truth out. Awesome discovery that is indisputable proof that intelligent aliens existed on Mars.
Scott C. Waring
Video states:
I was going through the Anomaly groups today on facebook and came across a post by Shamus that had Neville Thompson's Gigapan for SOL 2013 and this odd piece of what looks to be a Manufactured item all twisted up and destroyed as most of the stuff we have seen on Mars is. I was all setup to start a video on another great find when I decided I had to share this with everyone and see what they think. I can tell its not from the rover since there are not tracks around it. In the full gigapan you can see that even clearer. So tell me what you think this is?
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UFO Caught On Wildlife Game Camera On Eureka, Montana, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Caught On Wildlife Game Camera On Eureka, Montana, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 9-25-2018 6:14 PM but reported today
Location of sighting: Eureka, Montana, USA
Source: MUFON #98995
This UFO was caught by a game camera in Eureka, Montana just a few months ago. The UFO has the classic disk shape seen for many decades. Its not a bird since it has no wings, no head or tail or legs. The craft appears to be made of a metallic substance since judging from the sunlight reflecting off of it. The eyewitness appears to have taken a photo of the UFO off of his computer screen, thus the lines we see are those of the screen itself.
Funny it was a forest camera that caught it. I bet those aliens thought they had gotten away with exploring the back woods of Eureka...but I would love to see their faces when they see this hit the Internet.
Google Has Edited Out 2 of 3 Photo Indexes Of Alien Base At Zeeman Crater, moon, March 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Google Has Edited Out 2 of 3 Photo Indexes Of Alien Base At Zeeman Crater, moon, March 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: 2006-2007 abouts Location of discovery: Edge of Zeeman Crater, Earths moon Source: Google Earth Map (push moon button) I was exploring Google map (free to download) when I found the infamous ET base at Zeeman crater. I was astonished that Google had not deleted it yet. Google had already deleted the ET base from both the VISIBLE IMAGERY and theCOLORIZED TERRAIN photo map. Lucky for us the Lunar Orbiter Mossaic map has less editings...so far, but I'm sure this wont last. So I made this video which is 100% proof that Google is working with the US government to hide the existence of alien life from the public. Google is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Google is making a covert war that the public doesn't know even exists right now under our noses...the war on information. A war that fights to keep the public in the dark, and the information out of our minds. That is something I cannot allow. By editing what information the public sees and doesnt see...Google is taking part in THOUGHT CONTROL. The information the public knows is like programming code, it determines the future actions of those with it. Thus...by editing out certain alien info...they control the public by making them passive. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
Video released for the first time shows the UFO which appeared in the sky around 3am on January 3, 2012 in Denbigh, North Wales.
Brothers Nathan and Alex Thomas saw several lights rotating in a circular formation out of the window of their home.
Nathan, then aged 14, was watching TV when he heard a loud bang from a bin being knocked over in a storm so decided to investigate.
To his bemusement, he saw the bright lights flashing in the distance over a farmer's field.
ROTATING: The mystery lights seemed to spin in a circular formation (Pic: CASCADE)
“Upon my analysis of this fascinating footage in more detail I confirmed what the witnesses had seen and described also confirming the lights to be rotating in a circular uniformed formation, giving the impression of being fixed to a much larger circular b”
UFO researcher Jason Gleaves
After watching them or some time he decided to wake his brother Alex, who described the lights as "amazing".
They couldn't hear any noise from the lights and so decided it could not be fireworks.
Nathan grabbed his Toshiba Camilo S30 hand-held camera which he'd got for Christmas and filmed the lights from his bedroom window.
After trying to work out what they had been looking at Alex then decided to wake their mum Linda and cousin Kiera who also saw the unexplained lights.
STUNNED: Alex Thomas saw several lights spinning (Pic: CASCADE)
Former RAF worker Jason Gleaves studied the film using the latest computer technology.
He said: "During the video footage Nathan remarkably keep a steady focus on the objects in the distance for most of the duration, also focusing and zooming in and out on occasions capturing local housing, street lamps and foliage, which is ideal for perspective in relation to the witnesses sighting location and the unknown light sources in the distance.
"Upon my analysis of this fascinating footage in more detail I confirmed what the witnesses had seen and described also confirming the lights to be rotating in a circular uniformed formation, giving the impression of being fixed to a much larger circular base structure.
“Also frames were obtained revealing an unusual unknown shaped object, multicoloured in appearance exhibiting a full visual spectrum range.
"Near the end of the footage the lights appear to change angle to a 45 degrees angle but continuing to rotate as they did in the horizontal position before blinking out of sight for good."
SPOOKY: The location of the unexplained phenomenon in daylight (Pic: CASCADE)
Jason managed to obtain a daytime photograph from fellow UFO researcher Gari Jones taken from the exact location and direction of the night time footage.
He overlaid a frame taken from the original footage with the daytime image which placed the lights just above the tree line on a distant hill, approximately one and a half to two miles away.
Jason, author of UFO Photo and The Ufology Umbrella, added: "At the sighting location the only landmarks are a golf course and quarry, but both set off to the left and right of the sighting location by some considerable distance (in my opinion, enough not to impede or interfere with regards to a mistaken identification) the rest of the surrounding area is farmland and beyond the sighting location for many miles.
"At one point in the footage the family pet dog is heard getting agitated and unnerved, in other similar UFO cases animals and local wildlife are often heard getting excited, but on this occasion the pet dog could be just upset because of the strange early hours commotion.
"Other possible factors and identification of the unknown light sources could be drones, but during 2012 drone technology had not been widely available to the public as they are today, so I don't believe the lights to be drones.”
Cosmic impacts on young Mars may have triggered deluges, potentially explaining why the Red Planet was once covered in water, a new study finds.
Although Mars is now cold and dry, scientists have for decades found evidence suggesting that the planet's surface was once covered with rivers, streams, ponds, lakes, and perhaps even seas and oceans. Since there is life virtually everywhere on Earth where there is water, this history of water on the Red Planet raises the possibility that Mars was once home to life and might host it still.
However, despite the evidence for Red Planet water, scientists haven't been able to figure out how Mars could have possessed this water during its early days. During the Red Planet's youth, the sun was cooler than it is now, and previous climate models suggested that Mars may have lacked enough greenhouse gasesto trap enough heat to generate significant amounts of rainfall.
New, not-yet-peer-reviewed research analyzes one potential answer to this mystery: that cosmic impacts heated Mars by generating enormous amounts of molten or vaporized rock and steam. That, the paper said, would help explain the signs of a warmer, wetter past Mars. To explore this possibility, scientists analyzed the environmental effects of cosmic impacts on computer models of the climate and geology of Mars.
"Using sophisticated three-dimensional global climate-model simulations similar to the ones used, for example, to simulate global warming on Earth, we were able to simulate for the first time in three dimensions the climate change induced by the very large impacts that hit Mars about 4 billion years ago," lead study author Martin Turbet, a planetary scientist and climatologist at the Sorbonne University in France, told Space.com.
The researchers focused on impacts from the largest rocks to ever hit Mars, ones more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) across. These are big enough to explain the largest craters seen on the Red Planet, basins more than 370 miles (600 km) wide.
The scientists found that one of those impacts would make the atmosphere so hot that, for about half a Martian year, water would be unable to last on the Martian surface. After that, constant rain would fall for about a dozen Martian years. During this time, the water that was initially vaporized by the collision would return as deluges flooding the Red Planet, with an average of about 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) of water covering Mars per Earth year. (One Martian year is equal to about 1.88 Earth years.)
After these rains, Mars would quickly cool, with all its surface water freezing solid in 1,000 to 100,000 years. Over the course of another 10,000 to 1 million years, solar radiation would turn surface ice directly into water vapor, permitting water to migrate to and freeze at the Martian poles and other cold parts of the Red Planet.
The researchers calculated that an especially big impact — say, of a rock about 180 miles (300 km) wide, leaving a crater about 930 miles (1,500 km) in diameter — would, in addition to all these global consequences, create a local hot spot on Mars that could survive for tens of millions of years. Although, for most of its existence, this hot spot would not be warm enough to melt water on the Martian surface, it could help keep water liquid underground and at the bottom of any overlying ice deposits.
But the new findings don't explain some of the most notable water-created features on Mars: major valley networks south of the equator. Impact-related storms, however, likely peaked near the Martian equator. Previous research has also suggested that valley networks and the largest basins on Mars appear to have formed at different periods in the planet's history.
These findings also suggest that these deluges may have caused the crater erosion that scientists have identified in images of the Martian surface gathered by missions such as Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Turbet said. In addition, the cosmic-impact-triggered deluges may have led to the formation of ancient clays on the Red Planet, consistent with the suspected ages of these materials, he noted.
The research is described in a paper posted to the pre-print site arXiv.org and submitted to, but not yet accepted by, the journal Icarus.
It was 40 years ago today (March 5) that Voyager 1flew past Jupiter, revealing a surprising planetary system that includes moons of ice and fire. And scientists are still looking at some of these moons for signs of habitability for microbes.
Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, both left Earth in 1977 on the trail of an unusual planetary alignment that happens every 175 years, according to NASA. The gas giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune lined up in such a way that a spacecraft could use the gravitational field of one planet to swing on to the next. Voyager 2 flew past all four planets, while Voyager 1 instead traveled high above the plane of the solar system after visiting Jupiter and Saturn.
Between them, the two spacecraft garnered basic knowledge about these large planets — measuring their atmospheres, their ring systems, their magnetic fields (including Jupiter's especially strong one) and how their inner cores may function. Jupiter had already been visited by the Pioneer spacecraft, but it still held surprises for Voyager 1 when it flew by in 1979.
Voyager 1 captured this image of Jupiter and its moon Ganymede (bottom left) when it was just over a month away from its closest approach to the planet in 1979.
"Jupiter's atmosphere was found to be more active than during the visits of Pioneer 10 and 11, sparking a rethinking of the earlier atmospheric models which could not explain the new features. The spacecraft imaged the moons Amalthea, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, showing details of their terrain for the first time," NASA officials said in a statement.
"Possibly the most stunning of Voyager 1's discoveries was that Io has extremely active volcanoes, powered by heat generated by the stretching and relaxing the moon endures every 42 hours as its elliptical orbit brings it closer to and then farther from Jupiter," NASA officials added. "The spacecraft also discovered a thin ring around the planet (then making it the second planet known to have a ring), and two new moons: Thebe and Metis."
Io's volcanic plumes are now being imaged regularly by NASA's Juno spacecraft. And Voyager's discoveries at Europa, Ganymede and Callisto will soon result in a more close-up examination of these bodies. These moons have icy surfaces and probable global oceans underneath, according to joint observations from the Voyager spacecraft, Galileo mission (which orbited Jupiter between 1995 and 2002); and even the Hubble Space Telescope, which spotted periodic spurts of what appears to be water emanating from Europa. Thanks to the intense flexing these moons' interiors receive as they orbit Jupiter, it's possible that the oceans host all the ingredients necessary for life. But scientists need more spacecraft observations to confirm this.
NASA is hard at work on the Europa Clipper, which is expected to go into orbit around Europa in the 2030s to see if this icy moon is host to conditions that could support microbial life. The European Space Agency's JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission will launch from Earth in 2022 to study all three icy moons, but most especially Ganymede. JUICE will study the moons' oceans, ice layers and general geology, as well as learn more about their exospheres (tenuous atmospheres) and magnetic fields.
Bizarre footage shows a black ring hovering in the sky above snowy fields in Montana.
The baffling phenomenon was captured by farmers as they fed the cattle on their ranch.
The smoky hoop floats in the air for several minutes before breaking up and vanishing
The farmers said they might have mistaken the spooky apparition for an alien visitation – had they not known its real identity.
They said: 'While feeding our cows on a very cold evening on our farm and ranch north of Lambert, Montana, my husband and I noticed a black ring floating in the sky.
Leading them to ask: 'Aliens or an oil well burp?'
However the experienced farmers had heard of the phenomenon before, living over the hill from an oil well and were quick to guess where it had come from.
They said: 'Had we not known it was a smoke ring that came from one of the oil wells over the hill, we would have thought we were being visited by aliens.
The warm smoke in the ring rose in the sky as it became larger and less pronounced
'This smoke ring was caused by an oil well worker that was blowing out the regulator in oil well flare.'
Excess natural gas brought to the surface while collecting oil is burnt, or flared, to prevent it pressurising the system.
This flaring process is used to relieve pressure, effectively 'burping' the system while creating dark smoke which can sometimes form the rings seen in the video.
'The cold, still air provided the right environment for the exhaust to make this smoke ring.
'The ring stayed intact for several minutes before breaking up and dissipating.'
The farmer takes a break from feeding the cows to film. Her husband can be seen looking up at the spectacle in the field below
The ring begins to dissipate with dark smoke leaving the circle formation
The ring was in fact caused by a combustion of crude oil in a nearby oil well.
Conditions on the day, cold and still air, meant that the warm smoke stayed intact in a ring as it rose into the sky before eventually dissipating.
This is not the first time a ring like this has appeared in the skies internationally, causing confusion as to where it has come from.
Others have appeared in the UK, China, Argentina and U.S. and have been explained as a byproduct of fireworks, cannon fire and other pollutants.
The last remnants of the smoke ring as it disappears into thin air in seconds
Alien mothership with flying saucers and UFO scout fleet?
Alien mothership with flying saucers and UFO scout fleet?
Alien mothership with flying saucers and UFO scout fleet was coincidentally captured on photo while shooting a sudden cloud manifestation. The sudden cloud appearance happened in Denmark above Odense city on May 23, 2012, 01.18 pm local time.
I saw no objects during the photography but later I discovered a large elongated cloudy UFO in two of four hi-res photos. And this vessel seems to act as a mothership with something that looks like flying saucers attached outside. And there is a large fleet of smaller objects partly hiding in the sunshine in one of the photos. That´s the so-called UFO scout fleet.
I went to my friend’s colony garden again to help her with the weeds. The weather was beautiful and the Sun shone from an almost cloudless sky. As always, I had my camera ready to shoot pictures if a cool cloud appeared or something strange should occur. The colony garden is, by the way, the same place where I had a sighting with a black flying saucer
Sudden manifestation of a beautiful cloud
Afternoon at 1.18 pm we sat down and enjoyed the weather. Right above us, I see a sudden manifestation of a beautiful cloud I did not notice a few minutes before. I hurry to photograph, four snaps of the cloud, four more photos for the meteorology archive.
And then we sat there and looked up at the sky observing those artistic clouds. Although we both sat and looked up, none of us noticed the alien mothership and the UFO activity high above us. Which, however, occurred partly in the sunshine.
Alien mothership found in two photos?
There is clearly a large elongated UFO in two of the photos. In the first photo DSC06440 top center (Object A), it hovers alone with the deep blue sky as background. There is no UFO scout fleet to be seen just aside from two white dots far right in the sunshine. And there is one dark spherical object under the artistic cloud you see in the above photo.
In the second photo DSC06443 bottom right (Object B), it has moved a fair distance across the sky and now seem to be functioning as mothership. It is surrounded by a large number of smaller objects (scout fleet) partially hiding in the sunshine.
Alien mothership (A) with flying saucers docked?
When I enlarge the alien mothership in the first photo DSC06440, I see a vessel that could resemble a huge airship (or alien mothership). At the bottom of the vessel, there seem to be three round discs with a darker tone. To me, it looks like classic flying saucers (discs) that stands obliquely onto the large object, just as the dishes are set in the dishwasher.
The flying saucers as they hereby are baptized appears with a dark gray disc and a lighter elevation in the middle. Two of them are relatively clear. The last one on top of the object seems more unclear, is smaller and located offset from the other two.
The picture above is unedited and shows the mothership as it is seen in the original photo. The picture below is the same but has been processed with Auto Tone in Adobe Photoshop. In both images, sunlight shines from the right below middle.
What are these “flying saucers” doing up there at the bottom of this vessel? Are they in transit to or from their mothership or are they docked? Or did the saucers create a cloud to hide in? It is difficult to determine from the picture what is going on. What I see may not be what it really is? But if I really see what I think I see, this must be a real alien mothership with disc-shaped objects aka flying saucers docked. Simply a fantastic photo on the same level as the sphere with a vertical companion-photo if you ask me.
The alien mothership´s (as they hereby are baptized) in the first photo (object A) and the second photo (object B) has the same profile. Both look like a big airship with visible details in the form of elevations on the hull. And that is the reason why I assume it must be the same vessel in both photos, just seen from different perspectives.
Alien mothership (B) with elevations on the hull
The alien mothership (object B) in the second photo (DSC06443) also comes with some strange details at the bottom. When I magnify the image I see a vessel that most of all resemble a large airship. It is much brighter compared to object A since the “aliens” have now moved into the sunshine in relation to the camera position.
The cropped picture below shows object B as it appears in the original image without image processing.
The picture above and below shows the same vessel. We’re looking straight up at the bottom of the vessel. Sunlight comes down from top right. Above you can sense some extensions that are located on the outside of the ship. These are also visible in the picture below where you can see shadows on the hull.
The image above has been processed in Adobe Photoshop with Calculations (red channel merged/gray channel exclusion). This was the only image processing method that most clearly shows the elevations on the hull. The light/shadow relation can be misleading but it is indicating that something is sitting outside on the hull on this supposed alien mothership.
The UFO scout fleet
Object A seems to hover alone in the sky while object B seems to share the sky with a large fleet of small cloud-white objects. If some of these small objects are actually a UFO scout fleet originating from the alien mothership is unanswered…
The cropped picture above has been processed with Auto Tone in Adobe Photoshop and originates from DSC06443. It shows the alien mothership together with some smaller objects. The flying saucers are not visible here.
One object seems to blast a short distance in the sky, which leads my thoughts to something not out of this world. You find it on the right side of the picture with the two slanted arrows and a question mark.
Scout fleet gallery
Keep in mind we are in late May and the Sun is shining from an almost cloudless sky. So there must be pollen in the air. Some objects seen in DSC06443 in the sunshine may be pollen. But the objects nice outlined with indications of shadows may not be pollen but larger objects. See some of the UFO scout fleet in the list below…
Many more objects in the image are not included here. The blurred and smeared ones that can be pollen have been omitted. If some of these many objects are part of a larger fleet I cannot decide. I’ve been looking for those who seem to have enough pixel mass and light/shadow relations to be a physical object.
Alien mothership a large airship?
Looking beyond the strange elevations or extensions, and skipping by the “cigar-shaped UFO” terminology, the alien mothership could actually look like a large airship at a distance. But this “airship” seem to be very high up, higher than airships would normally come. And this thing moves at a relatively high speed.
The Hindenburg airship was one of the fastest airships ever built. It reached about 136 km / h and did not fly over 650 feet. Goodyear’s typical airships today manage to fly about 125 km / h and about 1500 feet high. However, they can go up to 7000 feet altitude (about 2 km).
There are High-altitude platform station (HAPS), but they are not built for high speed sky cruising. HAPS can both be airships and balloons and are build for operations such like telecommunication, surveillance, weather, and environmental monitoring.
UFO disappears in less than 8 seconds…
However, there is a problem with the airship theory. In the first photo DSC06440 at 01:18:10 you see the ship at the top middle. The next photo DSC06441 I take at 13:18:18 only 8 seconds later, is turned approx. 45 degrees counterclockwise. It still shows the area where the object was in the first picture but the object is gone…
Since the object is very close to the top edge of the first photo DSC06440, it could quickly disappear out that way. Since the next photo DSC06441 is turned approx. 45 degrees counterclockwise, there´s a greater distance to the top edge of the image. But neither airship, alien mothership or whatever it may be is nowhere to be found.
Besides a small black dot in the center out to the left In the next and third image DSC06442, there are no big objects to see here. First, in photo DSC06443 it all goes crazy with alien mothership and a large scout fleet.
24 seconds from point A to B
The fact that the alien mothership is visible in the first photo and gone in the next 8 seconds later is quite a mystery. But this vessel also seem to move over a greater distance from point A in photo DSC06440 to point B in photo DSC06443. And it travels this distance in only 24 seconds.
In 24 seconds, an airplane could very well get this far. But if its an airship I start to doubt. Now for good reasons, I do not know the height or exact position of the alien mothership in the two photos. Therefore I can not calculate the distance from points A to B. I am no aviation expert, nor expert photographer, so I will leave it up to the right experts to assess how far there is!
However, I think it is interesting that this UFO probably moves over this distance. And afterward, in the last photo, the alien mothership divides the sky with a fleet of smaller objects, which I hypothetically believe must be the associated UFO scout fleet.
Alien mothership photographed again in 2017?
The alien mothership in this article seems to have been photographed again. In another photo sighting from 2017 that produced this UFO gallery, a similar UFO is posing in some of the photos. Read the article UFO mothership with flying saucers docked?
IMG_6025 object 3 (Mothership with discs) gallery page source link
High resolution photos
I used a Sony A-100 DSLR reflex Camera with a Sony standard zoom lens 3.5-5.6/18-70mm attached. The image resolution is 3872×2592 pixels (12 MP).
Since ancient times, people have reported seeing strange lights and mysterious objects in the sky. The stories ofunidentified flying objects(UFOs) orencounters with extraterrestrials have managed to fascinate thousands of people and have even become centers of pseudoscientific studies, known as ufology. But in the canon of UFO legends, there are some incidents that continue to be unexplainable.(UFO on a mountain in Siberia)
Almost everyone knows the Roswell case, the Kecksburg UFO in Pennsylvania, or the Rendlesham Forest sighting in England. However, there are many more incidents throughout our history, with numerous witnesses and involving starry UFOs. Moreover, there continue to be reports of unidentified flying objects around the world. As in Russia, where apparently a strange object hit a mountain, causing a landslide and blocking a river, leaving nearby populations at high risk of flooding. And the strangest thing of all is that Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent the military to investigate the incident.(UFO on a mountain in Siberia)
The strange incident in the Bureya river
The Bureya River, of a length of 623 km, flows southward in Krai from Khabarovsk, in the far eastern Siberia. Well, that was before a strange incident. Sometime in early December, a mysterious object crashed into a mountain, causing a landslide and rocks in the river. Since it is located in a remote area, there were no witnesses to what happened. Because the Russian government has denied that it was the failed launch of a rocket or military evidence, some people believe that it is the accident of a UFO. And no wonder, since the incident occurred in early December, but was not publicly reported until December 24.(UFO on a mountain in Siberia)
However, to avoid the propagation of conspiracy theories, various explanations have been disseminated to explain what happened. Evgeny Zubko, a cosmic powder expert from the Academy of Natural Sciences of the Russian Federation, said the object that hit the mountain could be a meteorite.
“It smells like hydrogen sulfide and steam goes out in some places,” Zubko told the Siberian Times. “We even found a place at the top where there are hot stones, we use them to warm our hands. It seems that it was very hot there. The edges of the ice are thin as if they were in boiling water. “(UFO on a mountain in Siberia)
The other version is that the cause could be a “seismic earth slide” caused by an earthquake.
“It happens very often in the Russian Far East,“ explained Aleksei Makhinov, regional president of the Russian Geographical Society. “The whole coast of the Okhotsk Sea is covered with these landslides when half a mountain falls.”
Although it seems that these “scientists” have not taken into account that there was no record of earthquakes in the time interval corresponding to the month of December. The presence of meteorites was also not detected, according to the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Putin sends the military
But here it does not end everything since the Russian president Vladimir Putin has envied the military to investigate the incident. According to the British tabloid Daily Mirror , an Antonov An-124 and four other transport aircraft have been mobilized to the area loaded with military equipment. The official version is that the collapse of the mountain could unleash a tsunami in the river of almost 50 meters high. Although some doubt this version since the use of explosives could cause another giant wave.(UFO on a mountain in Siberia)
“The height of the waves was at least 50 meters (after the December landslide),” said Russian scientist Alexey Makhinov. “If there is an explosion and the debris collapses, there will also be a tsunami, but a little smaller. If they blow up the dam that has formed here, then, as a result of the explosion, the remaining part of the mountain could fall into the water. There is a high probability that this will happen. “
Did UFO crash?
The truth is that, with so many contradictions, with the military presence in the area and the lack of information it is inevitable that a UFO crashed into the mountain. Also, Russia seems to have a strange connection with incidents coming from space. As you may recall, the city of Chelyabinsk, in the southern Urals area, was shaken by an explosion in the stratosphere in 2012. This explosion caused damage to buildings and thousands of people were injured. Experts said the accident in Chelyabinsk was caused by a meteoroid.
The incident in Chelyabinsk was strangely similar to the Tunguska event in Russia in 1908 when an exceptionally powerful explosion (comparable to that of a thermonuclear weapon) in Siberia swept the vicinity of the Podkamennaya River. And to this list of enigmatic events in Russia, we add the one that occurred in the Bureya river.
Unfortunately, the inhabitants of this remote area of Siberia will not be able to see what the army finds because a state of emergency has been declared (of course) and the area is being evacuated due to “possible flooding”. And if it were really a UFO, would the Russian government reveal the truth to the world?
THIS NEW 3D PRINTER STRAIGHT OUT OF STAR TREK USES LIGHT TO MATERIALIZE OBJECTS
THIS NEW 3D PRINTER STRAIGHT OUT OF STAR TREK USES LIGHT TO MATERIALIZE OBJECTS
University of California, Berkeley has developed a new type of 3D printer that uses rays of light to turn liquids into solids in a matter of minutes. Dubbed the ‘The Replicator’ by its creators referencing the famous Star Trek technology; the new device can form objects, smoother, faster and with more complex than traditional 3D printers.
https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-28-2016/UabBmB.gif
It also has the ability to add new materials to existing objects, for example adding a handle to a cup.
The UC Berkeley researchers say the printer could completely change the way products are imagined and prototyped.
“I think this is a route to being able to mass-customize objects even more, whether they are prosthetics or running shoes,” said Hayden Taylor, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper describing the printer, which appears online today (Jan. 31) in the journal Science.
Printer opens possibilities for new types of design ideation
“The fact that you could take a metallic component or something from another manufacturing process and add on customizable geometry, I think that may change the way products are designed,” Taylor said.
Traditional 3D printers build up objects layer by layer in either plastic or metal.
The Replicator uses a gooey liquid that turns to a solid when exposed to different thresholds of light. It works when carefully calibrated light waves are projected onto a rotating cylinder of liquid which transforms the object ‘all at once’.
“Basically, you’ve got an off-the-shelf video projector, which I literally brought in from home, and then you plug it into a laptop and use it to project a series of computed images, while a motor turns a cylinder that has a 3D printing resin in it,” Taylor explained.
“Obviously there are a lot of subtleties to it — how you formulate the resin, and, above all, how you compute the images that are going to be projected, but the barrier to creating a very simple version of this tool is not that high.”
3D printing becomes truly 3D
In a series of test prints, Taylor and his team made several small objects including a tiny replica of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’. The printer can currently make objects up to four inches in diameter.
“This is the first case where we don’t need to build up custom 3D parts layer by layer,” said Brett Kelly, co-first author on the paper who completed the work while a graduate student working jointly at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“It makes 3D printing truly three-dimensional.”
The printer’s design was inspired by CT scans used by doctors to locate tumors, CT scans work by projecting X-rays into the body from all different angles. By analyzing the patterns of transmitted energy exposes the geometry of the object.
Taylor said they took this idea and basically reversed it.
“We are trying to create an object rather than measure an object, but actually a lot of the underlying theory that enables us to do this can be translated from the theory that underlies computed tomography.”
The Replicators inventors have filed a patent but hope to share their knowledge with other researchers who will continue to develop the technology.
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Lake Michigan UFO sightings still unsolved 25 years later
Lake Michigan UFO sightings still unsolved 25 years later
Dejanay Booth - Detroit Free Press
The eerie lights filled the sky along nearly 200 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, from Ludington south to the Indiana border.
On March 8, 1994, calls flooded 911 to report strange sightings in the night sky. The reports came in from all walks of life — from police and a meteorologist to residents of Michigan's many beach resorts. Hundreds of people witnessed what many insisted were UFOs — unidentified flying objects.
Cindy Pravda, 63, of Grand Haven remembers that night in vivid detail — four lights in the sky that looked like "full moons" over the line of trees behind her horse pasture.
"I got UFOs in the backyard," she told a friend on the phone.
Today, the mystery of one of the largest UFO sightings in Michigan history remains unsolved, but it continues to fascinate extraterrestrial researchers, psychologists and history buffs alike.
Pravda still believes the lights were UFOs.
Read more:
Think you've seen a UFO? Here's how to report it
"I watched them for half an hour. Where I'm facing them, the one on the far left moved off. It moved to the highway and then came back in the same position," Pravda told the Free Press on Thursday. "The one to the right was gone in blink of an eye and then, eventually, everything disappeared quickly."
She still lives in the same house and continues to talk about that night.
"I'm known as the UFO lady of Grand Haven," Pravda laugh.
The Detroit News and Free Press, March 20, 1994. The newspapers printed a combined Saturday and Sunday paper at the time.
Detroit Free Press
Where it started
Daryl and Holly Graves and their son, Joey, told reporters in 1994 they witnessed lights in the sky over Holland at about 9:30 p.m. on March 8.
"I saw six lights out the window above the barn across the street," Joey Graves told the Free Press in 1994. "I got up and went to the sofa and looked up at the sky. They were red and white and moving."
Others gave similar accounts, including Holland Police Officer Jeff Velthouse and a meteorologist from the National Weather Service Office in Muskegon County. What's more, the meteorologist recorded unknown echoes on his radar the same time Velthouse reported the lights.
"My guy looked at the radar and observed three echoes as the officer was describing the movement," Leo Grenier of the NWS office in Muskegon said in 1994. "The movement of the objects was rather erratic. The echoes were there about 15 minutes, drifting slowly south-southwest, kind of headed toward the Chicago side of the south end of Lake Michigan."
In 1995, The Free Press published the conversation between the National Weather Service and Velthouse.
"What do you think it is?" said the weather service radar operator.
Velthouse described witnesses seeing five to six objects, some cylindrical with blue, red, white and green lights.
The radar operator said, "There were three and sometimes four blips, and they weren't planes. Planes show as pinpoints on the scope, these were the size of half a thumbnail. They were from 5 to 12,000 feet at times, moving all over the place. Three were moving toward Chicago. I never saw anything like it before, not even when I'm doing severe weather."
Hundreds of reports of suspected UFOs were called in not only to 911 dispatchers but also to the Mutual UFO Network's (MUFON) Michigan chapter.
MUFON, an all-volunteer nonprofit organization founded in 1969, bills itself as the "world's oldest and largest civilian UFO investigation and research organization."
In 1994, the network received UFO reports from Ludington south to the Indiana state line, spokeswoman Virginia Tilly told the Free Press in 1994.
"We're getting 10 or 15 new sightings a day," Tilly said. "We have probably 20 people in various stages of investigating these reports."
The reported UFO sightings was the largest since March 1966, Bill Konkolesky, Michigan state director of MUFON, told the Free Press this week.
The Detroit Free Press, March 8, 1995
Detroit Free Press
"It was one of the big ones in the state. We haven't seen a large UFO (reported sighting) wave since that time," Konkolesky said.
Konkolesky joined the network in 1993. He was not part of the investigation team but still has a copy of an article about the sightings with a picture of the Graves family on the front cover.
MUFON interviewed dozens of witnesses, Konkolesky said, many of whom remain in contact with the organization.
"There was a lot of enthusiasm into the UFO field (then) because of the amount of press coverage. It was outstanding," he said. "They were paying attention to the phenomenon."
Konkolesky said the flying objects reported in 1994 are characterized as "unexplained" and the sightings remain a mystery.
Not so far-fetched
The idea of alien life isn't as farfetched as once thought, with a number of recent discoveries pointing raising the possibility.
In a series of reports from USA TODAY, researchers have studied whether life could exist on a recently discovered "Super Earth" about 30 trillion miles away.
Villanova University astrophysicists Edward Guinan and Scott Engle told USA TODAY that the planet, known as Barnard b, has a temperature of 274 degrees below zero, but "niches of life" may be possible under the ice.
Another group of researchers is studying whether a mysterious object entering the Earth's solar system from interstellar space at a high rate of speed actually is a probe intentionally sent here by an alien civilization. Scientists later decided that the weird object actually was a comet.
And another study reports that more “fast radio bursts" – bright, short-lived pulses of radio waves that come from across the universe — have been detected by astronomers. Some researchers have considered the idea that these bursts could be signals from intelligent aliens, according to Science News.
Other mysteries
The UFO frenzy of 1994 was one in a string of unexplained phenomena in Michigan history.
In 2016, a mysterious phenomenon known as the Paulding Light was reported in the western Upper Peninsula.
Witnesses reported seeing a bright white light, glowing deep inside the woods, changing size and shape before fading into the darkness. Although many individuals believed the flickering lights was because of a car driving over a hill, others believed it to be something supernatural and too bright to be headlights.
A light shines off in the distance seen off of Robbins Pond Road in Paulding, MI where the mysterious Paulding Light appears on Wednesday June 13, 2016 in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
That same year, a photo of a furry creature in the Upper Peninsula surfaced, sparking conversation about a possible Bigfoot. At that time, the Upper Peninsula Bigfoot/Sasquatch Research Organization also reported a sighting near the community of South Branch in Ogemaw County.
In December 2016, the organization led a search for the beast in the Seney National Wildlife Refuge.
In 2009, astronomers across the globe received a deep s[pace signal which is commonly referred to as FIRST J141918.9+394036. The signal was one of many fast radio bursts, or FRBs, which have been detectable since 2007. Since that first one was discovered, scientists have only found a few dozen more, but new research says these mysterious signals could be pinging around the universe every second.
Experts are still unsure exactly what these signals were, but what they do know is that they can emit as much energy in a second than the sun does in 10,000 years.
They are exceptionally difficult to study as they can last as little as a millisecond and there is no way to predict when they are coming.
Some experts says they are natural, such as exploding stars, while other scientists believe that they are extra-terrestrial signals which were intentionally sent Earth’s way.
‘Alien’ signal from deep space DECIPHERED by astronomers
(Image: GETTY)
However, scientists have now managed to decipher where FIRST came from, using an array of radio telescopes.
European astronomers believe that FIRST could be the leftovers of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) from 283 million lightyears away and spread over a huge distance of 5.2 lightyears, according to the results published in online science journal arXiv.
GRBs are are huge bursts of energy that are released from imploding and can travel vast distances through the universe.
The signal turned out to be a gamma ray burst
(Image: GETTY)
The researchers have been able to deduce that it was a GRB by the amount the light faded over time.
They write in their paper: “This decay could be explained by a change in the post-shock microphysical parameters following the transition to the non-relativistic phase, or by a drop in the ISM [interstellar medium] density (e.g. due to the shock reaching the outer edge of the star-forming region where the GRB exploded).”
NASA ISS SHOCK: How strange ‘illuminating' object left Mission Control BAFFLED
NASA ISS SHOCK:How strange ‘illuminating' object left Mission Control BAFFLED
NASA Mission Control was left stumbling for words after a strange object flew past the ISS, sparking wild claims from conspiracy theorists, it was revealed during a documentary.
NASAlaunched the STS-106 spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Centre on September 8, 2000. The object of the mission was to fly Space Shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station (ISS) in preparation to permanently man the low-orbit satellite. However, there was one bizarre moment that fuelled wild conspiracy theories.
On September 19, 2000, at around 10:30am, Atlantis was passing over Chicago, in the state of Illinois.
During the pass-by, two bright objects were seen flying across the screen, which appeared to startle the flight controller back at Mission Control in Houston.
He said: “Atlantis is approaching sunrise as it passes the Great Lakes area.
“There’s a, there’s a view of Chicago and some, uh, ice crystals, or other items being illuminated by the rising sun.
The ISS is a low-Earth orbit satellite
(Image: GETTY)
The strange anomaly was spotted near the ISS
(Image: GETTY/AMAZON PRIME)
There’s a, there’s a view of Chicago and some uh – ice crystals, or other items being illuminated by the rising sun
Mission Control
“Atlantis now moving into sunrise, in just about the next minute or so.
“As that occurs ice crystals that come off the shuttle becomes illuminated."
The bizarre event left conspiracy theorists, including Jeff Challender, convinced NASA had just captured something they should not have.
During Amazon Prime’s “Secret Space”, he revealed his view on how the event went down.
Alien hunters claim they have discovered a series of fossils on Mars over the years, and most of the fossils, which are apparently stone carvings, appear to be of male faces. One such fossil shows an “old male with an open mouth and high detailed lower teeth and jaw”, according to prominent UFO hunter Scott C Waring. Over the years, alien enthusiasts have given countless examples of male-orientated statues or fossils on Mars, and this is why they no longer exist there.
According to shocking claims, the male species on Mars failed to give females any recognition, leading to the eventual extinction of the species over time as the genders drifted apart.
Mr Waring wrote on his blog UFO Sightings Daily: “This ancient society on Mars is a male dominate culture.
“I find very few female faces and most the faces I find are male with beards, crowns, moustaches, aged older males with wrinkles.
“That alone may account for a large reason why their species went extinct – they dismissed the intelligence and ingenuity of the females of their species, thus increasing the odds of destroying themselves and their society.
Alien BOMBSHELL: Martian species went extinct as the males IGNORED females - shock claim
(Image: GETTY)
“Male and female combined intelligence creates a balance and increases the chance of survival of any species.”
Other conspiracy theorists, however, believe that an ancient Martian species went extinct because of a nuclear war on the Red Planet.
Dr John Brandenburg, a plasma physicist working as a consultant at Morningstar Applied Physics LLC, says in his book, ‘Death on Mars’, that nuclear isotopes found on the Red Planet “resemble those from hydrogen bombs on Earth” and a “Martian civilisation apparently perished due to a planet-wide catastrophe of unknown origin”.
An alleged face of a male Martian
(Image: UFO SIGHTINGS DAILY)
According to Dr Brandenburg, Earth could suffer a similar fate if we do not learn from the supposed signs of Mars’ end.
He writes in his book: “The discovery of dead civilisation on Mars, whose end was apparently catastrophic and due to unknown causes, reinforces our understanding that the cosmos can be a dangerous place and requires a vigorous response from the human race, to reduce the probability that we will perish the same way.”
Professor Avi Loeb, who is head of astronomy at Harvard University, reiterated that it is indeed “quite possible” that we have interacted with alien technology without realising. Professor Loeb made the astonishing revelation this week to Express.co.uk. He explained: “It’s quite possible that we did detect some traces of other civilisations but haven’t recognised them.
“The reason is we often imagine what we know already - what we have developed ourselves.
“And until we develop the appropriate technology, we would not recognise it out there in the sky.
The esteemed astronomer elaborated that there was nothing far fetched about the search for alien life.
Alien Life: Harvard Professor Avi Loeb explained to Express.co.uk how aliens could have visited Eart
(Image: Getty - Express)
“Many people adopt the attitude that it’s never aliens.
“And this approach is similar to an ostrich putting its head in the sand and not even looking through the telescope to search for it.
“I think we should be open-minded. We should look for industrial pollution on the atmospheres of other planets and relics from dead civilisations out there.
“I call it space archaeology: basically digging into space and searching for traces of other civilisations that may not exist anymore.”
One such object, Professor Loeb contends, could be ‘Oumuamua’ - a thin, cigar-shaped entity that briefly shot through our solar system.
No one can currently explain the reason for its trajectory towards the centre of the galaxy, nor its lack of gaseous emissions.
Professor Loeb’s contentions are echoed by NASA scientist Silvano P Colombano, who similarly suggests that we may have already encountered extraterrestrials.
The scientist wrote in a research paper: “I simply want to point out the fact that the intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us (if it hasn’t already) might not be at all produced by carbon-based organisms like us.
“If we adopt a new set of assumptions about what forms of higher intelligence and technology we might find, some of those phenomena might fit specific hypotheses, and we could start some serious enquiry.”
Don't panic; the solar system isn't falling apart, despite the strange dance on display in this incredible footage captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory(SDO).
Sure, the video appears to show the moon crossing the sun's face and then doubling back, like a celestial yo-yo — but that's just a matter of perspective. The phenomenon in the video is actually caused by the relative orbits of the spacecraft and the moon around Earth.
You can play a similar visual trick with neighboring cars on a highway: Picture your car speeding up relative to a nearby vehicle, which then appears to move backward. It doesn't actually reverse, of course; it just can't keep up with your point of view.
With the spacecraft, this phenomenon is about orbit size instead of speed. The SDO is orbiting much closer to Earth than the moon is. That means that every once in a while, they align just so, with the SDO briefly traveling directly perpendicular to the moon. Then, it turns in its relatively tight orbit around Earth, even as the moon, in its much more distant orbit, continues to swing across the sky.
A depiction of the orbital dynamics that produce the apparent yo-yo motion of the moon across the sun's face. As the spacecraft "turns the corner" in its orbit compared to the moon, the skewed perspective causes the moon to appear to reverse course.
The video doesn't show the moon doubling back across the sun, in other words — it actually shows the spacecraft's perspective doubling back in its own orbit around Earth.
On this particular occasion, the full event took a little over 4 hours on the night of March 6 to unfold. The moon blocks up to 82 percent of the sun's disk during the crossover.
The SDO has been in geosynchronous orbit since 2010 as it studies the sun in a range of wavelengths.
Nikola Tesla Discovered The Black Knight Satellite
Nikola Tesla Discovered The Black Knight Satellite
Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power.
He invented the first alternating current (AC) motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology.
Though he was famous and respected, he was never able to translate his copious inventions into long-term financial success—unlike his early employer and chief rival, Thomas Edison.
The Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory claims that there is a spacecraft in near-polar orbit of the Earth that is of extraterrestrial origin, and that NASA is engaged in a cover-up regarding its existence and origin. This conspiracy theory combines several unrelated stories into one narrative.
Over the last several months, a series of mysterious anomalies spotted on civilian radar systems have baffled observers and may suggest that the Air Force is testing something they don’t want the public to see. The anomalies began in December 2018 when a strangely dense cloud-like formationappeared on weather radarin Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. A few days later, similar radar anomalieswere observedin Maine and Florida, and last month the same phenomenonturned up in Australia.
While most observers are confident that these anomalies are some new type of chaff, a common anti-radar countermeasure deployed by military aircraft to fool radar, the frequency and distribution of these anomalies worldwide is somewhat puzzling. What is being hidden in plain sight?
The latest radar anomaly appeared on radar on March 5th, 2019 around 12:20 pm local time in partly cloudy skies with no precipitation anywhere on weather radar. The anomaly appeared as a large, mostly stationary plume in the skies just to the west of Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, about 100 miles north of Roswell, curiously enough. As Tyler Rogoway of The War Zonepoints out, Cannon Air Force Base is home to the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) which operates a number of cutting-edge unmanned aerial vehicles like the MQ-1 Predator, MQ-9 Reaper, RQ-11 Raven, Scan Eagle, and Wasp III. AFSOC conducts infiltration and exfiltration operations for US Special Forces as well as surveillance and reconnaissance missions and even psychological warfare.
While tests of new aircraft and aerospace technologies are nothing new to the desert, this plume and the others like it over the past few months display behavior not typically seen in known chaff systems. These plumes have persisted much longer than known chaff countermeasures and somehow remain mostly in place unlike traditional chaff which tend to be carried by the wind more easily.
A pair of B-1B Lancers deploy chaff and flares during a military exercise.
These radar anomalies could just be the Air Force testing new countermeasures, although I’m left to wonder why these tests would be conducted above civilian areas as in the Australia and Indiana cases. Is the Air Force hiding something stranger than a new type of chaff inside these plumes? If I were to guess, I would say these are most likely tests of the long-rumored drone swarms Air Forces around the world have been testing – maybe even the telepathically-controlled swarms DARPA has recently successfully developed. That’s all my conjecture, though. So far, Cannon Air Force Base has yet to respond to requests for comment on the incident.
On the development of the Incubusandthe Succubus, St Augustine, a noted philosopher and Christian theologian, who was born in 354 and died in 430, commented on this issue. Kevin Knight, in an article titled“Whether the angels have bodies naturally united to them?” quotes the words of St. Augustine: “Many persons affirm that they have had the experience, or have heard from such as have experienced it, that the Satyrs and Fauns, whom the common folk call incubi, have often presented themselves before women, and have sought and procured intercourse with them. Hence it is folly to deny it.” As this particular extract demonstrates, the term “Incubi” was around millennia ago, as was the connection between the Incubi and sex. Such things were also being talked about more than a thousand years later.
Malleus Maleficarum is a book that was written in the latter part of the 15th century by Heinrich Kramer. A priest, Kramer said: “At first it may truly seem that it is not in accordance with the Catholic Faith to maintain that children can be begotten by devils, that is to say, by Incubi and Succubi: for God Himself, before sin came into the world, instituted human procreation, since He created woman from the rib of man to be a help meet unto man. But it may be argued that devils take their part in this generation not as the essential cause, but as a secondary and artificial cause, since they busy themselves by interfering with the process of normal copulation and conception, by obtaining human semen, and themselves transferring it.”
Kramer added: “Moreover, to beget a child is the act of a living body, but devils cannot bestow life upon the bodies which they assume; because life formally only proceeds from the soul, and the act of generation is the act of the physical organs which have bodily life. Therefore bodies which are assumed in this way cannot either beget or bear. Yet it may be said that these devils assume a body not in order that they may bestow life upon it, but that they may by the means of this body preserve human semen, and pass the semen on to another body.”
Moving on, Paul Carus, in 1900, pennedThe History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil. He offered his readers the following words: “Satan is supposed to serve first as a succubus (or female devil) to men, and then as an incubus (or male devil) to women; and St. Thomas declares that children begotten in this way ought to be regarded as the children of the men whom Satan served as succubus. They would, however, be more cunning than normal children on account of the demoniacal influence to which they were exposed in their pre-natal condition. Matthæus Paris mentions that within six months one such incubus-baby developed all its teeth and attained the size of a boy of seven years, while his mother became consumptive and died.”
It’s important to note that such creatures are not limited to just one or two parts of the planet – or even to specific time-frames. Incubi and Succubi are everywhere – exactly as they were in the distant past. In Newfoundland, there is the Old Hag – a female monster that, just like Lilith, straddles the unwary in the dead of night and steals semen from terrified men. South Africa has the monstrous Tokoloshe. Scandinavia is home to the Mare – which, rather notably, is from where the word “nightmare” comes. Popobawa creates fear and dread for the people of Zanzibar. The Karabasan is a Turkish version. The Boto haunts the cities and jungles of Brazil. And, the Lidérc plagues the people of Hungary. While the names are many and varied (the list above is just the beginning…), the key component of a sexual encounter in the dead of night, in which the victim is unable to stop the experience, is worldwide.
'Angelic' Stranger touched his shoulder and saved his life
'Angelic' Stranger touched his shoulder and saved his life
Shopkeeper Serdar Binici'yi in the city of Adana Turkey was preparing to close his store for the night when a stranger reaches the shopkeeper and taps him on the shoulder, and keeps walking.
Wondering who just touched him, Binici'yi turns around, but only sees a white van rumbling down the street. Suddenly, from the back of the vehicle, a rather sizeable metal grate swings around and narrowly misses the shaken shopkeeper, who ducks at the last minute to avoid being struck.
Binici'yi looks up and down the road, ostensibly trying to figure out who had alerted him to the imminent danger, yet there is no one to be found. It was only later, when he looked at the CCTV video of the incident, did the shopkeeper fully comprehend how miraculous the encounter had been.
The stranger who tapped his shoulder simply vanished. source
This round cloud in the photo is more than it seems. Its actually a UFO that has created the cloud around it to hide from human eyes. Aliens do not wish to cause alarm or panic for humanity so they must hide from us. This ship is over an old volcano which very well could have an underground alien base below it about 4-6km down. Aliens want to come close, they have work to do, bases to visit, intel gathering on humans to do, so coming as close as possible to the ground is often essential. Created a cloud around the UFO is a logical and intelligent way to hide from humanity and keep the status quo. I've been to Bali island once. Its a culture thats seems like you stepped one hundred years back in time. Its amazing, beautiful, peaceful with ancient temples all over the place. Even the locals often bath in the running water near the roads. I met a man there who had five wives, all working while he relaxes. Very strange and unique culture. I could see why aliens would want to visit here. Less alien believers and more god believers here. Perfect place to come and go unnoticed in UFOs hidden in clouds. Scott C. Waring
News states:
Unusual scenery decorates around the peak of Mount Lawu in Karanganyar, Central Java on Friday (03/08/2019) afternoon. Is the phenomenon of Lenticular clouds, namely clouds resembling giant plates or UFOs. This phenomenon occurs on top of Mount Lawu . Not a few citizens who preach it through social media such as Twitter and Instagram. Even the phenomenon of the Lenticular cloud is also seen from the east side of Mount Lawu from Magetan, East Java. Regions Potential to Experience Extreme Weather Today to the Day of 8-10 March 2019 A similar phenomenon has also occurred at Gunung Agung, Bali, on Wednesday (1/23/2019) Quoted from Tribun Bali, on Thursday (1/24/2019) the scene was seen very clearly by the naked eye. Information from the Head of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) of the Region III Center for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics, Denpasar, Mohamad Taufik Gunawan, the phenomenon is known as the Altocumulus Lenticularis cloud. Artikel ini telah tayang di Tribunnews.com dengan judul Warga Kabarkan Gunung Lawu Dihiasi Fenomena Awan Lenticular Bak Piring Raksasa atau UFO Residents Report Lawu Mountain Decorated with Cloud Lenticular Phenomenon Bak Giant Plate or UFO.
I found a standing statue in a NASA Mars Curiosity Rover photo today. The figure is a bit chubby and almost looks like one of those garden gnome statues often seen in peoples yards. The figure is naked and I can easily make out its left hand above its head waving and its right arm with its hand on his hip. The face is huge and as is his belly and upper thighs.
I also found a tool of some sort not far from it. The two sides are connected by two other pieces that are perfect 45 degree angles. There is a hole in one end of the object...which makes me believe that this tool is a weapon.
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Peruvian Corporation of Airports and Commercial Aviation Issues an Official Report On UFOs Spotted Over Lima International Airport
Peruvian Corporation of Airports and Commercial Aviation Issues an Official Report On UFOs Spotted Over Lima International Airport
Two UFOs were spotted moving over Jorge Chavez International Airport at 6:30 am UTC on February 27, 2019. The sighting quickly reached to Peruvian media. According to the airport’s control tower, the mysterious objects stayed for nearly an hour above the Lima sky. The incident prompted delays to several flights.
Peruvian Corporation of Airports & Commercial Aviation (Corpac) staff saw the UFOs above the airport and photographed as well as videotaped them. Corpac eventually issued an official report, the first time it provided a detailed description of unidentified flying objects over international airport.
According to the report, the UFOs were positioned on runway 33.
One of the UFOs appeared on the radar for a few moments, but both vanished from the view of the airport staff moments later.
Official report of Corpac was made available online, which was signed by technician Jose Zarabia Salas.
UFO sightings over airports are not something new. Such sightings over airports were reported in different parts of the world. History Channel even featured a documentary on UFO sightings above airports.
Former NASA Consultant Finds Evidence Of Alien Civilisation on Mars
Former NASA Consultant Finds Evidence Of Alien Civilisation on Mars
A former NASA advisor has shockingly claimed that Mars was the home of ancient alien civilisation until they were all wiped out with a devastating nuclear war.
A conspiracy theorist and a former NASA consultant Richard C Hoagland said that extra-terrestrials once existed on Mars and other planets in the solar system. He argued his claim could be proven with ample of photographic evidence from Viking missions of NASA. He explained that NASA photos from the Cydonia region of Mars show pyramids, ancient habitats, and organised structures. He stressed the destructive power of nuclear warfare cut short the thriving alien civilisation in the Red Planet.
The conspiracist said the Viking lander discovered evidence of anomalous isotopes, which are known as Xenon 129. He pointed out that these isotopes strongly point towards nuclear detonations on the surface of the planet.
Mr Hoagland, together with plasma physicist John Brandenburg and a team of investigators, explored the possibility of Mars’ ancient alien civilisation. They came out with the idea that a global Martian nuclear war destroyed the civilisations they have been looking.
The theory comes from large concatenations of radioactive Xenon 129 on the Red Planet.
The radioactive isotope is usually found on Earth around the fallout from nuclear explosions and near nuclear fission reactors.
Mr Hoagland strongly believes that the entire solar system was colonised at one point and the evidence is out there to collect.
However, the likes of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) suppressed the information from the last 50 years of space exploration, according to researchers like Mr Hoagland.
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Ex-Ministry of Defence UFO investigator publishes novel so sensitive it needed ‘security clearance’
Ex-Ministry of Defence UFO investigator publishes novel so sensitive it needed ‘security clearance’
Jasper Hamill
He spent three years investigating mysterious sightings over Britain as head of the Ministry of Defence’s official UFO desk.
Now the defence chief-turned author Nick Pope has written a book so sensitive it had to undergo a ‘security clearance’ process which resulted in the removal of several passages.
Pope worked for 21 years at the MoD but became known around the world for his research and writing on UFOs after leaving public service.
In this latest book, Blood Brothers, he draws on the worldly experience he gained during a Whitehall career which saw him named deputy director at the Directorate of Defence Security.
Nick Pope is a UFO expert who also has a background in counter-terrorism
The novel deals with the threat posed by radical Islamist terrorists and is a is a ‘homage to the incredibly brave and dedicated men and women who serve in our Armed Forces and our intelligence agencies’.
It deals with topics explosive enough to make the author submit it to the MoD, where it was checked to make sure it didn’t break the Official Secrets Act.
Pope was even asked to remove certain passages.
‘I’m not sure I’m supposed to say much about the security clearance process,’ he told Metro.
‘However, I don’t want anyone to think I’m in any way disloyal or a whistleblower, so I can confirm that I did have to send the MoD an advance copy of the manuscript prior to publication, and it did ask me to make some changes, which I made.
‘Much of the book is about the SAS and MI5 taking on violent jihadis, so clearly the book delves deep into the secret and highly-classified world of Special Forces, intelligence and counter-terrorism.
”I consider myself a patriot and fully support the UK, US and other Western governments in the ongoing war on terror.
‘I wanted to make it realistic, but needed to be absolutely sure that nothing I wrote about in terms of strategy, doctrine, tactics, equipment issues or anything else was going to offer the slightest bit of assistance to any of the bad guys out there.’
This is the cliched view of a UFO
(Image: Getty)
But real-life UFO investigations often involve the uncovering of secret military aircraft designs, such as the craft depicted in this mysterious Boeing patent from the 1980s
It wasn’t all UFOs for Pope when he was at the MoD, because he spent several years focusing on counter-terrorism after 9/11.
”Counter-terrorism is something I know a lot about – and they say you have to write what you know,’ he continued.
‘Many action thrillers concentrate on car chases and gun battles, but I want readers to see how things are done for real – not that there’s any shortage of action in Blood Brothers.
‘My book deals with the policy issues, giving readers an insight into how political decisions on counter-terrorism are made at the highest level.
‘So in one scene we have the Prime Minister chairing a Cobra emergency committee, in the next scene we have MI5 analysts cracking a problem and then we cut to the SAS going in hard and fast, all guns blazing.
‘It’s about as different as you could get from UFOs.’
A member loyal to the Islamic State waves the black flag of jihad in Raqqa (Image: Reuters)
The book unflinchingly portrays the rival worlds of the intelligence services and extremist terrorists.
‘One of the reasons Blood Brothers is likely to be controversial is that it deals with the threat posed by ISIS and other extremist groups,’ Pope added.
”The most sensitive issues in Blood Brothers are race and religion.
‘Blood Brothers doesn’t demonize Islam, but shows how – like all religions – it can be misinterpreted and misrepresented by people with hate in their hearts.’
So does the former UFO hunter and high-ranking defence official believe the nightmare scenarios of his novel are going to happen in the real world?
‘Sadly, many of the things portrayed in Blood Brothers are already coming true, such as lone-wolf marauding terror attacks using vehicles and drones at airports – I’ve long warned about the terror implications of that,’ he said.
‘And of course, it’s no secret that terrorists want to get their hands on either a nuclear weapon or failing that, material to make a dirty bomb.
‘Western intelligence agencies are dedicated and highly capable, but the terrorists only have to be lucky once. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an act of nuclear terrorism in my lifetime.
‘I don’t think this would lead to a Third World War, but there would certainly be a devastating response not just against the terrorists, but against any nation found to have helped the terrorists.’
Photographer and astronomy enthusiast Andrew McCarthy extracted color data from 150,000 moon photos to show all the different colors of the minerals found on its surface. “The color was already in that picture, hidden behind the glare of the moon’s albedo, and represents the mineral content of our moon. While my previous images showed you the detail you could see if your eyes were sharper, this one shows you what the moon could look like if our eyes and brain were much more sensitive to color,” said McCarthy. Read more for a cropped shot that really makes the colors stand out.
“McCarthy shot all the images with the Orion XT10 telescope, a Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro computerized equatorial mount, a ZWO ASI224MC color astronomy camera, and the Sony a7 II full-frame mirrorless camera. After shooting 142,000 images with the ZWO, 2,000 with the Sony, and hundreds more with a 300mmm lens, McCarthy stacked and stitched the images in AutoStakkert! and Photoshop, respectively. And to turn the color ‘up to 11’, McCarthy adjusted saturation, contrast, and sharpening,” reports Peta Pixel.
It is an incredible glimpse of a trip on the red planet.
A Finnish filmmaker has revealed a stunning three minute video painstakingly made from NASA images from the red planet.
Jan Fröjdman transformed images from HiRISE, a camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, into a video using over 33,000 reference points - and did it without the aid of AI software.
Scroll down for video
The stunning video reveals the incredible landscapes on Mars. This oval mesa is a remnant of a geological unit that once covered this area, similar to the mesas and buttes in Monument Valley, in Arizona and Utah. This is a small remnant of a much larger unit of similar material that caps Ganges Mensa to the west. As can be seen in the sides of this small mesa, this remnant consists of a layered stack of rock. Prior to the massive erosion that left this a high-standing mesa, a more gentle phase of erosion created the small hills and whorls on the upper surface of the mesa.
'There is a feeling that you are flying above Mars looking down watching interesting locations on the planet,' he explained.
'There are really great places on Mars!
'I would love to see images taken by a landscape photographer on Mars, especially from the polar regions.
'But I'm afraid I won't see that kind of images during my lifetime.
The powerful HiRISE camera has snapped 50,000 spectacular, high-resolution stereo images of the Martian terrain from the planet's orbit, creating anaglyphs that anyone can view in 3D using special glasses.
However, Fröjdman decided to improve them by turning them into video.
Instead of using automated softweare, he decided to make the video painstakingly by hand.
'It has really been time-consuming making these panning clips,' he admitted.
'In my 3D-process I have manually hand-picked reference points on the anaglyph image pairs.
'For this film I have chosen more than 33.000 reference points!
'It took me 3 months of calendar time working with the project every now and then.'
Mars has extremely large temperature changes from winter to summer compared to the Earth. It gets cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere during the winter, but this ice is unstable when the warmer summer arrives and forces it to sublimate (transform directly back into a gas) away. Near the South pole though, it stays cold enough for some of this seasonal ice to stick around all year and even accumulate from year to year. This image shows a portion of this permanent carbon dioxide ice cap. This slab of ice is a few meters (about 10 feet) thick and is penetrated by the flat-floored pits shown here. The quasi-circular pits in the center of the scene are about 60 meters (200 feet) across. The distinct color of the pit walls may be due to dust mixed into the ice. For most of the year these walls are covered with bright frost, but they defrost and show their true colors at the end of the summer.
The colors in this film are false because the anaglyph images are based on grayscale images.
'I have therefore color graded the clips,' he admits.
'But I have tried to be moderate doing this.
'The light regions in the clips are yellowish and the dark regions bluish.
The clips from the polar regions (the last clips in the film) have a white-blue tone.'
To create the panning 3-D effect, he stitched the images together along his reference points and rendered them as frames in a video.
Finnish filmmaker Jan Fröjdman transformed images imagery into a dynamic, three-dimensional, overhead view of the Red Planet
'There might be software that does this work, but I haven't found it,' Fröjdman told Wired.
The surface of the red planet may be a desolate land with little geological activity now, but it is filled with fascinating bumps and scratches from frozen poles to deep basins, all hinting at a geologically active past.
This complicated area contains various types of channels, pits and fractures. We can determine the relative ages of the pits and channels based on which features cross-cut others. Older channels appear smooth-edged and shallow. Younger channels and pits are deeper and more sharp-edged, as well as less sinuous than the shallower channels.
Changing landscapes: This images show a 'Transition Boundary' between the Isidis Basin and Libya Montes regoing on the Martian surface
Earlier this months a team at Nasa has released more than 600 images of Mars, showing a range of gullies, dunes, craters, geological layering and other features.
Each feature teaches us something new about the history of our mysterious neighbour, which used to be covered with oceans, ice sheets and erupting volcanoes.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the red planet, capturing pictures using its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, since 2006. Now the team behind the orbiter has published hundreds of new images. Hyblaeus Dorsa, one of the ridges on the planet, is shown
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the red planet, capturing pictures using its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, since 2006.
The team behind the orbiter, led by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab in Passadena and the University of Arizona, has now published hundreds of new images taken by the instrument.
Among the images are hundreds showing one of its most fascinating features: craters.
There are hundreds of thousands of impact craters on Mars, caused by encounters with other objects such as asteroids, but only some of them have names.
Other craters were formed in different ways, through volcanic activity, for example.
Some of these craters have provided clues to the most fascinating history of the Martian surface.
Other craters were formed in different ways, through volcanic activity, for example. Some of these craters have provided clues to the most fascinating history of the Martian surface. Concave fagged features in the Tempe Fossae region, a group of troughs in the Arcadia quadrangle of Mars, shown
Among the images are hundreds showing one of its most fascinating features: craters. This picture shows a crater in the Chryse Planitia region, a relatively smooth, circular plain. Some think the plain is an ancient impact basin, in the north equatorial region of Mars
The surface of Mars is a well worn place in the solar system, heavily pounded by countless meteor impacts. And some of these craters are hundreds of millions of years old. So it's unusual for there to be a completely fresh impact on the surface. A recent impact site is pictured
Mesa-Forming layered materials pictured. A mesa is an elevated area of land with a flat top and sides that are usually steep cliffs
Mars is now a frozen desert, but geological studies of rocks by previous missions to the surface have suggested the planet used to be warmer and wetter.
The polar caps on the planet spend much of their time, during the pole's winter, in continuous darkness.
When the poles are again exposed to sunlight, the frozen carbon dioxide sublimes into gas, creating enormous winds that sweep off the poles as fast as 250 mph (400 km/h).
The caps at both poles are mainly made of water ice.
Frozen carbon dioxide accumulates as a thin layer about one metre thick on the north cap in the northern winter only, while the south cap has a permanent dry ice cover about 26 feet (8 metres) thick.
Both polar caps have spiral-shaped troughs (pictured), which analysis of ice penetrating radar has shown are a result of spiralling winds.
The polar caps on the planet spend much of their time, during the pole's winter, in continuous darkness. When the poles are again exposed to sunlight, the frozen carbon dioxide sublimes into gas, creating enormous winds that sweep off the poles as fast as 250 mph (400 km/h). The south polar residual cap is pictured
Cerberus Fossae (pictured) is a long fracture system in the southeastern part of Elysium. The system has acted as a conduit for the release of both lava and water onto the surface of the planet. Mars is now a frozen desert, but geological studies of rocks by previous missions to the surface have suggested the planet used to be warmer and wetter
The total volume of ice in the south polar cap, including nearby layered deposits, is around 380,000 cubic miles (1.6 million cubic km). Both the north and south polar caps have spiral-shaped troughs (south pictured), which analysis of ice penetrating radar has shown are a result of spiralling winds
At one point, Mars was covered with oceans, ice sheets and erupting volcanoes that created the mountains that tower over the planet.
Some of these remain, like Olympus Mons - the largest-known volcano in the solar system, measuring 15 miles (24 km) high.
Olympus Mons, the solar system's biggest volcano, three times higher than Mount Everest, is thought to have had its last major eruption as recently as 25 million years ago.
At one point, Mars was covered with oceans, ice sheets and erupting volcanoes that created the mountains that tower over the planet. Some of these remain, like Olympus Mons - the largest-known volcano in the solar system, measuring 15 miles (24 km) high. Olympus Mons (pictured) is the solar system's biggest volcano, three times higher than Mount Everest
Groundwater moving beneath a massive tectonic rift zone helped carve some of Mars' deepest basins. A study published earlier this year claimed these basins may have been habitable, suggesting that life once existed on the red planet. A valley in the Northern Hellas Planitia, pictured
Billions of years ago Mars might have been home to even larger volcanoes.
Evidence collected by Nasa's Curiosity rover earlier this year showed these ancient volcanoes might have been a lot more powerful than we had thought.
Curiosity's instruments found a substance called tridymite - a kind of crystal that only forms on Earth as a result of extremely hot, silcic volcanoes.
The tridymite was found in the Gale crater, a crater that spans 96 miles (154km) in diameter and holds a mountain rising from the crater floor.
Silicic volcanism is a highly explosive form of volcanic activity, which happens as tectonics plates move from the Earth's outer shell into the Earth's mantle and force water into the molten depths.
The plates melt into magma, which is ejected out into the surface in a powerful eruption.
There has been no evidence found for plate tectonics on Mars so far, so how the silcic volcanism occurred is a mystery.
Coprates Chasma, is a major trough in the Valles Marineris canyon system, pictured. Evidence collected by Nasa's Curiosity rover earlier this year showed these ancient volcanoes might have been a lot more powerful than we had thought
Isidis Planitia, pictured, is a plain inside a giant impact basin on Mars. Groundwater moving beneath a massive tectonic rift zone helped carve some of Mars' deepest basins. A study published earlier this year claimed these basins may have been habitable, suggesting that life once existed on the red planet
Groundwater moving beneath a massive tectonic rift zone helped carve some of Mars' deepest basins.
A study published earlier this year claimed these basins may have been habitable, suggesting that life once existed on the red planet.
The discovery could help future exploration missions decide where to look for evidence of Martian life.
'The temperature ranges, presence of liquid water, and nutrient availability, which characterize known habitable environments on Earth, have higher chances of forming on Mars in areas of long-lived water and volcanic processes,' said lead author Alexis Palmero Rodriguez.
Sand dunes are among the most widespread features on Mars, serving as unique indicators of the interaction between the atmosphere and surface.
On a planetary body, dunes accumulate where a supply of sand-sized grains exists or may be abraded, is carried downwind by winds, and is subsequently deposited where these winds weaken below the threshold for sand transport.
Dunes can be preserved in rock over time. This means the deposits can reveal insights into the evolution of Mars' atmosphere from a more hospitable realm to the harsh, dry climate there today.
As a result, the study of dune processes contributes to both atmospheric and sedimentary science.
It might look more like bacteria growin in a petri dish, but this picture actually shows frosty dunes on Mars' surface. Sand dunes (pictured) are among the most widespread features on Mars. Dunes form where a supply of sand-sized grains exists or may be abraded then carried downwind by winds
The surface of Mars is also covered with narrow, deep channels known as gullies.
Martian gullies carved into hill slopes and the walls of impact craters were discovered several years ago.
Exactly how these gullies formed is not fully understood - previous research had suggested the structures were a result of flowing liquid water, because water makes similar structures on Earth.
Polar ice caps were discovered on the planet four decades ago, and erosion patterns on the surface strongly suggest rivers and oceans may have existed there in its early years.
With low gravity and a thin atmosphere, it was thought that this water largely evaporated out into space, instead of falling back down, as it would have done on Earth.
But new research shows water is not behind the Martian gullies, instead suggesting they could be created by carbon dioxide freezing and thawing.
INDIAN SPACE PROBE SNAPS NEW IMAGES OF THE RED PLANET
India's space agency has released a new series of beautiful images, beamed back from its Mars orbiter, revealing our closest planetary neighbour in all its glory
The spotlight surrounding research on Mars is often on the US, European and Russian space agencies.
But while it may be overlooked, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) remains one of only three national space programmes to have reached the red planet to date.
To celebrate its achievements, the space agency has released a new series of beautiful images using data beamed back from its Mars orbiter, revealing our closest planetary neighbour in all its glory.
India's Mars Orbiter Mission, called 'Mangalyaan', reached the red planet in September 2014.
Since then it has been taking measurements, collecting data and capturing images from orbit.
Last month, ISRO released its first full year's data from the orbiter – covering the period up to September 2015 – with its incredible images beamed back in a stream of pixels.
A spacecraft designed to search the atmosphere of Mars for clues of life on the surface of the red planet successfully blasted off in March this year.
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a heavy lift Proton rocket on 14 March to begin a seven-month, 300 million-mile (483 million km) journey to the red planet.
It is due to analyse Mars' atmosphere to search for low levels of gases such as methane that may betray the presence of alien life on the planet's surface.
ExoMars 2016 is the first phase of an historic €1.2 billion (£924 million) joint European-Russian mission to search for biochemical 'fingerprints' of past or present life high above Mars and on its surface.
Scientists believe the probe has the potential to find 'very strong evidence' of alien life when it arrives at Mars on 19 October.
Scientists hope to land the ExoMars rover in Oxia Palus, a plain located on the north east of Mars.
However, any new data won't be shared until the end of next year at the earliest, because the probe has to spend a year decelerating so it can graze the atmosphere at a slow enough speed.
In 2018, a robotic probe built by Lockheed Martin for Nasa, the Mars InSight mission, will set off for red planet.
It forms part of wider efforts to glean information about the planet's rich geological past.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is simple — click on the boulders you see in a detailed image of a distant space rock.
That straightforward task could steer NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission toward a successful sample collection from an asteroid named Bennu. The team in charge of the spacecraft will have just six weeks between producing an extremely high-resolution map of Bennu's surface and choosing where precisely to gather a sample from that rock.
"It is a massive task to actually map every single boulder on the surface, and we just didn't know a better way to do it in the amount of time," Carina Bennett, an imaging processing engineer for the mission based at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. "We basically really, truly need the help."
So Bennett and her colleagues turned to CosmoQuest, a platform for crowdsourcing space science, for the extra eyes they need to complete the mapping in time. The Bennu mapping project will go live on the CosmoQuest site beginning in late April or early May. That's when asteroid buffs will be able to help NASA out, tagging the edges of boulders in detailed images of Bennu's surface.
The exact launch date for the project depends on precisely how long it takes the OSIRIS-REx team to compile the detailed global mosaics that will reveal the boulders in need of counting. (The spacecraft is currently working on the detailed survey that will produce the many different angles of imagery scientists need to build that global mosaic.)
Once the mosaic is complete, the clock starts ticking, with just six weeks to identify each boulder on the surface and produce a detailed hazard map of Bennu's surface. That information will be passed along to the team in charge of selecting where OSIRIS-REx will attempt to grab a sample so they can reduce the odds of the sampling apparatus floundering on boulders.
That's particularly important because Bennu has turned out to be a more complicated target than scientists thought before the spacecraft's approach. "It was significantly more rocky and bouldery than we expected," Bennett said.
So the team needs to be careful to avoid hazardous sites. A boulder 8 inches (21 centimeters) across, for instance, could clog the spacecraft's sampling mechanism. The apparatus works by blowing compressed air at the surface, so if it touches down off-kilter, it could be stuck at a tilt and simply blow the targeted sample away.
That's why the OSIRIS-REx team can't choose their sampling location until they consult with a comprehensive boulder tally — and with a team of amateurs from around the world. "I think the most interesting part is that you're actually contributing to a decision," Bennett said. "You can actually go and watch when we sample and potentially see some of the same areas and images that you might have actually counted."
But the mapping project doesn't end when the OSIRIS-REx team selects the sample site. There's science work to be done with the images as well. The work CosmoQuest volunteers do will help the OSIRIS-REx team study the size distribution of boulders, for example, and how light or dark they are.
With that data in hand, scientists should be able to draw conclusions about how Bennu works. Maybe lighter rocks are smaller, suggesting they're made up of material that breaks apart more easily. Maybe the direction boulders point toward suggests that the asteroid is shaking them around its surface.
The team also wants to be able to compare these pre-sampling images with those that the spacecraft will gather after it snatches a piece of Bennu to bring home.
"We're taking in a massive amount of data," Bennett said. "Just eyes on images is incredibly valuable."
NASA is always keeping an eye on space rocks that get anywhere near Earth, and 2019 has been a relatively calm year in terms of close passes. A recently discovered asteroid is going to make a not-super-close pass of Earth later this week, and while it doesn’t pose much of a threat to our planet it’s worth mentioning simply because of its size.
The rock, known as 2019 DN, is slated to arrive at its closest point to Earth this coming Friday, March 8th. At its nearest distance the asteroid will still be around 13 lunar distances away. One lunar distance is equal to the space between the Earth and our Moon, so it’s clear the asteroid has little chance of disrupting Earth during its flyby, and that’s a very good thing considering its size.
NASA estimates the asteroid to be between 91 and 200 meters wide. That’s a pretty sizable chunk of space debris as far as the Earth is concerned. It’s not the kind of rock that would pose a threat to humanity’s existence, but it would definitely cause some commotion if it were to come down above a populated area.
For the sake of comparison, the large Chelyabinsk meteor that streaked across the skies of Russia back in 2013 was around 20 meters wide. The asteroid became a fireball which exploded in the atmosphere with a force equivalent to over 400 kilotons of TNT, damaging thousands of buildings and injuring some 1,500 people.
In contrast, the rock that created the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impact in Mexico was thought to be as large as 50 miles in diameter. If 2019 DN made a surprise appearance we wouldn’t be wiped out, but we’d definitely hear about it.
NASA takes every single space rock seriously, and it keeps an up-to-date record of close Earth approaches that it forecasts months and even years ahead of time. You can even browse the entire list online, if that’s your kind of thing.
Something Twice the Size of Earth Slammed into Uranus and Knocked it Over on its Side
Something Twice the Size of Earth Slammed into Uranus and Knocked it Over on its Side
Astronomers think they know how Uranus got flipped onto its side. According to detailed computer simulations, a body about twice the size of Earth slammed into Uranus between 3 to 4 billion years ago. The impact created an oddity in our Solar System: the only planet that rotates on its side.
Astudyexplaining these findings was presented at the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Fall Meeting in Washington DC held between December 10th to 14th. It’s led by Jacob Kegerreis, a researcher at Durham University. It builds on previous studies pointing to an impact as the cause of Uranus’ unique orientation. Taken altogether, we’re getting a clearer picture of why Uranus rotates on its side compared to the other planets in our Solar System. The impact also explains why Uranus is unique in other ways.
When the Solar System formed, it all started with a massive cloud of gas and dust. The cloud swirled as it became more dense, and eventually the Sun formed in the center, with the rest of the gas and dust swirling around it. The Sun contains about 99.8% of the mass in the Solar System, and as the remaining 0.2% swirled around it, clumps began to form into the planets we know today. As they formed, the rotation of the gas cloud was imparted to the planets. So, all of the planets rotate the same way, except for Uranus, (and Venus, which was likely struck by an asteroid.)
The planets aren’t all exactly alike; Earth is tilted on its axis a little, giving us seasons, and so are Jupiter, Neptune, and Saturn, to varying degrees. But they’re still oriented more or less the same as the rest of the planets and moons. But Uranus isn’t. It’s tilted on its side relative to its fellow planets, by about 98 degrees.
Near-infrared views of Uranus reveal its otherwise faint ring system, highlighting the extent to which it is tilted. Credit: Lawrence Sromovsky, (Univ. Wisconsin-Madison), Keck Observatory.
“Our findings confirm that the most likely outcome was that the young Uranus was involved in a cataclysmic collision with an object twice the mass of Earth, if not larger, knocking it on to its side and setting in process the events that helped create the planet we see today.” – Jacob Kegerreis, Durham University.
Mid-collision snapshots from the simulation. Image Credit: Kegerreis et. al., 2018, Durham University.
For years, evidence has been building that supports a collision between Uranus and a body about twice the size of Earth. This most recent study builds on that evidence, and comes from a group of scientists led by Jacob Kegerreis from Durham University. According to an abstract from their presentation at the AGU, they “performed a suite of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations to investigate in detail the results of a giant impact on the young Uranus.” SPH is a computational method developed in the 1970s to study astrophysical problems. It’s also used in ballistics, volcanology, and oceanography.
“We ran more than 50 different impact scenarios using a high-powered super computer to see if we could recreate the conditions that shaped the planet’s evolution. Our findings confirm that the most likely outcome was that the young Uranus was involved in a cataclysmic collision with an object twice the mass of Earth, if not larger, knocking it on to its side and setting in process the events that helped create the planet we see today,” said Kegerreis.
The results of their simulations explain not only Uranus’ obliquity, but also some of its other properties:
Not only does Uranus rotate on its side, but so do its five largest moons.
It’s magnetic field is also lopsided, and doesn’t go out the poles.
It’s the only planet where the interior heat doesn’t escape from its core.
The collision that made Uranus what it is today happened two or three billion years ago, but according to the simulation it was over in a matter of hours.
The simulation shows that a body about twice the size of Earth slammed into Uranus, tilting it to about 98 degrees. The object that slammed into it was made of rock and ice, and some of that material fell into Uranus’ core. According to the abstract, not all of it did, and that explains why Uranus doesn’t shed heat from its core: “Furthermore, most of the impactor’s ice and energy is deposited in a hot, high-entropy shell at a radius of 3 R. This could explain Uranus’ observed lack of heat flow from the interior…”
Diagram of the interior of Uranus. Credit: Public Domain
The abstract also says that this could help explain the planet’s weird magnetic field. While Earth’s magnetic field is tilted from its geographic poles by 11 degrees, Uranus’ field is tilted by 59 degrees.
Uranian Magnetic Field. Image: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3059141
The simulation also suggests that the moons of Uranus formed after the collision. There was likely a ring of debris as the result of the impact, and the moons formed from that debris. That’s why the five largest moons rotate on the same axis as the planet.
Uranus, and the Solar System’s other ice giant, Neptune, are the least studied planets in our system. There’ve been no dedicated missions to either planet, though Voyager 2 did visit them briefly in the late 1980s. Scientists rely on observation and computer simulation to understand them both. This latest study builds on other evidence pointing to impacts as the cause of Uranus’ tilt. Once such study suggested multiple impacts were responsible, but that line of evidence hasn’t persisted.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that an impact is responsible for Uranus’ predicament. The history of the Solar System is full of impacts. The so-called ‘Late Heavy Bombardment‘ about 4 billion years ago pelted Earth and the inner Solar System with asteroids. Earth’s Moon may have been created from a collision between Earth and a doomed planet called “Theia”. On the Moon, Venus, and other bodies we can see the abundant craters caused by impacts. And, of course, a massive asteroid strike here at home brought on the demise of the dinosaurs and changed the history of our planet forever.
Many missions to Uranus have been proposed, but so far none have been approved. But space scientists are nothing if not patient. Eventually, a dedicated mission to this far-flung neighbour will be launched, and some of this ice-giant’s secrets will be unlocked.
Bob Lazar, Area 51, Flying Saucers, UFOs, Alien Technology, Free Energy
Bob Lazar, Area 51, Flying Saucers, UFOs, Alien Technology, Free Energy
In this video I talk about the film Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers.
The film is the work of Jerry Corbell, is narrated by Mickey Rourke, and was released in December 2018.
If you've never heard of it there's a link to it below this video.
If you've never heard of Bob Lazar then you're in for a treat. It should at least awaken your curiosity.
It might also be one of those pivotal moments in life after which nothing is quite the same again.
The film itself is an excellent piece of documentary film making and is a highly commendable movie.
I'm no more of a film reviewer than I am an art or food critic, so I'll leave that to others. What I will say is do watch it, and keep an open mind as you do so.
About 30 years ago Bob Lazar took the courageous decision to become a whistleblower.
He had been recruited to assist with the reverse engineering of nine alien spacecraft - the small, silver, flying saucers that have been the subject of so much discussion since Roswell in 1947.
In the film he recounts the details of the information he gave three decades ago and it's clear from all the investigative journalism that his story is consistent.
What comes across though, and this is pointed out in the film, is that Bob Lazar is a very reluctant whistleblower.
His motivation for divulging these secrets was the fact that the alien technology is being kept secret.
It is thus depriving the human race of the solutions to almost every problem the modern industrial world faces.
It's technology that could provide free, clean energy for all our transportation; on land, at sea, in the air, and into space.
Instead, these secrets remain locked away and only known in detail to those with the highest level of security clearances.
If they were shared with the world's scientists then perhaps reverse engineering could continue to the point where all the secrets are unlocked and humanity could benefit from them.
By now I've probably lost of few viewers as they roll their eyes and think, "What is this gullible fool talking about?".
And that is a common reaction, because the main reason that there is rarely open and intelligent debate about non-human intelligences in the universe is fear.
It is the fear of ridicule, of loss of reputation and respect, and the fear of what might happen if the incontrovertible and uncomfortable truth finally came out.
No one wants to become that centre of attention for cynics and a jeering mob of critics.
Our addiction to social media is a symptom of a constant need for endorsement by others.
Say the wrong thing, hold the wrong point of view, and you risk unleashing the hounds on yourself and perhaps being shunned altogether.
After successfully undocking from the International Space Station in the early morning hours and burning through Earth’s atmosphere, SpaceX’s passenger spacecraft slowly descended back down to Earth, before safely splashing down into the Atlantic Ocean — and right on schedule at 8:45 am EST.
Crew Dragon’s descent was slowed thanks to four large parachutes it deployed once it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.
Astronauts loaded roughly 300 pounds (136 kg) of cargo from the ISS into the spacecraft on Thursday to send back down to Earth.
SpaceX successfully launched the spacecraft on Saturday. It marks the first time a passenger spacecraft launched from American soil to the ISS — and returned safely back down to Earth — since the end of NASA’s Space Shuttle program in 2011.
Mission Accomplished
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon docked itself, with no robotic arm required, to an open port of the International Space Station early Sunday morning. It then spent five days docked to the station while astronauts checked out the inside of what could one day become their ride back home.
A lot could’ve gone wrong. The cargo Dragon variant featured a different parachute system and had a differently shaped hull.
“I see hypersonic re-entry as probably my greatest concern,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said during a post-launch press event on Saturday.
In July, SpaceX is hoping to send the Crew Dragon capsule back into space — but this time with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board.
Two of NASA’s astronauts are scheduled to make history this month.
On March 29, Anne McClain and Christina Koch will leave the relative safety of the International Space Station for aspacewalkto upgrade the craft’s batteries.
Though rare, a spacewalk alone isn’t history-making. What’s exciting is the fact that this spacewalk will be the first to feature only women astronauts — an inspiring sign that women are catching up with men in exploring the final frontier.
Spacewalk This Way
On Wednesday, NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz confirmed the all-female spacewalk with CNN.
“As currently scheduled, the March 29 spacewalk will be the first with only women,” she told the network.
In addition to McClain and Koch, Schierholz pointed out that two other women will play important roles behind the scenes for this spacewalk — Mary Lawrence and Jackie Kagey will serve as the spacewalk’s lead flight director and lead spacewalk flight controller, respectively.
A third woman, Canadian Space Agency flight controller Kristen Facciol, will support the spacewalk from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. She’s the one who first broke the news of the all-female spacewalk with an exuberant tweet on March 1.
As with anything space-related, there is always a chance the spacewalk might not go as planned, with Schierholz telling CNN that “assignments and schedules could always change.”
Still, right now, it’s looking like McClain and Koch will spacewalk their way into the history books on March 29.
Dozens of Weird Mummies Were Found in a Tomb near Pyramids.
Dozens of Weird Mummies Were Found in a Tomb near Pyramids.
SAQQARA, Egypt (Reuters) – Archaeologists in Egypt said on Saturday they had discovered a rare collection of mummified scarab beetles, as well as an apparently pristine Fifth Dynasty tomb that they plan to open in the coming weeks.
The mummified beetles were among artifacts found in seven tombs discovered over the past six months on the edge of the King Userkaf pyramid complex at the ancient necropolis of Saqqara, south of Cairo.
As they were preparing the site to present the latest discoveries, archaeologists found the door of another tomb that remains sealed, Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters.
The tomb dates from the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom and is unusual because the facade and door are intact, meaning its contents may still be untouched, said Mohamed Youssef, director of the Saqqara area. He said experts plan to open the tomb in the coming weeks.
The Fifth Dynasty ruled Egypt from about 2,500 BC to 2,350 BC, not long after the great pyramid of Giza was built.
The tombs lie in a buried ridge that has only partially been uncovered and could offer many more similar discoveries, Waziri said. Excavations in the area had halted in 2013 before resuming earlier this year.
Saqqara served as the necropolis for Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt for more than two millennia.
Ancient Egyptians mummified humans to preserve their bodies for the afterlife, while animal mummies were used as religious offerings.
Two large scarabs wrapped in linen and in very good condition were found inside a limestone sarcophagus with a vaulted, decorated lid, the antiquities ministry said in a statement.
Another collection of scarab mummies was found inside a smaller sarcophagus.
The mummified beetles were among artifacts found in seven tombs discovered over the past six months on the edge of the King Userkaf pyramid complex at the ancient necropolis of Saqqara, south of Cairo.
As they were preparing the site to present the latest discoveries, archaeologists found the door of another tomb that remains sealed, Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters.
The tomb dates from the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom and is unusual because the facade and door are intact, meaning its contents may still be untouched, said Mohamed Youssef, director of the Saqqara area. He said experts plan to open the tomb in the coming weeks.
The Fifth Dynasty ruled Egypt from about 2,500 BC to 2,350 BC, not long after the great pyramid of Giza was built.
The tombs lie in a buried ridge that has only partially been uncovered and could offer many more similar discoveries, Waziri said. Excavations in the area had halted in 2013 before resuming earlier this year.
Saqqara served as the necropolis for Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt for more than two millennia.
Ancient Egyptians mummified humans to preserve their bodies for the afterlife, while animal mummies were used as religious offerings.
Two large scarabs wrapped in linen and in very good condition were found inside a limestone sarcophagus with a vaulted, decorated lid, the antiquities ministry said in a statement.
Another collection of scarab mummies was found inside a smaller sarcophagus.
The latest data sent back by the Juno and Cassini spacecraft from giant gas planets Jupiter and Saturn have challenged a lot of current theories about how planets in our solar system form and behave.
The detailed magnetic and gravity data have been “invaluable but also confounding,” said David Stevenson from Caltech, who will present an update of both missions this week at the 2019 American Physical Society March Meeting in Boston. He will also participate in a press conference describing the work. Information for logging on to watch and ask questions remotely is included at the end of this news release.
“Although there are puzzles yet to be explained, this is already clarifying some of our ideas about how planets form, how they make magnetic fields and how the winds blow,” Stevenson said.
Cassini orbited Saturn for 13 years before its dramatic final dive into the planet’s interior in 2017, while Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for two and a half years.
Credit: American Physical Society (APS)
Juno’s success as a mission to Jupiter is a tribute to innovative design. Its instruments are powered by solar energy alone and protected so as to withstand the fierce radiation environment.
Stevenson says the inclusion of a microwave sensor on Juno was a good decision.
“Using microwaves to figure out the deep atmosphere was the right, but unconventional, choice,” he said. The microwave data have surprised the scientists, in particular by showing that the atmosphere is evenly mixed, something conventional theories did not predict.
“Any explanation for this has to be unorthodox,” Stevenson said.
Researchers are exploring weather events concentrating significant amounts of ice, liquids and gas in different parts of the atmosphere as possible explanations, but the matter is far from sealed.
Credit: American Physical Society (APS)
Other instruments on board Juno, gravity and magnetic sensors, have also sent back perplexing data. The magnetic field has spots (regions of anomalously high or low magnetic field) and also a striking difference between the northern and southern hemispheres.
“It’s unlike anything we have seen before,” Stevenson said.
The gravity data have confirmed that in the midst of Jupiter, which is at least 90 percent hydrogen and helium by mass, there are heavier elements amounting to more than 10 times the mass of Earth. However, they are not concentrated in a core but are mixed in with the hydrogen above, most of which is in the form of a metallic liquid.
The data has provided rich information about the outer parts of both Jupiter and Saturn. The abundance of heavier elements in these regions is still uncertain, but the outer layers play a larger-than-expected role in the generation of the two planets’ magnetic fields. Experiments mimicking the gas planets’ pressures and temperatures are now needed to help the scientists understand the processes that are going on.
For Stevenson, who has studied gas giants for 40 years, the puzzles are the hallmark of a good mission.
“A successful mission is one that surprises us. Science would be boring if it merely confirmed what we previously thought,” he said.
Zagen deze 6 kosmonauten engelen in de ruimte? Nog altijd geen verklaring voor bizarre waarneming
Zagen deze 6 kosmonauten engelen in de ruimte? Nog altijd geen verklaring voor bizarre waarneming
In 1985 voerden zes kosmonauten op een dag experimenten uit in hun ruimtestation, Saljoet 7 , toen het schip plotseling werd gehuld in een oranje waas.
De kosmonauten Leonid Kizim, Oleg Atkov, Vladimir Solovjev, Svetlana Savitskaja, Igor Volk en Vladimir Dzjanibekov werden korte tijd verblind door een fel licht.
Vervolgens zagen ze buiten het ruimtestation de silhouetten van zeven gedaantes die de ruimtevaarders aan engelen deden denken.
Bizarre waarneming
De bemanning bracht het controlecentrum op aarde op de hoogte van de bizarre waarneming.
Documenten over het incident werden geclassificeerd als topgeheim. Alle bemanningsleden werden onderworpen aan psychologische en medische onderzoeken, maar ze bleken kerngezond te zijn.
Ook Amerikaanse astronauten zouden aan boord van spaceshuttles van de NASA engelachtige wezens hebben gezien.
Witte stad
Op 26 december 1994 maakte de Hubble-telescoop honderden foto’s van een soort witte stad in de ruimte. Het verhaal gaat dat de foto’s nooit zijn vrijgegeven.
Een kosmonaut die zes maanden lang in het ruimtestation Mir leefde en werkte, zei dat hij tijdens zijn verblijf samen met zijn partner de meest fantastische visioenen kreeg.
Onzichtbare hand
Piloten maken vaak melding van soortgelijke fenomenen. Er zijn gevallen bekend waarbij piloten tijdens lange vluchten voelden dat de stuurknuppel werd overgenomen door een ‘onzichtbare hand’.
De Amerikaanse luchtmacht concludeerde dat bijna 15 procent van de piloten zoiets heeft meegemaakt.
While we’re rightly worrying about the diminishing numbers of honeybees and the crop apocalypse that could occur with their demise, other creatures with stingers seem to getting … bigger. Earlier this year, a Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto), measuring a whopping 1.5 inches and thought to be extinct, wasfound alive and stinging in Indonesia.Meh, say researchers in China who this week announced the discovery of a new species of Godzilla (uh-oh) hornet that is nearly an inch longer than the giant bee, has a 3.9 inch wingspan and a quarter-inch stinger (ouch!). With those measurements, it’s either the world’s biggest hornet or the world’s smallest fighter jet. This being China … it could be both!
The Godzilla or killer hornet was discovered near the Myanmar border in the city of Pu’er in the Yunnan province of southwestern China. It was brought to Zhao Li, the curator of the Insect Museum of West China in Sichuan Province, who determined it was a new species in the Vespa mandariniafamily. Vespa mandariana is already the world’s largest hornet and one of the deadliest, deserving of its other nickname – ‘yak killer’. These are not the yellow-legged or Asian hornets (Vespa velutina) which are an invasive now found across Europe and the UK (too late for a hornet Brexit). The yak killers only live (so far) in tropical eastern China in low mountains and forest areas. Zhao Li measured this specimen at six cm (2.3 inches) in length, a wingspan close to 10 cm (3.9 inches) and that 6.35 mm (.254 inch) stinger. (See a picture here.) Being a good entomologist, Zhao Li warned that the specimen was a worker and the queen would be even larger. Ahhh!
A hornet with a wingspan of 9.35 cm discovered in Southwest China's Yunnan province.
[Photo/Xinhua]
At least the Godzilla hornet only attacks larger insects like mantises and the occasional yak, right? Wrong! Asian giant hornets feed on honey and will attack entire colonies of defenseless honeybees to get to it. They also attack other hornet species and have been known to attack hives of their own species in order to bring protein-rich larvae to feed their queen. Moving up the biological scale, Asian giant hornets use their quarter-inch stinger to deliver a venom containing a toxin that causes tissue damage. Multiple stings by a swarm of giant hornets have been lethal to humans, even if they’re not allergic to the venom. In 2013, stings by Asian giant hornets killed 41 people and injured more than 1,600 in Shaanxi Province alone. Don’t bother running and hiding – they’re the only species of social wasps that mark their food source with a scent and return with a hunting party.
An example of an Asian giant hornet (not the one recently found)
(Wikipedia)
It’s a good thing there are professional giant hornet exterminators, right? Wrong! Godzilla hornets are the most difficult to kill. Exterminators resort to beating them with clubs (slow), removing nests (they’re huge), traps (expensive), poison (bad for other insects) and screens that only let honeybees in (leaving the angry hornets to attack humans instead).
Is there any good news about this new discovery of the world’s largest and deadliest hornet? Well, that larva that the queens eat is potentially good for improving human endurance and is being marketed in China as a “hornet juice” nutritional supplement.
You’ll be able to spot the users at the next Olympics – they’ll be the ones wearing gold medals and thanking their mom, God and the giant killer hornets.µ
Staying at a fancy hotel on a tropical beach doesn’t seem as much fun now since humans may soon be able to take a vacation into space and stay there at a hotel. Now that would be one amazing view. Since theCrew Dragon spacecrafthad a successful launch and docking mission to the International Space Station (ISS) this month, SpaceX plans to send humans to different destinations in space that could include hotels.
SpaceX plans to send astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley into space on Crew Dragon this summer and following that, it will take up to four astronauts to the ISS in six contracted missions with NASA. And it doesn’t just end there. After those missions are complete, the spacecraft plans to travel to several other locations in space.
Since the spacecraft is a commercial vehicle that will include up to seven seats per flight, anyone who is willing to pay will be able to travel into space in the near future. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a press conference, “Once Dragon is in regular operation, I think we will seek commercial customers.”
International Space Station
And several companies are already in the process of creating plans for space hotels that Crew Dragon could visit. In 2016, Bigelow Aerospace in Nevada attached a prototype habitat to the ISS and they plan to elaborate even further by sending the first items into space in 2021 for their hotels.
The habitat that they’re developing is called B330 and its interior space will measure 330 cubic meters. It has enough room for up to six people and they can conduct scientific research while they’re there. They plan on sending two habitats into space in 2021 on Atlas V rockets from the United Launch Alliance (ULA). The company said in a 2018 statement, “These single structures that house humans on a permanent basis will be the largest, most complex structures ever known as stations for human use in space.”
And Bigelow Aerospace isn’t the only company planning to launch space hotels, as Axiom space and NanoRacks – both located in Texas – are also interested in developing space housing.
Soyuz rocket
The cost of visiting space won’t come cheap, as seven space tourists have already gone to the ISS on the Russian Soyuz rocket and each of them paid around $20 million. But if money isn’t an option, it would certainly be the trip of a lifetime with a breathtaking view beyond anything we could imagine.
As a follow-up to my 2-part article on Shadow People and the Philadelphia Experiment – which is very much driven by the words and controversial claims of a whistleblower – I thought I would share with you over the next few days a number of additional whistleblower-based accounts that have come my way. We’ll begin with one which concerns the controversial Roswell affair of 1947. Back in 1998, I wrote a book titled The FBI Files. It told the story of the Bureau’s involvement in the UFO phenomenon, contactee cases, the alleged Aztec, New Mexico UFO crash of 1948, the cattle mutilation mystery, and even FBI records on the sinister Men in Black. Chapter Four of the book was titled “The Oak Ridge Invasion.” As so often happens when I write a book, people who personally know something of its contents or subject-matter will contact me and share the relevant information. And that is precisely what happened with regard to that specific chapter. It was a study of FBI files that had been declassified under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act and which described various UFO encounters at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.
One of the people who contacted me – by letter, via the London, England-based publisher of The FBI Files, Simon & Schuster – was an elderly woman who worked at Oak Ridge in 1947, and who had read my book. She added she had some information that I was sure to find of interest, but which she preferred to tell me about specifically in person. Well, as I was living in the U.K. at that time, there wasn’t much of a chance of me meeting up with her at any time soon – which is exactly what I told her. I couldn’t persuade her to put her revelations onto paper. Nor would she share them with me over the telephone. And, she wasn’t on email – not a massive number of old folks were online in 1998, I am guessing. So, for a couple of years it was a case of her story not just stalling, but coming to a complete halt. That is, until the summer of 2001.
I moved to the United States to live in early 2001, and, in the summer, I traveled around much of the west coast – chiefly to do a series of lectures for various UFO groups in California. I put out a feeler to that same old lady, explaining my new circumstances and asking if we could now, finally, talk. Well, that would be just fine, she said. On July 28, 2001 I hung out with the then-seventy-nine-year-old woman: we had lunch in a Los Angeles restaurant and chatted extensively. She was driven to the restaurant by a family member, a much younger man who seemed to be equally as worried as she was. Nevertheless, she agreed to share what she knew, providing her name was never published (although, she was required to provide Simon & Schuster’s legal people with a release-form, as were each and all of the other whistleblowers when I wrote my 2005 book on all this: Body Snatchers in the Desert). So, I sat back and listened.
I referred to her in the book as the Black Widow. There was a relevant reason for this; a reason which was not mentioned in Body Snatchers in the Desert: her husband, who she married in 1972, was African-American. She, however, was not. They were both just into their very early fifties when they married and had twenty-four happy years together, despite some unforgivable racist comments from her ignorant family. It was in 1996 that her husband passed away, hence the title I gave her. When we met, and knowing that she had read The FBI Files, my natural assumption was that she wanted to tell me something about UFO encounters at the Oak Ridge facility. Makes sense, right? No. I was wrong: what she actually wanted to share with me was certain information that, if provable, would radically alter the face of Ufology and blow the Roswell case right out of the water. As we ate, I wondered, with a fair degree of excitement: what the hell have I got myself into? It wasn’t long before I had the answer to that loaded question.
The Black Widow, born in 1922, had been in the employ of Oak Ridge – in a medical capacity – from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s. While there, and on three occasions between May and July 1947, she saw a number of unusual-looking bodies brought to the facility – and under stringent security. They looked like regular Japanese people, she said. Others, however, displayed the signs of certain medical conditions: dwarfism, oversized heads, and bulging eyes. A few of the bodies were extensively damaged – as if they had been in violent accidents. In all, fifteen such bodies were brought to Oak Ridge under great secrecy; all of them reportedly used in certain high-altitude, balloon-based experiments in New Mexico, one of which led to the Roswell legend. Or, became a part of the legend is probably more correct. The Black Widow said: “Those bodies – the Roswell bodies – they weren’t aliens. The government could care less about those stories about alien bodies found at Roswell – except to hide the truth.”
She added: “I don’t know anything at all about how these people were brought [to the United States], but I heard at Oak Ridge that some of them were in the States in late 1945 and brought over with Japanese doctors and Nazi doctors who had been doing similar experiments. That’s when some of this began.” The story continued that at least some of the people used in the tests were American prisoners given the opportunity to cut the lengths of their sentences – if, that is, they were willing to take a chance and take part in the dicey experiments. Reportedly, a number did take the bait, but failed to survive the flights. Some of the handicapped people did not come from Japan, but from “hospitals and “asylums” in the United States.
All of the material evidence was said to have been eventually destroyed – chiefly because the operations didn’t provide much in the way of results, and because of the outright illegality of the experiments. Everything, the Black Widow said, was hidden beneath a mass of fabricated tales of flying saucers and little men from the stars. She doubted that anything of any significance still existed – certainly not the bodies or the balloons, and probably not even the old records, which she believed were burned to oblivion. Unless, however, some of them were preserved for secret, historical purposes, which is not impossible. I hope they were. If not, it may be nigh on impossible to conclusively prove anything about Roswell – ever.
There was one final aspect of the Black Widow’s story that needs to be addressed: her overwhelming fear. It was ever-present throughout our 2001 meeting. She tried to disguise that fear with smiles and laughter, but she was certainly no Oscar-winning Hollywood actor. That’s for sure. Seeing through her facade was like seeing through freshly polished glass. In Body Snatchers in the Desert I said that she “…possessed the sad and somewhat sunken eyes of a person with the weight of the world on her shoulders. She was clearly looking for someone to speak with; but, equally, she was very concerned about the ramifications of doing so, ‘if the government finds out.’”
What Does the Milky Way Weigh? Hubble and Gaia Investigate
What Does the Milky Way Weigh? Hubble and Gaia Investigate
Measurements from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the ESA Gaia mission have been combined to improve he estimate of the mass of our home galaxy the Milky Way: 1.5 trillion solar masses.
Credit: ESO, P. Horálek, ESA, Hubble, NASA., L. Calçada, M. Kornmesser, ATG Medialab, F. Ferraro, S. Brunier
We live in a gigantic star city. Our Milky Way galaxy contains an estimated 200 billion stars. But that’s just the bare tip of the iceberg. The Milky Way is surrounded by vast amounts of an unknown material called dark matter that is invisible because it doesn’t release any radiation. Astronomers know it exists because, dynamically, the galaxy would fly apart if dark matter didn’t keep a gravitational lid on things.
Still, astronomers would like to have a precise measure of the galaxy’s mass to better understand how the myriad galaxies throughout the universe form and evolve. Other galaxies can range in mass from around a billion solar masses to 30 trillion solar masses. How does our Milky Way compare?
Curious astronomers teamed up the Hubble Space Telescope and European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to precisely study the motions of globular star clusters that orbit our galaxy like bees around a hive. The faster the clusters move under the entire galaxy’s gravitational pull, the more massive it is. The researchers concluded the galaxy weighs 1.5 trillion solar masses, most of it locked up in dark matter. Therefore, the Milky Way is a “Goldilocks” galaxy, not too big and not too small. Just right.
This artist’s impression shows a computer generated model of the Milky Way and the accurate positions of the globular clusters used in this study surrounding it. Scientists used the measured velocities of these 44 globular clusters to determine the total mass of the Milky Way, our cosmic home.
Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, L. Calçada
We can’t put the whole Milky Way on a scale, but astronomers have been able to come up with one of the most accurate measurements yet of our galaxy’s mass, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite.
The Milky Way weighs in at about 1.5 trillion solar masses (one solar mass is the mass of our Sun), according to the latest measurements. Only a few percent of this is contributed by the approximately 200 billion stars in the Milky Way and includes a 4-million-solar-mass supermassive black hole at the center. Most of the rest of the mass is locked up in dark matter, an invisible and mysterious substance that acts like scaffolding throughout the universe and keeps the stars in their galaxies.
Earlier research dating back several decades used a variety of observational techniques that provided estimates for our galaxy’s mass ranging between 500 billion to 3 trillion solar masses. The improved measurement is near the middle of this range.
“We want to know the mass of the Milky Way more accurately so that we can put it into a cosmological context and compare it to simulations of galaxies in the evolving universe,” said Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. “Not knowing the precise mass of the Milky Way presents a problem for a lot of cosmological questions.”
[Left] — This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of a portion of the globular star cluster NGC 5466. It is among 150 compact islands of stars that orbit our Milky Way galaxy like bees buzzing around a hive. The orbital speed of the cluster can be used to estimate the total mass of our galaxy. The more massive the Milky Way, the faster the cluster is moving under the pull of gravity. [Right] — To clock the cluster’s velocity, Hubble images taken ten years apart were compared. Hubble’s view is so sharp it can be used to measure the motion of the cluster’s stars by their offset positions between observing epochs. A grid in the background helps to illustrate the stellar motion in the foreground cluster (located 52,000 light-years away). Notice that background galaxies (top right of center, bottom left of center) do not appear to move because they are so much farther away, many millions of light-years. The precise measurements, when combined with other data, show that the Milky Way weighs in at about 1.5 trillion solar masses. Only a few percent of this comes from its population of approximately 200 billion stars. Most of the rest is locked away in an invisible mass called dark matter.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and S.T. Sohn and J. DePasquale (STScI)
The new mass estimate puts our galaxy on the beefier side, compared to other galaxies in the universe. The lightest galaxies are around a billion solar masses, while the heaviest are 30 trillion, or 30,000 times more massive. The Milky Way’s mass of 1.5 trillion solar masses is fairly normal for a galaxy of its brightness.
Astronomers used Hubble and Gaia to measure the three-dimensional movement of globular star clusters — isolated spherical islands each containing hundreds of thousands of stars each that orbit the center of our galaxy.
Although we cannot see it, dark matter is the dominant form of matter in the universe, and it can be weighed through its influence on visible objects like the globular clusters. The more massive a galaxy, the faster its globular clusters move under the pull of gravity. Most previous measurements have been along the line of sight to globular clusters, so astronomers know the speed at which a globular cluster is approaching or receding from Earth. However, Hubble and Gaia record the sideways motion of the globular clusters, from which a more reliable speed (and therefore gravitational acceleration) can be calculated.
The Hubble and Gaia observations are complementary. Gaia was exclusively designed to create a precise three-dimensional map of astronomical objects throughout the Milky Way and track their motions. It made exacting all-sky measurements that include many globular clusters. Hubble has a smaller field of view, but it can measure fainter stars and therefore reach more distant clusters. The new study augmented Gaia measurements for 34 globular clusters out to 65,000 light-years, with Hubble measurements of 12 clusters out to 130,000 light-years that were obtained from images taken over a 10-year period.
When the Gaia and Hubble measurements are combined as anchor points, like pins on a map, astronomers can estimate the distribution of the Milky Way’s mass out to nearly 1 million light-years from Earth.
This artist’s impression shows a computer-generated model of the Milky Way and the accurate positions of the globular clusters used in this study surrounding it. Scientists used the measured velocities of these 44 globular clusters to determine the total mass of the Milky Way, our cosmic home.
Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, L. Calçada, M.Kormesser
“We know from cosmological simulations what the distribution of mass in the galaxies should look like, so we can calculate how accurate this extrapolation is for the Milky Way,” said Laura Watkins of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany, lead author of the combined Hubble and Gaia study, to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. These calculations based on the precise measurements of globular cluster motion from Gaia and Hubble enabled the researchers to pin down the mass of the entire Milky Way.
The earliest homesteaders of the Milky Way, globular clusters contain the oldest known stars, dating back to a few hundred million years after the big bang, the event that created the universe. They formed prior to the construction of the Milky Way’s spiral disk, where our Sun and solar system reside.
“Because of their great distances, globular star clusters are some of the best tracers astronomers have to measure the mass of the vast envelope of dark matter surrounding our galaxy far beyond the spiral disk of stars,” said Tony Sohn of STScI, who led the Hubble measurements.
The international team of astronomers in this study are Laura Watkins (European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany), Roeland van der Marel (Space Telescope Science Institute, and Johns Hopkins University Center for Astrophysical Sciences, Baltimore, Maryland), Sangmo Tony Sohn (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland), and N. Wyn Evans (University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom).
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
Contacts and sources:
Ray Villard Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
Laura Watkins European Southern Observatory, Garching
What You Have to Know About Latest UFO Footage and Why
What You Have to Know About Latest UFO Footage and Why
The Latest UFO Footage Chronicles
UFOs are frequently associated with aliens and conspiracy theories. They are frequently associated with aliens and conspiracy theories. Sometimes, however, they cannot be identified because of the low quality of evidence related to their sightings. Throughout that period of time, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the same site.
The fantastic news for people that would like to have an out-of-body experience (OOBE), but haven’t yet done so is that there are tons of astral projection techniques out there. Some reports state it is a ping, although some claim it is a beep. They state it’s a ping, but others claim it’s a beep. Incidentally, it’s claimed the incident would lead to the recovery of a downed disk.
My sighting only lasted a couple of seconds. Many reported UFO sightings actually end up being something as simple as a balloon. They actually end up being something as simple as a balloon.
UFOs are observed through telescopes. At some stage, you’re most likely to encounter a UFO. At a while, you’re very likely to run into a UFO. Throughout that time period, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the exact site.
Lies You’ve Been Told About Latest UFO Footage
You have the ability to have a peek at the footage below. You could have a look at the footage below. You may have a look at the footage below. It’s possible for you to look at the footage below. It’s possible that you look at the footage below.
You may have a look at the video below. It’s possible to have a peek at the video below. You’re in a position to have a look at the video below. It’s possible to have a look at the video below. You have the ability to look at the video below.
Whatever They Told You About Latest UFO Footage Is Dead Wrong…And Here’s Why
The object continues at a fast speed, and the pilots appear to go amazed. All the objects look the exact same dimensions and circular in shape. It tilts perpendicular to its original orientation at the end of the video. The strange object began to approach again. Since that day lots of people have filmed similar objects in and about crop circles.
You may observe the footage below. You may see the footage below. Footage of a gigantic shadow moving over the crowd stays in the movie.
You might actually watch videos all day long for many years about aliens. The quick video below, for example, is just one of several contemporary sightings. The shaky video tries to concentrate on the object. however, it fades in the clouds within minutes. You’re able to have a look at the video below. The video can be seen on the TTS Academy Community of Interest site by click on this link. Hypnosis video is merely one of the absolute most productive approaches to do hypnosis without the use of an actual hypnotist.
In fact, thousands of women and men visit the area annually. In reality, thousands of individuals go to the area annually. There are hundreds and hundreds of credible folks who support the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
The entire Moon can cause all kinds of changes on Earth. It can lead to all types of changes on Earth. None are in reality extraterrestrial spacecraft. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. Other folks report being made to breed with human-like extraterrestrials. Today, plenty of individuals are confident that aliens exist.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETTwee vrouwelijke astronauten zullen voor de eerste keer in de geschiedenis samen een ruimtewandeling maken. Dat meldt de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA aan CNN. Anne McClain en Christina Koch zullen de wandeling uitvoeren vanuit het internationaal ruimtestation ISS, zo deelde NASA-woordvoerster Stephanie Schierholz mee.
Vrouwen hebben in het verleden wel al vaker een ruimtewandeling gemaakt, maar het wordt de eerste keer dat twee vrouwen zich samen aan een stapje in de ruimte zullen wagen. De historische wandeling, die op vrijdag 29 maart plaatsvindt, zal zo’n zeven uur duren.
Het vrouwelijke team wordt vervolledigd door de Canadese Kirsten Facciol, die de twee astronauten zal coördineren vanuit Houston. Facciol maakte het nieuws eerder deze maand bekend op Twitter.
De ruimtevaartwereld werd lange tijd gedomineerd door mannen, maar daar is volgens NASA-woordvoerster Stephanie Schierholz stilaan verandering ingekomen. Zowel McClain als Koch studeerde in 2013 af als astronaut. De helft van de afgestudeerden, zo’n 6.100 astronauten, waren vrouwen.
De eerste ruimtevlucht van McClain, Sojoez MS-11, werd op 3 december vorig jaar gelanceerd. Zij zal een half jaar aan boord van het Internationaal ruimtestation ISS verblijven voor ISS-Expeditie 58 en ISS-Expeditie 59. Voor Koch is het zelfs de eerste ruimtevlucht ooit. Zij wordt volgende week op 14 maart gelanceerd vanop de ruimtevaartbasis in Bajkonoer, in Kazachstan.
Opdracht
NASA communiceerde voorlopig nog niet over de precieze opdracht van McClain en Koch. De ruimtevaartorganisatie zal meer uitleg geven op een persconferentie die ongeveer een week voor de wandeling georganiseerd wordt.
“Ruimtewandelingen kunnen een aantal verschillende doelen hebben”, zo vertelt Schierholz aan CNN. “Zoals het uitvoeren van onderhoud of reparaties aan de buitenkant van het ISS, het testen van nieuwe apparatuur en wetenschappelijke experimenten.”
De eerste vrouw die ooit een ruimtewandeling uitvoerde, was de Russische Svetlana Savitskaja. Dat gebeurde op 25 juli 1984.
Photo NewsEen simulatie van hoe de Crew Dragon zich aan aan af het ISS koppelt.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET De testvlucht van de Crew Dragon - de ruimtecapsule van Elon Musks ruimtevaartbedrijf SpaceX - zit erop. Het nieuwe Amerikaanse ruimteschip voor bemand transport is na een eerste en geslaagde testvlucht zoals gepland omstreeks 14.45 uur (Belgische tijd) in de Atlantische Oceaan geland, zo was rechtstreeks op NASA TV te volgen.
De capsule plofte op 370 kilometer van de kust van Florida in het water. Een speciaal uitgeruste bergingsschip Go Searcher van SpaceX was in de buurt, net zoals een onderzoeksvliegtuig van het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartbureau NASA dat voor livebeelden zorgde. De laatste keer dat de Amerikanen een ruimteschip voor bemand transport in de Atlantische Oceaan zagen landen was op 13 maart 1969, met de Apollo-9.
De landing was een laatste grote test voor de Crew Dragon, die vanaf juli astronauten de ruimte in moet brengen. Het toestel heeft met de succesvolle landing bewezen dat het kan terugkeren in onze atmosfeer, zonder dat de lading iets overkomt. Daarbij gebruikte het onder meer een systeem van parachutes.
De testvlucht werd uitgevoerd met aan boord een dummy uitgerust met sensoren. Op die manier moest worden nagegaan welke krachten echte astronauten zouden ondergaan. De pop kreeg de naam ‘Ripley’, naar de heldin uit de Alien-films. Zij volgde zo ‘Starman’ op, die vorig jaar aan een reis door de ruimte begon in de rode Tesla van SpaceX-baas Elon Musk.
Met de missie - Demo-1 - wil het bedrijf van Elon Musk aantonen dat het ook een bemand ruimteschip kan ontwikkelen. De Crew Dragon was vorige week zaterdag met behulp van de draagraket Falcon 9 op Cape Canaveral gelanceerd en meerde een dag later op automatische piloot aan bij het internationaal ruimtestation ISS. De laatste grote test - de terugvlucht - werd vanmorgen ingezet.
Omdat alles goed is verlopen, zullen Bob Behnken en Doug Hurley waarschijnlijk in juli als allereerste astronauten met een Crew Dragon naar het ISS vliegen. Daarna zal de NASA beslissen of de capsule in dienst komt of niet.
Watch on NASA TV (all times ET): https://go.nasa.gov/2IW7vYt March 7 12:15pm Hatch Closure March 8 2:00am Undocking March 8 7:30am Deorbit Burn & Splashdown
Would that roundabout description of karma still hold true if the Earth was flat? A group of Flat Earthers trying to prove earthy flatness got a big dose of comes-aroundness when the $20,000 gizmo they purchased for that purpose kept coming up “round.” They could have spent far less with the same result by using a Magic 8-Ball … if those were flat. What does karma have against Flat Earthers? Let’s find out.
A documentary currently showing on Netflix called “Behind the Curve” follows members and leaders of the Flat Earth movement as they attempt to prove their beliefs and gather new followers. One of those leaders is Bob Knodel, who claims his background as an engineer and a pilot have convinced him that the Earth is folat and inspired him to create a YouTube channel cleverly named “Globebusters.” If anyone should know how to prove the globe is a flat glob, it’s an engineer and a pilot … right?
According to Newsweek, Knodel and his followers managed to purchase a gyroscope … not one of those fun spinning toys you played with as kids but a $20,000 highly-accurate laser gyroscope that they planned to use to disprove the scientific fact that a round Earth spinning at 15 degrees per house causes a gyroscope to drift the same 15 degrees per hour. Knodel fired up the gyroscope and stood back. When he saw the results, he said:
“We don’t want to blow this, you know? When you’ve got $20,000 in this freaking gyro. If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad? It would be bad. What I just told you was confidential.”
That doesn’t sound anything like “Eureka!” That’s because it was more like a “Eureka … not!” moment for Knodel. What he saw that was “bad” and should be kept “confidential” was the laser gyroscope drifting 15 degrees per hour just like it was supposed to. So, Knodel had an awakening, admitted the Earth really is round, shut down his YouTube channel, picked up his flat globes and went home … right?
“Now, obviously we were taken aback by that – ‘Wow, that’s kind of a problem.’ We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for easy to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.”
If you don’t like the results, blame the machine! (See a video clip here.) Knodel should have gone into politics … on second thought, maybe it’s a good thing he didn’t. Ignoring the drift and refusing to drift away from his non-scientific belief, he kept repeating it, hoping to get a different result. Many of you will recognize this as a popular definition of insanity … Knodel probably believes that this only applies to Round Earthers. Needless to say, the drifting $20,000 gyroscope wins again and again.
The documentary also shows Knodel’s channel co-host Jeran Campanella conducting a different experiment using a light pointed through three circles cut into boards at the same height, with the boards being far apart. If the Earth is flat, the beam will pass through all three holes. And if the Earth is round? Campanella saw the beam miss the last hole and said:
“Interesting. That’s interesting.”
At least he didn’t blame the boards … or the saw … or the laser pointer. (See a clip here.)
At this point, even a flat Magic 8-Ball would say, “Don’t bother asking again.”
It’s that time again, readers: the weekly mystery boom round up. These unexplained, powerful explosion-like sounds have been shaking the ground around the world with a worrisome increase in frequency lately, and if you ask me, not enough attention is being paid to them. While there are many different possible explanations for these anomalous sounds, the similarities among them are striking and seem to suggest one overriding phenomenon may be occurring. What could be causing these booms, and why are the ‘official’ channels so silent?
Probably because they’ve got much bigger fish to fry these days.
In my home state of North Carolina, residents of Johnston County have been reaching out to law enforcement for answers about the earth-rattling booms which have been shaking their homes for weeks. This week, one of the booms was so powerful it seemed to disturb the air. “It was a little bit of a weird atmosphere then, boom a loud bang,” said Clayton, North Carolina resident Rocky Hall. “When I mean loud, I mean it took the air out of your chest… it sucked right out of you and then everybody came running out of the houses and stuff.” The Wake County and Johnston County Sheriff’s Offices say their phones have been “ringing off the hook” this week due to the booms, but so far no evidence of their origin has been found.
Mysterious booms have been reported 64 times this year, in locations including Michigan, Lapland, St Ives, Swansea and Yorkshire. Incidents are becoming more frequent according to some reports.
Much farther north, people in southern Idaho have been reportedly hearing and feeling booms for weeks. The booms have been so prevalent that local radio station KEZJ has begun polling residents to see just how widespread this unexplained phenomenon may be. One local professor of geology believes the mysterious “skyquakes” are related to a nearby bombing range, but a spokesperson for the Mountain View Air Force station says the base had no aircraft in the air at the time the “skyquakes” were reported. However, the same spokesperson added that they “could not confirm that a separate military outfit wasn’t responsible for the noise.”
Idaho. How could you not want to visit this place? Just watch out for those skyquakes.
This next incident seems to close the case of the mysterious explosions which have plagued neighborhoods in northwest Phoenix, Arizona since last November. In that case, mysterious booms were accompanied in some cases by unexplained flashes of light and even flying debris, two details which seemed to suggest someone was testing improvised explosives. Those suspicions were confirmed this week as Phoenix Police recently arrested Houston Willis, a man they say has been detonating explosives all over town including on the grounds of an elementary school.
Last July, the FBI helped arrest the owner of a chemical supply company who had also been detonating homemade explosivesthroughout Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Are more of these mystery booms being caused by would-be bomb makers? Why are so many people constructing homemade explosives? Given the current sociopolitical climate in the US and the fact that several would-be terrorist plots have already been foiled, these developments are worrisome to say the least.
It’s been a tumultuous couple of years, that’s for sure.
Still, it seems that not all mystery booms can be chalked up to idiots playing with combustible materials. In central Missouri, residents reported a loud boom on the morning of March 4. Columbia Police and Emergency Management officials scrambled to locate the source of the noise before aerospace giant Boeing claimed responsibility. It turns out Boeing was performing a “functional check on a military aircraft” in the area, and while the company’s statement did not include the term “sonic boom,” it’s pretty clear that they broke the sound barrier as part of the test.
I’ve suspected for a while now that many of these booms are caused by military aircraft, but this is one of the few times that anyone has actually stepped forward to claim responsibility. Here we are hundreds of cases later with explanations provided in only a few incidents. Are these mystery booms not as related as they seem? Are there more would-be terrorists testing improvised explosive devices throughout the country? Is the military industrial complex testing new aerospace technology in secret? While a few cases have now been closed, the mystery only increases in terms of the hundreds of cases which still remain unsolved.
WHAT COULD THEY BE?
In 2017 alone, 64 booms have been heard worldwide.
The cause of most of the booms remains a mystery, although several explanations have been suggested.
1) Sonic booms
A sonic boom is the sound associated with the shock waves created by an object traveling through the air faster than the speed of sound – such as supersonic aircrafts.
Sonic booms generate significant amounts of sound energy, sounding like an explosion to the human ear.
2) Military exercises
Many unexplained loud noises can be put down to military training, either at Army or Naval bases or in remote areas used for such exercises.
3) Controlled explosions
A controlled explosion is a method for detonating or disabling a suspected explosive device, such as bags left at train stations.
4) Unusual weather
Many loud noises link back to unusual weather events, such as electrical storms or thunder storms.
5) Meteors
Large meteors passing above Earth often produce shock waves that can be heard as a sonic boom.
6) Sound amplified from aircraft
Some have suggested that the sound was due to inversion - a phenomenon that occurs when a layer of warm air sits over a layer of cooler air, magnifying the sound of an aircraft miles away.
7) Aliens
Some conspiracy theorists claim that the mysterious booms are noises created by aliens - although there is no evidence to support this.
Ever since biblical times, mankind has been making astute observations of all of the known planets within the solar system. While many of the outer planets have only been discovered in more recent history, ancient civilisations have been fascinated with the inner solar system. The overwhelming passion for these ancient astronomers has been Mars. However, successfully getting any probe there has proven to be a bizarrely daunting task. This is the basis for what some people call the Great Galactic Ghoul.
The article Exploration of Mars in Wikipedia explains:
The phrase “Galactic Ghoul”or “Great Galactic Ghoul”, referring to a fictitious space monster that subsists on a diet of Mars probes, was coined in 1997 by Time Magazine journalist Donald Neff, and is sometimes facetiously used to “explain” the recurring difficulties.
Is there such a thing as the Great Galactic Ghoul? This illustration depicts a concept for NASA’s Mars Telecommunications Orbiter.
NASA.
Popular science fiction authors have long considered Mars to be the source for alien civilisations that have come to Earth in order to do us harm or take over our home. Most familiar of these tales is likely to be H.G. Wells ‘The War of the Worlds’. Such is the appeal of this timeless work that it has never been out of print in over a century.
Failed Mars Missions
It was only recently that technology firmly caught up with man’s curiosity. The last fifty or so years has seen plenty of probes and spacecraft make their way to our closest and best known neighbour. While not alone in humanity’s desire to learn more about the solar system we reside in, Mars is far and away the most popular planetary destination for our thirst for knowledge. Given this fact, it should be expected that, at times, something will go awry with any mission at any time. Statistics suggest that only a third of all missions sent to the Red Planet are actually successful. Scientists can’t fully understand why the other two thirds fail. To NASA and the Soviet Union, this goes beyond all expectations. While Mission Controllers can expect at least some failure, the sheer volume of unsuccessful launches is cause for some concern.
Strange Interference
Is there something on Mars that someone, or something, doesn’t want us to discover, and are interfering with most of our efforts to learn more? This is what proponents of the Great Galactic Ghoul theory maintain. Of the missions that have made it to Mars, plenty of images have made it online that show a whole host of features and formations that defy explanation. The Cydonia region is a mystery all of its own. Mars landers have sent back images of Sphinx-like statues, pyramids, apparent life forms, fossils and unknown lights.
Cydonia (The City), Mars. The famous face of Mars in upper right corner.
Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera Release, published by NASA.
Failed Mars Missions Mount
The long list of failed Mars missions began with the first half a dozen probes sent there. All but one of these were Soviet missions that were only supposed to fly-by the planet. Several of these missions broke apart once Earth orbit had been established. Failures like these might be expected, given that the human race had never tried anything of this ilk before.
The first mission that made it as far as Mars was Mariner 4, NASA’s second attempt made in 1964. 21 images were sent back to Mission Control. Russia attempted numerous times to send a probe to Mars, but didn’t make a successful trip until 1971. This probe, Mars 2 Orbiter/Lander, made it as far as it’s intended destination but the lander was destroyed and no data was received. The Russians assumed that this probe was lost like so many others before it. Subsequently, the Mars 3 mission was the first Soviet success story. The lander touched down but only recorded several seconds of data, while the orbiter maintained contact for 8 months.
Over the course of the next four years, several missions were launched. Two of these missed Mars entirely and are probably still adrift somewhere within the solar system. One, Mars 7 Lander, is said to be in solar orbit. In 1975 a breakthrough in Martian exploration was achieved when NASA sent a pair of probes which likely made all previous failures worth it. The Viking probes were the first real success story, sending back in excess of 16,000 images, including the notorious Cydonia photos. It seemed the Great Galactic Ghoul was at work. It would be almost 20 years after this that another probe was a success.
Mars probe, Viking 2 Selfie on Mars. Sept. 3, 1976, NASA.
Japan Attempts a Mars Mission
In 1998, a new nation tried their luck with a probe, however they too had a failed Mars mission. The Japanese probe, Nozomi, was lost when fuel problems contributed to the probe’s failure to properly insert into Mars orbit. To date, this marked the beginning and end of Japan’s efforts to study the Red Planet. Since the launch of Nozomi, both the European Space Agency (ESA) and India have made launches toward the Red Planet. Both were deemed to be a success, but the ESA Beagle 2 lander failed to touch down on the surface of Mars. The India probe was the last mission that was sent to Mars back in 2013.
Mars and The Galactic Ghoul in Action
In the early days of Martian exploration, an idea began to develop that intent was behind these failures. What started as a probable joke quickly gained recognition outside of space agencies and an entire conspiracy theory was built up behind the so-called Great Galactic Ghoul. There can be little doubt that plenty of unforeseen technological issues may have plagued hardware such as a planetary lander and something not expected to happen had happened. Other causes could be nothing more than basic human error. This could explain fates that befell certain probes or missions, but some of these historic probes have disappeared completely.
Could the Great Galactic Ghoul have ushered them away from Earth control? NASA launched the Mars Observer in 1993 and when the probe was just 3 days from arriving, it ceased all transmissions. Officially, the propulsion system sprung a leak and the probe spun out of control as a result. All electronics were switched into safe mode and no transmissions were possible after this.
Cursed Mars Movies
If there is indeed a curse connected with all things Mars, then it extends beyond mere probes sent towards fact finding missions to the planet. There have been quite a few films made within a Martian setting. Mission to Mars, Red Planet, John Carter and Last Days on Mars never fared well with either cinema-goers or critics alike. The original release of Total Recall and the recent hit The Martian did much better at the box office, the latter being credited by The Washington Post as ‘having saved NASA and future space exploration’.
The Great Galactic Ghoul. From the novel, War of the Worlds. 1906.
Public Domain.
Video games are not immune to a possible curse either. In 2012, Bioware released the third game in their acclaimed Mass Effect trilogy. While not set on Mars, there was a mission early in the game that required Commander Shepard to visit an outpost on Mars. The conclusion of this game caused a severe backlash from many gamers about the ending. So much so, that Bioware developers were encouraged to supplement the ending with additional downloadable content to satisfy gamers later that same year. A more recent title based solely on Mars is the updated version of the classic Doom franchise of 1990s. Generally the reviews of this updated version have been positive. Video games do tend to transition to film, mostly to the chagrin of critics. Doom was no exception to this rule when it was released in cinemas in 2005.
Man vs. The Great Galactic Ghoul
The next stage of Martian exploration is, of course, to send astronauts there. These intrepid souls will have to face a whole host of challenges from a logistical and physical perspective. Schedules have yet to be finalised, but the current estimates is that man will set foot on Mars in 10-15 years time. Hopefully, we have all the Great Galactic Ghoul kinks worked out. Who could be waiting for them and what will they find there?
Mars, also often called “The Red Planet,” due to the reddish tint of its atmosphere, gets its name from the ancient Roman god of war, and is the 4th planet from the sun, as well as the second smallest in the solar system. For a very long time it has held a certain fascination for astronomers, and has over the century become quite a fixture in science fiction stories, once a very popular origin for alien invaders and all manner of bizarre creatures, most famously depicted in the H.G Welles science fiction classic War of the Worlds. In recent years it has become a major destination for exploration and an envisioned future of manned missions. The planet even now incites wonder and speculation, as we debate whether there is life there and the Internet pores over pictures often purported to show alien spacecraft, fossils, living organisms, spaceships, evidence of some ancient Martian civilization such as pyramids and other structures, and all manner of assorted bizarreness. There is also the idea that it is actually cursed or protected by alien forces from beyond our understanding.
There can be no doubt that Mars holds its share of mysteries, and one of the more curious of these is the persistent idea that for whatever reasons the planet itself seems to be cursed. The seed of this bizarre notion lies in the fact that despite all of the efforts, technology, and money poured into Mars exploration, it has stubbornly and persistently proven to be inordinately difficult to successfully reach and investigate, with a long list of freak mishaps, problems, and malfunctions that have conspired to keep us years behind where we should actually be in our stage of Mars exploration considering our best efforts.
The history of the exploration of Mars is littered with failed missions. The first half a dozen or so probes that were sent out there were all total failures, either malfunctioning, suffering miscalculations, or breaking up completely, or simply disappearing without a trace. In 1964, the Mariner 4 did manage to reach the planet and take a series of photographs, but in the meantime Russia suffered a string of failures, only managing to finally put a probe on the surface in 1971, the Mars 2 Orbiter/Lander, which made it to its destination but promptly and mysteriously lost contact with its handlers without any data being transmitted at all. Undaunted, the Mars 3 program was carried out, but the lander once again mysteriously cut out after transmitting only a few seconds of video.
Other failures followed at an alarming rate, with several other lost probes, on some occasions missing the planet entirely to go careening off out into space, including the Mars 7 lander. It wasn’t until 1975 that any real success was found with exploring Mars, with the Viking program, which was able to gain thousands of images of the planet’s surface. After that there would be another string of various failures to even reach the Red Planet that proved to be both enormously frustrating and expensive. One of these was NASA’s doomed Mars Observer, which was just 3 days away from its destination when it suffered a freak propulsion leak that caused it to spin out of control and cease transmissions. In 1998, Japan managed to send its Nozomi probe, but even this mission suffered various difficulties, as although it made it to Mars it had a fuel shortage that kept it from achieving orbit. So costly and disappointing was this failure that Japan hasn’t tried to send another probe since. The European Space agency had a similarly crushing failure when they managed to get its Beagle 2 lander into the Martian atmosphere, only to have it fail to land.
In 2004, NASA managed to land its robotic rover Opportunity on the surface, where it performed admirably for years before suddenly losing communication after a 2018 dust storm. At the time it was thought that the rover would resume operation after the weather cleared, but it never did, staying dark for reasons no one is quite sure of. The same sort of fate was suffered by Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, which had landed on the other side of the planet just a few weeks before the Opportunity. This lander functioned well until 2009, when it suddenly got stuck on something on the landscape and ceased to transmit. These are just some of the numerous misfires with Mars exploration missions, with errors, malfunction, mishaps, freak accidents, and even craft that have just sort of vanished for no discernible reason.
Of course this is not to say that every single mission has failed, as there are currently 6 orbiters in successful orbit around Mars and two functioning probes on its surface, the rover Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity and the lander InSight, and even the Opportunity mission was considered a success considering it had functioned far past its estimated lifespan before contact was suddenly lost. However, it is worth pointing out that it really is quite odd just how frequently failures have occurred considering all of the effort put into it all, with only one third of all attempts to reach Mars finding any appreciable success at all. This sheer number of failures versus successful missions is so pronounced that even the space agencies behind them have had trouble explaining why this should be.
Leave it to the media and Internet to pick up the slack. In 1997 there was an article published in Time Magazine by journalist Donald Neff, who jokingly suggested that the failures of the Mars missions were due to a nefarious alien creature he called the “Galactic Ghoul,” a space monster that basically runs amok attacking any probes that approach its home world. It was all meant to be in jest, but this got people to thinking that, while of course there wasn’t a literal enormous monster trashing Mars probes, could there be some force or presence on the planet that doesn’t want people snooping around? Is there maybe something that is trying to interfere with our efforts to photograph and explore the Red Planet? As absurd as this may seen, the idea has been picked up on many Internet forums, talking about the “Mars curse,” and the “Galactic Ghoul,” a stand-in for whatever presence does not want us there, and it has all become known as the Great Galactic Ghoul Theory, the idea that we are being pushed back and warded away.
Of course the rational explanation for all of this is that these setbacks were all caused simply by the fact that with these vast distances involved, the sheer complexity and logistics of it all, and the wealth of opportunities for technical problems it only makes sense that Mars is not an easy nut to crack even with all of our modern technology. Is that what this all is? Is this just technical difficulties mixed with a little human error, or is there something that does not want us there? In the coming years we can be sure to expect ongoing efforts to put people on Mars, so it is obvious that they will need to iron these problems out, correct our horrible track record of exploring the Red Planet, and possibly keep an eye out for rampaging alien monsters.
"Guardian Angel" high in the sky above New Windsor, New York
"Guardian Angel" high in the sky above New Windsor, New York
What is going on with all of the strange sightings in the sky.
This time a strange anomaly has been recorded hovering high in the clouds over New Windsor, New York on March 8, 2019.
It is not clear what the anomaly could be, but some people suggest that it is a flying humanoid or an interdimensional being, while others say that it is a guardian angel that is assigned to protect the country.
To transport “Project Blue Book” viewers into the top-secret world of the U.S. government’s Cold War-era U.F.O. investigations, production designer Ross Dempster and his team were tasked with conjuring a moment in time—from scratch. The drama series, in its first season on HISTORY, is based loosely on the real-life story of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a brilliant astronomer recruited by the U.S. Air Force to scientifically scrutinize the growing number of saucer sightings, alien-abduction claims and more during the early 1950s.
HISTORY talked with Dempster, whose credits also include the recent reboot of “Lost in Space,” about how he creates environments that bring mid-century history to life onscreen and evokes the anxiety of the Atomic Age and the mystery of the unknown.
What does a production designer do?
Production design is the world in which our characters inhabit. It’s my job, along with the director and director of photography [DP], to make sure we come up with something creative that pushes the story along, makes it believable, and absorbs the audience.
Concept drawing, top, and set photo of the Project Blue Book headquarters reception room, which was designed to evoke the federal Art Deco look of the 1920s and '30s.
CREDIT: Drawing Ross Dempster, Photo: Eduardo Araquel/HISTORY.
How would you describe the setting for ‘Project Blue Book’?
We’re in 1951-52, so you've got this post-war thing that all the characters are living in. Rather than making it scream out as stereotypically '50s, I wanted to keep it in the realm of reality and show the time periods before that. In Dr. Hynek’s house, for example, there are antiques in the bedroom that were meant to be pieces that might have been handed down to the couple by their parents. Alongside that, you have modern furniture that they've purchased more recently. All of that tells a story, and makes the characters more real.
What mood were you trying to evoke in the key sets? Were you given a specific brief?
Other than the script, I didn’t have a brief to follow. I wanted my set design to evoke the period: the Project Blue Book HQ shows government frugality—plain enough with just enough period details to keep it visually interesting. For the Majestic 12 meeting room, the inner sanctum of the secret government team investigating the UFOs, we created a robust circular design with four entrances and heavy blast doors, evocative of the fear and planning, made from that fear, that would keep the seat of power intact no matter what happened in the arms race above ground.
The UFOs that appear throughout are all designed with the period aesthetic in mind so that the audience doesn’t feel removed from the moment. Again, people were scared of these saucers and lights, and my challenge was to reference the designs seen in comics but ensure they weren’t comical to a sophisticated audience. I wanted our audience to also be afraid of these ships.
What is your research process for a project so rooted in history?
I cover the walls in the art department [with period ads, artwork, movie stills and such]… I live in that world, and it is a constant inspiration. It's especially important when you're doing a period piece, that you understand the nuances of the period, the finer details.
The internet is a great source, but it doesn't cover all the specialist stuff. We ordered up a whole bunch of period interior magazines, Arts & Architecture, from 1935 into about 1955, to see where things were culturally and aesthetically, and where they were headed. We had a clear idea of everything that was going on in that period: curtain fabrics, laminate choices, appliances, all those kind of things. The look of films like L.A. Confidential and the Hong Kong-based In the Mood for Love [helped inform the design, with their rich evocation of] secrets, the good kind of historic nostalgia—and the mystery and look of a noir detective story.
Can you share a specific ad and how it ended up in the set?
To illustrate some of Mimi’s frustration with society’s expectations of women, we created an ad for the Hoover vacuum (“Moms Love the Hoover Upright”), that appears [in a store window] in the first episode. That fit with numerous references from the period—[specifically, all the ads we saw extolling how home appliances would bring happiness to women].
Any artists whose work informed the design?
Edward Hopper’s wonderful use of light and strong color in the darkness [was something] I wanted to apply to the scenes. The best example is the gas station scene from the “Abduction” episode. I also took color palettes from his work and used them frequently in the show, for example, in the backstage green room of the radio theater in the “Lubbock Lights” episode.
The dramatic lighting in this gas station scene shows the influence of painter Edward Hopper, says production designer Ross Dempster.
CREDIT: Eduardo Araquel/HISTORY.
This is such an interesting transitional period, design-wise, when modernism is starting to creep into people’s lives. Where did that aesthetic best serve the story?
I approached the Blue Book Headquarters, which were on the air base, to look like something that had been built earlier, beginning in the '30s into the '40s, this federal Art Deco look. In contrast to that, I thought the Hynek house could be a lot more modernist.
It also fits in with Mimi’s character...she was finding herself—it was the beginning of women freeing themselves from the home. I added in the idea that she had this modernist eye, and the furniture items that she picked were the beginnings of her emancipation. Those are the kind of details that a designer creates a story around. Then you push it forward and run with it.
Are there any specific pieces that illustrate that part of her character?
No individual piece speaks to this. It’s much more about separate items forming a whole—a larger picture—and together helping to push along a story arc. We sourced a period sofa and chose a fabric that was slightly more contemporary to brighten the mood in the [living] room. A lot of the fabrics in the period were dull browns and greens, and I wanted to have the mood lighter in the home than other sets. Warmer wood tones throughout also contrasted with the other main sets. We learn enough of Hynek’s character to guess that he isn’t the type to be picking furniture, so therefore it has to be Mimi’s choices. So it works on a subliminal level to the audience; when we see her character push for further freedoms in her life, it comes together to tell the story.
How much of what you’re sourcing is original to the period and how much is re-creation?
We try to get the real stuff wherever possible, but one thing you have to be careful of is in the period [of the show], they're supposed to look new. A lot of times you go around to second-hand stores, collectors' rooms, prop houses and there’s vintage stuff, but it’s in superbad condition. It's not going to look right.
For the Majestic 12 room, we wanted these leather and aluminum chairs, so we got in touch with the CEO of Emeco [a modernist furniture company founded in the 1940s], who is the son of the founder and is revitalizing that company. Emeco actually went back and remade the chairs especially for us.
What’s something you needed to recreate?
We have the Russian agent character, who was using the radio listening device. I always try and find pieces that are going to add something aesthetically. We knew about it on a Wednesday, I found [an image on the internet] on a Thursday or Friday, and by Monday my prop master had the device built and on set.
What are some original items you were able to source?
There were quite a few. The telephone in the Hynek house was something super-nice from the period. We got it from the widow of a collector of vintage phones—she supplied almost all the phones on the show, including a vintage phone booth. We’re always looking for stuff that stands out as a nice piece [like the iconic Kit-Cat Klock in the kitchen], but being careful it's not something that overtakes what’s going on in the scene. We didn’t pick specific designers for the Hynek house; we found stuff that was similar. We don’t want the audience thinking, "Oh, I recognize that as so-and-so’s chair."
Even simple stuff, like finding the correct oven: Storyline-wise, it had to work, so we had specialist gas fitters come in and make this wonderful vintage-looking piece actually work.
I have a wonderful set decorator, Janessa Hitsman, who loves to get into the finer details of things, making sure that a typewriter is exactly 1951 and not '52. We want to get it right. Sometimes you can get away with little things, but it’s all about making the period feel correct and keeping the audience in the story, believing where they are.
Lighting plays such an important role in the show; it’s so moody and noir-ish. How did you think about it?
Lighting is not something I completely leave to the DP; it becomes a discussion. It’s something I’m cognizant of from the beginning, giving them as many different tools in their box as possible to use.
That can be the difference between certain practical lighting on the desk or something that's a lot more built-in, such as in the Majestic 12 set. There's a very typical bulkhead light that appears in 100 different shows every week, but I didn’t want it to be like that… I wanted it to feel designed for that space, period correct and that it had something that made it cool and different. They're actually from old British trains [and salvaged from a factory in the Midlands]. They’re built bulletproof, they can withstand a bomb blast, and the Majestic 12 room is supposed to feel like a bunker, so they had an ideal aesthetic with all this protection around the light.
Coming from England, I’m a big fan of James Bond movies; Ken Adam is an amazing production designer [who designed the James Bond films in the 1960s and '70s and the famous war room in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove]. I wanted to pay some small homage to him with the Majestic 12 room, so we designed that light to be reminiscent of the one in Dr. Strangelove.
What other lighting elements were important?
Thinking about the lights on the desk, we wanted to give this vibe that there were several people in the room [whose faces you may never see], just unknowable people in the darkness. There are a couple of scenes when you first see it where they lean forward and reveal themselves in the light through the cigar smoke. It gave this secretive vibe to the whole room.
In the Hynek house, it was about using the windows and the skylight above the kitchen. I came across the work of several period architects, but one of my favorites was [Los Angeles modernist] A. Quincy Jones. There was a particular house [of his] that inspired the Hynek house, which had a skylight with a nice wooden grill detail over it. But there was actually a practical element to it; it meant we could light the characters without having to push them right against the sink and the outside windows.
What other practical concerns do you need to think about?
Film school taught me about cinema, lighting and angles, so I tend to visualize sets from within the frame of a camera, and plan for shots in my head. They don't always have to use them, but they're there. I'm planning ahead right from the beginning.
The red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 – about 40 light-years away – has 7 Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting it. A new study puts limits on how many of those worlds have hazy or cloudy atmospheres.
Artist’s concept of one of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets. A new study is putting limits on what kinds of hazes or clouds are in the atmospheres of these intriguing, Earth-sized, relatively nearby worlds.
TRAPPIST-1 is one of the most intriguing exoplanetary systems known. Two years ago, it was found to consist of ared dwarf starwith seven Earth-sized worlds orbiting it. While we know the planets exist, there’s still a lot astronomers don’t know yet about what the actual conditions are like on these distant worlds. An important question concerns their atmospheres. Are they cloudy worlds, with weather, like Earth? Are they entirely haze-covered like Venus? Or are their atmospheres clear?
A new study led by Sarah Moran at Johns Hopkins University suggests that at least some of the planets likely have hazy or cloudy atmospheres, and at least one may have a clear hydrogen atmosphere. The peer-reviewedpaper was published in The Astronomical Journalon November 9, 2018.
Recent observations from the Hubble Space Telescope showed that some of the planets have muted spectral features in their atmospheres that could be indicative of clouds or haze. The new study tries to put limits on these observations to determine further just what the atmospheres are like on the TRAPPIST-1 worlds. As noted in the paper:
The TRAPPIST-1 planetary system is an excellent candidate for study of the evolution and habitability of M-dwarf hosted planets. Transmission spectroscopy observations performed on the system with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) suggest that the innermost five planets do not possess clear hydrogen atmospheres.
Artist’s concept of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, which contains 7 Earth-sized worlds close to the star.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The researchers are using transmission spectroscopy – aka absorption spectroscopy – in which they analyze the spectral lines in the light that filters through a planet’s atmosphere as the planet transits, or passes in front of, its host star. They focused on TRAPPIST-1 d, e, f and g, comparing the new computer models with the spectral data from Hubble. This allows them to learn more about possible hazes or clouds, their metallicities and the heights of possible cloud decks.
And there’s one more important step. They then compare their results to recent laboratory astrophysics experiments studying haze formation under a range of planetary temperatures and atmospheric compositions. By performing this final step, the researchers can make sure that their limits are physically realistic.
The results showed that TRAPPIST-1 d, e and f most likely have hazy or cloudy atmospheres that continued to evolve after the planet first formed (called secondary atmospheres). TRAPPIST-1 g may be more likely to have a primordial clear hydrogen atmosphere – formed during the formation of the planet itself and relatively unchanged since then. This may also apply to TRAPPIST-1 f, but the results are still open to interpretation at this point. From the paper:
Our results suggest secondary, volatile-rich atmospheres for the outer TRAPPIST-1 planets d, e and f.
Artist’s concept of TRAPPIST-1 e, which is thought to have an atmosphere with high-altitude clouds. Scientists also now think that it has an iron core and is the most likely of the 7 planets to have water on its surface, perhaps even oceans.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
From the paper:
For TRAPPIST-1 g, we cannot rule out a clear hydrogen-rich atmosphere. We also modeled the effects an opaque cloud deck and substantial heavy element content have on the transmission spectra. We determine that hydrogen-rich atmospheres with high altitude clouds, at pressures of 12mbar and lower, are consistent with the HST observations for TRAPPIST-1 d and e. For TRAPPIST-1 f and g, we cannot rule out clear hydrogen-rich cases to high confidence.
Haze in exoplanet atmospheres can make it difficult to study the compositions of the planets themselves. But haze could also protect hypothetical life on those planets’ surfaces from the high-energy radiation of their host stars. Understanding aerosol content in exoplanetary atmospheres is therefore important to being able learn more about such exotic worlds. While not a planet, Saturn’s largest moon Titan has a thick atmospheric haze composed of tholins – organic particles – that completely obscures the surface from view.
The TRAPPIST-1 planetary system is a great target for studying atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets since there are seven of them in one system, and they are not too far away our solar system – only 39.6 light-years, which is right next door, cosmically speaking.
Size comparison of the 7 known planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 (appearances are artist’s concept). All are similar to Earth in size, but – as yet – surface conditions on these distant worlds remain unknown.
Image via NASA.
TRAPPIST-1 is a cool red dwarf star only slightly larger than Jupiter. But all the known planets orbit quite close to the star, so some of them are within the habitable zone – the region where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist on the surfaces. Whether any of them actually are habitable is still unknown, however, as that also depends on other factors such as organic material and chemistry that could allow life to begin in the first place.
A previous study suggested that some of the planets in this system may be more like Venus than Earth, but also that TRAPPIST-1 e is probably the most likely to have water on its surface – perhaps even oceans (although others may as well). Three of the terrestrial rocky planets in our solar system have clouds or hazes in their atmospheres, but all are different – Mars just has a scattering of thin clouds, Earth has more substantial clouds and Venus is completely wrapped in a thick cloud cover. The TRAPPIST-1 planets may be just as varied as well, but further observations will be needed to find that out.
Bottom line: We still don’t know what conditions are like on any of the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets, but scientists are getting closer to finding out. Determining what kind of atmospheres these worlds have can help scientists understand other details about them as well, and whether any of them could possibly support life.
Cattle Mutilations: The History and Mystery Behind Them
Cattle Mutilations: The History and Mystery Behind Them
Freya Kuka
Cattle mutilations have been plaguing the farmers that suffer from them since the early 1600s, and an end to these unexplained incidents does not seem to be in sight.
In case you are reading this and are unaware of cattle mutilations, these are incidents that have been reported regarding dead animals mostly in farms with certain organs missing and no proof of anyone coming or going.
Investigators in the 1960’s started taking it as a strong indication of alien involvement, and stories spread far and wide about extraterrestrial beings lifting creatures up into their spaceships to conduct gruesome experiments on them before sending back the mutilated carcasses.
First Cattle Mutilations
The first occurrences in the 1600s were said to be of similar nature to what happens today, where the sheep that were found had very specific organs missing. People who spoke about the cattle mutilations at the time said it was a satanic force that was causing it or something that was of an unearthly nature.
The first reported incident was witnessed by Alexandra Hamilton who on April 21, 1897, said that he heard humming noises that he followed only to witness what he describes as an airship hovering over his cattle.
He described it as a cigar-shaped craft that carried six of the strangest creatures he has ever seen. This is a snippet of some of the exact words Alexandra used to describe the incident that later spread like wildfire:
It seemed to pause and hover directly over a two-year old heifer, which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found a cable about a half-inch in thickness made of some red material, fastened in a slip knot around her neck, one end passing up to the vessel, and the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship, heifer and all, rise, slowly, disappearing in the northwest.
Unfortunately, this incident was later admitted to being fake, and only spread because of the time period that it happened in. The only reason people continue to talk about it today is because it so closely matches the facts that surround mutilations seen now.
The first modern incident was seen in 1967 with the infamous “Lady mutilation”, wherein press really seemed to focus on the possibility that it was extraterrestrials behind the occurrences.
Agnes King and her son found there horse, Lady, mutilated with certain organs missing, which led to subsequent press involvement.
The articles during that time focused on the fact that there were unearthly reasons behind the death of the horse and that the cuts were far too precise for it to be an animal.
There were also no footsteps leading to or away from the horse, which gave more attention to the possibility that aliens and UFOs are conducting gruesome experiments in the name of science.
The FBI and their role in what we believe in today
Like many aspects of modern society, when people become too paranoid, officials are forced to step whether they deem it worthy or not.
This is precisely what happened in the 1970s when the FBI had to begin investigations regarding cattle mutilations, because there were simply too many people complaining. The conclusions that the FBI came to gave absolutely no credence to the conspiracy theories that were being talked about.
The FBI came to the conclusion that foxes were responsible for the attacks where genitals, lips, ears and other soft body parts went missing in particular.
The final 32-page report explained the smooth, precise cuts as being the work of the smooth teeth that worked like scissors for foxes because they were small and swift creatures.
The FBI ended the investigation a little half-heartedly as well, due to the fact that at the time there was no law against cattle mutilation, which made the investigation low on the priority list.
Even though the FBI narrowed the incidents down to natural death and scavengers, conspiracies still persisted, insisting that these organs were taken in specific because soft tissue is more easily attracted to natural inorganic substances in the environment which makes them great test subjects for, you guessed it, extraterrestrials.
fbi cattle mutilation investigation
The conclusion is that there are far too many incidents with unexplainable factors surrounding them for all of the incidents to be because of foxes and scavengers. This leaves room for other guesses to be made.
Cattle mutilations today and what has changed
Fast forward to 2018. The idea of a cow floating up into the sky with a mysterious light surrounding it, and its tongue gaping out is still believable for a lot of people around the world.
In Argentina, history seemed to be repeating itself in August of 2018 when farmers were convinced that aliens were making cuts and marks over the bodies of mutilated animals, far too precise for any other explanation.
Farmers in the area were blaming a South American mythical creature or aliens for the mutilations which shows that the way the incidents are perceived has not changed all that much.
These samples were then sent for further research and no proof of the cow being shot and poisoned seemed to further convince the farmers that it was an unearthly cause.
Experts on the subject did end the argument by saying that a hocicudo, which is an animal native to the region, is the most logical cause since these ‘natural scavengers’ seem to target the softer parts of the body for food.
In regard to the cause of death, experts said exposure to the changing weather and lack of food is probably what caused the deaths.
This answer is also extremely similar to the one given by the FBI during the investigations in the 70s.
Although this explanation is logical, it is not exactly satisfactory for the farmers.
They and other believers insist that the cuts are too precise and the mutilations happen at different times during the year. So as logical as the explanation is, it does seem to leave certain parts of the mystery clouding cattle mutilations unexplained, which leaves room for more speculation.
Archaeologists working at a site in Peru have uncovered a horrifying mass sacrifice, with over 140 children and over 200 llamas being slaughtered in a ritual. This is the largest known sacrifice of children (and llamas) in the Americas — if not in the entire world.
Image credits: John Verano.
A horrifying sacrifice
Archaeologist Gabriel Prieto was excavating an old temple near the seaside in Peru when he got word of an unusual occurrence: coastal erosion was uncovering human remains nearby. They spent the next few years excavating and preserving this site, and when Prieto and colleagues were finished, they had uncovered more than 140 sets of child remains and 200 juvenile llamas.
All these lives were sacrificed in one single event, explained John Verano, who also worked at the site and is an author of the new study. In an email to ZME Science, he explained that no child graves cut into or disturb others, so it seems like they were all buried at once. The way there were buried is also indicative of a sacrifice.
The children, aged 5 to 15, were generally buried facing west, towards the sea, whereas the llamas were buried towards the Andes mountains in the east. Three additional sets of remains (a man and two women) were found in close proximity, carrying signs of blunt-force trauma to the head. Researchers suspect that they probably played a role in the sacrifice and were dispatched quickly after.
Cut marks transecting the sternums and bone displacement suggests that both the children and the llamas have suffered a similar fate: they had their chests cut open and pulled apart, possibly followed by the ritual removal of the heart.
Unwilling victims
Excavations at the site.
Image credits: John Verano.
“The discovery was a surprise, and of course it kept growing in size,” Verano told ZME Science. “We had not seen anything like this before, and there was no suggestion from ethnohistoric sources or historic accounts of child or camelid sacrifices being made on such a scale in northern coastal Peru.”
In addition to the remains, which were well-preserved by a dried mud layer covering the sand dune, archaeologists also discovered a myriad of footprints, belonging to sandaled adults, dogs, barefoot children, and young llamas. Deep skid marks illustrate that the llamas tried to resist being dragged to the sacrificial site and were forcibly pushed.
Judging by the footprints, it seems that the children and llamas were led to the site from both the north and the south. Some were brought from far away, as indicated by the cranial modification exhibited by some of the children, a process which was practiced They were sacrificed systematically, by someone who was well-versed in this sort of ritual: the cut marks are clear, indicating no hesitation.
Most of the children and llamas were buried, but some of them were simply left out in the wet mud.
Appeasing the gods
The authors of this grisly ritual belong to the Chimú culture. The sacrifice site, called Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, lies just half a mile away from Chan-Chan, the former administrative center of the Chimú. At their peak, the Chimú controlled an empire: a 600-mile-long territory along the Pacific coast, extending into valleys and areas close to today’s Peru-Ecuador border. They developed a thriving culture from about 900 AD and on the continent, were second only to the Inca empire, which conquered them in 1470, fifty years before the arrival of the Spanish in the region. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the sacrifice was carried out around 1450 AD, at the peak of their power, right before they started a losing war with the Inca.
Of course, the question of why is painfully present. What would motivate the Chimú to do such a thing?
Human sacrifices have emerged in one form or another all around the world — though they do seem to be more prevalent in South America than most other areas. The common theme around these sacrifices is appeasing the gods. Whether it’s to negotiate favor from them or improve environmental conditions, people sacrifice what they hold dear to get something else that they want. In this case, the telling clues might be in the mud layer in which the children and llamas were buried in.
The layer is probably the result of severe rain and flooding, which would have been a rare occurrence in a largely arid landscape. These events were probably associated with El-Niño— the warming of the sea’s surface that occurs every few years, especially in the equatorial Pacific area.
“The site has evidence if flooding indicating heavy rainfall that only occurs during sporadic El Niño events, so this is possibly the reason to make such a huge offering,” says Verano.
The flooding would have probably disrupted the agricultural systems, while in the seas, El Niño would have disrupted important fisheries. The Chimú were potentially faced with famine, and researchers believe this was the driving cause for the sacrifice.
Unbeknownst to them, however, the Chimú would crumble under the Inca attacks just decades later. It’s unclear if these weather events led to their demise, but even if they would have survived the war with the Incas, the Spanish arrival was also just decades away, and this event would alter the fate of South American culture in an unprecedented way — one way or another, the Chimú demise was bound to happen.
But while their culture came to an end, for archaeologists, this is only the beginning. Verano says he has dug so many sacrifices in Peru that he almost got used to it. But one can only wonder how many more such sites still remain uncovered in Peru and in the world.
“This site opens a new chapter on the practice of child sacrifice in the ancient world,” Verano concludes.
Journal Reference: Prieto G, Verano JW, Goepfert N, Kennett D, Quilter J, LeBlanc S, et al. (2019) A mass sacrifice of children and camelids at the Huanchaquito-Las Llamas site, Moche Valley, Peru. PLoS ONE 14(3): e0211691. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211691
WETENSCHAPOnze Melkweg weegt bijna 1,5 miljard miljard keer onze ster, zo meldden het Amerikaanse en het Europese Ruimtevaartbureau, NASA en ESA.
Hoeveel ons sterrenstelsel weegt is een vraag die wetenschappers reeds lang bezig houdt. De meningen liepen fel uiteen: van 500 miljard keer de massa van de Zon tot 3 miljard miljard keer.
De grote moeilijkheid was de distributie van donkere materie, die ongeveer 90 procent van de massa van ons sterrenstelsel uitmaakt, uit te klaren. Maar met de hulp van de GAIA-telescoop van het Europese Ruimteagentschap en de Hubble ruimtetelescoop van NASA, konden wetenschappers nu uitrekenen dat het Melkwegstelsel 1,5 miljard keer de Zon weegt.
SpaceILDe Israëlische maanlander Beresheet maakte een selfie met de aarde en een Israëlische vlag.
WETENSCHAPDe Israëlische maanlander ‘Beresheet’ – vrij vertaald naar ‘Genesis’ – die de nacht van 21 op 22 februari gelanceerd werd, zorgt voor primeurs. De robot is een onderdeel van de eerste private maanmissie en draagt een bibliotheek van 30 miljoen pagina’s met zich mee. Een glorieuze selfie om het moment te vereeuwigen, mocht niet ontbreken.
Beresheet, een maansonde zo groot als een wasmachine, maakt deel uit van de allereerste maanmissie van Israël. Bijna twee weken geleden werd de robot richting de maan gelanceerd. Intussen reisde hij al zo’n 37.600 kilometers: een goed moment om een mooie foto te maken.
Op het kiekje pronkt de maanlander op de voorgrond, en hij lijkt wel te zwaaien met de Israëlische vlag. Daarop staan de woorden “am Ysrael chai” geschreven, vertaald betekent dat “het volk van Israël leeft”. En daarachter onze aarde: België is jammer genoeg niet zichtbaar, Australië wel als je goed kijkt.
Mislukte selfie Zoals bij elke geslaagde selfie ging er bij Beresheet overigens ook een mislukt exemplaar aan vooraf. Daarop is vooral de vlag duidelijk te zien, en van de aarde zie je niets meer dan een dun zilverkleurig lijntje.
(Lees verder onder de foto)
SpaceILAan een geslaagde selfie gaat meestal ook een mislukt exemplaar vooraf.
Eerste private maanmissie
De eerste private maanmissie van Israël werd bijna twee weken geleden gelanceerd door een Falcon 9-raket van Elon Musks SpaceX. Aan boord de robot ‘Beresheet’ die een (relatief) kleine metalen disk met zich meedraagt. Daarop staan zo’n 30 miljoen pagina’s gebrand met informatie over de menselijke beschaving. De bedoeling is dat die schijf achterblijft op de maan en er zo’n zes miljard jaar zal overleven. Op die manier kunnen onze verre afstammelingen leren uit de fouten die hun voorouders al maakten.
Vermoedelijk landt Beresheet op 11 april 2019. Dan zal Israël het vierde land in rij zijn – na de VS, Rusland en China – om een robot op de maan te zetten.
FAA RELEASES RECORDINGS OF OREGON UFO EVENT THAT SCRAMBLED F-15S
FAA RELEASES RECORDINGS OF OREGON UFO EVENT THAT SCRAMBLED F-15S
On October 25, 2017, the FAA picked up an unidentified target moving rapidly across radar from northern California toward Portland, Ore. Several commercial pilots were able to visually confirm the object from their aircraft, stating they could not make out any identifying markings, but that the craft appeared to be entirely white and moving at high speed.
Now, the FAA has disclosed documentation and audio files between the pilots and air traffic controllers, giving more detail about the UFO that remains shrouded in mystery still to this day.
Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the astute investigative work of The Drive‘s aviation branch The War Zone, we have more insight into the events that transpired that day, the reactions that led to the contact of NORAD, and the scrambling of several Air Force F-15 fighter jets to intercept the unidentified craft.
Before losing the UFO on radar after initial detection, traffic controllers placed the object at a cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, quickly confirmed by pilots at similar altitudes who witnessed the craft anywhere between five and 15 miles off their wings. Over the course of another half hour and several hundred miles, other pilots confirmed sightings of the craft, eventually leading to the Air Force’s response.
The recordings obtained by The War Zone‘s FOIA request contain minutes of dead audio, which Tyler Rogoway, the investigative journalist covering the story, says he is unsure whether these can be attributed to recording anomalies or whether the tapes were edited.
But what one does manage to distinguish in the recordings is that despite numerous eyewitnesses accounts, no pilot was able to make out what type of craft they saw.
“If it was like a Lear type airframe I probably would not have seen it this clear. This was a white airplane and it was big,” said a Southwest Airlines pilot who witnessed it. “And it was moving at a clip too, because we were keeping pace with it, it was probably moving a little faster than we were, but we weren’t converging with them, but it was a larger aircraft.”
The Drive also published recordings that occurred after the event, investigating its handling by various flight controllers, pilots, and FAA officials. Within them, one of the takeaways seemed to be a disagreement or dissatisfaction with the way the F-15 launch orders occurred.
During one of the closing remarks on tape, a female administrator reassures a colleague who felt he was being blamed by saying, “[t]his is a weird enough thing that there’s not a set procedure, I think you guys did the right thing in doing all the notifications the way you did…”
The FAA controller then asks if he should file the incident as an “aircraft” operating at altitude speed, or whether it would be more appropriate to file it as “something else.” His colleague confirms that “aircraft” is probably appropriate, but that it’s not common they hear about an “unknown guy up at that altitude.”
Both situations seem to add to the notion that, though these events may be rare, there continue to be unexplained instances of unidentified aerial phenomena picked up by pilots and air traffic controllers alike. These events seem to potentially corroborate the bizarre tic-tac UFO encountersdescribed by fighter pilots in the “GO-FAST” and “GIMBAL” videos disclosed by former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, who headed a clandestine Pentagon program to study such occurrences.
And according to Elizondo, there is still much more to come…
For more on the imminent exposure of UFO technology watchDisclosurewith Dr. Steven Greer:
Nog nooit zoiets gezien. Luister hier naar de geluidsopnames van een UFO-incident waarbij straaljagers werden ingezet
Nog nooit zoiets gezien. Luister hier naar de geluidsopnames van een UFO-incident waarbij straaljagers werden ingezet
Op 25 oktober 2017 verscheen op klaarlichte dag een UFO boven de Amerikaanse staat Oregon. Er werden straaljagers op afgestuurd, maar die konden niets vinden.
Het onbekende vliegtuig werd rond 16.30 uur lokale tijd opgepikt op de radar, meldde website The Drive.
Het object bevond zich op ruim 11 kilometer hoogte en bewoog zich met grote snelheid voort. Het reageerde niet op radio-oproepen.
Niet traceren
Het kwam aangevlogen vanuit het noorden van Californië, begaf zich vervolgens onder het commerciële luchtverkeer en verdween uiteindelijk van de radar.
Kort daarop maakten diverse piloten bij de luchtverkeersleiding melding van een wit vaartuig op ongeveer 11 kilometer hoogte.
Vanuit Portland stegen F-15’s op om het object te onderscheppen, maar die konden het mysterieuze toestel niet traceren.
Gestoord
De Amerikaanse luchtvaartautoriteit FAA en luchtmacht hebben bevestigd dat dit voorval zich daadwerkelijk heeft voorgedaan.
Uit geluidsopnames blijkt dat de autoriteiten grote moeite hadden om te begrijpen waar ze mee te maken hadden.
Een luchtverkeersleider maakte melding van een object ‘dat zeer snel bewoog op een hoogte van 11 kilometer’. “Dit is gestoord,” klonk het.
Nog nooit
Eén van de piloten merkte op dat hij gedurende zijn hele carrière nog nooit zoiets had gezien. “Het was een wit vliegtuig en het was groot,” zei hij.
Sommigen speculeren dat de UFO mogelijk een geheim militair stealthvliegtuig was. Maar het zou niet logisch zijn om zo’n vliegtuig te testen in een gebied waar ook lijnvliegtuigen vliegen.
German U-Boat Allegedly Spotted in Antarctica on Google Maps (PHOTO)
German U-Boat Allegedly Spotted in Antarctica on Google Maps (PHOTO)
Multiple conspiracy theories exist linking Nazi Germany with Antarctica, with some of them claiming that the leaders of the Third Reich might have fled to secret bases in Antarctica after their defeat in World War II.
A YouTuber studying various anomalies and conspiracy theories, named MrMBB333, has published a video in which he shared his bizarre findings in Antarctica, where, he thinks, melting ice is revealing the frozen continent's secrets. The video blogger specifically pointed to two spots on Google Earth, where the ice has melted in unnaturally straight or circular lines, which, he claims, looks like a U-boat.
In one of the screenshots, a tube-like greyish object can just barely be seen under a layer of ice and snow. MrMBB333 thinks it could be a submarine. In another spot, another greyish object can be seen in a more ellipse-like pattern of melting snow. The YouTuber suggested that it could be a U-boat, or in other words a German submarine.
"If you look at the top of it, you can see what looks like a greyish type of steel colour. You can see a set of straight lines through the centre which doesn't look like a completely random act of nature. That has an intelligently designed structure to it", he said.
Previously, Russian researchers found Nazi secret meteorological station in the Arctic in Alexandra Land, a thousand kilometres from the North Pole. It was established in 1942 and functioned for two years, but was only discovered recently.
Duitse U-boot gespot op Antarctica? Bekijk de beelden
Foto: Hiàn (alt) Wikimedia Commons
Duitse U-boot gespot op Antarctica? Bekijk de beelden
Diverse complottheorieën hebben nazi-Duitsland gelinkt aan Antarctica. Volgens sommige theorieën zijn de leiders van het Derde Rijk na de Tweede Wereldoorlog naar geheime bases op Antarctica gevlucht.
Een YouTube-gebruiker heeft nu een video geplaatst waarin hij vreemde lijnen laat zien die hij op Google Earth heeft gevonden.
De lijnen zouden een U-boot, een Duitse onderzeeboot, vormen, schrijft persbureau Sputnik.
Onderzeeër
De beelden tonen een buisvormig, grijs object onder een laag ijs en sneeuw. MrMBB333 denkt dat het om een onderzeeër zou kunnen gaan.
Op een andere plek heeft hij nog een tweede grijskleurig object gespot dat een meer ellipsachtige vorm heeft.
“Bij de bovenkant zie je een grijze kleur,” zei hij. “Je kunt rechte lijnen zien die door het midden lopen. Ze zien er niet natuurlijk, maar kunstmatig uit.”
Geheime nazi-basis
Enkele jaren geleden werd nog een geheime nazi-basis ontdekt bij de Noordpool. Er werden zo’n 500 voorwerpen gevonden, waaronder legeruniformen, munitie, meteorologische apparatuur en hakenkruizen.
Uit documenten blijkt dat het station vanaf 1942 in gebruik werd genomen door de nazi’s. Korte tijd later, in de jaren vijftig, werd het station vernietigd.
Het station werd ‘Schatgraver’ genoemd. Het is niet bekend waarom men dacht waardevolle voorwerpen te zullen vinden in het gebied.
Bad news for Loch Ness Monster fans … two Loch Ness Monster experts (I know, skeptics say that’s an oxymoron) arecasting doubts on the three sightings this year,including two in just five days, that put 2019 on pace to be a record-breaking year for Nessie views. Is this dispute scientific, paranormal, political or just plain spite? Or could it be soul-searching, as both experts seem to be questioning their own existence?
Lisa Brennan believes she took a photo of the monster's head emerging from the water
(Image: Deadline News)
“The fact is that well over a thousand honest and sober people have seen monsters in Loch Ness. Yet over 80 years of expeditions have failed to find them. Either we’re fairly bad at what we do or there’s another reason for that. I think it’s fair to say we’d all like there to be a Loch Ness monster. But equally there are people who will see what they want to see.”
It’s tough to find someone who has devoted more of their life to finding the Loch Ness Monster than Adrian Shine. He’s been looking for it since 1973 and is currently the Loch Ness and Morar Project and the possessor of a giant beard long before ZZ Top or David Letterman. In 1987, he organized “Operation Deepscan” which used 24 boats equipped with echosounder sonar to search the entire loch. Needless to say, no monster was found by Operation Deepscan, but Shine has never been deterred in in his search. However, the first three sightings of 2019 don’t float his Loch Ness boat.
There have been over 1,000 sightings of Nessie in Loch Ness
“In fact the huge majority of sightings are caused by the illusions that the loch is capable of creating, precisely because of the monster legends.”
So, what does Adrian think these sightings might be?
“My best guess is that what people are seeing is a fish like a sturgeon, which is very primitive and reptilian in appearance and can grow very big.”
Anyone who’s ever researched the Loch Ness Monster knows the name Steve Feltham. The self-proclaimed Nessie Hunterhas been living in a converted van on the shore of the loch since 1991, searching daily for Nessie and reviewing photos and videos taken by others. He is, or at least was, far more enthusiastic about the existence of the creature than Adrian Shine.
“When I arrived here full-time nearly 30 years ago I was looking for plesiosaurus, those dinosaurs with long necks. But now I’m not looking for dinosaurs, I’ve ruled that out, which is disappointing for me as I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Nessie. There are people out there who are incredibly gullible and believe every picture they see and bit of evidence. The internet has made it very easy for people to upload photos and cause a Nessie sensation with many believing it really is Nessie until proven otherwise. Every day there are many two or three decent interesting photographs, bit of films or pieces of evidence to study, but there are 10 times as many false alarms.”
So, what does cynical Steve think the three sightings of 2019 might be?
“My favourite is the wels catfish, the second-biggest freshwater fish in the world, although we’re no where nearer to saying it is definitely this or that. It doesn’t mean that it will turn out to be a catfish, but it’s my best guess at the moment.”
A sturgeon or a catfish? While Shine and Feltham seem to have resigned themselves to these ideas, they will surely disappoint the businesses dependent on the search for an actual monster. These two legendary Loch Ness Monster experts both hope that the results of the DNA testing of the loch last year, if and when they’re finally released, will solve the myth, or at least push the needle closer to an answer.
Is it aliens? Strange lights were seen in the waters off Bangor in County Down, Northern Ireland. In fact, numerous people reported seeing the mysterious lights in the water and a few of them even captured pictures of the strange phenomenon and posted them online.
A woman named Jackie is one of several people who took pictures of the lights, and underneath the Facebook post of her photograph, it said that she walked around trying to figure out what it was since there were no divers or bubbles or anything left on the shore line to indicate that someone was in the water. Apparently, the lights flickered, turning off and on at random times and intervals.
While it’s possible that it could have been divers in the water, nobody has yet to come forward. Mark Piper, who is a local diver, said that he had asked around if anyone was in the water as it’s a very popular location at this time of year, but nobody claimed that it was them.
Eve O’Connor, who also witnessed the unexplained lights, said that they just appeared after a “strange fog” had lifted. “It was like two pinky peach sheens on the water that were concentrated in the middle,” she explained, adding, “There had been a strange on-off fog as soon as we had left for the coastal path. I thought maybe it was the sun breaking through in a strangely specific way.”
The lights were spotted in the waters off Bangor in County Down, Northern Ireland.
Credit: Pen News
Ireland is no stranger to alleged UFO sightings. Just a few months ago, in November of 2018, several pilots reported seeing an unidentified object in the skies over Ireland. The pilot of the British Airways flight BA94 contacted air traffic controllers to ask them if there were any military exercises in progress off the west coast of Ireland as she witnessed an unidentified flying object moving past the plane. It was confirmed that there weren’t any military exercises going on at that specific time.
Another pilot who was flying a Virgin Airlines aircraft spotted something unexplained that he described as a “meteor or another object making some kind of re-entry,” also adding that there appeared to be “multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory – very bright from where we were.” In addition to those two witnesses, another pilot chimed in by expressing, “Glad I’m not the only one.”
While the alien theory is a popular explanation as to what those lights were, several Brexit jokes were also included as a possible explanation. One person commented by saying, “It’s Theresa May trying to find somewhere useful to put the Irish border after Brexit,” while another claimed that it was probably a “dreadnought class British submarine getting ready for Brexit.”
As someone who writes books, gives lectures, and posts articles here and there, I get a lot of feedback. For the most part, it comes via emails, phone-calls and Facebook messages, from people who want to share their experiences, ask questions, or offer their opinions on the things I have written about. Occasionally, however, I’ll find myself on the receiving end of a communication (or several) from someone claiming an “Insider”-type background. A whistle-blower, in other words. There have been a few occasions when my path has crossed with those of enigmatic characters whose backgrounds did indeed place them in the world of certain, covert activities – all connected to UFOs, in one way or another. This occurred most graphically when I was researching and writing my books, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, Body Snatchers in the Desert, and Final Events.
On March 2, 2017, it happened again. In this case, it came in the form of an “Unknown Caller” phone-call in the early afternoon. The elderly man at the other end of the line said that he had read my books Men in Black and Women in Black and wanted to share something relevant. It all revolved, he said, around the Philadelphia Experiment of 1943 and the MIB. This was certainly a new one on me. And I thought I had heard it all! I clearly had not. Like me, he had no time for the teleportation- or time-travel-based scenarios. But, what he did believe (or, rather, claimed to know) was certainly just as controversial. Perhaps, even more so. He said that in the early 1980s he was given the opportunity to read a particular batch of classified U.S. Navy files that told the “real” story of the Philadelphia Experiment. He was extremely cagey on verifiable facts (no surprises there, I have to say…), but maintained that the experiment had a bearing on the aforementioned MIB and Women in Black. I asked: “In what way?”
His reply was that the experiment – the precise nature of which he would not comment on – created what he called “a shift.” It was a shift that allowed those aboard the ship to see certain things that, in a normal state, they, you and I would not be able to see. But, which are supposedly around us all of the time. We’re talking about the MIB, WIB, and even what have become popularly known in recent years as the Shadow People, one-dimensional entities that are considered highly dangerous. So the tale went, the stories of crew-members vanishing, or becoming fused into the metal of the ship itself, were very wide of the mark. They were, I was assured, wildly distorted accounts of the crew seeing not sailors, but encountering MIB, WIB and Shadow People walking through walls, becoming invisible, and then reappearing. It didn’t take long, though, before the “truth” of the matter became a tale of vanishing and reappearing sailors. The man claimed – even more controversially – that this particular event at sea marked the first moment when the U.S. Government became “aware” of the Men in Black phenomenon.
USS Eldridge
The man stressed that he used the word “aware” for a very good reason. He wanted to make it clear that the government’s awareness did not mean they fully understood the nature of the MIB (and related) phenomenon. And, then, he stressed yet again that awareness and understanding should not be confused. Yes, I got it, jeez. Interestingly, he also said that the stories of some of the crew going insane were absolutely true. He explained that this was caused by the strange ability of some of the men to randomly see the MIB, the WIB, and the Shadow People for up to at least several years later. True or not, I could understand why people might well flip their collective lids under such circumstances. Imagine being endlessly faced with ghoulish, pale creatures in black swarming all around you, all the time, and in somewhat ethereal form. And your friends and family are completely oblivious to what’s going on around them. That would surely be enough to send anyone completely off the rails.
Creepiest of all, he said that when the creatures realized they could be seen by the sailors, they would respond by endlessly tormenting them. They would point their bony fingers at the men and grin in manic style. Others would “dance” around them, in wild, crazed fashion, while wailing and howling. It was a definitive bedlam, one from which there was no escape whatsoever. A Danse Macabre, one might say. Minds were lost, destroyed and never recovered. Having listened to all of that, I felt like I needed a drink. Was 3:00 p.m. on a weekday too early for hard liquor mixed with chilled Coca-Cola and ice? No, it was not. Of course, the most logical explanation for all of this is that the source was a nut-job. But, what if he wasn’t…?
The story is not quite over. Part-2 will soon follow…
Part-1 of this article began as follows: “As someone who writes books, gives lectures, and posts articles here and there, I get a lot of feedback. For the most part, it comes via emails, phone-calls and Facebook messages, from people who want to share their experiences, ask questions, or offer their opinions on the things I have written about. Occasionally, however, I’ll find myself on the receiving end of a communication (or several) from someone claiming an “Insider”-type background. A whistle-blower, in other words. There have been a few occasions when my path has crossed with those of enigmatic characters whose backgrounds did indeed place them in the world of certain, covert activities – all connected to UFOs, in one way or another. This occurred most graphically when I was researching and writing my books, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, Body Snatchers in the Desert, and Final Events. On March 2, 2017, it happened again. In this case, it came in the form of an “Unknown Caller” phone-call in the early afternoon. The elderly man at the other end of the line said that he had read my books Men in Blackand Women in Black and wanted to share something relevant. It all revolved, he said, aroundthe Philadelphia Experimentof 1943 and the MIB.”
There the extract from part-1 of this article ends. Now, it’s time for part-2. As interesting as this almost crazed story admittedly was, I quite naturally asked the man for something to back up his extraordinary claims. He told me to keep a look out for something that would be arriving in a couple of days. The phone then clicked. He had hung up. I thought: how can something be coming to my apartment when he didn’t even have my address? Two days later, on March 4, 2017 I found out. Apparently, he, or someone associated with him, did have my address. Around noon, I went down to get the mail. As I opened my apartment door, I saw a yellow envelope sitting on my “Welcome” mat.
What was particularly odd about the envelope was its complete lack of stamps or address: the entire envelope was blank. It wasn’t even sealed; the flap had just been pushed inside the envelope. I looked around, but didn’t see any unfamiliar faces wandering around. That was not surprising: it could only have been placed there some time after I last returned to the apartment, which was around 10:00 p.m. on the previous night, after I had helped a friend haul a new recliner into his second-floor apartment, one block down from mine. Logically, though, I figured it was probably delivered in the early hours of the morning, when there would have been hardly anyone awake or in a position to see the person who made the stealthy delivery.
So, I took the envelope inside and sat down on the couch. I opened it and could see what looked like an old book. That’s exactly what it was. I took it out. What I was holding in my hands was an original, 1950 edition of a book published by the Bureau of Ships, U.S. Navy Department. Its title was Microwave Techniques. It had been prepared by the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On the “Acknowledgments” page, it said: “Microwave Techniques is a Bureau of Ships edition of the report T-13, Microwave Technique as of May 1943, issued by the Radiation Laboratory.” It was signed “D.H. Clark, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy, Chief, Bureau of Ships.” Interestingly, Rear Admiral Clark was the Commander of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. Why is that of interest? Well, because in the legend, the “teleported” ship turned up at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. And although I don’t buy into the wild tales of teleportation (or of time-travel, too), it was clear to me that someone was trying very hard to make a point.
When, back in the 1980s and the early-to-mid-1990s, I used the Freedom of Information Act to a significant degree, I was used to receiving government-, military-, and intelligence-based documents through the mail. But, this was very different: via FOIA you would always get photocopied material. And, of course, it would be delivered in conventional fashion. On this occasion, though, I was the recipient of an original military document. Plus, it wasn’t delivered by the mail, by UPS, or FedEx. On this occasion, someone had climbed the stairs to my apartment and had very quietly placed it right outside of my door (in the dead of night, I concluded), knowing that I would soon find it. Also, there was the not insignificant fact that the “Acknowledgments” section of the Microwave Techniquesdocument referenced 1943 – the year of the Philadelphia Experiment. The report didn’t mention the legendary experiment, but there was no doubt in my mind that it came from the old man on the phone two days earlier. Or, at the very least, from an associate of his.
After perusing the book for an hour or so, I went outside and scanned the apartment blocks. Everything was as normal as it ever was. Or, rather, it seemed to be. Beneath the veneer of normality, though, I detected a sense of something else. Of dark machinations and of an unclear, masked agenda.
It’s common knowledge that humans know more about mars and the moon than they do about their own oceans. Humans have devoted lots of time and money into developing space travel, however do we know what really lies in the depths of our oceans? Today we will showcase some of the most bizarre discoveries made by deep-sea divers. These discoveries range from frightening sea creatures, to underwater cities and remnants of ancient civilizations that are outright scary! These odd findings may rouse lots of curiosity as to what else is left to be discovered in the very depths of our oceans.
You Wont Beleive That These Places Exist If These were not Recorded
You Wont Beleive That These Places Exist If These were not Recorded
Most of us have wondered about the mysterious places on earth. And the best part is the world never ceases to surprise you. Each and every corner of earth holds something mysterious or special for you which just silently wait to be discovered. And then falls in the scientist and excavators who always brings something new for us. Whether that place is difficult to reach or a visited tourist destination, our thirst for discovering some new and bizarre thing never dies.
Today let’s WATCH some of the most mysterious and unknown places on earth which are a bot alien to our world yet beautiful.
Here are 20 Mysterious And Weird Places Around The World
Brand New Video Captures Massive Diamon Shaped Craft in The Sky!!
Brand New Video Captures Massive Diamond Shaped Craft in The Sky!!
This is just-released raw video shot in the skies over Staten Island, NY. The symmetry of it lends to the conclusion that this is absolutely not a natural cloud formation. See what you think! Leave your comments below.
TWO ex-soldiers who claim to have captured spaceships flying over their home in Fife also say they've filmed ALIENS.
The brothers - who do not want to be named but run The Sky Hunter site - have been searching for UFOs since October in a bid to prove their existence.
SCOTTISH SUN
The brothers filmed footage of what they believe to be aliens and found this after zooming in
SCOTTISH SUN
The pair changed around the analysis colours to find the eery 'creatures'
The pair faced their brand new cameras towards the Forth Bridge in the hope of catching a glimpse of extra-terrestrials.
And one - who went by the pseudonym 'Paul' - was ecstatic to discover he had managed to film what he believes to be male aliens.
Speaking exclusively to Scottish Sun Online, he said: "I keep catching things on video because the fact is, when you're walking along the street, everyone is looking down.
"I was facing the Forth Bridge in the clouds and I saw something. I caught a ball shape in the clouds and analysed it.
SCOTTISH SUN
Ex-soldier brothers say the aliens are male because of their 'heavier brow'
"We then noticed a skeletal outline and it looked fantastic.
"I've seen so many things that it's no longer shocking to me but the first time, especially, was really exciting.
"We filmed an alien occupant and when analysing it we used different filters which highlighted muscle mass.
"We also filmed a massive spacecraft."
He continued: "The spacecraft, that was what went over my house. It's a ship.
SCOTTISH SUN
The unidentified objects fascinated the brothers
SCOTTISH SUN
One of the 'spacecrafts' that the pair filmed flying above their house
"In one picture you can clearly see the vertebrae and neck, jaw bone of something.
"Then you can see the things hand going up to support something.
"You can also see muscle mass and a brow which suggests to me that it's a male because the brow section is heavier."
The brothers, who have been alien-searching since October, are convinced they've struck gold in their paranormal hunt.
But they accept that not everyone is going to be a "believer".
SCOTTISH SUN An unidentified object in the sky above the Forth Bridge
SCOTTISH SUN
The extra-terrestrial sight from the footage zoomed in
The pair have even attempted to get their videos and pictures professionally looked at by experts.
But they reckon nobody will touch their footage over fears of being "blackballed or laughed at."
He added: "I've always been interested in this sort of thing, we're both ex-military so we have an idea of what's flying around up there, what's ours and what isn't.
ALAMY
'Paul' stuck his camera facing the Forth Bridge and spotted plenty of unidentified objects
Deze ex-soldaten zeggen een enorm ruimteschip met aliens te hebben vastgelegd in de lucht boven Schotland
Deze ex-soldaten zeggen een enorm ruimteschip met aliens te hebben vastgelegd in de lucht boven Schotland
Twee oud-soldaten zeggen boven het Schotse Fife ruimteschepen met aliens te hebben gefilmd. De broers, die anoniem willen blijven, speurden al sinds oktober vorig jaar naar UFO’s in een poging hun bestaan te bewijzen.
Eén van de broers merkte op dat hij als één van de weinigen dingen weet vast te leggen op camera omdat ‘iedereen omlaag kijkt als je over straat loopt’.
“Ik keek richting de Forth Bridge en zag iets in de wolken,” zei hij tegen de Scottish Sun Online. “Ik legde een bolvormig object in de wolken vast en analyseerde het.”
Enorm ruimteschip
“We filmden een buitenaardse inzittende en konden met behulp van diverse filters zelfs spiermassa ontwaren,” vervolgde hij.
Ook konden ze naar eigen zeggen wervels, een nek en kaakbeen zien. De broers denken dat het om een mannelijk exemplaar ging.
“We hebben ook een enorm ruimteschip gefilmd,” klonk het. De oud-soldaat zei dat het over zijn huis vloog.
Bestuderen
De broers hebben geprobeerd hun opnames te laten bestuderen door experts, maar er is nog niemand geweest die zijn of haar vingers hieraan durft te branden.
“Ik ben altijd al geïnteresseerd geweest in dit soort dingen,” zei de man. “We hebben allebei in het leger gezeten, dus we weten wel een beetje wat er allemaal door de lucht vliegt, wat van ons is en wat niet.”
It seems that whenever strange, unexplainable, loud sounds – horns, booms, shrieks, etc. – occur in the sky, HAARP is usually blamed. When mysterious clouds – trails, saucers, pillars, etc. – occur, HAARP, with its reputation for alleged weather control experiments, is blamed again. While HAARP’s involvement in these types of events has never been conclusively determined, Slovakia may have a case for pushing the investigations to continue since it seems to be a hotbed (testing ground?) for both strange sounds and odd clouds.Another sound event occurred this weekand many are demanding answers before it’s too late. Or is it already? (See the video here.)
“Something very strange is going on in recent years in the atmosphere on the planet.”
If anyone should know about these strange atmospheric events, it’s Martin Mikuaš, who runs a YouTube channel where he posts videos of these eerie sounds and unusual cloud formations – along with other odd stuff – and, perhaps as a result of the sheer number he’s found, likes to point his finger towards Alaska at the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program or HAARP. To his credit, Mikuaš also gives an alternative explanation for this particular sound over Slovakia.
HAARP
“With frequent observations of these sounds, I noticed that this mysterious sound can be heard before or after the bigger earthquake in the world. It probably has a connection from the shifting of the lithospheric plates.”
Hmm. Mikuaš posted the video on March 1, 2019, and there have been no earthquakes in Slovakia in the past 30 days. However, there was one in 2015, the same year Mikuaš uploaded videos of what appears to the untrained ear to be the same sounds (see it here.). Videos of the sound were uploaded by other people in 2016 and they show strange cloud formations as well. On his channel, Mikuaš also uploads videos of strange clouds (here’s one from 2018) and UFOs over Slovakia (Here’s one from 2017).
Castle in Slovakia
Are these strange sounds, clouds and UFOs over Slovakia because Martin Mikuaš lives there and is either quick with his cellphone or has a network of spotters? Hard to say. Is he a hoaxer, as some commenters suggest? That’s certainly possible, but his collection of videos is pretty large and varied. Is Slovakia ground zero for HAARP testing or some other types of atmospheric or weather experimentation? Well, Eastern European countries have been used for strange, unusual and deadly experiments before.
One thing is certain … Martin Mikuaš is listening. Is anyone listening to him?
A recent proposal made by the Interior Department could potentially make it more difficult to request and obtain public records, in a move some transparency advocates are calling a potential violation of the Freedom of Information Act.
In response to the proposed changes, a group of congressional leaders penned a letter to David Bernhardt, Acting Interior Secretary, arguing that the move could undermine efforts toward more transparency in government.
A portion of the letter reads, “The proposed rule appears to restrict public access to DOI’s records and delay the processing of FOIA requests in violation of the letter and spirit of FOIA. Rather than clarifying DOI’s FOIA process, the proposed rule would make the process more confusing and potentially expose it to politicization and unnecessary litigation.”
David Paulides, author of a number of books on people who have vanished in National Parks, Tweeted about the proposed changes.
“For 9 yrs I’ve explained how the DOI demanded $1.4 mil for a list of missing people from our parks,” Paulides wrote. “They have abused, ignored and now want to change the FOIA.”
“The National Park Service is not what the public perceives and is fed via advertising,” Paulides said. In his books, Paulides has discussed the exorbitant fees the National Park Service requested from him in the past, in response to a request for details on people who have vanished on U.S. federal land.
FOIA laws have traditionally provided civilians access to information pertaining to a wide variety of different areas of government. In January, one notable release via FOIA by the Defense Intelligence Agency revealed new details about the Pentagon’s UFO tracking program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program.
This is not the first such change in policy in recent years. Beginning on March 1, 2017, the FBI changed its FOIA policies, stating the agency would no longer accept Freedom of Information Act Requests via email. The decision was met with derision by transparency advocates, who argued that this placed limitations on the public’s ability to request and access information that can be lawfully obtained from government agencies.
Prior to 2017, the FBI cited requests numbering greater than 951 pages “complex,” and anything between 50 and 950 “medium” processing track. This was changed in 2017, with requests involving more than 50 pages now being labeled “complex.”
Elizabeth Hempowicz with the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) was quoted by The Daily Caller at the time of the decision, saying “It’s hard to see this move by the FBI as anything other than an attempt to make it more difficult for the public to access information about the agency, as is our legal right under the Freedom of Information Act.”
According to an AP report, the changes for 2019 proposed by the Interior would affect “wording authorizing staff to reject records requests they deem ‘unreasonably burdensome’ and impose monthly limits on the number of FOIA requests that can be filed by an individual. The proposal would also replace the phrase “time limit” in the agency’s FOIA regulations with the term ‘time frame,’ a subtle change critics worry might allow staff to treat FOIA’s legally required time limits as mere guidelines.”
The proposed changes are similar to the FBI’s policy shift in 2017, in that both appear to be aimed at limiting large numbers of requests that can be filed with ease through digital mediums like email. There are reasons why it can be assumed such changes may be deemed necessary by certain government agencies; particularly those like the FBI that receive a large volume of FOIA requests, which often may be pertaining to information for which the agency keeps no records.
However, transparency advocates (which includes the bipartisan group in Washington whose letter recently opposed the changes) argue that this moves government institutions further away from accountability and measures which allow openness and disclosure of information to the public.
Lauren Easton, a spokesperson for the Associated Press, said in January that the proposal “would greatly infringe upon the public’s right to know and understand the inner workings of its government,” and the news agency “condemns such restraint of public information and any move by a government agency to undermine transparency.” They are one of several media outlets currently opposing the measure.
Alex Hinson, a spokesman for the Interior, argues to the contrary, saying recently in a public statement that the agency believes “these changes will result in a more transparent, equitable, and accountable FOIA program.”
It remains unclear how placing restrictions on the amounts and methods by which individuals may request information would promote transparency.
We all know the world of men will end someday. It could be tomorrow or it could be thousands of years from now – either way, it’s pretty clear by now that our time on Earth is limited. Will a man-made catastrophe like nuclear or biological warfare, climate change, or resource depletion bring about our demise, or will natural disasters, an astronomical impact event, or the evolution of a new superbug wipe out humanity?
Let’s not fool ourselves. We all know the machines will soon crush our collective skull under their cold, metal feet.
Whatever the cause is, the histories of our planet and its life show us that all things must pass. Humanity is ultimately just a blip on the unimaginably long life of the spaceship we call Earth, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and preserve our knowledge and civilizations for future beings or intelligent machines to learn from. With that in mind, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit called the Arch Mission Foundation has set out to create a “civilization backup” which would outlive humanity in the event of a species-wide catastrophe. The first version of this backup was sent to the moon last week.
The “Lunar Library,” as the civilization backup is known, consists of 30 million pages of information etched onto tiny metallic discs packed into a container the size of a DVD and is being hailed as “the first library on another celestial body.” The disc was carried aboard the privately-funded Israeli Beresheet spacecraft which was launched towards the moon aboard a SpaceX rocket on February 22nd. The archive is meant to be an encyclopedia of human knowledge, containing over 200 gigabytes of information such as the entire English-language version of Wikipedia, thousands of works of literature, nonfiction, and textbooks, and a “Rosetta Stone” consisting of 5,000 human languages and the means to translate between them.
A SpaceX Falcon launching from Vandenberg AFB in 2017.
The Arch Mission Foundation says their Lunar Library is intended to preserve the best parts of humanity to ensure any future humans don’t make the same mistakes we do (here’s a hint: don’t build artificial intelligence). “One of the primary evolutionary challenges that we face is amnesia about our past mistakes, and the lack of active countermeasures to repeating them,” an Arch Mission Foundation spokesperson told NBC news. “For the survival of our species, we need to find ways to raise our awareness of what worked and didn’t work, and we need to ensure it is shared with the people of the future.”
Nearly exactly a year ago, the Arch Mission Foundation sent a similar payload aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Do they know something we don’t, or is this merely a group of simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic well-wishers?
Time will tell. It’s too bad we won’t be here to see if future civilizations can avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.
A decades-long scientific mystery may have finally been solved. Some Antarctic icebergs are an odd emerald green color instead of the normal blue tinge and scientists have suggested a new theory as to why they look that way.
Ice absorbs more red light than blue light and that’s why they appear as a blue color. While most of them look blue or white while they are in the seawater, many people over the years have seen these oddly colored icebergs. Even sailors and explorers from the early 1900s have reported witnessing strange colored green icebergs around Antarctica.
A green iceberg floats in the Wendell Sea in 1985. Green icebergs’ unusual color has long perplexed researchers.
AGU/JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH: OCEANS/KIPFSTUHL ET AL 1992
While green icebergs have captured the curiosity of scientists for several decades, glaciologists conducted new studies which lead them to believe that iron oxides that’s in rock dust from Antarctica’s mainland is what’s turning the icebergs a green color. Australian researchers found huge amounts of iron in East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf and that’s how the theory got started.
Iceberg in Antarctica
Interestingly, iron is a very important nutrient for phytoplankton which is a microscopic plant that’s at the base of the marine food chain. While iron is very limited in quite a few areas of the ocean, if this new discovery of iron in some icebergs proves to be true, it would be an extremely important benefit for marine life.
According to Stephen Warren, who is a glaciologist at the University of Washington, “It’s like taking a package to the post office. The iceberg can deliver this iron out into the ocean far away, and then melt and deliver it to the phytoplankton that can use it as a nutrient,” adding, We always thought green icebergs were just an exotic curiosity, but now we think they may actually be important.”
Icebergs break off of glaciers and ice shelves that extend out into the sea. Normal glacier ice is created when several layers of snow build up and eventually harden up, meaning that it has air pockets that light reflects off of. However, some icebergs in Antarctica contain a layer of marine ice which is water from the ocean that has frozen to the bottom of an overhanging ice shelf. Since marine ice doesn’t have any air pockets that reflect light, it is darker and much clearer than glacier ice. When Warren and his colleagues studied the green icebergs, they noticed that the green areas were in fact made up of marine ice instead of glacier ice.
Iceberg in Antarctica
Iron oxides that are found in soil, common rust, and rocks typically have warm, earthy colors such as yellow, orange, brown, and red. That’s why Warren was thinking that the iron oxides in the marine ice were turning the blue ice into a green color.
When glaciers move over bedrock, the rocks end up grinding into a very fine powder called glacier flour that ends up going into the ocean. The pieces of rock dust could then become part of the marine ice if it gets trapped under an ice shelf.
Warren, along with iron researchers from Australia are now planning to sample different colored icebergs in order to find out exactly how much iron they contain as well as how much light they reflect. If their theory is proven, that would be a huge discovery in regards to the study of icebergs, especially since iron is such an important and beneficial nutrient to marine life.
Seawater sometimes freezes to the underside of ice shelves, creating a layer of what’s called marine ice.
Credit: AGU.
A partly-capsized iceberg embedded in sea ice. The clear, light blue ice is made of marine ice. The boundary between the glacier ice and marine ice (originally horizontal) is now tilted about 60 degrees.
With new and advanced space technology, humans tend to feel more protected and not as scared if an asteroid was to ever threaten Earth. That’s because we believe that advanced technology allows us to be able to smash an asteroid into tiny pieces in order to protect our planet. However, new research indicates that blowing up an asteroid may not be as easy as we once thought.
In the early 2000s, a team of researchers conducted an experiment where they created a computer model of a simulated asteroid with a diameter of around one kilometer smashing head-first into a target asteroid with a diameter of 25 kilometers with a five kilometer per second impact velocity. Their results showed that the asteroid would have been totally destroyed.
However, newly conducted research by a new team suggests that after an asteroid is hit, its gravity would be so powerful that it would be able pull the destroyed pieces back together. After the impact, millions of cracks would form, pieces would fly off, and a crater would appear on the asteroid. After studying the cracks and predicting how they would multiply and move throughout the asteroid, they found that the entire body would not have broken up. They instead noticed that it had a huge damaged core that had such a powerful gravitation pull that the broken pieces would have been pulled back in. This means that the asteroid would need to be hit with a much stronger force than previously thought.
Charles El Mir, who is a doctoral graduate at Johns Hopkins University, explained in a statement, “It may sound like science fiction but a great deal of research considers asteroid collisions.” He went on to say, “For example, if there’s an asteroid coming at Earth, are we better off breaking it into small pieces, or nudging it to go a different direction? And if the latter, how much force should we hit it with to move it away without causing it to break? These are actual questions under consideration.”
While scientists don’t have much information about the interior structure of asteroids, they once believed that the bigger it was, the easier it would be to destroy, but they now think differently. “We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws,” El Mir explained, “Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered.”
A top defensive idea has always been to knock an incoming asteroid off course or obliterate it.
Picture: NASA/JPL-CaltechSource:Supplied
Image:Space objects hitting Earth have dominated science fiction ideas about human extinction
Farscape Actress Confesses Her Belief In The Existence Of Aliens On Twitter, March 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Farscape Actress Confesses Her Belief In The Existence Of Aliens On Twitter,March 2019, UFO Sighting News.
I Tweeted to Farscape actress Gigi Edgley this week asking if she has ever seen a UFO before. She replied but only said, "I defiantly believe we are not alone :) " Since she was from Australia I was thinking that she may have caught a sighting of a UFO sometime in her life, but being an actress, most of her time is probably spent indoors. I was wondering if she was ever inspired by UFO sighting and wondered how it may have influenced her role on Farscape, be she didn't reveal that to me. Very cool she answered me. The Farscape sci-fi series is one of the greatest space adventures of our time. The show includes bio-mechanical living ships, multi species crews, aliens that even Star Wars directors couldn't think up and a script that unbeatable. Check it out sometime. Scott C. Waring
SCWbooks@SCWbooks
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@GigiEdgley Hi Gigi, have you ever had a UFO sighting before and did it effect your acting on Farscape in any way? Your views would greatly support thousands of others who reported seeing UFOs but were ridiculed and belittled. Plz support us all by telling us your experience. SCW
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Ancient Alien Faces Ancient Alien Faces On Mars In NASA Rover Photo, 100% Real!March 2019, UFO Sighting News.On Mars In NASA Rover Photo, 100% Real!March 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Ancient Alien Faces On Mars In NASA Rover Photo, 100% Real!March 2019, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: March 7, 2019 Location of discovery: Mars Source photo:
I was totally blown away while making this video below. I found that not only was there one alien human like face, but there was actually dozens of other giant artefacts that I had not noticed before. There were several large faces on the top of the hill, most looking out or up at the sky. This tells me they were all placed there on purpose. None were upside or fallen over. I also found a cyborg face. I have never found a half tech half alien face before so this was very unexpected and exciting. It means that alien on Mars did integrate technology into themselves, not just around them, but in them. The size of the ancient artefacts and the huge number of them in this photo really blew me away. At first when I looked at the photo, it looked boring and empty, but on closer inspection I found a flood of evidence that Mars once had a thriving intelligent culture on it. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
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Amazing footage of a cigar-shaped UFO over North Carolina
Amazing footage of a cigar-shaped UFO over North Carolina
This really interesting footage was filmed on 25th January 2019 near Greensboro in North Carolina.
Witness report:
Yesterday while walking around outside looking for birds to film and photograph I noticed a strange flashing light in the sky near an airplane. It was moving slowly in the sky, a little slower than the planes flying around. I could see the random flashing coming from the object for about 10 seconds. I tried to film it with my camera. Using my GH5 and Leica 100-400mm lens I was able to grab a few frames of the object. I did not think I captured it at all because the focus would only hunt and not lock on.
When I got inside and checked the footage I was blown away by what I saw. I have no idea what this object is. It is pill shaped with bullet headed ends. This is in rural North Carolina just outside of Greensboro. Enjoy the video and let me know if you have any idea as to what this object is.
NASA’s Martian rover Opportunity breathed its last digital gasp this week. What was a busy scurrying robot picking over and investigating the Martian landscape is now a slowly decaying pile of metal and circuitry. That is to say, Opportunity has entered my world, the world of abandoned things that is archaeology.
Humans have been dreaming about Martian archaeology for well over a century now. When the Italian Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli described seeing canali on the surface of the red planet in 1877, many in the English-speaking world began to speculate that Schiaparelli was referring to artificially constructed canals. Percival Lowell became the largest champion of this interpretation. In his 1895 book “Mars,” Lowell claimed that the canals of Mars had been built by a desperate alien race seeking to salvage what water they could from the planet’s melting ice caps.
A drawing by Percival Lowell (1896) depicting "canals" and dark areas on Mars.
GETTY
As telescopes continued to improve, the Martian canals evaporated as quickly as the water they were meant to contain, but Mars’ association with fantastical archaeology was only beginning. In an 1898 science fiction novel, “Edison’s Conquest of Mars,” author Garrett P. Serviss told of a human expedition to the Red Planet that was sent as a counter strike against the Martian invaders depicted in H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” (which was plagiarized by Serviss in his own book “Fighters from Mars”). During the assault on Mars, the invaders encountered an encampment of human slaves whose ancestors had been captured in a Martian raid on Earth 9,000 years earlier. These slaves related a great secret to their liberators, when visiting Earth the Martians had built the Great Pyramid of Egypt along with the Sphinx.
As the era of Pulp Fiction boomed, stories of the inhabitants of Mars abounded. Most successful were Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories about the adventures of John Carter, a Civil War veteran who magically found himself on the surface of Mars. Carter encountered a Martian landscape filled with fantastical cities and alien races. The theme of ancient ruins on Mars continued to echo as Burroughs’ hero regularly found himself in long abandoned cities.
Martian ruins took on a decidedly more sinister appearance in, noted Weird Tales author, Clark Ashton Smith’s 1932 story “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” which tells the story of human archaeologists visiting an ancient Martian city. As the archaeologists approached the tumbled monoliths, the story’s narrator proclaims “I have seen the hoary, sky-confronting walls of Machu Picchu amid the desolate Andes; and the frozen, giant-builded battlements of Uogam on the glacial tundras of the nightward hemisphere of Venus. But these were as things of yesteryear compared to the walls upon which we gazed.” Without revealing the ending, it should be noted that the archaeologists do not fare well when they pass within these ancient walls.
In the ensuing decades, it seemed ever clearer that Lowell’s dreams of an ancient Martian race building canals and other structures across the planet was best left to fiction, but in 1976 NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter arrived in Martian orbit and the planet’s story shifted yet again. Among the pictures sent back to Earth by Viking 1 was a photograph of a region of Mars known as Cydonia, which included a massive geological feature that appeared to resemble a humanoid face. Controversy swirled as NASA officials insisted the face was simply a geological oddity, while others began to speculate that at long last Martian monuments had been found.
Image of the Cydonia region taken by the Viking 1 orbiter.
NASA/JPL
Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar lead the charge in proclaiming the importance of Cydonia to the public. Together they authored “Face in Space,” an article for Omni Magazine (April, 1982), as well as a book, “Unusual Martian Surface Features,” which argued that the Cydonia photos revealed not only a monumental sculpted face but also pyramids and other artificial structures. DiPietro and Molenaar attracted a great deal of attention with their claims, but ultimately it was a difficult case to prove. People either believed the official NASA statements that these were simply natural features, or they indulged their itch for conspiracy and imagined that perhaps Mars had been home to an ancient race.
As NASA began carrying out more missions to Mars, many eagerly waited to see what new images might come from Cydonia. Finally, in 2001 the Mars Global Surveyor sent back a high-resolution image of the “Martian Face.” To the disappointment of many, the face had faded to a simple rocky outcrop. The structure was photographed again in 2007 by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, further dashing our hopes and dreams for an ancient Martian monument as the rocky ridges and eroded slopes came into ever clearer resolution.
HiRISE captured this image (PSP_003234_2210) of an eroded mesa made famous by its similarity to a human face in a Viking Orbiter image with much lower spatial resolution and a different lighting geometry.
NASA/JPL/UNIV. OF ARIZONA
Yet all along this journey, the Martian landscape has become populated by actual human-made objects. Fourteen separate missions from four different space agencies have littered the surface of Mars with not only landers and rovers, but heat shields, parachutes, and an untold number of broken bits. As an archaeologist, I love broken bits.
The things that people make and leave behind tell a different story than written history. A physical examination of landing sites on Mars would reveal critical details about why some landers arrived safely while others crashed to never be heard from again. Even the crashed landers tell a story of human triumph and ingenuity. One day, an astronaut will walk up to the original Viking 1 lander and marvel at the accomplishments of their ancestors. The material heritage we are currently scattering across the Martian surface will stand for centuries to come as a symbol of what we as human beings can do.
Israel is planning its first mission to the moon. The launch is scheduled for April 11th.
Tucked away inside Israel’s Beresheetlunar lander, currently on its way to theMoon, is a massive archive documenting humanity’s achievements.
The collection of images, text and symbols is the first part of a project to build a “Lunar Library” and part of a bigger push to create a space-based archive of Earth.
According to the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF), the library contains 30 million pages of human history that covers a wide range of subjects, languages and time periods, all stored on a DVD-sized archive made of 25 nickel discs that are each only 40 microns thick. An 84-page document that AMF provided to Gizmodo showed subject categories in the time capsule including aerospace, mathematics, women's studies, humor and criminology.
The first four layers contain over 60,000 analog images of pages of books, photos, illustrations and documents, AMF explained. Among the included items will be a copy of The World Factbook.
When Gizmodo asked why the full list of contents was not being released, the AMF toldthe news outlet:
"We’re only announcing some of the content in the library right now because of the various partnerships we have. Much more content will be revealed. ... Rather than rely on problematic curations of material, we want to include the full breadth and diversity of recorded human knowledge and culture and a record of the life and civilization of planet Earth."
There will be more discs sent to the Moon in the coming years, including in partnership with Astrobotic next year.
The Beresheet lander was launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and could reach the Moon by April 11. The lander and its time capsule will remain on the Moon indefinitely.
The Moon looms large for a number of countries’ space programs. China, for example, recently became the first country to successfully land a probe on the far side of the Moon when the Chang’e 4 lander reached the lunar surface on Jan. 2.
An artist's illustration of a Kepler-1658-like system. Kepler-1658b, which orbits its host star every 3.8 Earth days, was the first exoplanet candidate discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope nearly 10 years ago.
The first exoplanet candidate ever detected by NASA's late and lamentedKepler space telescopehas finally been confirmed, 10 years after the iconic instrument's launch.
The candidate, known as KOI (Kepler Object of Interest) 4.01, was originally pegged as a possible Neptune-size planet orbiting a star a smidge bigger than our sun. KOI 4.01 was dismissed by some scientists as a false positive, however, after certain Kepler observations didn't accord with this scenario.
Specifically, Kepler saw a pronounced "secondary eclipse" in the system — a significant drop in total light caused when the candidate went behind the host star from the telescope's perspective. A Neptune-size world orbiting a sunlike star would not produce an observable secondary eclipse, astronomers said.
HANDOUT
Kepler-1658b was actually the first exoplanet that the Kepler space telescope identified
But a new look at archival Kepler observations has forced a rethink about the star, which is known as Kepler-1658 and lies about 2,600 light-years from the sun.
"Our new analysis, which uses stellar sound waves observed in the Kepler data to characterize the host star, demonstrated that the star is in fact three times larger than previously thought," Ashley Chontos, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii, said in a statement.
"This, in turn, means that the planet is three times larger, revealing that Kepler-1658b is actually a hot Jupiter-like planet," added Chontos, lead author of a new study announcing the world's confirmation, which was presented today (March 5) at the Kepler/K2 Science Conference in Glendale, California.
The study has also been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. You can read a free preprint of it here.
Kepler-1658b — for that is now the world's official name — zips around its host star in an incredibly tight orbit, completing one lap every 3.8 Earth days. If you were in a plane cruising through Kepler-1648b's skies, and you somehow managed to avoid incineration, that star would appear 60 times bigger than our sun does from Earth's surface, discovery team members said.
Kepler-1658 is a future version of our own star. It's rare to find planets orbiting such "evolved" stars, discovery team members said. One possible reason is that hot Jupiters eventually spiral into their host stars. But the new observations suggest that such death plunges occur over longer time spans than previously thought, adding to the mystery.
"Kepler-1658 is a perfect example of why a better understanding of host stars of exoplanets is so important," Chontos said. "It also tells us that there are many treasures left to be found in the Kepler data."
Kepler launched into orbit around the sun on March 6, 2009. The spacecraft spotted planets by noticing the tiny brightness dips caused when these worlds crossed their stars' faces from the telescope's perspective.
Kepler did this work across two missions: its primary one, which ended in 2013, and a second, broader mission known as K2, which ended this past October when the spacecraft ran out of fuel.
Kepler's work has been incredibly productive. The spacecraft is responsible for nearly 70 percent of the roughly 3,900 exoplanet discoveries to date. And, as the new study indicates, Kepler finds will continue to roll in even though the spacecraft has shut its eyes.
Indeed, nearly 3,000 candidates spotted during the original and K2 missions await confirmation by follow-up analyses or observations.
And, in case you were wondering why the first Kepler exoplanet candidate was called KOI 4.01: KOIs 1.01, 2.01 and 3.01 were known prior to the telescope's launch.
Japan's space agencycompleted a complicated touchdown maneuver at a distant space rock last month, and it has now released an incredible video from the spacecraft's point of view.
The spacecraft, Hayabusa2, is conducting a sample-return mission at a near-Earth asteroid called Ryugu, and last month's touchdown was perhaps the single most important maneuver of the mission. The new video shows what happened during the procedure, which occured on Feb. 21.
First, the spacecraft eases itself down toward the asteroid's rocky surface. Then, it immediately bounces back up, leaving a burst of flying rubble in its wake as it retreats up to safety.
What we don't see in that video is what caused the chaos: the spacecraft firing its sampling apparatus — basically a sophisticated bullet — and sucking up some of the debris it created. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) practiced the procedure earlier this year on Earth, using an artificial asteroid — a glorified bucket of gravel — designed to mimic Ryugu's structure and rock composition.
But knowing that it worked on Earth isn't nearly the same as watching the procedure unfold on a distant space rock. The footage was captured by a camera that was funded by public donations, JAXA noted.
Although the sampling procedure was the spacecraft's masterpiece maneuver, the mission still has a few tasks to accomplish before Hayabusa2 heads for home. First, in April, the spacecraft will create an artificial crater, then examine it to see what happened.
There are more surface operations to come as well. In early summer, the spacecraft may touch down for a second time, inside this new crater, to get a different perspective on it. Then, in late summer, the spacecraft will deploy the last of its onboard rovers to get another look at the rocky surface.
At the end of the year, Hayabusa2 will begin its yearlong journey back to Earth — and at the end of 2020, scientists will finally be able to hold in their hands the result of last month's stunning space boop.
A key instrument on NASA’s Mars InSight rover has run into a problem — ground control suspects a stone.
A rendering of a InSight Mission Candidate Landing Site made using topography data from the University of Arizona / NASA/. Image credits Kevin Gill / Flickr.
The rover’s heat probe has struck an obstacle just below the red planet’s surface over the weekend and hasn’t been able to make progress since.
The Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package Problem
“The team has therefore decided to pause the hammering for about two weeks to allow the situation to be analyzed more closely and jointly come up with strategies for overcoming the obstacle,” Tilman Spohn, the principal investigator for the heat probe, wrote Tuesday in the mission logbook.
The instrument, known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, or HP³, was designed to hammer itself 16 feet (roughly 5 meters) into Mars’ underground and measure how much heat its interior leaks. This data would help researchers estimate the planet’s composition and history.
However, trouble is brewing underneath InSight — this probe (nicknamed the “mole”) encountered some kind of resistance underground over the weekend and hasn’t been able to make any progress since. Ground control (at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, California) first tried to power it up last week. This first attempt failed to reach all the way to the Mars Odyssey orbiter, however, which was supposed to pass it on to InSight.
The mole was deployed last Thursday, after the team established a stable connection to the rover. It pushed its way in the red soil and made quick progress. For about five minutes. The next four hours of hammering failed to push the mole much deeper and eventually forced the device to one side — the mole is now lodged in the underground, leaning at about 15 degrees of vertical.
Artist’s concept of InSight and its instruments. Image credits NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Current estimates place the mole at a depth of around one foot (0.3 meters). This means that the probe — measuring some 16 inches (0.4 meters) in height — is partially sticking out of the ground. Despite this, the probe likely still is burrowed “deeper than any other scoop, drill or probe on Mars before,” which was its intended purpose.
Spohn writes that the team is a bit worried but that they “tend to be optimistic.” They’re currently working on the assumption that the holdup is a buried boulder or some gravel.
This particular spot was picked for InSight to land on as it appeared to be mostly sandy and soft. However, the team was aware that such a holdup was possible. Tests carried out at JPL suggested that the probe should be able to dig its way around small rocks or layers of pebbles. Since the second attempt to hammer away at the probe didn’t do that, the team decided to put the mole on hold. They’re currently waiting to receive more data from InSight, including pictures, so they can “better assess the situation.”
But not all is lost. The probe is still intact — that’s a really good thing — so it can actually start collecting data. The team has already put it to the task. HP³ will measure how quickly a generated pulse of heat spreads through the soil. Later this week, as (Mars’ moon) Phobos passes overhead and eclipse the sun over InSight the probe will also track how the event changes surface temperatures. While not its intended role, these readings should help the team make better sense of heat flow values in Mars’ soil if and when the probe is deployed as planned.
US MILITARY TO DEVELOP HYPERSONIC “TACTICAL BOOST GLIDE” WEAPON
US MILITARY TO DEVELOP HYPERSONIC “TACTICAL BOOST GLIDE” WEAPON
RAYTHEON COMPANY
VICTOR TANGERMANN
Mach 5 Missiles
Defense contractor Raytheonjust signeda $63.3 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a “tactical boost glide” (TBG) hypersonic weapons program.
The weapon system could reach hypersonic speeds of up to five times the sound barrier thanks to a rocket engine. A payload will then glide the rest of the way to the intended target — completely unpowered, without the ability to accelerate again. But operators will be able to maneuver it from a distance.
“We have lost our technical advantage in hypersonics,” Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Military Times — perhaps a nod to the fact that hypersonic weapons are already being developed and even tested by both Russia and China.
Enhanced Effectiveness
The TBG system could “offer the potential for military operations from longer ranges with shorter response times and enhanced effectiveness compared to current military systems,” according to DARPA’s website.
In October 2016, Raytheon signed a separate $174.7 million contract with DARPA for the development of a “Hypersonic Air-Breathing Weapon” concept to explore the possibility of an “air-launched hypersonic cruise missile,” according to DARPA. It was also meant to offer military operations a longer range for future missions with shorter response times.
Going Hypersonic
Previous DARPA projects have explored very similar concepts. For instance, the Falcon (Force Application and Launch from Continental United States) Hypersoncic Technology Vehicle (HTV) was an unmanned military aircraft prototype that was first announced in 2003. A second iteration, the HTV-2, first embarked on a test flights in April 2010, but the mission had to be cut short when the vehicle lost ground contact.
But the U.S. command is far from giving up.
“We haven’t lost the hypersonics fight,” Selva told the Military Times.
The two red lights were spotted in the waters surrounding Bangor, Northern Ireland at the end of February.
While standing cliff side, Jackie filmed the unidentified red beams that can be seen lighting up an area under water.
Though appearing to be to from two separate sources, a cloud of light can be seen radiating while surrounding them.
Jackie shared the video with local Facebook page Bangor life, in the hope to identify what they belonged to.
Eve O’Connor, another witness, claimed the lights emerged after a “strange fog” lifted.
Once the video was posted, many started to speculate what could be responsible for the strange sighting.
The video was captioned: “She walked round to try and find out what it was.
“[There was] no evidence of divers; i.e. no bubbles and nothing left on the shoreline.
ALIEN NEWS: Is an Alien invasion responsible for the lights? (Pic: PEN NEWS)
“They flickered at times, coming on and off at random intervals. Any idea of what they could be? Is this the start of an alien invasion!?”
Eve further added: “It was like two pinky peach sheens on the water that were concentrated in the middle,”
“There had been a strange on-off fog as soon as we had left for the coastal path. I thought maybe it was the sun breaking through in a strangely specific way.
“I do believe in supernatural occurrences, but if I see something strange I like to first think of what the logical reasons may be behind it.”
Local diver Mark Piper said the site was frequented by himself and others but said nobody from the local diving community had come forward to say it was them.
“I asked around the two local clubs but no takers,” he said. “It’s a popular site at this time of year so it could be anybody really.”
The light could be seen from the Stricklands Glen area of Bangor, some 1.4 miles away.
Some viewers online suggested the sighting could have been caused by bio luminesce – the emission of light by a living organism underneath the water.
But the source of the lights is yet to be confirmed.
Ex-Agent from Area 51: Battle Between Humans and Aliens from 1978 was Real
Ex-Agent from Area 51: Battle Between Humans and Aliens from 1978 was Real
According to the claims of Thomas Castello, ex-agent of the famous Area 51, humankind almost testified a battle between humans and extraterrestrials. However, this event luckily didn’t spread outside the area where humans usually conducted experiments on aliens.
Mr. Castello said he was a photographer who worked for the US Army. Furthermore, before taking his job, he signed a contract with a confidentiality clause considering some relevant prohibited information.
According to the former employee, there was an obscure underground base where people went to search for the cure of their diseases. Among these people there were even children, he said.
Given these points, Thomas wholly negated the likelihood of interacting with any of these people.
Recently released declassified CIA data says Thomas had the chance to eyewitness numerous obscure practices. These practices included astral journeys and mind control.
Then again, the most exciting part of his claims is that he said he has seen scientists who had rather an extraterrestrial origin. Apparently, they were making experiments related to alien-human hybrids and cloning of humans and aliens.
Also eerie is that he claims he could recognize the abducted by hearing them talking nonsense because of strong sedatives.
He said he acknowledged what was happening because he was constantly seeing posters around his town about the same persons being lost without a logical justification.
He further says that was the instant when the battle between humans and extraterrestrials, called “the sweet battle” started emerging.
This war might have prompt due to increase of pressure. Aliens allegedly agitated to make an inside destruction to the genetic investigation of the humans.
All this happened because aliens wanted to keep using humankind to extend their study.
Today, nobody knows where Castello is or what is he doing; however, he sure did escape the secret infamous base.
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NASA alien planet DISCOVERY: Will NASA find life on the distant world of Kepler 1658b?
NASA alien planet DISCOVERY: Will NASA find life on the distant world of Kepler 1658b?
NASA’S discovery of a distant planet in the Kepler-1658 system could boost the space agency’s hopes of discovering alien life – but is there life on the planet Kepler 1658b?
NASAconfirmed today (March 6) a candidate planet in the Kepler-1658 star system, 10 years after it was first discovered. Spotted by NASA’s now retired Kepler space telescope, Kepler 1658b remained an exoplanet candidate for a decade. Exoplanet candidates are alien worlds, which have been spotted outside of our solar system but need to be confirmed by further observations. NASA’s Kepler-1658b was the very first planet candidate spotted by the space telescope but NASA said the road to its confirmation was “rocky”.
NASA alien planet: The space agency confirmed today the existence of a distant exoplanet
(Image: Gabriel Perez Diaz/Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias)
“The initial estimate of the planet’s host star was off, so the sizes of both the star and Kepler-1658b were vastly underestimated.
“It was later marked as a false positive — that is, scientists thought the data did not really point to a planet — when the numbers didn’t quite add up for the effects seen on its star for a body of that size.”
Kepler 1658b bounced back and forth between being a planetary candidate and being false positive until its collected data was refined with computer software.
Ashley Chontos from the University of Hawaii, who studied Kepler 1658b’s data set, analysed the planet for her first year research project.
She said: “Our new analysis, which uses stellar sound waves observed in the Kepler data to characterise the star, demonstrated that the star is, in fact, three times larger than previously thought.
Kepler-1658b is actually a hot Jupiter
Ashley Chontos, University of Hawaii
“This, in turn, means that the planet is three times larger, revealing that Kepler-1658b is actually a hot Jupiter.”
Once the reined data poured in, confirming the planet’s status was the next logical step.
Ms Chontos contacted Dave Latham from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory with the discovery.
NASA alien planet: Kepler's observations of the scorching exoplanet
(Image: NASA)
NASA alien planet: The Kepler exoplanet resembled our own gas giant Jupiter
(Image: GETTY)
She said: “We alerted and his team collected the necessary spectroscopic data to unambiguously show that Kepler-1658b is a planet.
“As one of the pioneers of exoplanet science and a key figure behind the Kepler mission, it was particularly fitting to have Dave be part of this confirmation.”
Right now, NASA’s Exoplanet Archive at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute lists a total of 3,924 exoplanets.
Out of these alien worlds, 2,338 have were discovered and confirmed by Kepler.
There are another 2,423 Kepler telescopes yet to be confirmed.
The new asteroid, nicknamed by NASA Asteroid 2019 DD, is hurtling towards a so-called “Earth Close Approach”. The startling revelation comes just three days after NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) first observed the asteroid flying through space. NASA’s JPL estimates Asteroid DD is positioned to fly past the Earth at breakneck speeds today (Friday, March 1). As the asteroid zips by, it will reach its closest possible distance to Earth around 1.06pm GMT (UTC).
Several witnesses reported seeing flying objects which were not planes hovering near Jorge Chávez International Airport on February 27. Two UFOs were witnessed by staff of the Peruvian Corporation of Airports and Commercial Aviation (Corpac) and flights were even delayed, according to ExoNews. The video, while unverified, seems to show two bright objects hovering over the airport.
While some have claimed these are simply drones, or even planes, other believe they are evidence of alien activity.
Prominent alien hunter Scott C Waring claims that UFOs are often seen hovering over airports.
Mr Waring wrote on his blog UFO Sightings Daily: “The object teased for an hour before just disappearing and flights were delayed.
“Why? Flying objects are expected at the airport making even a UFO sighting more relaxed and less of a surprise.
UFOs spotted over Lima airport in Peru claim alien enthusiasts
(Image: UFO SIGHTINGS DAILY • GETTY)
“I say let them land. Give them clearance!”
This is not the first time Mr Waring has made claims that UFOs have been seen over an airport.
The UFO enthusiast even claims that aliens were responsible for the drone crisis at Gatwick in December 2018, which affected around 140,000 passengers when hundreds of flights were cancelled.
Mr Waring wrote on UFO Sightings Daily: “Here is an important question; were UFOs seen over the Gatwick Airport down played as drones to control the situation?
A UFO was also apparently seen over Gatwick
(Image: YOUTUBE)
“I cannot find any photos of a drone or UFO over the Gatwick Airport, which is strange.
“I believe that people at the airport did not see the UFO. That it was only seen on radar zooming around the airport.
“That would cause them to panic, especially if it was cloaked causing them to panic from not being able to see it.”
Life on Mars? Ex-NASA consultant finds 'PROOF' nuclear war wiped out alien civilisation
Life on Mars? Ex-NASA consultant finds 'PROOF' nuclear war wiped out alien civilisation
MARS once thrived under the rule of an ancient alien civilisation until a devastating nuclear war wiped out all evidence of life, a former NASA advisor has shockingly claimed.
Richard C Hoagland, a former NASAconsultant and conspiracy theorist, strongly believes alien civilisations once existed on Mars and other planets in the solar system. Appearing on Coast to Coast AM radio, Mr Hoagland argued there is ample photographic evidence from NASA’s Viking missions to prove his claim. Mr Hoagland said NASA photos snapped in the Cydonia region of Mars show organised structures, ancient habitats and pyramids. But the thriving alien civilisation, which dominated the Red Planet, was cut short by the destructive power of nuclear warfare.
Following a 1983 “Independent Mars Investigation” in which he took part, the conspiracist said NASA’s Viking lander found evidence of “anomalous isotopes” on Mars.
These peculiar isotopes are known as Xenon 129 and, in his opinion, strongly point towards nuclear detonations on the planet’s surface.
Together with plasma physicist John Brandenburg, Mr Hoagland and a team of investigators explored the possibility of Mars once teeming with life.
Mr Hoagland said: “John and I in 1983 had this conversation when I invited him in because I wanted him to be our nuclear expert on the team because to me some of the craters in the Cydonia region around the face and the pyramids did not look like natural meteoritic impact craters or asteroid impacts.
Life on Mars: A former NASA consultant thinks ancient Martians were wiped out by nuclear war
(Image: GETTY)
“They look like the nuclear explosion tests in Nevada, in Sedan and the other named tests which were done in the Southwestern Unites States.
“And they have a different size-to-depth ratio and they really look different if you have any kind of eye for this.
“That’s why John and I began this conversation, which ultimately led him into the Independent Mars Investigation as a contributor and ultimately to write a couple of books on ancient civilisations on Mars and now to come out with the idea that the civilisations we have been looking at may have been destroyed by a global Martian nuclear war.”
The theory of nuclear warfare ravaging the surface of Mars comes from high concatenations of radioactive Xenon 129 on the planet.
The radioactive isotope is typically found on Earth near nuclear fission reactors and around the fallout from nuclear explosions.
Civilisations we have been looking at may have been destroyed by a global Martian nuclear war
Richard C Hoagland, former NASA consultant
However, Xenon 129’s presence on Mars can be explained by natural processes where cosmic radiation bombarding Mar’s paper-thin atmosphere releases the isotope from the planet’s surface.
A research paper on the subject, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, states: “The Xenon measurements suggest an intriguing possibility that isotopes lighter than Xenon 132 have been enriched to varying degrees by spallation and neutron capture products degassed to the atmosphere from the regolith, and a model is constructed to explore this possibility.”
But to many NASA sceptics and conspiracy theorists alike, such explanations are not sufficient enough.
Life on Mars: NASA's Viking lander snapped this photo of Mars' surface
(Image: GETTY)
Life on Mars: Conspiracists believe pyramids and other structures exist on Mars
(Image: GETTY)
Instead, researchers like Mr Hoagland choose to believe the entire solar system was at one point colonised and the evidence is out there to collect.
The problem is, the treasure trove of information flowing from the last 50 years of spaceexploration is being suppressed by the likes of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Mr Hoagland said: “We’re being prepared to confront the up to now hidden reality by NASA and all these other space programmes, that in fact, there’s enormous stuff out there to go and explore, bring home, back-engineer, create the kind of human civilisation on this planet that we all deserve.
“I don’t think we’re very many months or years away from such an extraordinary change.”
De sonde Hayabusa2 is erin geslaagd kort neer te strijken op asteroïde Ryugu en een projectiel af te vuren. Op deze beelden die het Japanse ruimteagentschap JAXA heeft vrijgegeven is duidelijk te zien hoe de sonde een lichte impact maakt op de rotsachtige formatie. De missie van deze sonde is al enkele jaren bezig, maar dit korte moment was voor de wetenschappers het absolute hoogtepunt.
AFP
Hayabusa 2, vlak na het afschieten op asteroïde Ryugu.
AP
Schaduw van Hayabusa2 op de asteroïde, getrokken vanaf de sonde zelf.
AP
Professor Yuichi Tsuda van de “Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency” (JAXA) tijdens een persconferentie over de landing.
AFP
De wetenschappers achter de missie in het controlecentrum van JAXA
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SECRETS OF THE DEPT... WHAT DID HAPPENED REAL IN THE PAST?
SECRETS OF THE DEPT... WHAT DID HAPPENED REAL IN THE PAST?
VIDEOS, selected by peter2011
1. Secrets of the Deep - Ancient Underwater Cities
Secrets of the Deep - Underwater Cities (Bimini Road and Yonaguni)
It is the stuff of lore and legend. Cities swept into the sea. Civilizations lost beneath the waves. But are these more than just myths? Are there really sunken cities and ruins that need to be discovered?
The Bimini Road, sometimes called the Bimini Wall, is an underwater rock formation near North Bimini island in the Bahamas. The Road consists of a 0.8 km (0.50 mi)-long northeast-southwest linear feature composed of roughly rectangular to subrectangular limestone blocks. Various claims have been made for this feature being either a wall, road, pier, breakwater, or other man-made structure.
The Yonaguni Monument, also known as "Yonaguni (Island) Submarine Ruins" is a submerged rock formation off the coast of Yonaguni, the southernmost of the Ryukyu Islands, in Japan.
Masaaki Kimura, Professor Emeritus from the Faculty of Science at the University of the Ryukyus claims that the formations are man-made stepped monoliths. His ideas are disputed and there is debate about whether the site is completely natural, a natural site that has been modified or a man-made artifact. Neither the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, nor the government of Okinawa Prefecture recognize the features as important cultural artifacts and neither government agency has carried out research or preservation work on the site.
2. Underwater Discoveries That Will Make Your Jaw Drop!
3. Ten Amazing Underwater Cities That Will Blow Your Mind
4. This City Exists Or Not ? Even Scientists Are Scratching Their Head On This Question.
This city exists or not ?? Even scientists are scratching their head on this question. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Under the Antarctica. The endless search now made the researchers go to the depths of the South Pole. Recently, with the help of imaging technology scientists started to discover the depths of Antarctica. The landmass has been explored to a depth of half a mile by the researchers from Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- A structure similar to the Eiffel Tower .On exploring the depths, one of the structures found was resembling the height of Eiffel Tower with a height of 300 meters. According to a documentary by National Geographic channel, the water conduits and sediment ridges found under the South Pole tell about the stability the surface gets. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The Piri Reis map in the 1960s. The idea of Atlantis city under the Antarctica has surfaced earlier also in the 1960's and 70s. At the time, according to the Piri Reis map humans must have been living there. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Created by Turkish admiral. The map's name was actually kept in the name of a Turkish admiral and cartographer who made the map with the help of scholars and discovered many places through the same. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Discovered Antarctica before 1818. Antarctica situated at the South Pole was discovered in the year 1818, but according to The Epoch Times, the Reis map showed Antarctica hundreds of years back before its discovery. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Plato mentioned it first. As per the legends, Plato was the first person to come up with the idea of Atlantis city. It was cited in his dialogues, namely 'Timaeus' and the 'Critias' written around 330 B.C. as per Live Science. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Then Ignatius L. Donnelly. For two millennials after that, it did not occur to anyone about the long lost Atlantis until when the writer, Ignatius Donnelly again came up with it in the year 1881. He also believed that metallurgy, agriculture, religion, and language came from the city of Atlantis. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= And the US researchers believed this. In the year 2011, it was a team of the US researchers who believed that the legendary city was found on the mud flats of Spain in Cadiz. According to them, the city is submerged right under the north Cadiz which was swamped due to a tsunami. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
60 miles of impossibility. The team of researchers was led by the professor of University of Hartford, Connecticut - Richard Freund, who said, "It is just so hard to understand that it (tsunami) can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about." =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Richard Freund claims... According to what Plato described Atlantis 2600 years ago as 'an island situated in front of the straits called the Pillars of Hercules', in 2011 Richard claimed that, "We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archaeology, that makes a lot more sense." =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Tsunami Prone. Freund added that it is no surprise because the area is tsunami prone. The largest of all hit Lisbon in November 1755 with a 10-story tidal wave. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The Old Testament theory. There was a time around 5000 BC when people actually used to believe Atlantis to be a myth. It was believed that it was inspired from the Black Sea Floods; a flood story of the Old Testament. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The land of superpowers. With the number of misconceptions earlier, it was also believed that one could possess superpowers if Atlantis City is discovered. Well, we don't see any superpowers today so maybe if you find it, then you can have those powers. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Relation with the Minoan Civilization. Another theory of Plato only suggests that the Crete and Thera islands were earlier the city of Atlantis. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The truth? Still debatable. Whether it was mid-Atlantic continent which sunk, Antarctica only, the outcome of Black Sea floods, or the Minoan civilization; nothing has been proved yet.
5. 7 Mysterious UNDERWATER Cities
7 Submerged Cities and Settlements
From mysterious building found at the bottom of a lake left for centuries to cities which were only previously thought to exist in the realms of fantasy to a...Russian Atlantis these are 7 Underwater Cities.
Audio production provided by JaM Advertising www.tasteofjam.com
Fuxian Lake is a 212sq km body of water which stretches over three separate counties in southwest China, and for centuries locals who lived on its shores told of the strange sights they had witnessed within its waters.
For centuries many believed the ancient city of Heracleion was a myth, consigned to the realms of fantasy along with Atlantis, Valhalla, and wherever the little Mermaid lived. Heracleion was mentioned in the works of the Greek historian Herodotus as somewhere visited by Helen of Troy, but in Greek mythology she was the daughter of Zeus, so this didn’t really help lend the city an air of credibility.
Whilst some of the cities on this list were mysteriously lost to the ocean deep, we know exactly what happened to the Chinese city of Shicheng – the government flooded it on purpose in 1959.
At nearly 5000 years old the city of Pavlopetri is the oldest underwater settlement humanity has ever discovered, and after sinking sometime around 1000BC these aquatic ruins provide a fascinating snapshot into stone-age life.
Phanagoria was a huge Greek city located in modern-day Russia’s Krasnodar Krai region, and whilst some of its ruins can be found on land, approximately a third can be found at the bottom of the Black Sea.
An old Welsh legend tells the story of a legendary 6th Century Prince known as Helip ap Glanawg whose kingdom straddled much of modern-day North Wales. The tales mention how Helip had a giant palace built in the area today known as Conwy Bay, but it was destroyed after a storm struck the area and it became flooded by the sea, completely submerging both the palace and surrounding city.
Remember how we said Pavlopetri was the oldest known underwater city? Well technically it still is, but only because archaeologists are still arguing over the age of another submerged city found in India’s Gulf of Cambay.
6. Most Amazing Cities Found UNDERWATER!
Here is the top list of mysterious sunken underwater cities in the world found underwater! These strange and mindblowing but also amazing forgotten ancient underwater ruins are located deep into the ocean. Check out Alexandria, City of Cuba, Yonaguni, Lake Titicaca, Pavlopetri, Lion City, Heracleion and more underwater cities!
7. 5 Lost Underwater Cities of the Ancient World
We’ve all heard of the legend of Atlantis – the once great city, submerged under water, unseen yet compelling. But unlike this fictional island there are several real lost cities buried under layers of water waiting to be discovered. Today we bring you top 5 lost underwater cities of the ancient world that were once lost in time but has been discovered and are being explored.
Bible Proves Long-Lost City of Atlantis is in Israel, Researcher Claims
Bible Proves Long-Lost City of Atlantis is in Israel, Researcher Claims
A Biblical researcher and writer believes the sunken city of Atlantis never disappeared, and that its remains can still be found in the Holy Land.
Ryan Pitterson, a researcher and writer who focuses on ancient Hebrew thought and theology, claims that there are certain links between Plato’s tale of the lost city of Atlantis and the stories of Biblical giants known as the Nephilim.
The Nephilim were the offspring of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men”, meaning they were half-human, half-angelic creatures. Atlantis, described by ancient Greek philosopher Plato in around 350BC, was a mythical island that sunk somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean after suffering a devastating natural disaster.
Speaking on American radio, Pitterson said the story of the Nephalim matches the tale of the Greek god Poseidon, who was said to have fathered children with a human woman in Atlantis.
The researcher, who wrote the book “Judgement of the Nephilim”, is convinced that Plato's description of Atlantis matches biblical records of the mysterious Israeli stone structure, Galgal Refaim (“wheel of ghosts”) or Gilgal Refaim (“circle of giants” in reference to a biblical race of giants) in Hebrew.
"One example that really stood out for me is Plato's description of Atlantis. It's almost remarkable how similar it is to Ezekiel 31, which describes the rise of this fallen angel spawning many children and having a kingdom with an abundance of resources and rivers as well as a military power and then having it crumble. In Plato's account, it was the Greek god Poseidon who fell in love with a human woman and impregnated her”, he said on US radio.
Built in concentric circles, Gilgal Refaim is believed to date from around 3000 BCE and is commonly called “The Stonehenge of the Middles East”. Plato’s Atlantis was also said to have been built outwards in concentric circles with water running through the city.
“So right from the onset, it was a god coming to an Earthly realm and conceiving a child with a human woman in the same fashion of Genesis 6. Atlantis is described as having all sorts of great minerals — gold, precious minerals — and in a biblical account in Genesis 2, we're told the rivers that ran out of the Garden of Eden encompassed the whole line of Avila", Pitterson explained.
Is Stonehenge van het Midden-Oosten de plek waar Atlantis ligt? Bijbelonderzoeker doet opvallende uitspraken over Nephilim
Foto: Hebrew Wikipedia אסף.צ
Is Stonehenge van het Midden-Oosten de plek waar Atlantis ligt? Bijbelonderzoeker doet opvallende uitspraken over Nephilim
Een bijbelonderzoeker en schrijver meent dat de gezonken stad Atlantis nooit is verdwenen en dat de resten ervan in Israël kunnen worden gevonden. Dat schrijft persbureau Sputnik.
Ryan Pitterson claimt dat er veel overeenkomsten zijn tussen Plato’s verhalen over de verloren stad Atlantis en verhalen over reuzen in de Bijbel, ook wel Nephilim genoemd.
De Nephilim waren de nazaten van de ‘zonen Gods’ en de ‘dochters der mensen’.
Reuzenras
Het verhaal over de Nephilim komt precies overeen met dat over de Griekse god Poseidon, die kinderen zou hebben gekregen in Atlantis, zei Pitterson op de Amerikaanse radio.
De onderzoeker is ervan overtuigd dat Plato’s beschrijving van Atlantis overeenkomt met de bijbelse verhalen over Gilgal Refaim, een mysterieuze steencirkel op de Golanhoogten.
Gilgal betekent ‘wiel’ en Refaim heeft betrekking op een reuzenras dat volgens de Tenach in de regio leefde.
Stonehenge
De steencirkel zou dateren van 3000 voor Christus en wordt ook wel het Stonehenge van het Midden-Oosten genoemd.
Atlantis bestond volgens Plato net als Gilgal Refaim uit een aantal concentrische cirkels.
Gevallen engel
Pitterson zei dat Plato’s beschrijving van de stad erg doet denken aan Ezechiël 31, waarin wordt gesproken over een gevallen engel die veel nakomelingen krijgt en een koninkrijk opbouwt, dat uiteindelijk uit elkaar valt.
In het verhaal van Plato wordt de god Poseidon verliefd op een vrouw en krijgt hij kinderen met haar, aldus de onderzoeker.
Archaeologists discover 1,000-year-old 'untouched' Maya ritual site containing hundreds of ceramic vessels, burnt offerings, and fragments of bone in Mexican cave
Archaeologists discover 1,000-year-old 'untouched' Maya ritual site containing hundreds of ceramic vessels, burnt offerings, and fragments of bone in Mexican cave
The ritual cave was discovered at the ruins of the ancient Maya city Chichen Itza, on the Yucatan Peninsula
There they found about 200 ceramic vessels left as offerings, containing bone fragments and burnt materials
The team says the cave likely had been discovered, but not fully explored, by locals about 50 years earlier
Archaeologists have stumbled upon an 'untouched' ritual cave onMexico's Yucatán Peninsula that could hold the key to unraveling the fall of the Maya Empire.
At the ruins of the ancient city Chichen Itza, the team found roughly 200 ceramic vessels left as offerings more than 1,000 years ago.
And remarkably, it seems they've remained undisturbed since.
The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the vessels appear to date back to around A.D. 1000 and contain bone fragments and burnt offering materials that are being analyzed.
Archaeologist Guillermo de Anda stands next to pre-columbian artifacts in a cave at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. Mexican archaeologists say they have found offerings of about 200 ceramic vessels in nearly untouched condition. The National Institute of Anthropology and History says the vessels appear to date back to around 1,000 A.D
Archaeologist Guillermo de Anda said exploration of the cave began in 2018 after local Maya residents told experts about it.
It turned out the cave had been discovered, but apparently not fully explored, by locals about 50 years earlier.
They told an archaeologist about it then, but he ordered it sealed - perhaps to protect it - and only issued a brief report that was essentially forgotten in government archives.
The 155 ceramic braziers and incense burners found by the experts bear the likeness of Tlaloc, the rain god of central Mexico.
The Mayas also had their own rain god, Chaac, and may have imported Tlaloc from other pre-Hispanic cultures.
There were also clay boxes and other vessels. The team plans to leave all the objects in the cave.
Archaeologists have stumbled upon an 'untouched' ritual cave on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula that could hold the key to unraveling the fall of the Maya Empire. Above, pre-columbian artifacts sit in a cave at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza
Archaeologist Guillermo de Anda said exploration of the cave began in 2018 after local Maya residents told experts about it. It turned out the cave had been discovered, but apparently not fully explored, by locals about 50 years earlier
De Anda said ancient Mayas had to crawl on their bellies through the extremely narrow cave to deposit the offerings inside a few larger, higher chambers. The offerings were apparently meant to ask for rain.
The cave, called Balamku, is about 1.7 miles (2.75 kilometers) east of the main pyramid of Kukulkan, also known as El Castillo, 'The Castle.'
De Anda and his team are exploring Chichen Itza to establish the routes and sites of its underground water system.
A series of sinkhole lakes known as cenotes are visible on the surface of the Chichen Itza site, but there are other, undiscovered water sites beneath the pyramids, patios and temples.
The 155 ceramic braziers and incense burners found by the experts bear the likeness of Tlaloc, the rain god of central Mexico. The Mayas also had their own rain god, Chaac, and may have imported Tlaloc from other pre-Hispanic cultures
The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the vessels appear to date back to around A.D. 1000 and contain bone fragments and burnt offering materials that are being analyzed
Water was always central to Chichen Itza, whose very name means 'at the mouth of the well of the Water Wizards' in Maya.
De Anda said experts have crawled a few hundred meters (yards) into the cave, which in places is just 16 inches (40 centimeters) tall, in hopes of finding the connection to a cenote cave believed to lie under the pyramid of Kukulkan.
'Let's hope this leads us there,' De Anda said.
'That is part of the reason why we are entering these sites, to find a connection to the cenote under the Castillo.'
WHAT CAUSED THE COLLAPSE OF THE MAYAN CIVILISATION?
For hundreds of years the Mayans dominated large parts of the Americas until, mysteriously in the 8th and 9th century AD, a large chunk of the Mayan civilisation collapsed.
The reason for this collapse has been hotly debated, but now scientists say they might have an answer - an intense drought that lasted a century.
Studies of sediments in the Great Blue Hole in Belize suggest a lack of rains caused the disintegration of the Mayan civilisation, and a second dry spell forced them to relocate elsewhere.
The theory that a drought led to a decline of the Mayan Classic Period is not entirely new, but the new study co-authored by Dr André Droxler from Rice University in Texas provides fresh evidence for the claims.
The Maya who built Chichen Itza came to dominate the Yucatan Peninsula in southeast Mexico, shown above, for hundreds of years before dissappearing mysteriously in the 8th and 9th century AD
Dozens of theories have attempted to explain the Classic Maya Collapse, from epidemic diseases to foreign invasion.
With his team Dr Droxler found that from 800 to 1000 AD, no more than two tropical cyclones occurred every two decades, when usually there were up to six.
This suggests major droughts occurred in these years, possibly leading to famines and unrest among the Mayan people.
And they also found that a second drought hit from 1000 to 1100 AD, corresponding to the time that the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá collapsed.
Researchers say a climate reversal and drying trend between 660 and 1000 AD triggered political competition, increased warfare, overall sociopolitical instability, and finally, political collapse - known as the Classic Maya Collapse.
This was followed by an extended drought between AD 1020 and 1100 that likely corresponded with crop failures, death, famine, migration and, ultimately, the collapse of the Maya population.
Mexican archaeologists were searching for a sacred well when they instead discovered a cave at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza that contained over 150 ceramic artifacts. What’s even more interesting is that the vessels have been untouched for over a thousand years and are believed to date back around 1000 AD. In addition to the ceramic objects, there were also bone fragments and burnt offering materials that are currently being analyzed.
Archaeologist Guillermo de Anda said that after local Maya residents told experts about the location, exploration of the cave started last year in 2018. Around 50 years ago, the cave was discovered by locals but nobody went in to explore it. The locals did, however, report their findings to an archaeologist but he ordered that the cave be sealed and the only thing that was documented on it was a short report that was put in government archives.
Archaeologist Guillermo de Anda stands next to pre-columbian artifacts in a cave at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. Mexican archaeologists say they have found offerings of about 200 ceramic vessels in nearly untouched condition. The National Institute of Anthropology and History says the vessels appear to date back to around 1,000 A.D
The cave is called Balamku and it’s located around 2.75 kilometres east of the main pyramid which is named Kukulkan, or El Castillo (also known as “The Castle”).
Chichen Itza
Of the 155 found artifacts, which include incense burners, ceramic braziers, and clay boxes, some of them appear to have the face of Tlaloc who is central Mexico’s rain god. While the Mayas had their own rain god called Chaac, it’s possible that they could have brought over Tlaloc from additional pre-Hispanic cultures.
The objects that were found inside of the cave were offerings brought in by the ancient Mayas who were asking for rain. And it wasn’t an easy task to bring the artifacts to the location, as they had to crawl on their stomachs through a very narrow cave in order to get to a few bigger chambers where they placed their offerings. The team said that they plan to leave all the artifacts inside of the cave.
The archaeological team is examining Chichen Itza to figure out the routes and sites of the underground water system. While several cenotes (or sinkhole lakes) can be seen at the site, there are additional water sites that are located underneath the temples, patios, and pyramids that have yet to be discovered. Interestingly enough, “Chichen Itza” translates to “at the mouth of the well of the Water Wizards” in Maya.
Chichen Itza
Experts have already crawled into the cave (some areas which are only 40 centimetres in height), but have only gotten to around a few hundred metres in so far. They are hoping to find a connection to a cenote cave which they think is located underneath the Pyramid of Kukulkan. “Let’s hope this leads us there. That is part of the reason why we are entering these sites, to find a connection to the cenote under the Castillo,” de Anda expressed.
Archaeologists have stumbled upon an 'untouched' ritual cave on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula that could hold the key to unraveling the fall of the Maya Empire. Above, pre-columbian artifacts sit in a cave at the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza
A driver has filmed a strange thing in the sky over Montreal, Canada on February 27, 2019.
At first glance it looks like it is the sun, but the sun is visible next to the object. Then maybe it could be a sun arc, a part of a so-called Halo but that does not seem to be the case either.
This circular object clearly is a stand alone object in the sky where the sun rays reflect on the object. Watch Video.
Strange sunset off coast California
Strange sunset do not you think? We are used to seeing the sunrise and sunset on the horizon line.
But something illogical could be seen on December 25 in California. The sun went into the ocean. Watch Video.
Rare figure pops up above Italy
As sunrays broke through the clouds, a fascinating view opened for a moment to those enjoying a sunset from ashore the Tyrrhenian Sea on 1 March, but only one appeared to capture it on camera.
Credit images: Alfredo Lo Brutto.
Italian photographer, Alfredo Lo Brutto from Agropoli, took note of an unusual glow in the clouds above the Tyrrhenian Sea, the figure which looked strikingly like the famed Christ the Redeemer statue towering in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro sky and posted his finding on Facebook.
Like northern lights electrifies the sky over the mystery Bucegi mountains in Romania
Photographer Răzvan Neagoe posted on his Facebook page some remarkable images what looks like northern lights electrifies the sky over the Bucegi Mountains in Romania.
Răzvan Neagoe: Sunday 24 February 2019 at sunset, bucegi offered an incredible show: the microscopic ice crystals of the clouds clouds decomposed the sunlight and offered us a true winter rainbow!
Credit images: Răzvan Neagoe.
I don't know how it was seen from other parts, but I think azuga was privileged with the optimal position for watching this show.
As in the case of polar aurorelor, the phenomenon was dynamic, sometimes more intense, sometimes more pale; it lasted in total about twenty minutes, after which the sun went down too much to form the whole spectrum, the light summed up At Orange-Red and then the darkness left.
It is remarkable that these so-called northern electric lights appeared above the Bucegi Mountains.
The Bucegi Mountains in Romania are well known for its secret underground, labyrinthine tunnel network within the mountain and supposed alien base located inside the mountain. Yet the mysterious sphinx and the Bable figures near the Bucegi Mountains.
A giant glowing figure appeared within a UFO sighting this week. A giant disk was seen during sunset with rays of light shining down into the ocean, but it also has a depiction of a robed figure with his arms out, as if nailed to a cross. I find this really bizarre, but can't help but wonder...did the aliens do as a reward for the people who were watching and their belief in Jesus? It seems so. UFOs can detect your thoughts instantly and so do their probes. These objects can literally create figures from clouds into any shape and make them keep their shape for a long time. This is just too detailed to dismiss it. I can clearly see a robe on a standing figure with his arms outstretched as if on a cross, and his hands are both easily seen. His neck and head have amazing detail.
There is only two possibilities...either aliens created this Jesus figure as a reward for the consistent and loyal belief in Jesus by the onlookers, or...this really could be Jesus himself appearing before the onlookers.
Since Jesus turned water into wine, healed the dyeing and rose from the dead...clearly he is an advanced alien species who wanted to instill humanity with some much needed morals and ethics to help guide them. One thing is absolute...the detail of Jesus in this photo is undeniable. So...miracles really do happen.
Scott C. Waring
News states (translated):
The "mysterious" appearance of Christ in the sky of Agropoli, immortalized by Alfredo Lo Brutto , is inspiring many. Among the believers there are those who cry out for the miracle and those who, instead, are debating with more or less bizarre theories about the apparition. Someone believes that the shape formed in the sky is not that of Jesus, but that of St. Francis . There are even those who have done graphic studies on photography coming to this conclusion. And 'the case of a citizen of Agropoli: "I am atheist - he says - but after a night spent studying the representations of St. Francis, I can say that the image appeared in the sky of Agropoli is precisely that of the saint of Assisi, appeared in eight hundredth anniversary of his coming to the city ". Lovers of stars and ufology, however, are of different notice. After studying the shot of Alfredo Lo Brutto and having ascertained that it was not a photomontage, they came to a conclusion very different from the previous ones: "Inside that beam of light - they say - there was a solid body, perhaps a ufo ". Probably, however, to give the most suitable solution to the interpretation of the image was the parish priest Don Bruno Lancuba , who spoke at Vita in Diretta: "It's a suggestive photo and we can read a meaning for ourselves".
What if we learned an asteroid was headed toward Earth? How much energy does it take to destroy an asteroid and break it into pieces? More than we thought, it turns out.
In recent decades, astronomers have become increasingly aware that asteroids and comets do sometimes strike Earth. Funding has increased for studies in which our skies are scanned for asteroids, which is the main reason wehear so oftennowadays about asteroids sweeping relatively near the Earth. What’s more, astronomers have met to discuss what might happen if we found an asteroid headed our way. Popular books and movies have taken up this theme, too, with the idea we might send spacecraft to the asteroid to blow it up. But – according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University – blowing up an asteroid might not be easy.
These scientists used a new understanding of how rocks fracture, and a new computer modeling method, to simulate asteroid collisions. Charles El Mir, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the paper’s first author, commented in a statement:
We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws. Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered.
These scientists’ findings will be published in the March 15, 2019, print issue of the peer-reviewed journal Icarus(preprint here).
They said their work can:
… aid in the creation of asteroid impact and deflection strategies, increase understanding of solar system formation and help design asteroid mining efforts.
A frame-by-frame showing how gravity causes asteroid fragments to reaccumulate in the hours following impact.
Researchers understand physical materials like rocks at a laboratory scale (about the size of your fist), but it has been difficult to translate this understanding to city-size objects like asteroids. In the early 2000s, a different research team created a computer model into which they input various factors such as mass, temperature, and material brittleness, and simulated an asteroid about a kilometer (.6 mile) in diameter striking head-on into a 15-mile (25-km) diameter target asteroid at an impact velocity of 3 miles (5 km) per second. Their results suggested that the target asteroid would be completely destroyed by the impact.
In the new study, El Mir and his colleagues, K. T. Ramesh, director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute and Derek Richardson, professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, entered the same scenario into a new computer model called the Tonge-Ramesh model, which accounts for the more detailed, smaller-scale processes that occur during an asteroid collision. Previous models did not properly account for the limited speed of cracks in the asteroids.
The simulation was separated into two phases: a short-timescale fragmentation phase and a long-timescale gravitational reaccumulation phase. The first phase considered the processes that begin immediately after an asteroid is hit, processes that occur within fractions of a second.
The second, long-timescale phase considers the effect of gravity on the pieces that fly off the asteroid’s surface after the impact, with gravitational reaccumulation occurring over many hours after impact.
In the first phase, after the asteroid was hit, millions of cracks formed and rippled throughout the asteroid, parts of the asteroid flowed like sand, and a crater was created. This phase of the model examined the individual cracks and predicted overall patterns of how those cracks propagate.
The new model showed that the entire asteroid is not broken by the impact, unlike what was previously thought. Instead, the impacted asteroid had a large damaged core that then exerted a strong gravitational pull on the fragments in the second phase of the simulation.
The research team found that the end result of the impact was not just a ‘rubble pile’ – a collection of weak fragments loosely held together by gravity. Instead, the impacted asteroid retained significant strength because it had not cracked completely, indicating that more energy would be needed to destroy asteroids. Meanwhile, the damaged fragments were now redistributed over the large core, providing guidance to those who might want to mine asteroids during future space ventures.
El Mir commented:
Our question was, how much energy does it take to actually destroy an asteroid and break it into pieces?
It may sound like science fiction but a great deal of research considers asteroid collisions. For example, if there’s an asteroid coming at Earth, are we better off breaking it into small pieces, or nudging it to go a different direction? And if the latter, how much force should we hit it with to move it away without causing it to break? These are actual questions under consideration.
Ramesh added:
We are impacted fairly often by small asteroids, such as in the Chelyabinsk event a few years ago. It is only a matter of time before these questions go from being academic to defining our response to a major threat. We need to have a good idea of what we should do when that time comes – and scientific efforts like this one are critical to help us make those decisions.
Bottom line: Researchers at Johns Hopkins employed a new understanding of how rocks fracture, and a new computer modeling method, to simulate asteroid collisions. They found that asteroids are harder to shatter than previously believed.
Researchers at MIT have developed a ‘mini cheetah’ robot whose range of motion, they boast, would rival those of a champion gymnast. This four-legged robot (hardly more than a powerpack on legs) can move, bend, and swing its legs in a wide range of motions, which allows it to handle uneven terrain about twice as fast as a human, and even walk upside-down. The robot, its developers add, is also “virtually indestructible” at least as falling or slamming into stuff is concerned.
Skynet’s newest pet
The robot weighs in at a paltry 20 pounds, but don’t let its diminutive stature fool you. The mini cheetah can perform some really impressive tricks, even being able to perform a 360-degree backflip from a standing position. If kicked to the ground, or if it falls flat, the robot can quickly recover with what MIT’s press release describes as a “swift, kung-fu-like swing of its elbows.” Apparently, nobody at MIT has ever seen Terminator.
But, the mini cheetah isn’t just about daredevil moves — it’s also designed to be highly modular and dirt cheap (for a robot). Each of its four limbs is powered by three identical electric motors (one for each axis) that the team developed solely from off-the-shelf parts. Each motor (as well as most other parts) can be easily replaced in case of damage.
“You could put these parts together, almost like Legos,” says lead developer Benjamin Katz, a technical associate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
“A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn’t break easily, and if it does break, it’s easy and not very expensive to fix.”
The mini cheetah draws heavily from its much larger predecessor, Cheetah 3. The team specifically aimed to make it smaller, easier to repair, more dynamic, and cheaper so thatthey would create a platform on which more researchers can test movement algorithms. The modular layout also makes it highly customizable. In Cheetah 3, Katz explains, you had to “do a ton of redesign” to change or install any parts since “everything is super integrated”. In the mini cheetah, installing a new arm is as simple as adding some more motors.
“Eventually, I’m hoping we could have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms, and we can see which strategy is more effective. That’s how you accelerate research.”
Each of the robot’s 12 motors is about the size of a Mason jar lid and comes with a gearbox that provides a 6:1 gear reduction, enabling the rotor to provide six times the torque that it normally would. A sensor permanently measures the angle and orientation of the motor and its associated limb, allowing the robot to keep tabs on its shape.
It’s also freaking adorable:
This lightweight, high-torque, low-inertia design allows the robot to execute fast, dynamic maneuvers and make high-force impacts on the ground without breaking any gears or limbs. The team tested their cheetah through the hallways of MIT’s Pappalardo Lab and along the slightly uneven ground of Killian Court. In both cases, it managed to move at around 5 miles (8 km) per hour. Your average human, for context, walks at about 3 miles per hour.
“The rate at which it can change forces on the ground is really fast,” Katz says. “When it’s running, its feet are only on the ground for something like 150 milliseconds at a time, during which a computer tells it to increase the force on the foot, then change it to balance, and then decrease that force really fast to lift up. So it can do really dynamic stuff, like jump in the air with every step, or run with two feet on the ground at a time. Most robots aren’t capable of doing this, so move much slower.”
They also wrote special code to direct the robot to twist and stretch, showcasing its range of motion and ability to rotate its limbs and joints while maintaining balance. The robot can also recover from unexpected impacts, and the team programmed it to automatically shut down when kicked to the ground. “It assumes something terrible has gone wrong,” Katz explains, “so it just turns off, and all the legs fly wherever they go.” When given a command to restart, the bot determines its orientation and performs a preprogrammed maneuver to pop itself back on all fours.
The team, funnily enough, also put a lot of effort into programming the bot to perform backflips.
“The first time we tried it, it miraculously worked,” Katz says.
“This is super exciting,” Kim adds. “Imagine Cheetah 3 doing a backflip — it would crash and probably destroy the treadmill. We could do this with the mini cheetah on a desktop.”
The team is building about 10 more mini cheetahs, which they plan to loan to other research groups. They’re also looking into instilling a (fittingly) very cat-like ability in their mini cheetahs, as well:
“We’re working now on a landing controller, the idea being that I want to be able to pick up the robot and toss it, and just have it land on its feet,” Katz says. “Say you wanted to throw the robot into the window of a building and have it go explore inside the building. You could do that.”
I have to admit, the idea of casually launching a robot out the window (there’s a word for that, by the way: defenestration) with complete disregard, and having it come back a few minutes later with its task complete, is hilarious to me. And probably why they will, eventually, learn to hate us.
Still, doom at the hands of our own creations is still a ways away, and not completely certain. Until then, the team will be presenting the mini cheetah’s design at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in May. No word on whether they’ll be giving these robots out at the conference, but if they are, I’m calling major dibs.
The country’s space program is training astronauts and planning to move the first module to a launch site — and though details are still scarce, it’s the latest sign that China’s leadership is investing heavily in the country’s space capabilities.
Ramping Up
State-run news agency Xinhuacorroborated the SCMP‘s report, adding that the first module of the station will be launched on a heavy-lift Long March-5 rocket.
“China is scheduled to complete the construction of the space station around 2022,” reads Xinhua‘s report. “It will be the country’s space lab in long-term stable in-orbit operation.”
Three Modules
China’s new space station won’t be huge, according to the SCMP — it’ll comprise three modules, and the whole thing will house up to three astronauts at a time.
The Chinese space program already has a small station in orbit, Tiangong-2, but it’s scheduled to be de-orbited this summer, according to Xinhua.
China's first space station burns on its exit from orbit, touching down in the Pacific. China's first space station Tiangong-1 has made its way back into Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean and hassafely broken apart. As the majority of the space vessel burned upon re-entry, the remaining pieces landed in the South Pacific northwest of Tahiti. ( 2018)
Russia Proposes Superhighway Between New York And London
Russia Proposes Superhighway Between New York And London
Russia has proposed to build a road stretching all the way from London to New York, going thru the entire of Russia in the process. It really is what you would call a "superhighway."
The idea for the project has garnered lots of support, although some oppose it as well of course. The superhighway was dreamt up by the Russian Government. In total it would be 12,910 miles (20776 kilometers) in length. That is a serious amount of tarmac that needs to be mixed. On the route between London and New York, it would also connect other big cities including Moscow.
It would, without a doubt, be the greatest highway ever made and it goes by the name of, "Trans-Eurasian belt development project."
The cost of the project would be around the $3trillion mark. That is a huge amount of cash. According to authorities, this may be money well spent in the long-term. The mention of long-term cost does also bring up maintenance. It is one thing to build it, but what happens when potholes appear on the road or when people crash and emergency have to get there to help out. This will all cost money.
Opening the road may encourage some people and business to change how they travel. With vehicles getting very economical now how would the cost compare to flying for somebody who wanted to get from one part of the route to another? Driving from London to New York may take a while, but it would sure be an adventure! If it is going to cost hundreds of dollars to do the route by plane, would it be cheaper in petrol or diesel bills? By driving you would have the convenience of leaving at a time you wanted to, with no waiting around at an airport.
At this time there doesn't seem to be details about whether there would be toll roads to pay for upkeep. If so this may increase the cost of traveling on it and move the favor back the way of planes. For those on an adventure it probably wouldn't make much of a difference either way. For travelers, this could be like the next Route 66 - A famous stretch of road in America. I can imagine hiring a cool car and driving the full-length from London to New York would be an incredible effort.
What do you think about the plans? Will they go ahead with it? And are they realistic and would it even be worth building? With an ever growing global population, we will need more transport options, is this sort of project the answer?
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(NL ondertiteling) UFO’s BOVEN LUCHTHAVENS
We weten niet wat deze ongeïdentificeerde objecten zijn die al vele en vele jaren (en de laatste tijd wel heel frequent) worden waargenomen boven luchthavens, overal ter wereld. Ik beweer niet dat het beslist buitenaardse toestellen zijn, maar wat dan wel? In de gevestigde media zal je er weinig over lezen en horen, men doet net alsof het niet voorvalt. En als men er niet omheen kan, omdat zoals vorig jaar in het geval van de Londense luchthaven Gatwick de luchthaven dagenlang stilligt, dan krijgen meteen de drones van mensen die in de buurt wonen er de schuld van. Geen enkele kritische vragen worden er verder gesteld, zoals bv: kunnen dergelijke particuliere drones wel uren achtereen in de lucht blijven? Of hoe het mogelijk is dat dergelijke drones drie dagen lang een internationale luchthaven plat kunnen leggen, zonder dat de politie en zelfs het leger de daders niet kan lokaliseren? En als er dan een helikopter van het leger of de politie poolshoogte neemt, de drone met een ongelooflijke snelheid over de horizon verdwijnt, niet bij te houden door de heli, overigens ook niet door een F-16. En als de objecten bij daglicht met het blote oog worden waargenomen, dan blijken ze van een grootte te zijn die je niet in je schuur of op zolder kan opbergen. De vorm ervan lijkt ook niet op een drone. Maar zelfs als er drones zijn met dergelijke afmetingen, dan moeten ze absoluut op radar te zien zijn, iets waarvan doorgaans alle luchtverkeersleiders beweren dat ze niet op radar te zien waren, ongeacht dat men ze vanuit de verkeerstoren met het blote oog kon zien.
Kijk, UFO’s bestaan gewoon, dus niet te identificeren vliegende objecten. Daar moet hoognodig een onbevooroordeeld, officieel en open onderzoek naar worden ingesteld en daarbij mag geen enkele hypothese worden uitgesloten, dus… ook niet de buitenaardse hypothese, hoe vergezocht je dat ook mag vinden. Binnen het UFO-fenomeen bestaat 100% bewijs dat een aantal van de waargenomen vliegende objecten (en in de afgelopen 70 jaar gaat het om duizenden objecten) beslist niet van een Aardse mogendheid kunnen zijn. Er zijn vele duizenden hooggeplaatste getuigen die op basis van hun ervaring bij de overheid, het leger, de luchtmacht, politie, enz, er vast van overtuigd zijn dat het wel degelijk om een buitenaardse aanwezigheid gaat, maar dat nagenoeg alle overheden op deze wereld dat steevast ontkennen, omdat men al tientallen jaren de exotische buitenaardse techniek en kennis voor zichzelf te pakken wil krijgen. In plaats daarvan maken ze getuigen belachelijk en beïnvloeden ze de gevestigde media. Met als gevolg dat bijna niemand over UFO’s durft te praten, bang om ook uitgelachen te worden.
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WETENSCHAP Er zijn bewijzen gevonden dat de planeet Mars ooit een grondwatersysteem heeft gehad, zo heeft de Universiteit Utrecht na onderzoek bekendgemaakt. De aanwezigheid van grondwater op onze buurplaneet was al sinds 2010 voorspeld. De bevindingen werden gepubliceerd in het wetenschappelijke vakblad Journal of Geophysical Research.
Geoloog Francesco Salese van de Utrechtse universiteit onderzocht 24 laaggelegen gebieden in het noordelijk halfrond van de Rode Planeet. Delta’s, rivieren, valleien, beddingen en kustlijnen die enkel op die diepte te vinden zijn, duiden er allemaal op dat er grondwater moet zijn geweest. “Niets wees erop dat ze vanaf het oppervlak waren gevuld. Alleen opwellend grondwater blijft dus over als verklaring”, klinkt het.
Met behulp van foto’s van de Europese sonde Mars Express hebben Salese en collega’s nu bewezen dat er inderdaad water is geweest, met aan elkaar verbonden gebieden op zo’n vier kilometer onder de gemiddelde hoogte van Mars.
De onderzochte kraters lagen allemaal tussen de evenaar en 37 graden noorderbreedte. Daarom vermoeden de wetenschappers dat het van 3,5 miljard jaar geleden daterend grondwatersysteem over de hele planeet bestond. Om daar zeker van te zijn is meer onderzoek nodig. Eens te meer stelt zich de vraag waar al dat water is gebleven.
Mars ExpressEen foto gemaakt door de Europese sonde Mars Express.
Like the groundhog in the U.S., a sure sign spring is coming soon is the first Loch Ness monster sightings of the year in Scotland. It means the weather is warming up enough for tourists to visit the loch looking for Nessie, and it means either the water is warm enough for the monster to surface or the banks have thawed enough to unfreeze logs and branches and send them floating out to be faux Nessies. In either case, it’s good for Nessie fans and Loch Ness business owners that there are already some 2019 sightings … however, one was made by a repeat spotter whose technique could spell lost revenue for hotels, tour guides and souvenir sellers.
“It’s a great feeling you get when you have photographed something out of the ordinary in Loch Ness. Nessie is the dark shape on the surface of Loch Ness on the opposite side of the loch.”
Eoin O’Faodhagain. Besides having the best name for a Nessie hunter, he’s either the smartest or the laziest spotter ever. You may remember his name from April 2018 when the resident of Drumdoit Castlefin, County Donegal, Ireland, captured a video of an alleged Nessie in Urquhart Bay while sitting in Drumdoit Castlefin, County Donegal, Ireland … watching the possible monster on the live video feed from the loch. That time, he was quick enough to hit ‘record’ and submitted a video of the feed to Gary Campbell, the Keeper of the Official Register of Sightings, who excitedly said, “As far as Nessie footage goes this is a feature film.” He was referring to the length not of the unidentifiable floating object but of the video.
C’mon, Nessie. C’mon, Nessie.
Well, Eoin hasn’t budged from his easy chair and on February 27th, he saw ‘something’ again on the live feed. It only appeared for a few seconds, so he had to settle for a screen capture photo to send to Gary Campbell. (See the photo here.) While he isn’t sure, Eoin was convinced, as he explained in the Daily Record:
Lisa Brennan claims to have spotted the monster on February 23
Lisa Brennan and her partner Danny were driving near Urquhart Castle when she saw the creature
“I knew immediately I had spotted Nessie, and not a boat. Boats do not disappear from screen there was no further appearance of an object in that area after 20 minutes of watching.”
Perhaps he also saw Lisa Brennan and her partner Danny (or perhaps logs resembling them), who were driving Urquhart Castle on February 23 when Lisa saw something in the loch and managed to take a photograph (Danny was driving) before it disappeared. (See the photo here.) In her report to Gary Campbell, Lisa said,
“… the dark coloured creature rose about 3 feet out of the water for about 10-15 seconds before disappearing back under the surface.”
Danny didn’t see it then and neither saw the object again when he turned around and made another pass. Being a good partner, Lisa said he told her that “my reaction to what I saw was very convincing.”
OK, not THAT convincing.
Convinced Lisa and Eoin saw Nessie? Probably not, since their photos are both far away and burry. Still, these two sightings are the second and third of 2019, which would project to 18 for the year and puts it on pace to exceed the record-setting total of 15 sightings in 2018. There’s still no word from the scientific team which has been running DNA tests on Loch Ness water samples for months.
Eoin O’Faodhagain has proven that you don’t have to go to the Loch Ness to be a monster spotter, while Lisa and Danny showed a trip to the loch to look in person could be good for a relationship. Either way, the definitive Loch Ness monster photo is still up for grabs.
Fact or Fiction? Famous ‘sightings’ of Nessie
The Loch Ness monster – known affectionately as Nessie – is often described as being a large animal with a long neck and usually with a hump popping out of the water.
Although the first sighting is said to have occurred in 565AD it was only in 1933 that widespread public opinion was sparked.
While scientists dismiss claims that there is some sort of prehistoric monster swimming about in the Scottish Highlands others are convinced of its existence.
Either way though the story of Nessie is now firmly part of Scottish folklore.
Saint Columba
The first reported sighting of a monster is said to have been by the Irish monk St Columba in 565AD. Columba sent a man across the River Ness after stories of a “water beast” had circulated. It’s said that while the man was swimming he was approached by a beast but Columba made the sign of the cross and told the animal to “go no further”.
George Spicer
Modern day interest in the beast was largely sparked by a sighting in July 1933 by George Spicer and his wife when they claimed "a most extraordinary form of animal" crossed the road in front of their car.
Surgeon’s photograph
Perhaps the best-known picture of Nessie is the ‘Surgeon’s photograph’ which was published in April 1934, supposedly showing the animals head and long neck. According to the photographer Robert Kenneth Wilson, he managed to capture the image while he was looking at the lake. The image though was exposed as a huge hoax in the 1999 book, Nessie – the Surgeon’s Photograph Exposed.
Holmes video
Lab technician Gordon Holmes claimed he had managed to film the monster in 2007 which he described as "this jet black thing, about 14 metres (46 ft) long, moving fairly fast in the water." Both BBC Scotland and STV aired the footage at the time which marine biologist Adrian Shine described as among “the best footage [he had] ever seen.”
11 Mysterious Human Species That Most People Don’t Know Existed
Evolution includes many now extinct human species.
11 Mysterious Human Species That Most People Don’t Know Existed
Modern humans,Homo Sapiens ,are now the only surviving member of the homo genus. It is almost inconceivable to us that there was a time we walked with other human species, but as the science of archaeology has progressed and more findings have been made it has become clear that the homo genus was once rife with different species.
Since the publication of Darwin’s On Origin of the Species in 1859 there has been great interest in piecing together our family tree. Fossil hominids like Lucy the Australopithecus and Java Manhave helped us to fill in some of the blanks, but as more and more remains of extinct human species have been discovered it has become clear that the history of our ancestors and how they evolved is not as simple as may once have been thought. Our family tree is now filled with not only direct ancestors like Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus but also cousins and distant relatives like Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Denisova .
But despite so many extinct human species now being known, there are still gaps in the picture. And even though we have remains and evidence of some species, we know very little about them.
1. Homo Heidelbergensis
Homo Heidelbergensis – Heidelberg man. This extinct human ancestor walked the earth about 600,000 years ago in Africa, parts of Asia, and Europe. They are believed to be the direct ancestor of Neanderthals, and some archaeologists even argue that they are “archaic” or “early” Neanderthals. Heidelberg man was exceptionally tall at an average height of 6’, but also intelligent. They were using stone tipped spears made from obsidian to hunt and butcher large prey and may be the first species of homo to intentionally bury their dead.
Heidelberg man - facial reconstruction based on the Kabwe skull displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. (Tim1965 / CC BY-SA 2.0 )
2. Homo Rudolfensis
This extinct human ancestor is only known through a small number of fossilized bone fragments. There has been some debate as to whether Rudolfensis is the earliest known member of the homo genus, or if it is a very late member of the Australopethicus genus.
Due to the scant nature of the remains not much is known about the species, but evidence suggests its brain was proportionally larger than the other earliest members of the homo genus.
3. Java Man
In the early 1890s, the tooth, skullcap, and thighbone of an extinct human species were found by a team of archaeologists in East Java. This is what gave the discovery its nickname ‘Java Man’.
It was a big deal at the time, as the bones were at that point the oldest hominid remains ever discovered. It was originally argued by some archaeologists that Java Man was an ancestor of Homo Erectus , but there were some who said that it was the so called ‘missing link’ between ape and man.
The three main fossils of Java Man found in 1891–92: a skullcap, a molar, and a thighbone, each seen from two different angles. (120 / Public Domain )
4. Boskop Man
Boskop Man was discovered in 1913 in Boskop, South Africa. It is notable as the brain size of the skull was larger than that of a modern human. After other specimens of the species were discovered, it was given the name Homo Capensis. However, after heavy criticism in the 1950s there was a change of opinion and the Boskop Man along with the rest of Homo Capensis was reclassified as anatomically modern Homo Sapiens and not an extinct ancestor at all, despite an estimated head size of 30% larger than the modern average.
5. Homo Denisova
One of the more recent discoveries of an extinct human species was made at the Denisova Cave in Siberia as recently as 2008. Only a very few remains have been discovered so far, but thanks to advances in DNA analysis it has been possible to sequence the genome of Homo Denisova . With this evidence, it has been possible to show that some people in Tibet have snippets of Denisovan DNA in the same way that some Europeans have a tiny percentage of Neanderthal DNA.
Replica of a Denisovan molar, originally found in Denisova Cave. (Thilo Parg / CC BY-SA 3.0 )
6. Penghu Man
Another extinct human found in 2008 was Homo Tsaichangensis , which has the catchier nickname Penghu Man. Penghu Man’s fossilized mandible was discovered by fishermen working near the Penghu Islands off the coast of Taiwan. It is extremely thick and has gigantic teeth, which has puzzled scientists for several reasons. They have been able to determine it is the mandible of a previously unknown species and that it was probably very similar to Homo Erectus , but larger. It has so far not been possible to date the fossil, so they are not sure when the species was alive.
7. Dmanisi Man
Homo Georgicus , otherwise known as Dmanisi Man, is a species of extinct human which has been found in Dmanisi, Georgia. The species had a very small brain, unlike many of our extinct ancestors. The five skulls which are evidence of Homo Georgicus were discovered in 1991, and since then they have been the subject of much debate. They may be an intermediary between Homo Erectus and Homo Habilis , but there are some scientists who think the skulls are simply examples of Homo Erectus. Despite having a small brain, the fossils are associated with a total of 73 tools which proves a large brain is not always necessary to use and produce tools.
The most recent known archaic human to go extinct, the remains of the Red Deer Cave People have been dated to approximately 11,500 years ago, meaning they were still around for about 28,500 years after the last pure Neanderthals.
Some scientists think the Red Deer Cave People were a hybrid of Homo Denisova and modern humans but attempts to sequence their DNA have not proved successful, so it is currently impossible to say for sure.
9. Homo Naledi
Evidence of Homo Naledi was unearthed in 2013 in a cave in South Africa by cavers who were able to access a chamber in the Rising Star system for the first time. Thirty meters (98 feet) below the surface, it is strewn with thousands of bones which have unique and interesting features with 1550 currently excavated and many more remaining in the cave. Some of their features are archaic and resemble specimens from around 20,00,000 years ago, but they also have more modern hominid features, and their bones have been dated to about 250,000 years ago. It has been concluded that they were not a direct ancestor of modern humans.
Archaeologists are unsure how so many bones ended up in the cave, but they may have been deliberately depositing the bodies there at the time of death as there is evidence that they were not all deposited at one time.
10. The Hobbit
In 2004 researchers made the announcement that a discovery had been made on the island of Flores, Indonesia. The people on the island had long talked of the Ebu Gogo, a supposed race of short, hairy men who lived in caves. Astonishingly, the discovery of stone tools and remains of a small hominid in a cave on the island seemed to prove the legends right. The remains were given the official name Homo Floresiensis after the island, but they have become known as The Hobbit . Homo Floresiensis was approximately 3.5’ tall, with large feet.
Comparison of skull features of Homo naledi and other early human species. (Animalparty / CC BY-SA 4.0 )
11. The Ghost Ancestor
A study published in 2019 has shared evidence of a yet undiscovered extinct human ancestor, proposed after an AI program determined that there was a ‘ghost’ population of archaic human which interbred with modern humans in the distant past. Researchers think the unknown ancestor may have been an offshoot of Homo Denisova, based on the evidence.
With new techniques such as this and advances in fields such as DNA analysis , it is now possible to learn more about extinct species of human than ever before. New species are being discovered and identified with relative frequency, and the earliest discoveries can now be reassessed and analyzed in greater detail. The evidence is pointing not to one unbroken chain of human ancestors , but a rich family tree with a number of offshoots. Exactly how many extinct relatives we have will probably never be known for sure, but with each discovery we are able to add a new and unique piece to the puzzle of who we are .
Top image:Evolution includes many now extinct human species.
LA Marzulli: Pilot of SR-71 Blackbird Sights a UFO
LA Marzulli: Pilot of SR-71 Blackbird Sights a UFO
The Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” is a long-range, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance aircraft that was operated by the United States Air Force. It was developed as a black project from the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft in the 1960s by Lockheed and its Skunk Works division. The SR-71 served with the U.S. Air Force from 1964 to 1998.
L. A. Marzulli interviews Russel Rasmussen who tells of an encounter a pilot had with a UFO on the wing-tip of his SR 71 for several minutes at an altitude of 70,000 feet.
The pilot said to Russel Rasmussen that at the moment the disc-shaped UFO flashed off and disappeared, it was going a bit faster than Mach 3 which was the speed of the SR-71 Blackbird at that moment.
This testimony proves once again that U.S. Air Force pilots do indeed have encounters with UFOs, but they are not allowed to talk about it.
Dr. Steven Greer on Disclosure UFOs, ETs - Coverups and more...
Dr. Steven Greer on Disclosure UFOs, ETs - Coverups and more...
Thanks For Watching :Dr Steven Greer on Disclosure UFOs, ETs – Coverups and more… The world is about to change and you can be a part of it! We are calling for new witnesses to come forward and disclose what they know regarding the multitudes of cover ups that are happening all around us… UFO, Secrecy, Cover Up, Free Energy and more! The signs are everywhere.
From startlingly candid presidential candidates to recent NASA & military whistleblowers, the forces suppressing truth can no longer hold back the floodgates of disclosure. Dr. Steven Greer, the father of the Global Disclosure Movement, is thrilled to announce the ultimate campaign that ends illegal UFO and Free Energy Technology secrecy once and for all and embraces the beginning of a new civilization on Earth.
Following “Sirius”, one of the most successful crowdfunded documentaries in history, Dr. Greer and his team are producing Unacknowledged : An Expose of the Greatest Secret in Human History. “Unacknowledged” is named after the super- secret and illegal Unacknowledged Special Access Projects (USAPs) that deal with the UFO/ET issue and will be THE disclosure event that we’ve been waiting for …
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Archeologen hebben in een grot in de beroemde Mexicaanse ruïnestad van de Maya’s, Chichén Itzá, meer dan duizend jaar oude vaartuigen en andere Precolumbiaanse objecten ontdekt. Archeoloog Guillermo de Anda spreekt van “buitengewoon materiaal dat enorm goed bewaard is gebleven”.
De archeologen hadden de Balamkú-grot op het schiereiland Yucatán vorig jaar ontdekt op aanwijzing van omwonenden. Het bestaan van de grot, een uitgestrekt tunnelsysteem met verschillende zalen, was al langer bekend, maar niet gedocumenteerd. Bovendien was zij afgesloten, de toegang ertoe bevindt zich 24 meter onder de grond. De vorsers konden uiteindelijk binnengeraken via een amper halve meter hoge opening.
“Wat wij aantroffen, was ongeschonden en ongelooflijk”, zegt archeoloog Guillermo de Anda. Ze ontdekten zeven offergaves, voornamelijk bestaande uit houders voor wierook en deels gebroken schepen uit keramiek met verkoolde resten, zaden, jade, mosselschelpen en kleine dierenbeenderen. De gevonden objecten stammen vermoedelijk uit de achtste tot de tiende eeuw. Volgens de Anda zijn het plengoffers voor de watergod Tláloc. De gaves doen vermoeden dat de regio destijds een lange tijd van droogte moet hebben gekend.
REUTERS
Nog maar een derde onderzocht
Tot dusver hebben de archeologen ongeveer een derde van de grot onderzocht. Een deel ervan staat onder water, waardoor voor verdere exploratie gedoken zal moeten worden.
De grot ligt ongeveer 2,7 kilometer ten oosten van de piramide Kukulkán, het hoofdgebouw van het tot het Unesco-werelderfgoed behorende complex. In 2015 werd onder Kukulkán een “cenote”, een met zoet water gevuld hol, ontdekt. Yucatán is bezaaid met zulke grotten, die de kalksteenbodem doorboren en soms over kilometers afstand met elkaar verbonden zijn. Bij het al lang uitgestorven Maya-volk golden cenotes als heilige plaatsen, die gebruikt werden voor religieuze ceremonieën.
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Dit zijn de 50 meest vervuilde steden ter wereld. In België krijgt Oostrozebeke slechtste rapport - HLN.be
Dit zijn de 50 meest vervuilde steden ter wereld. In België krijgt Oostrozebeke slechtste rapport - HLN.be
KVDS Valentijn , Dumoulein Daimy en Van den Eede
Getty Images
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETDe 50 meest vervuilende steden ter wereld liggen op drie na allemaal in dezelfde twee landen. Dat blijkt uit een nieuw rapportvan Greenpeace en AirVisual, een bedrijf dat metingen van de luchtkwaliteit uitvoert. Grote boosdoeners zijn India en China.
Vooral India maakt een slechte beurt. Maar liefst 22 van de steden in de top 30 liggen daar, inclusief de meest vervuilde stad ter wereld: Gurugram. Dat is een van de grootste satellietsteden van New Delhi, in het noorden van het land. In Gurugram ligt de gemiddelde luchtkwaliteitsindex bijna drie keer hoger dan wat als gezond beschouwd wordt.
China heeft 5 steden in de top 30, maar ook 17 steden tussen de 30ste en de 50ste plaats. Het land maakt wel vooruitgang in vergelijking met vroeger. Volgens het rapport zou de gemiddelde concentratie aan vervuilende stoffen - het rapport focust op deeltjes met een afmeting van PM2,5 of 2,5 micrometer (0,000 002 5 meter) omdat die de grootste impact op onze gezondheid hebben - tussen 2017 en 2018 teruggelopen zijn met 12 procent. De hoofdstad Peking is zelfs uit de top 100 gevallen van meest vervuilde steden, na inspanningen van de overheid om de luchtvervuiling er onder controle te krijgen.
Enkele landen in de buurt van China zien dan weer een slechtere evolutie. Indonesië, Zuid-Korea, Vietnam en Thailand zien hun cijfers flink achteruitgaan. In Bangkok bijvoorbeeld, werden in januari vliegtuigen uitgestuurd die het kunnen doen regenen om de vervuiling in de lucht te doen neerslaan.
Dichter bij ons maken vooral Boznië en Herzegovina, Macedonië en Polen een slechte beurt. Samen maken zij de volledige top 10 uit van meest vervuilde steden in Europa. Op 6 Italiaanse steden na – onder meer Venetië – bestaat de top 50 overigens exclusief uit Oost-Europese steden.
Oostrozebeke
De eerste Belgische gemeente in de lijst is Oostrozebeke. Wereldwijd vind je die terug op de 822ste plaats, in de Europese lijst op de 158ste plaats. Dat is geen verrassing. Oostrozebeke staat al sinds 2005 bekend als slechtst scorend in ons land op het vlak van luchtkwaliteit. Oorzaak is dat het meetpunt vlakbij spaanplatenfabrikant Unilin (het vroegere Spano) staat - in een gebied met veel industrie - en vlakbij de gewestweg N385. Die laatste wordt vaak gebruikt door vrachtverkeer. Unilin nam intussen maatregelen om de luchtkwaliteit te verbeteren, onder meer door het plaatsen van filters. En de gemeente zelf beloofde in januari vorig jaar om te investeren in “ecologische maatregelen”. In totaal waren er 46 Belgische gemeenten bij het onderzoek betrokken.
Als alle landen in hun geheel worden bekeken, staat België op de 52ste plaats. Daarmee zijn we bij de slechtste leerlingen van de klas in West-Europa en doen we net iets minder goed dan onze buurlanden Frankrijk, Duitsland en Nederland.
Overlijdens
Volgens het rapport zal luchtverontreiniging volgend jaar wereldwijd 7 miljoen voortijdige overlijdens veroorzaken en een enorme impact hebben op de economie. Wereldwijd zou de kost oplopen tot 225 miljard dollar (199 miljoen euro, red.) aan verloren arbeid en biljoenen in medische kosten, zo staat er in het rapport te lezen.
Voor het rapport werden de gegevens van meer dan 6.000 steden en gemeente ter wereld opgemeten en vergeleken. Opmerkelijk: er zijn vooral data uit Europa, Azië en Noord-Amerika voor handen. Onder meer in Afrika, Zuid-Amerika en Rusland zijn er amper meetgegevens over de luchtverontreiniging beschikbaar.
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Triangle UFO Seen Over Amsterdam During Daytime Close Up, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Triangle UFO Seen Over Amsterdam During Daytime Close Up, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 10-28-2013
Location of sighting: Amsterdam
Here is an old video of a UFO over Amsterdam that I haven't seen before. This is really a breathtaking video of a triangle craft, and yes, it does appear to be a TR3B. The UFO also has a yellow rectangle that is a separate part of the ship. I darkened the photos below to better see the detail of the UFO. Sure this was taken back in 2013, but damn its really mind-blowing video! I doubt very much that its a TR3B, because no pilot would be stupid enough to fly this low out in broad daylight showing it off to the public. I do however believe it to be an alien craft.
Two Foo Fighter UFOs Seen Over Germany, Should We Be Worried? Feb 3, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Two Foo Fighter UFOs Seen Over Germany, Should We Be Worried? Feb 3, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 3, 2019 Location of sighting: Germany These white orbs seen over Germany a few weeks ago, have been seen over Europe for over 5 decades. They are called Foo Fighters. They use to fly along side fighter planes and bombers as they flew on missions. They observed the war close up to see just how close humanity was to destroying itself. The fact that these large Foo Fighters are showing up again...worries me, because they may be observing a very destructive force on the ground or below the ground that could potentially threaten the existence of humanity again. So the real question is...what is Germany secretly working on that attracted these orbs? Scott C. Waring
WETENSCHAP Of buitenaards leven bestaat, weten we nog steeds niet. Wel slaagden wetenschappers van het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartagentschap NASA erin om een buitenaardse vorm van DNA te creëren, genaamd Hachimoji. En Hachimoji kan zo maar even tot een doorbraak leiden.
NASA’s ontdekking suggereert immers dat andere vormen van DNA zodus ook andere levensvormen, perfect kunnen bestaan. En dankzij de nieuwe DNA-vorm hebben onderzoekers alweer een beter idee naar wat ze precies op zoek zijn.
Kern van ons bestaan Voor wie tijdens de biologielessen vooral sliep: een korte les. Het menselijk DNA ziet er als volgt uit: het bestaat uit twee lange strengen van nucleotiden die in de vorm van een dubbele helix of wenteltrap met elkaar vervlochten zijn. De nucleotiden zijn dan weer verbindingen bestaande uit kleinere bouwstenen of basen: adenine, cytosine, guanine en thymine. Kort samengevat is DNA de kern van ons bestaan, letterlijk en figuurlijk.
Waarom bovenstaande biologieles belangrijk is voor Hachimoji? Zonder een stukje menselijk DNA zou hij niet bestaan. Het Hachimoji-DNA bevat immers dezelfde vier ‘ingrediënten’ of basen (adenine, cytosine, guanine en thymine), maar daarbovenop telt het unieke DNA nog eens twee dubbele verbindingen: purine en pyrimidine. Het resultaat? DNA dat maar liefst dubbel zoveel ‘ingrediënten’ telt: acht.
UNIVERSALE.T.
Laboratoriumversie
Uiteraard is de alien van NASA slechts een laboratoriumversie, en eentje die niet eens vingers heeft, laat staan de woorden “E.T. phone home” uitspreekt. Toch is het een veelbelovend experiment waarmee de wetenschappers aantonen dat een andere vorm van leven – inclusief andere bouwstenen – perfect mogelijk is. Verder benadrukken ze graag het belang van de financiering voor grondig onderzoek naar buitenaards leven. Dergelijk onderzoek is noodzakelijk menen de wetenschappers. Met hun experiment hopen ze die noodzakelijkheid ook aan te tonen.
NASAClark McClelland in de space shuttle, of het gaat om een authentieke foto, is niet duidelijk.
BIZARDe wonderen zijn de wereld nog niet uit, want als we Clark McClelland mogen geloven, dan heeft een alien een ritje gemaakt met de space shuttle. De alien zou ook gebabbeld hebben met astronauten terwijl hij dacht dat niemand keek.
McClelland beweert 35 jaar voor NASA te hebben gewerkt, en vooralsnog heeft de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie die bewering niet weerlegd. McClelland zegt dat hij een missie van de space shuttle aan het monitoren was vanuit het Kennedy Space Center toen hij iets zag wat hij eigenlijk niet mocht zien: een 2,7 meter lange, magere alien die in de space shuttle een gezellige babbel sloeg met astronauten. De NASA-veteraan beweert ook een ruimteschip gezien te hebben vlakbij de shuttle. “Ik herken een ruimteschip wanneer ik er een zie”, aldus McClelland. “Aliens lopen rond op onze aarde”, besluit hij.
Velen beweren dat McClelland ze niet allemaal meer op een rij heeft, maar sommige ‘believers’ hechten veel belang aan zijn uitspraken. McClellands website ’Stargate Chronicles” geeft enkele, laten we zeggen, interessante inzichten.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hasn’t gotten much sleep this weekend. But true to form, he’s already dreaming of something far more ambitious.
“To be frank, I’m a little emotionally exhausted,” Musk said at a post-launch press conference at four o’clock in the morning on Saturday. “Because that was super stressful. But it worked, so far.”
The private space company has achieved a lot within the last 48 hours. Their futuristic passenger spacecraft Crew Dragon launched early Saturday morning from the Kennedy Space Center and successfully docked autonomously with the International Space Station some 26 hours later.
If all goes well, two astronauts will fly on board the spacecraft to the ISS as soon as July.
Beyond Earth’s Orbit
But, as expected, Musk has much bigger plans — for traveling to beyond Earth’s orbit. “We should have a base on the moon, like a permanently occupied human base on the moon, and then send people to Mars,” Musk said at the press event. “Maybe there’s something beyond the space station, but we’ll see.”
The Starship Enterprise
Earlier this year, Musk admitted that he wanted to get to the Moon – and “as fast as possible,” he wrote in a Jan 31 tweet.
The vehicle that could fulfill that dream: the stainless-steel monstrosity dubbed Starship. But getting Starship to the Moon will be a much harder feat to pull off than any NASA project ever.
“It won’t be easy for us or SpaceX,” Walt Engelund, director of Space Technology and Exploration Directorate at NASA, told Business Insider in a February interview.
But one step at a time. “We’ve got to focus on getting [the Crew Dragon missions] right, for sure. That’s the priority,” Musk admitted at Saturday’s press event.
“But then, after that, maybe something beyond low-Earth orbit.”
Moon landing PHOTOS reignite conspiracy theories… again
Moon landing PHOTOS reignite conspiracy theories… again
A UFO conspiracist has uncovered what he believes is proof that the moon landings were fake, although his detective work has drawn criticism.
“Does Astronaut's visor reflection show a stagehand on the Apollo fake Moon set?" is the question posed by Streetcap1, who shared his recent discovery on YouTube.
The photo in question is taken from the Apollo 17 mission, which took place in late 1972. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 22 hours exploring the surface and were the last humans to walk on the moon.
The moon landings have been the source of scepticism for conspiracy theorists ever since astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon in 1969.
According to Streetcap1, who took a picture of the NASA image using his “software,” the astronaut’s visor reflection appears to show a man “not wearing a spacesuit,” standing on the moon.
"It looks like a man back in the early 1970s, long hair, you know,” he said. "He is wearing some sort of, I don't know, waistcoat type thing… one leg there, with one shoe, another leg and a shadow of that figure presumably.”
Streetcap1 says he wasn’t a moon landing disbeliever until he came across the suspicious image. "I sort of think we did make it to the Moon, but this is starting to make me think if we did because where is this guy's spacesuit?"
Streetcap1’s video divided opinion, with some people surprised to have their suspicions raised.
“Pretty Earth-shaking for a believer in the landing,” a commentator said.
“I vote astronaut... the shadow on the ground looks more like an astronaut in a bulky suit,” said another.
However, other photographs taken from the Apollo 17 mission suggest the “stagehand” in the helmet reflection is likely the other astronaut.
One image shared on the NASA website shows Cernan on the moon, with another astronaut clearly seen in his helmet’s reflection.
As Cernan and Schmitt performed three moonwalks over three days, pilot Ronald E. Evans stayed orbiting the moon during this time, in the command service module of the spacecraft.
Examining NASA’s history site, which contains thousands of images from the mission, along with the accompanying transcript of footage taken on the moon, the astronaut pictured is likely Schmitt.
An image shared on NASA’s site shows Schmitt standing next to the large boulder featured in the suspicious image. It was taken by Cernan. If Schmitt turned toward Cernan, he would have been in an ideal position for Cernan’s reflection to be captured in Schmitt’s helmet.
Cameras
The Apollo 17 mission aimed to capture precise images for mapping and examining the lunar surface. Multiple cameras were used on the surface of the moon, meaning there were many different cameras that could have captured the astronaut with the helmet reflection.
The astronauts had three battery powered 70-millimeter Hasselblad cameras which were attached to their chests, the Lunar Planetary Institute reports. They also carried a 16-millimeter Maurer Data Acquisition Camera that could be handheld or mounted to the lunar module and lunar roving vehicle.
A lunar surface TV camera was also used and operated from three positions, either mounted on a tripod, or on the modularized equipment storage assembly (MESA). “The camera could be aimed and controlled by the astronauts or remotely controlled by personnel in the mission control center,” LPI said.
NASA doesn’t comment on specific moon hoax theories, but it has said in the past that it did go to the moon.
Scientists found valleys and channels carved into the depths of Martian craters, and according to the European Space Agency (ESA), these formations provide the first evidence of a vast groundwater system in the planet's past.
Researchers also spotted signs of special minerals linked to the emergence of life on Earth in Martian basins.
Mars is a prime target for the cosmically geared imagination, from the story "War of the Worlds" to the last 20 years of robotic exploration on the Red Planet's surface. If a world just a monthslong journey away from Earth could have hosted water, maybe extraterrestrial life once resided at cosmic arms' length from our planet.
The red dots in this image mark a number of deep craters recently explored as part of a study exploring groundwater on Mars. The reds and oranges indicate lower elevations, and the blues and greens show higher ground.
"Findings like this are hugely important; they help us to identify the regions of Mars that are the most promising for finding signs of past life," Dmitri Titov, ESA's Mars Express project scientist, said in an agency statement Feb. 28 about the recent findings.
ESA's Mars Express orbiter, which has been circling the planet since 2003, found the first geological evidence of an ancient interconnected system of lakes linked by branching channels deep beneath the planet's surface, ESA officials said.
"Early Mars was a watery world," Francesco Salese of Utrecht University in the Netherlands said in the statement. "But as the planet's climate changed, this water retreated below the surface to form pools and 'groundwater.' We traced this water in our study, as its scale and role is a matter of debate, and we found the first geological evidence of a planet-wide groundwater system on Mars."
This diagram shows a model of how crater basins on Mars evolved over time and how they once held water. Images from the context camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show examples of the different features observed in the basins.
Over the last few years, research has pointed to the existence of a warmer Marsin the past — possible thanks to a thicker atmosphere in the planet's history — that supported the flow of water on the ground. Now, there's physical evidence to further support existing models.
Salese led a team that used Mars Express to explore 24 enclosed craters in Mars' northern hemisphere. The crater floors analyzed by the team were at depths of about 2.5 miles (4,000 meters) below Martian sea level, ESA officials said. (Since Mars does not have an existing sea, a "sea level" is approximated by deriving an arbitrary point based on atmospheric pressure and elevation.)
"We think that this ocean may have connected to a system of underground lakes that spread across the entire planet," co-author Gian Gabriele Ori, director of the Università D'Annunzio's International Research School of Planetary Sciences in Italy, said in the statement. "These lakes would have existed around 3.5 billion years ago, so [they] may have been contemporaries of a Martian ocean."
Topographic view of dried-out river-valley network (center) on Mars, as seen by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. The rippled, snake-like feature is a dendritic formation.
Five of the deepest craters showed signs of carbonates, silicates and several kinds of clay, according to ESA. These minerals provide further supporting evidence that the ingredients for life were present long ago on Mars.
Last week, ESA released Mars Express imagery of the planet's southern highlands region with rocks up to 4 billion years old. The area photographed by the mission lies east of the Huygens impact crater and north of the impact basin Hellas, according to the agency. While the land has gone through heavy erosion since it first formed, some valleys retain tree-like shapes called dendritic structures. Riverbeds on Earth also bend in these ways, offering more evidence for a wet Mars.
Buildings alone cover more than 390 000 square meters, while the visual footprint (the areas from which human activity can be seen) extends to more than 93 000 square kilometers.
This is Australia’s Davis research station, Antarctica.
Image credits: Shaun Brooks.
Antarctica is the world’s southernmost continent. It’s the coldest, driest, and windiest continent, and has the highest average elevation of all the continents — an unfriendly polar desert that only hosts a few creatures which have adapted to survive these extreme conditions. Antarctica, however, is no longer pristine.
At any given moment, there are over 1,000 humans in Antarctica, generally engaged in scientific research. However, during some months, the number of researchers in Antarctica goes closer to 5,000. While much of this research contributes to our understanding and conservation of Antarctica, it still has an environmental impact. Considering that an estimated 38,000 tourists visit the frozen continent every year, it seems quite likely that humans are having quite an impact in Antarctica.
However, this impact hasn’t been thoroughly quantified — until now.
In a new study published in Nature Sustainability, PhD student Shaun Brooks focused on the area that humans changed. He explains that measuring the area impacted by humans was important for Antarctic conservation and environmental management.
“Although the 53 countries that have signed the Antarctic Treaty agreed to protect the Antarctic environment, until now there has been only limited data on the spatial extent of human activity on the continent,” Mr Brooks said.
“Our research shows that human impacts are the greatest on land that is also the most environmentally sensitive – ice free areas within a few kilometres of the coast.”
The international treaty he is referring to mandates Antarctic activities. The treaty prohibits military activities and mineral mining of any kind. It also prohibits nuclear explosions and nuclear waste disposal, but allows scientific research, and protects the continent’s biodiversity.
About 98% of Antarctica is covered by ice, but the remaining 2% hosts a rich biodiversity — Antarctica’s only true biodiversity. However, whenever humans set up camp, it’s almost always in or just outside of this iceless area.
“Ice-free land supports the continent’s greatest diversity of flora and fauna, including iconic species such as Adelie penguins, and provides the most accessible areas for marine animals that breed on land,” Brooks continues. “We found that 81 per cent of the buildings in the Antarctic are located within just 0.44 per cent of the land that is free of ice.”
With a growing number of researchers, and increasing pressure from tourism, the environment pressure is also certain to increase. Brooks says this type of research is vital to ensuring that the fragile balance in Antarctica isn’t
“There is a growing tension between the increasing pressure for access to the continent and international commitments to protect the Antarctic environment. Hopefully, our research can help to inform a sustainable balance between these competing imperatives,” Brooks concluded.
Afterlanding the world’s first roveron the far side of the Moon early this year, China already has far more ambitious plans in the works: sending a rover to Mars.
“Over the past 60 years, we’ve made a lot of achievements, but there is still a large distance from the world space powers,” chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program Wu Wiren said ahead of the opening of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference,CNN reports. “Next year, we will launch a Mars probe, which will orbit around the Mars, land on it and probe it.”
Race To Mars
China’s space program has rapidly picked up pace. Its Yutu 1 rover landed on the Moon in 2013. A second rover landed on the far side some six years later, and a third rover will follow at the end of this year, with the goal of returning to Earth with at least four pounds of lunar soil and rock samples.
But increasingly, China’s space agency has been focusing its efforts on the Red Planet. This weekend, China opened its first Mars simulation base in Qinghai Province at a location known to have similarities to the Martian surface. The base can house 60 people in its futuristic capsules.
Catching Up
China won’t be the first nation to explore Mars. NASA, for one, has a considerable head start: Its Jet Propulsion Lab has so far sent four remotely operated rovers to the Martian surface to look for signs of life gather scientific data about the distant world.
Both NASA and the European Space Agency each plan to send new rovers to Mars as soon as next year. But China is making a substantial effort to catch up.
China began construction on the base in June. According to a July report by the South China Morning Post, the plan for the base includes a “Mars community” and a “Mars camp” designed to educate and entertain the public, while also providing a place for scientific research and simulation training.
Roughly $22.3 million later, the 53,330-square-meter base is now complete, welcoming its first public attendees on Friday.
The Global Times claims that the project’s founder, Gao Junling, told the newspaper that visitors to the base will have a chance to “immerse themselves in the environment and try to solve problems they might face on Mars, such as planting potatoes on Mars for food supply and solar power generation.”
Next-Best Thing
As Mars-like as the setting of China’s Mars simulation base might be, it’s still far more hospitable to humans than Mars — anyone visiting the Red Planet will need to contend with its low air pressure, stronger radiation, and regular sandstorms, Peking University space science professorJiao Weixin told The Global Times.
Still, if the base can provide researchers with an approximation of Mars for their experiments, while also getting the public — and young people, in particular — excited about space exploration, it could have a positive role to play in shaping humanity’s space-faring future.
It is unclear how many intelligent civilizations have arisen in the Milky Way galaxy so far, but if some have, a pressing question comes to mind: were they or are they more intelligent than we are?
When reading the morning newspaper, it is difficult to avoid the thought that our own intelligence bar is not particularly high nor difficult to surpass. We fight among ourselves in “lose-lose” situations; we do not promote long-term solutions over short-term fixes; and we have been broadcasting our existence to the galaxy with radio waves for over a century without worrying whether about whether there are any predators or competitors in outer space. (If it’s the latter, they might have been ignoring us because we appear so incompetent.)
If other civilizations do exist, one key in becoming aware of them is whether we are intelligent enough to adequately interpret their signals or to identify a piece of their technology if it should appear in our solar system. One fact is clear: if we assign a zero prior probability for such evidence coming our way, as some scientists did in the case of ‘Oumuamua by invoking the principle “it’s never aliens,” we will indeed never find any. We will be like ostriches burying our heads in the sand.
In fact, this attitude may be one sign that our intelligence isn’t very impressive—that the human race as a whole suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which those with mediocre abilities insist that they’re unusually talented or smart.
How can our civilization mature? The same way kids do: by leaving home, going out into the neighborhood, meeting others and comparing notes with them. In other words, we can develop a balanced perspective on our current technological accomplishments by engaging in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Since our own technological development accelerates exponentially with an e-folding time of a few years, it is difficult to imagine what a much more advanced technology crafted by a civilization that had lived for a cosmic timescale—billions of such e-folding times—would look like.
As natural as this suggestion to search might seem, however it is evident that SETI faces a hostile mainstream culture in astronomy. The simple proposal to consider the possibility that ‘Oumumua is technological debrisas an explanation for its unusual properties, for example was met with controversy on social media.
True, SETI carries non-scientific baggage related to unrealistic aspects of the science fiction literature and unsubstantiated reports about unidentified flying objects (UFOs)—something SETI researchers sometimes refer to as the “giggle factor.” But at the same time, it would be a strategic mistake for observers to restrict the interpretation of data from their telescopes and not search for “other kids in our neighborhood” just because of this baggage. The existence of extraterrestrial intelligence has nothing to do with the credibility of science fiction stories of UFO reports. The problem with adopting this wrong attitude is that it delays scientific progress. Grant applicants are frequently asked to forecast the scientific discoveries they will make if their application is approved—but by bracketing the range of possibilities in advance, we might never discover the unexpected. Instead we cultivate a scientific culture that tends to replicate what we already know.
History teaches us that this is a mistake. The search for extrasolar planets encountered mainstream resistance in its early days. Observing proposals to search for low-hanging fruits, such as “hot Jupiters”—which are easiest to detect—were rejected by conservative committees of telescope-time allocation that argued that such planets should not exist in nature based on what we know about the solar system. But discovery forged ahead as some observers dared to challenge this prejudice, demonstrating that hot Jupiters are abundant. There was 40-year delay, however, given that the first theoretical proposal to do such a search was made by Otto Struve as early as in 1952.
Hence, an obvious obstacle to identifying our neighbors is the tendency to limit our imagination to what we already know. But this should not necessarily remain the case in the future. What we imagine for extraterrestrial life should not be solely defined by the natural chemical and geological processes that took place spontaneously on Earth. We could, for example produce synthetic life in the laboratory under a broader range of conditions than those with which we are familiar. Metaphorically, we could bake new kinds of cakes using the same ingredients, expanding the book of recipes handed to us by Mother Earth.
Realizing that life can exist under new conditions will improve our forecasts for where to search for it in space and how to interpret our findings, in just the same way that the laws of physics—which were first revealed in laboratory experiments—allowed astrophysicists to study the universe billions of light years away.
An important survival skill in the company of unknown neighbors is to listen before speaking out. Given our sloppy behavior in transmitting signals to outer space without restraint, we can only hope that we have not become the laughingstock of our galactic neighborhood by now. But even if we have, we can still get our act together and do better in the future. In order to know how to behave, we should find out first who is on our street by searching with our best telescopes for unusual electromagnetic flashes, industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres, artificial light or heat, artificial space debris or something completely unexpected.
Fortunately, we possess instruments that are sensitive enough to find out not only whether we have neighbors but also whether they have noticed us already.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
A large, unknown Planet 9 in our solar system continues to elude astronomers. But a new review article in Physics Reports explains why some scientists still think they’ll find it.
Artist’s concept of what Planet 9 might look like, if it exists.
Does a large Planet 9 – a hypothesized planet several times the mass of Earth in the distant outer reaches of the solar system – really exist? That question is still a topic of heated debate among astronomers. Some think a large Planet 9 can explain the weird orbits of some of the smaller known bodies in theKuiper Belt. Others think that those orbits might be caused by multiple unknown smaller bodies instead.
Several astronomers recently reviewed the evidence for Planet 9 in an article published in February 2019 by Physics Reports. This peer-reviewed journal aims to publish long and deep reviews – more extensive than just literature surveys – on timely topics in physics. The article is called The planet nine hypothesis, and the astronomers who wrote it are still very optimistic that Planet 9 will eventually be found and confirmed. According to co-author Fred Adams at the University of Michigan:
The strongest argument in favor of Planet 9 is that independent lines of evidence can all be explained by a proposed new planet with the same properties. In other words, there are multiple reasons to believe that Planet 9 is real, not just one.
From the review article in Physics Reports:
Over the course of the past two decades, observational surveys have unveiled the intricate orbital structure of the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. In addition to a host of readily-predictable orbital behavior, the emerging census of trans-Neptunian objects displays dynamical phenomena that cannot be accounted for by interactions with the known eight-planet solar system alone.
Diagrams showing the calculated orbit of Planet 9 in the outer solar system – much farther out than Neptune – and estimated size compared to the other planets.
Planet 9 – so-called since Pluto is no longer officially considered a major planet – was first hypothesized by astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech three years ago. Its existence could explain the odd orbits of some objects in the Kuiper Belt known as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). The orbits of these small bodies are clustered together in a way that suggests to some astronomers that a larger and more distant world (a Planet 9) has been tugging on them with its relatively strong gravity.
Mike Brown explained that the new review paper does not prove Planet 9’s existence. But, he said:
… it does indicate that the hypothesis rests upon a solid foundation.
In a previous paper published on January 22, 2019, in The Astronomical Journal, astronomers calculated that the likelihood of Planet 9 not existing was only 1 in 500.
If real, Planet 9 is estimated to be about five to 10 times the mass of Earth, possibly making it similar to super-Earth-type exoplanets – larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. If it exists, Planet 9 may be on an elongated orbit, taking it up to 400 times the distance of Earth from the sun; that is very far away! The orbit is also calculated to be 15 to 20 degrees off the main orbital plane in which most of the other planets orbit.
The orbits of 6 extreme trans-Neptunian objects (in magenta) are mysteriously aligned in one direction, a configuration which can be explained by the presence of a Planet 9, according to some astronomers.
Image via Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC).
Planet 9 has not been easy to find – assuming it’s actually there – so how long might it be before it is finally found? Adams thinks that, within the next 10 to 15 years, astronomers will either confirm that Planet 9 exists or refute it via the data. He said:
With its proposed properties, Planet 9 is right on the edge of being observable. But this is a very dim object in a very big sky. Since we don’t know exactly where it is, you have to survey the whole sky, or at least large portions of it, in order to find the planet.
Over the course of the next 10 years, we will have deeper and deeper – which means more sensitive – sky surveys. So I think by 2030 we will have seen it or will have a better idea of where it is. Of course, it’s also possible that by then we could also have alternate explanations for the observed orbital anomalies.
Juliette Becker is a doctoral candidate from University of Michigan’s Department of Astronomy and a co-author on the new review paper about Planet 9. She thinks that discovering Planet 9 would help answer various mysteries in the solar system, including the origin of the rocky object labeled 2015 BP519 and nicknamed Caju. This object is one of the TNOs thought to be gravitationally affected by Planet 9. It is only 340 miles (550 kms) in diameter and is on a highly eccentric and inclined orbit. She said:
Planet 9 is a really good explanation for 2015 BP519. The physics works perfectly. However, until we see Planet 9 in an image and are sure it’s there, I don’t feel like we’ve truly solved the mystery of its origin. The presence of Planet 9 would beautifully and coherently answer several seemingly unrelated open questions about the solar system. I look forward to the day we either see it or rule it out so that we can conclusively answer these questions.
By the way, there is even a theory that Planet 9 might be an exoplanet – such as a super-Earth – that was “stolen” by the sun from a nearby star. So you see that astronomers truly are perplexed about the orbits of these outer solar system bodies. They are casting around for ideas to explain them.
If a Planet 9 is found, whatever its origin, it will be one of the most exciting space discoveries in history. Since Pluto lost its major planet status in 2006, Neptune has been considered the most distant large planet from the sun in our solar system. If that’s not the case, if another large planet – a Planet 9 – exists, it’ll provide astronomers with an unprecedented opportunity to learn more about how our solar system originated and evolved.
Artist’s concept of the size of Earth compared to the super-Earth 55 Cancri e. If Planet 9 exists, it may be similar to this distant exoplanet.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC).
Bottom line: Finding Planet 9 – if it really exists – is still a difficult task for astronomers, but the new study in Physics Reports reflects astronomers’ continued optimism that it will be found in the relatively near future.
One sign thatrobots are increasinglycapable of human tasks? Companies are buying a lot more them: Some 35,880 robots were shipped to North American companies last year, according to new data from theAssociation of Advancing Automation, seven percent more than 2017, setting a new record. In particular, non-automotive companies picked up the pace of automation, with shipments growing 41 percent.
Robot purchases picked up in a variety of industries except for, notably, the auto industry, which has traditionally been at the forefront of automated assembly (car companies still account for a little more than half of robotics purchases, according to the AAA’s data). Food and consumer good companies picked up their pace of automation the most, with shipments up 48 percent. Plastics, life sciences, and electronics companies all put more robots to work in 2018 as well.
“While the automotive industry has always led the way in implementing robotics here in North America, we are quite pleased to see other industries continuing to realize the benefits of automation,” said Jeff Burnstein, President of the Association for Advancing Automation, in a statement released with the report.
Robots are simply getting better: The World Economic Forum estimates that robots or automation will be capable of replicating more than half of workplace tasks by 2025, including 28 percent of tasks that involve decision-making, up from about 19 percent today. As 5G networks begin to roll out over the next two years, robots will also benefit from significantly from the extra bandwidth and latency improvements, making them much more dextrous and quick-to-react to their surroundings.
Automation is projected to create a lot more jobs than it eliminates, but there is a catch.
The job market is particularly strong, with unemployment hitting the lowest level it’s been at in nearly half a century, as the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. That’s finally starting to translate into stiff competition to find even relatively “low-skill” workers to fill jobs, which can drive up the economic incentive to automate, because the savings-per-worker is greater.
As always, the debate about how worried we need to be about this trend rages. As these trends — better, smarter, robots and machines capable of doing more — continue, some have argued that it could create a “barbell” economy, i.e. an economy where jobs are concentrated on low-paying and high-paying extremes instead of there being a large middle class.
The Brookings Institute published this month an alarming paper suggesting that automation’s job displacement will be regionally concentrated. In the future, life will be particularly difficult for people in cities with fewer than 100,000 people and in rural areas. In some regions, almost half of the jobs people have may be susceptible to automation.
Then again, people have always feared that the robots are coming for our jobs. And just because the tech is there, doesn’t mean replacing a person with a cheaper robot is always going to be preferable. As the economist Oren Cass recently pointed out to the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore, just because parents can put their kids on an autonomously driven school buses doesn’t mean they will.
Cultural resistance to robots may provide some measure of comfort in the short term, but, unfortunately, it may only be a matter of time before robots get pretty good at babysitting, too.
04-03-2019 om 18:05
geschreven door peter
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Des OVNI en formation triangulaire auraient été filmés par l’ISS
Des OVNI en formation triangulaire auraient été filmés par l’ISS
La retransmission en direct de la Station spatiale internationale par la NASA a été interrompue après que quatre anomalies aient traversé l’objectif de la caméra. Ces OVNI formaient un triangle.
La NASA a lancé la navette spatiale STS-106 depuis le Kennedy Space Center le 8 septembre 2000. Le but de la mission était de faire voler la navette spatiale Atlantis vers la Station spatiale internationale en vue de manœuvrer de manière permanente le satellite à orbite basse. Cependant, il y a eu un moment qui a retenu l’attention des théoriciens du complot.
La série « Secret Space » diffusée sur Amazon Prime a révélé que quelque chose de bizarre s’était passé pendant la diffusion en direct de cet événement.
Jeff Challender, observateur passionné du ciel et présentateur, a expliqué en détail ce qui s’était passé au cours de cette émission diffusée en 2017 : « STS-106 était l’avant-dernière mission à destination d’une station spatiale sans pilote. »
« Le cosmonaute Yuri Malenchenko et l’astronaute Edward Lu ont effectué une seule sortie dans l’espace. »
« Les deux scientifiques ont effectué les dernières connexions de câble entre le module Zarya et le tout nouveau module de service, nommé Zvesda. »
« L’équipage a également activé les installations sanitaires sur Zvesda. »
M. Challender a ensuite détaillé l’étrange événement survenu le 18 septembre 2000.
Il a expliqué : « Vers 21 h 47, la caméra a été dirigée vers le sud-ouest en direction du Canada. »
« L’équipage était en train de se préparer à atterrir le lendemain et a échangé des messages verbaux de temps en temps. »
« Mais lorsque la caméra de l’ISS a basculé, quatre anomalies ont été repérées. Elles formaient un triangle parfait. »
« Ces objets voyageaient entre la navette et la surface de la Terre. »
Cette affaire a fortement intéressé les ufologues du monde entier. Toutefois, les sceptiques ont rapidement prétendu qu’il s’agissait, en réalité, de trois satellites de la Marine Américaine.
Cependant, M. Challender n’est pas d’accord avec cette dernière théorie.
Il a ajouté : « Il est impossible que ces objets soient des satellites de type NOSS [Naval Ocean Surveillance System, NDLR] de la marine américaine. »
« Cela est impossible car Atlantis gravitait à plus de 386 kilomètre au-dessus de la Terre. »
« Ces trois satellites gravitent autour de 1200 kilomètres. »
« Pour cette seule raison, ce n’est pas la réponse. »
The grainy black and white snap first appeared in a book by the Italian consul Alberto Perego in 1958 but have never been seen outside of Italy
Dr Roberto Pinotti, 72, said the otherworldly visitor, who wore dark shades to cover his eyes, let two of them on board his flying saucer.
The strange encounter allegedly happened in Francavillia, on the Adriatic Coast, in October 1957.
Dr Pinotti said a group of residents were regularly visited by human-like extraterrestrials who wanted to be "friends" with mankind - just like ET in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounter movie.
Two men were allowed to enter the UFO to take photographs.
The diameter of the UFO was 24 metres, and the control cabin was 10 metres, they claimed.
The grainy black and white snaps first appeared in a book called "Sono Extraterrestri" by the Italian consul Alberto Perego in 1958 but have never been seen outside of Italy.
An animation shows the random appearance of fast radio bursts (FRBs) across the sky. Astronomers recently discovered 13 of the mysterious signals, including one that repeated from the same location over several months.
Credit: NRAO Outreach/T. Jarrett (IPAC/Caltech); B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF
Don't look now, but Earth is being bombarded with mysterious, invisible light. Among the typical array of radio signals and microwavescast out by distant stars, black holes and other celestial bodies, there exists a brand of intergalactic light that consistently boggles scientists' minds — and their instruments. These signals are known asfast radio bursts (FRBs). These ultrastrong, ultrabright radio signals last only a few milliseconds and are thought to originate from billions of light-years away, though their precise source is unknown. (Alienshave not been ruled out.)
The mystery is partially owed to a lack of data; since astronomers first discovered FRBs in 2007, only about 60 have been observed. Now, those numbers are growing fast. According to two new papers published today (Jan. 9) in the journal Nature, scientists working at the CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) radio telescope in the hills of British Columbia have detected 13 new FRBs in just a two-month span. Among these newly captured signals are seven bursts that registered at 400 megahertz — the lowest FRB frequency detected so far — and, for only the second time ever, an FRB that flashed repeatedly, six times in a row. [Stephen Hawking's Most Far-Out Ideas About Black Holes]
"Until now, there was only one known repeating FRB," Ingrid Stairs, a member of the CHIME team and an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia, said in a statement. "With more repeaters and more sources available for study, we may be able to understand these cosmic puzzles — where they're from and what causes them."
CHIME radio telescope (seen at night here) recently detected rare, low-frequency bursts of energy from deep in the universe. Astronomers are eagerly searching for an explanation.
Credit: Courtesy Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)
Scientists have a few theories about those origins. Previous studies have suggested that FRBs may be the remnants of distant supernovas, or radiation spewed out by supermassive black holes. Avi Loeb, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the discovery, has said that we shouldn't rule out "artificial origins," like the pulses of an alien spacecraft.
These newly discovered signals could help scientists get closer to an answer. For starters, the existence of repeating FRBs like the one captured last year could rule out some possible origins. These repeating signals flashed from the same spot in the sky (from an estimated 1.5 billion light-years away) six times over the course of several months. According to the study authors, this delayed repetition rules out "cataclysmic events" like supernovas as a likely source of the repeated blasts, as bursts from an exploding star would be expected to happen just once.
Moreover, the CHIME team's new discoveries suggest that FRBs are probably far more common than current technology is able to reflect. The fact that seven of the new bursts registered at 400 MHz (the lowest frequency the CHIME telescope is able to detect) suggest that FRBs with even lower frequencies are likely zipping past our planet all the time — we just aren't able to see them yet.
During the winter of 1922, there was no sea ice around Spitzbergen (Svalbard.) The water had warmed by 12°C and it was too warm for seals. There was a radical change in climatic conditions with unheard-of high temperatures.
Experts describe this increase in ice since 1922 and normal ice conditions – as a tipping point of global warming. As is normally the case, the data shows the exact opposite of claims made by climate scientists.
The planet must be large enough to hold an atmosphere. Today, plenty of people are confident that aliens exist. Other individuals report being made to breed with human-like extraterrestrials.
These days, UFO sighting has been an issue of amusement as an alternative to a concern, although there are ample evidences about their scary overall look. Many reported UFO sightings actually end up being something as simple as a balloon. They actually end up being something as simple as a balloon.
UFOs are often connected with aliens and conspiracy theories. They are often associated with aliens and conspiracy theories. At some stage, you’re most likely to encounter a UFO. At a while, you’re most likely to run into a UFO. Throughout that time period, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the identical site. Throughout that period of time, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the same site.
You can have a look at the video below. The video can be seen on the TTS Academy Community of Interest site by click on this link. The quick video below, for example, is just one of several contemporary sightings. The shaky video tries to concentrate on the object. however, it fades in the clouds within minutes. You may actually watch videos all day long for many years about aliens. Hypnosis video is simply one of the absolute most productive approaches to do hypnosis without the use of a true hypnotist.
You may have a look at the footage below. You might have a look at the footage below. It’s possible to have a look at the video below. It’s possible to have a peek at the video below. May you reside in interesting times! There is a good deal of work by the department to make sure we always can identify what’s flying whether it’s in our airspace or any other airspace. Regrettably, while there can be quite a few videos that are actually the true deal and supply proof of the presence of UFOs, there’s a huge quantity of fake videos posted on YouTube, the majority of them being the product of Computer Generated images (CGI).
The object continues at a quick speed, and the pilots appear to get amazed. It continues at a quick pace, and the pilots appear to get amazed. All the objects look the identical dimensions and circular in shape. Since that day a lot of people have filmed similar objects in and about crop circles. The strange object began to approach again. Then, in a couple of moments, a white Tic Tac-like object appeared over the water. As a consequence the image might be warped.
Some reports state it is a ping, but others claim it is a beep. It’s so incredible fantastic that it can’t be adequately explained or investigated in just a single hub article. Basically, it is a way for the worldwide science community to learn more about the topics which have been previously under-explored or unexploredincluding extraterrestrial life. The reply remains, for the time being, beyond our grasp. Maybe the truth is actually out there. Maybe it is actually out there. The reality is that they do.
In fact, thousands of women and men visit the area annually. Actually, thousands of individuals go to the area every year. There are hundreds and hundreds of credible individuals who support the extraterrestrial hypothesis. They don’t want to get challenged. They do not want to be challenged.
UFO'S BOVEN VLIEGVELD LIMA VERSTOREN VLIEGVELD ( VIDEO )
UFO'S BOVEN VLIEGVELD LIMA VERSTOREN VLIEGVELD ( VIDEO )
De afgelopen tijd zijn er veel verstoringen geweest voor onder het vliegverkeer door onbekende objecten.
Dit gebeurde vooral in Engeland, maar onlangs zorgde een aantal ufo’s boven het vliegveld van Lima in Peru ook voor de nodige problemen.
Wat is het toch ontzettend jammer dat er geen betrouwbare mainstreamkanalen zijn die nieuws brengen zoals dat zich werkelijk voor doet. Die gewoon verslag doen van dingen die gebeuren, zonder een achterliggende agenda.
Aangezien dat niet kan of mag en we dus niet op mainstream kunnen vertrouwen voor belangrijk nieuws, blijven we toch aangewezen op eigen onderzoek.
Neem nu deze gebeurtenis, zoals die plaatsvond op het vliegveld van Lima in het Zuid Amerikaanse Peru op 27 februari 2019 en waarvan we bij ons in het nieuws helemaal niets hebben gezien.
Boven het veld werd door talloze getuigen een aantal ufo’s waargenomen die maar liefst een uur lang boven één van de landingsbanen bleven hangen.
Volgens berichten in de plaatselijke media werden er rond 07.30 boven het Jorge Chavez vliegveld twee onbekende objecten waargenomen.
Deze brachten niet zomaar even een bliksembezoek, maar bleven minstens een uur lang boven het veld hangen, volgens officiële berichten van het vliegveldpersoneel.
Het betreft hier personeel van de Peruvian Corporation of Airports and Commercial Aviation (Corpac). Ook werd er door Corpac zelf een gedetailleerd rapport over het voorval naar buiten gebracht, de eerste keer dat Corpac iets dergelijks heeft gedaan.
Volgens de verkeersleiding op de toren hingen de objecten boven baan 33 en ook een aantal piloten maakten melding van deze objecten.
Het vreemde is dat beide objecten even zichtbaar waren op de radar en daarna verdwenen, terwijl ze er nog wel gewoon waren.
Bovenstaande gebeurtenis is echt, er waren daadwerkelijk vreemde objecten boven het vliegveld die ook voor de nodige verstoringen zorgden. Niemand weet wat die objecten waren, waar ze vandaan komen, wie ze besturen en wat ze kwamen doen.
En toch…. de wereld heeft belangrijker dingen te doen klaarblijkelijk dan zich met bovenstaande vraagstukken bezighouden.
While most of us consider robots and artificial intelligence as modern-day inventions, a woman’s new perspective lets us consider that people thousands of years ago also dreamed of these same ideas.
After conducting research, a Stanford classics scholar named Adrienne Mayor is convinced that the ancient Greek myths consisted of thoughts about the creation of artificial, life-like creatures. These creatures are comparable to modern-day robots and artificial intelligence. In fact, the ancient Greeks were told several stories that suggested artificial intelligence, such as an artificial woman named Pandora, and a huge bronze robot called Talos.
While historians normally link the idea of a moving mechanical device made to imitate a human (or automata) to the Middle Ages, Mayor says that the perception of artificial, life-like creatures dates all the back to at least 2,700 years ago as indicated from different legends and myths. She said, “Our ability to imagine artificial intelligence goes back to the ancient times,” adding, “Long before technological advances made self-moving devices possible, ideas about creating artificial life and robots were explored in ancient myths.” She has elaborated on these ideas in her book titled Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology.
Mayor also insisted that the Greek poets Hesiod and Homer, who were alive sometime between 750 and 650 B.C., wrote about artificial intelligence, self-moving objects, and robots in their work. In fact, Hesiod’s story of Talos indicated that he was a robot since he was described as a giant bronze man built by the Greek god of invention and blacksmithing called Hephaestus. Talos was said to have been directed by Zeus to protect the island of Crete from invaders and he would throw boulders at enemy ships that were approaching the island. In addition, Talos had a tube that ran from his head to one of his feet that had some sort of life source, as well as having a bolt in his ankle.
Sculpture of Zeus
Another example is Hesiod’s Theogony which is a myth about Pandora. While more modern versions of the myth have Pandora described as an innocent woman who accidentally opened a box full of evil, the original version of the story portrays her as an artificial evil woman who was built by Hephaestus and came down to Earth as directed by Zeus to conduct punishments on humans for discovering fire. “It could be argued that Pandora was a kind of AI agent,” Mayor suggested, “Her only mission was to infiltrate the human world and release her jar of miseries.”
According to Homer’s description, Hephaestus made other self-moving objects such as automated servants that were created from gold and possessed the knowledge of the god which could be in reference to artificial intelligence.
One eerie coincidence – or not a coincidence at all – is that none of those mythical creatures had very good final outcomes. “Not one of those myths has a good ending once the artificial beings are sent to Earth,” Mayor explained, “It’s almost as if the myths say that it’s great to have these artificial things up in heaven used by the gods. But once they interact with humans, we get chaos and destruction.” This would make sense, as there are many people nowadays that are worried that robots will one day ruin humanity.
The Lockheed SR-71 "Blackbird" is a long-range, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance aircraft that was operated by the United States Air Force. It was developed as a black project from the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft in the 1960s by Lockheed and its Skunk Works division. The SR-71 served with the U.S. Air Force from 1964 to 1998.
L. A. Marzulli interviews Russel Rasmussen who tells of an encounter a pilot had with a UFO on the wing-tip of his SR 71 for several minutes at an altitude of 70,000 feet.
The pilot said to Russel Rasmussen that at the moment the disc-shaped UFO flashed off and disappeared, it was going a bit faster than Mach 3 which was the speed of the SR-71 Blackbird at that moment.
This testimony proves once again that U.S. Air Force pilots do indeed have encounters with UFOs, but they are not allowed to talk about it.
Popular conspiracy theory UFOmania has recently shared the image of an apparently triangular shaped unidentified flying object (UFO) hovering in the skies of Orlando, Florida. The YouTube channel revealed that these images were originally shared on the conspiracy theory websiteexopolitics.org, and the images were taken by a man, confidentially known as JP.
As per the website report, the incident happened on February 18 at around 1.20 am. The image of the UFO spotted in the video has three well-defined edges, and lights were seen glowing in these areas.
The report also revealed that two men, most possibly men in black approached JP soon after the incident. Soon, these men pointed a gun on JP and threatened him to cover up the sighting. The next thing JP remembered was waking up from bed on next day morning. When JP checked the smartphone, the videos he took were deleted, but the images seem intact.
The video uploaded by UFOmania soon went viral, and viewers of UFOmania seem convinced about the secret USAF space program theory put forward by conspiracy theorists. Many viewers argued that Donald Trump's space force is already operational, and the force is now conducting regular patrolling in the skies.
Some other viewers argued that this spacecraft is actually TR-3B, the alleged anti-gravity space vessel developed by the United States Air Force during the time of the Gulf War. Many conspiracy theorists believe that the USAF has developed this secret space vessel using reverse technology they learned from advanced aliens from the deep space.
"MIB now connected to TR3B humans those two are human technology... Aka breakaway civilization or a secret space program" commented Elegantpaws01, a YouTube user.
Even though conspiracy theorists are convinced about the authenticity of the clip, sceptics claim that these images are intentionally manipulated just for the sake of publicity and clickbait needs.
A new sky map based on data gathered by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope network reveals about 300,000 previously unknown galaxies in the distant universe.
Astronomers have spotted hundreds of thousands of previously unknown galaxies, a raft of new studies reports.
The huge data haul should help researchers better understand the birth and growth of supermassiveblack holes, the evolution of galaxy-cluster mergers and many other cosmic phenomena, discovery team members said.
The team consists of more than 200 astronomers from 18 countries who pored over results from the first part of a sky survey performed by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a network of radio telescopes operated by the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (known as ASTRON). Most LOFAR scopes are in the Netherlands, but the system spans multiple European countries, including Germany, France and the United Kingdom. [The Universe: Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps]
The researchers discovered and mapped 300,000 radio sources, nearly all of which, the scientists said, are extremely distant galaxies. These detected radio emissions are dominated by fast-moving jets of material rocketing away from the supermassive black holes at these galaxies' hearts.
"LOFAR has a remarkable sensitivity, and that allows us to see that these jets are present in all of the most massive galaxies, which means that their black holes never stop eating," team member Philip Best, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said in a statement.
"With LOFAR, we hope to answer the fascinating question: 'Where do those black holes come from?'" team member Huub Röttgering, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in the same statement.
The newly reported observations — which were published online last Tuesday (Feb. 19) in 26 papers in a special issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics— also provide a window on galaxy-cluster mergers. These dramatic collisions accelerate deep-space particles to tremendous speeds, which create swaths of radio emission that can span millions of light-years.
But this doesn't tell the whole story, the new results suggest.
Locations of the radio telescopes that make up the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR).
"What we are beginning to see with LOFAR is that, in some cases, clusters of galaxies that are not merging can also show this emission, albeit at a very low level that was previously undetectable," team member Annalisa Bonafede, of the University of Bologna and INAF in Italy, said in the same statement. "This discovery tells us that, besides merger events, there are other phenomena that can trigger particle acceleration over huge scales."
The discoveries above should be just the tip of the LOFAR iceberg. The new studies cover only the first 2 percent of the sky survey, LOFAR team members said. When complete, they added, the project should map a total of 15 million cosmic radio sources.
"Just imagine some of the discoveries we may make along the way," ASTRON Director General Carole Jackson said in the same statement. "I certainly look forward to it."
Expert Says Humans Are Aliens – And We Were Brought To Earth Hundreds Of Thousands Of Years Ago
Expert Says Humans Are Aliens – And We Were Brought To Earth Hundreds Of Thousands Of Years Ago
What if Humans are the aliens we’ve been looking for all along? According to experts, humans were most likely crossbred with another species, perhaps from the star system Alpha Centauri –which is one of the closest solar systems to Earth—in the distant past, giving birth to modern humans.
Tell Al-Uhaymir modern-day Iraq, where the ancient Sumerian city of Kish used to be, archaeologists found one of the oldest ancient documents on the planet, the tablet of Kish which is believed to date back to the year 3500 BC.
The Sumerian king list states that Kish was the first city to have kings following the deluge, beginning with Jushur. Jushur’s successor is called Kullassina-bel, but this is actually a sentence in Akkadian meaning “All of them were lord”. Thus, some scholars have suggested that this may have been intended to signify the absence of a central authority in Kish for a time.
This ancient document is believed to precede the cuneiform writing of the Sumerians, and the Egyptian hieroglyphs for almost one hundred years.
Developing the ability to express thoughts through written language is one of the first ways in which man differed from the animal kingdom.
Five thousand years since, humans have developed electricity, divided the atom, developed computers, and led man to the moon. We have achieved things that other species have still not. No other species on earth can attribute such unique achievements in such a short period of time. Interestingly, compared to other species of the earth, our ‘evolution’ is relatively short.
It has been a short period of time, most likely a few million years since the first hominid walked on Earth. Precisely this is one of the biggest scientific questions of all times: Why have only our species emerged to this truly advanced technological intelligence?
Evidently, there is nothing more advanced than humans on planet Earth. While there are different ‘intelligent’ species on Earth, none of them makes use of technology like us. Just imagine for a second, if for some reason, mankind had to return to the jungle, and survive there. Many experts agree that most of them would not survive for a very long period of time.
Many scientists agree that humans, in addition to their intelligence, are not very capable to occupy a wide range of environments. In other words, we are very limited when it comes to our planet.
In addition to our fascinating intelligence, biologists have also noticed contrasts between human physiology and that of other animals on earth. Many scientists agree that compared to other species on earth, humans are rather strange. For example, a baby horse when born is able to walk and function almost independently, but this a human baby cannot do, which makes us quite helpless. In other words, we are born before being neurologically ready for life.
Many researchers agree that there are many vulnerabilities that accompany our intelligence. Humans on earth eventually became bipeds, which freed up our superior extremities allowing us to manipulate objects, create tools and much more. But for all this, experts believe that our species has paid an expensive price. Lumbar pain a sign that according to many experts could tell us a lot about our species. Curiously, other animals on Earth do NOT have this problem. It’s as if only humans are affected by some of these problems.
So what does all of this mean? According to one expert, it means that we are the aliens we’ve we been looking for all along. A new theory proposed by Dr. Ellis Silver states that there are several tell-tale signs present in the human race that suggest human beings did not evolve ALONGSIDE other lifeforms on Earth. The book called ‘Humans are not from Earth: a scientific evaluation of the evidence’ is basically a resume of theories for and mostly against man’s evolution on Earth.
In the book, leading environmentalist and ecologist Dr. Ellis Silver goes through an evaluation of thirteen leading hypothesis and seventeen factors which suggest HUMANS ARE NOT FROM EARTH. Mankind is supposedly the most highly developed species on the planet, yet is surprisingly unsuited and ill-equipped for Earth’s environment: harmed by sunlight, a strong dislike for naturally occurring foods, ridiculously high rates of chronic disease, and more said Dr. Ellis in an interview.
According to Dr. Ellis, humans might suffer from back pain because our species initially evolved on another planet with a lower gravity, adding to the mysteries, Dr. Ellis also indicates that it is strange that newborns have large heads and make it difficult for mothers to give birth, which can result in fatalities for both mother and child. So where do we come from? According to Dr. Ellis, Neanderthals were most likely crossbred with another species, perhaps from the star system Alpha Centauri –which is one of the closest solar systems to Earth— in the distant past, giving birth to modern humans.
In his book, Dr Ellis Silver points to a number of physiological features to make his case for why humans did not evolve alongside other life on Earth
According to Dr. Ellis, there are millions of people around the globe who ‘feel’ that they do not belong on Earth. Dr. Ellis explains: “This suggests (to me at least) that mankind may have evolved on a different planet, and we may have been brought here as a highly developed species. One reason for this … is that the Earth might be a prison planet since we seem to be a naturally violent species and we’re here until we learn to behave ourselves.”
Dr. Ellis concludes that mankind did not evolve from that particular strain of life, but evolved elsewhere and was transported to Earth (as fully evolved Homo sapiens) between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago. Furthermore, as noted by Robert Sepher, according to modern DNA sequencing, it is demonstrated that humanity as we know it, isn’t just ONE single ‘race’ that descended from the same ancestor in Africa, but a hybridized species, with a far more enigmatic truth behind it all.
Many questions have been raised in the discussion about Rh negative blood. If mankind did, in fact, evolve from a mutual ancient African ancestor, theories state that everyone’s blood would be compatible, but regrettably, this is not the case. This raises numerous questions that science alone has not been able to fully answer. Where did Rh-negative blood come from? And why is it that a Rh-negative mother carrying Rh positive children tries rejecting her own offspring? Is it possible that this can be explained by a rather controversial theory? A theory which suggests that humanity isn’t in fact one race, but a hybridized species.
The book was written by Robert Sepehr, Species with Amnesia: Our Forbidden History tells us more about the enigmatic blood type Rh-negative. Not only does Species with Amnesia suggest mankind is, in fact, a hybridized species, the author suggests that highly advanced civilizations have been on Earth before us, just to be destroyed by some great global catastrophe, as mysteriously, history tells us. Sepehr argues that for each race that has died out, another has taken its place, with a selected few holding on to the memories and sacred knowledge of the past race.
In our vanity, we think we have discovered some of the great truths of science and technology, but we are in fact only just beginning to rediscover the profound wisdom of past civilizations. In many ways, we are like an awakening Species with Amnesia, yearning to reclaim our forgotten past. – The Basque people of Spain and France have the highest percentage of Rh-negative blood. About 30% have (rr) Rh negative and about 60% carry one (r) negative gene.
“There are 612 primate species and subspecies recognized by the International Union for Conversation of Nature (IUCN), and not one has Rh-negative blood”. – Robert Sepehr, Species with Amnesia: Our Forbidden History.
THE 'EVIDENCE' TO SUGGEST HUMANS CAME FROM SPACE SO FAR
Bad backs suggest humans evolved in a world with lower gravity
Sunburn hints humans were not designed to be exposed constantly to the sun
The size of babies' heads present a problem for women when giving birth - difficulty not shared by other species on the planet
Humans are always ill, perhaps beacuse their body clocks have evolved to expect a 25 hour day - unlike Earth's
People just feel like they are not at home on our planet
Was this home? Dr Ellis suggests Neanderthals such as homo erectus were crossbred with another species, perhaps from Alpha Centauri. Star Proxima Centauri is pictured in the star system, which is the closest to our solar system some 4.37 light years away from the sun
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Must See! Suicidal, Death-Diving Comet Plunges Into the Sun (Video)
Must See! Suicidal, Death-Diving Comet Plunges Into the Sun(Video)
A Sun-diving Comet Crashed into the Sun on March 2, 2019. Coronagraphs onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded the death plunge. The doomed comet was a member of the Kreutz family.
Kreutz sungrazers are fragments from the breakup of a single giant comet many centuries ago.
Death-Diving Comet Plunges Into Sun On March 2, 2019
Why Did They Try to Bury This Sci-Fi Film? Christoper Walken in Brainstorm
Why Did They Try to Bury This Sci-Fi Film? Christoper Walken in Brainstorm
Christopher Walken is an American actor of screen and stage who has appeared in more than 100 films and television shows, including Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, The Dogs of War, The Dead Zone, A View to a Kill, Batman Returns, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Antz, Sleepy Hollow, Catch Me If You Can, Hairspray, Seven Psychopaths, the first three Prophecy films, The Jungle Book, as well as music videos by many popular recording artists.
Brainstorm is an 1983 American science fiction film directed by Douglas Trumbull, and starring Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson.Wikipedia
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Het nieuwe ruimteschip Crew Dragon van de Amerikaanse raketbouwer SpaceX, van zakenman Elon Musk, is vandaag met succes aangemeerd aan het internationaal ruimtestation ISS. Dat bevestigden de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie Nasa en SpaceX tijdens de videouitzending van de koppeling.
Om 11.51 uur was het contact een feit, 27 uur na de lancering met een Falcon 9-raket vanuit Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. De koppeling vond plaats 400 kilometer boven het aardoppervlakte, ten noorden van Nieuw-Zeeland. Binnen een tweetal uur is de volgende testfase gepland met de opening van het luik.
Het onbemande tuig, gebouwd om mensen te vervoeren, zette voor de testvlucht koers naar het ISS met een pop aan boord. De Crew Dragon moest zich autonoom aan het ISS koppelen. Volgende vrijdag komt het ruimteschip terug naar de aarde. Ripley, de pop aan boord genoemd naar het hoofdpersonage in de Alien-films, is voorzien van sensoren om te kijken welke krachten echte astronauten zouden ondergaan en doorheen de capsule is er ook een waaier aan meetinstrumenten. Lukt de test, dan zouden er nog voor het einde van het jaar twee astronauten met de Crew Dragon reizen.
Zowat acht jaar geleden stopten de VS met autonome bemande ruimtevluchten met de spaceshuttle. Sinds 2011 staat Rusland vanop de basis Bajkonoer in Kazachstan in voor het transport van Amerikaanse astronauten naar en van het ISS.
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OVERAL TER WERELD ZIET MEN INEENS MYSTERIEUZE LICHTEN ( VIDEO )
OVERAL TER WERELD ZIET MEN INEENS MYSTERIEUZE LICHTEN ( VIDEO )
Wanneer één iemand iets vreemds ziet in de lucht, dan is dat bijzonder, maar daar blijft het dan meestal ook bij.
Maar, als mensen wereldwijd hetzelfde zien, inclusief piloten, dan denk je al snel aan een buitenaardse invasie, nep of echt.
Er gebeuren zoveel vreemde dingen op onze aarde, waarvan je in de misdadige propagandakanalen van de mainstream media (MSM) niets terugvindt. Logisch, want het is niet in het belang van de machthebbers, die eigenaar zijn van zo goed als ieder MSM kanaal, dat wij teveel op de hoogte raken.
Waar we nu mee te maken hebben is een soort golf van waarnemingen van vreemde lichten in de lucht. Een golf die enkele weken geleden begon met de waarneming van twee Britse piloten van Air Midwest uit Gloucester die onafhankelijk van elkaar vreemde dingen zagen.
Beide vliegtuigen waren bezig met IFR trainingsvluchten (leren vliegen op alleen instrumenten), toen beiden een rood en een oranje licht waarnamen.
Het ene toestel vloog op een hoogte van 7.000 voet en de andere op 4.000 voet en ze probeerden een dusdanige koers te vliegen dat ze de lichten zouden onderscheppen. Maar, hoe ze ook probeerden, dit lukte niet, omdat de lichten zich steeds sneller leken te verwijderen.
Ze beschrijven de lichten als ongeveer op dezelfde hoogte als waar zij vlogen, met een vierkante vorm. Dit zou kunnen, maar omdat dit soort lichten ook vaak pulseren, zou de vorm ook optisch bedrog kunnen zijn. Maar, hoe dan ook, ze namen vreemde rood/oranje lichten waar.
In de video onderaan dit artikel komt Tyler van Secureteam nog met een gelijksoortige waarneming. De locatie is onbekend, maar ook hier een vreemd roodachtig licht in de lucht.
Ook in de Filipijnen wordt een golf aan roodachtig lichten gemeld, zodanig zelfs dat er uitgebreide reportages op de nationale nieuwszender te zien zijn. Voorbeeld hiervan is te bekijken in de video van Tyler.
Maar, veel dichterbij huis worden ze ook waargenomen, zoals te zien in de volgende video die gemaakt is half februari door iemand die in Frankrijk buiten liep.
Er staat dat is gefilmd in noordwest Frankrijk, dus ergens in de buurt van Normandië of Bretagne.
Rond dezelfde tijd maakt ook iemand anders aan de andere kant van de oceaan een opname van een vreemd roodachtig licht in de lucht.
Zowel de video hierboven als degene hieronder zijn op het moment dat wij ze vinden minder dan 100 keer bekeken. Dat is meestal wel een goede aanwijzing dat je met een echte opname te maken hebt en niet met een advertentieklikker.
Het soort gevoel dat je hierbij krijgt is dat er ergens net buiten de aarde een grote buitenaardse vloot hangt en dat die op verschillende plaatsen op aarde verkenners naar beneden heeft gestuurd.
Als we er even vanuit gaan dat dit allemaal geen onderdeel vormt van de geplande nep buitenaardse invasie, maar dit echt buitenaardsen zijn, dan is het natuurlijk heel erg interessant om er achter te komen wat zij denken/willen.
Het is te hopen dat ze voor hun beeldvorming niet teveel naar MSM kanalen bekijken, want dan zien we ze nooit meer terug (of ze blijven juist dat kan natuurlijk ook).
En dan is er natuurlijk nog de mogelijkheid dat die enorme vloot is gekomen om een beperkt aantal mensen mee te nemen naar waar het ook is waar zij vandaan komen.
Probleem dat wij dan weer hebben is dat we dan bijna 60 procent van onze lezers kwijtraken.
Hierna volgt de video van Tyler over de wereldwijde toename van de vreemde rode lichten.
En voordat er misschien heel veel mensen vertrekken naar andere delen van het universum, is het misschien handig om snel nog even gebruik te maken van het aanbod van Orjana voor Niburulezers deze week, zodat ze na een lange ruimtereis in ieder geval gezond aankomen.
When you have more money than God, what’s next? What could the man who has everything possibly want? Well, transforming humanity into a space-faring civilization, and the immortality that comes with it, seems a likely bet and that looks like the direction many of these billionaires want to go. Amazon founder and Lex Luthor doppelganger Jeff Bezos recently spoke at a members-only event at New York’s Yale Club about his space colonization ambitions with his company Blue Origin. At the event, Bezos described his vision for the future which, according to him, would see one trillion humans living in space, a society of “thousands of Mozarts and Einsteins,” and an Earth whose natural beauty and environment has been preserved by moving heavy industries off-world.
“The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we’d have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins. Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be.
But if we’re going to have that, we do have to go out into the solar system. You have to capture more of the sun’s output, and we have to use all of the resources that are out in space, in terms of minerals and not just energy. And that’s very doable, but we have to get started.”
The alternative to going to space, according to Bezos, is bleak. Citing compounding energy use, he says a future locked on earth would be one of “population control and energy rationing,” and that’s not the future he wants for his grandchildren’s grandchildren.
NASA concept for a lunar base, which would construct large ships and space stations
Unlike Elon Musk, who is also deep into the new billionaire space race, Bezos doesn’t believe we should colonize other planets. Instead, he says we will build giant “O’Neil-style” cylindrical space colonies:
[T]he space colonies we’ll build will have many advantages. The primary one is that they’ll be close to Earth. The transit time and the amount of energy required to move between planets is so high. But if you have giant space colonies that are energetically close and, in terms of travel time close to Earth, then people will be able to come and go. Very few people are going to want to leave this planet permanently — it’s just too amazing.
On the matter of what happens to the Earth, Bezos says that the goal of building a space-faring civilization is to protect it. Locked down here we have no choice but to exploit all of the finite resources, but in space that won’t matter. He says:
“Ultimately what will happen, is this planet will be zoned residential and light industry. We’ll have universities here and so on, but we won’t do heavy industry here. Why would we? This is the gem of the solar system. Why would we do heavy industry here? It’s nonsense.”
Jeff Bezos says he now believes Blue Origin, his private aerospace company, is the most important work he will ever do. To fund this important work, Bezos reportedly liquidates $1 billion worth of Amazon stock every year. The company is focused on building a low-cost, reusable launch vehicle, which Bezos believes is the key to extending our reach to the stars. He says:
“The fact of the matter is we don’t have forever, and the first step — I don’t know all future steps — but I know one of them is we need to build a low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle. No matter which path you take, it has to go through that gate.”
Artist’s conception of the inside of an O’Neil space cylinder.
Now, I’m feeling a little bit confused. On one hand, Jeff Bezos is Lex Luthor. On the other hand, he’s right. If we could sure that this future, no matter who gets to have their statue built, is the one that’s coming, I think we’d all sleep a little easier and worry a little less. There are all sorts of problems with Jeff Bezos and Amazon. There are all sorts of problems with everybody. But there is something singularly beautiful about dreaming of the stars. To quote astronaut David Scott as he was standing on the surface of the Moon:
“As I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley, I sort of realize there’s a fundamental truth to our nature, Man must explore . . . and this is exploration at its greatest.
For when I look at the Moon I do not see a hostile, empty world. I see the radiant body where man has taken his first steps into a frontier that will never end.”
March is supposed to come in like either a lion or a lamb, but this year’s relief-that-February-is-over month has come in like odd UFO recordings. Following a recent sighting oftwo UFOs mysteriously hovering for almost an hour over a major international airport in Peru, reports and recordings have come in showing a strange ring of UFOs over Wales and a wing or sock-shaped formation of lights (obviously a deceptive alien maneuver) over Minnesota. If March comes in like a UFO, does it go out like a government disclosure?
“Upon my analysis of this fascinating footage in more detail I confirmed what the witnesses had seen and described also confirming the lights to be rotating in a circular uniformed formation, giving the impression of being fixed to a much larger circular base structure. Also frames were obtained revealing an unusual unknown shaped object, multicoloured in appearance exhibiting a full visual spectrum range. Near the end of the footage the lights appear to change angle to a 45 degrees angle but continuing to rotate as they did in the horizontal position before blinking out of sight for good.”
The Welsh sighting occurred in 2012 but the video was only released recently by British UFO researcher Jason Gleaves and, while unresolved, offers a brief but good tutorial on how to take a UFO video and then how to analyze it. (Watch the video here.) Gleaves received the video from teen brothers Nathan and Alex Thomas, who claim they saw the UFO around 3am on January 3, 2012 in Denbigh, North Wales. Deciding it wasn’t fireworks and puzzled by the lack of sound, they recorded it using a camera Nathan had just received for Christmas. Gleaves complimented Nathan on his “steady focus” and for focusing and zooming on local landmarks. Gleaves then used daytime photos of the same landscape to determine that the UFO was traveling above trees less than two miles away. Yes, Gleaves knows what you’re thinking.
“Other possible factors and identification of the unknown light sources could be drones, but during 2012 drone technology had not been widely available to the public as they are today, so I don’t believe the lights to be drones.”
Flying saucer? Gleaves knows better than to propose that, given he’s working with a 37 second video taken at 3 am. Nonetheless, he confirmed it was something round that he couldn’t identify. A blimp or hot air balloon? Perhaps he’s better with sock-shaped UFOs. That’s what is seen in a video hovering over St. Louis Park (a western suburb of Minneapolis) taken on February 10, 2019, by Netzaid Vazquez Diaz and uploaded to the Internet last week where it was picked up around the world. (Watch the video here.) Diaz must have read the UFO video handbook because he started his clip with a shot of the ground, then up some buildings and into the sky. Unfortunately, the 25 second clip. Doesn’t show much more than a sock-shaped circle of lights – an alien spaceship with one wing’s lights out? A TR-3B with one wing’s lights out? A lighted kite? A laser light display? A tight formation of drones? We could go on but none of those can be conclusively proven by this video and, although other videos are rumored to exist along with other witnesses, none have surfaced as of this writing.
Interesting videos … no conclusions. Remember the rules of UFO recording: keep your batteries charged, your arm steady and your landmarks (and opinions) in perspective. And hold your breath while shooting … but not while waiting for March to go out like a government UFO disclosure.
Not exactly proper English for a remake of David Bowie’s classic song, but in this case the answer is “Yes” … or at least “Yes, at one time.” For the first time ever, researchers have found solid evidence of large liquid lakes on Mars that were interconnected and possibly teeming with life. Cavemen, sailors and lawmen? Only a hands-on look at this geological evidence will answer that question. Elon?
“Early Mars was a watery world, but as the planet’s climate changed this water retreated below the surface to form pools and ‘groundwater. We traced this water in our study, as its scale and role is a matter of debate, and we found the first geological evidence of a planet-wide groundwater system on Mars.”
As University of Utrecht planetary geologist Francesco Salese explains in his new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, credit for this fantastic discovery goes to the three-camera team of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, and NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and the Context Camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. All of that observational equipment was aimed at 24 deep, enclosed craters in the northern hemisphere of Mars. At a depth of 4,000 meters, which the study defines as 4,000 meters below an arbitrary Martian sea level, nearly all of the craters showed similar evidence that could only be attributed to water.
Mars Express
“Features include channels etched into crater walls, valleys carved out by sapping groundwater, dark, curved deltas thought to have formed as water levels rose and fell, ridged terraces within crater walls formed by standing water, and fan-shaped deposits of sediment associated with flowing water. The water level aligns with the proposed shorelines of a putative martian ocean thought to have existed on Mars between three and four billion years ago.”
Based on this commonality in the majority of the craters, co-author Gian Gabriele Ori, director of the Università D’Annunzio’s International Research School of Planetary Sciences in Italy, believes these underground lakes connected Martian oceans which stretched across the planet 3.5 billion years ago. Because of Marian climate change, this water eventually went underground where it’s possible that it could still exist in pockets of ice. Will that ice or the soil around it contain evidence of Martian life?
“The team also spotted signs of minerals within five of the craters that are linked to the emergence of life on Earth: various clays, carbonates, and silicates. The finding adds weight to the idea that these basins on Mars may once have had the ingredients to host life. Moreover, they were the only basins deep enough to intersect with the water-saturated part of Mars’ crust for long periods of time, with evidence perhaps still buried in the sediments today.”
If there was water …
That’s a qualified ‘yes’, which means thirsty Martian explorers may want to avoid drinking from any water fountains or wells as they traverse the Red Planet. In fact, the discovery highlights the importance of unmanned expeditions in general, as Dmitri Titov, ESA’s Mars Express project scientist, explained in the press release. (Charts and photos here and here.)
“It is especially exciting that a mission that has been so fruitful at the Red Planet, Mars Express, is now instrumental in helping future missions such as ExoMars explore the planet in a different way. It’s a great example of missions working together with great success.”
Working together in space. If the Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can do it, why not humans from the space-exploring countries as well?
In the 1988 science fiction film Alien Nation, a group of alien immigrants arrives on Earth and attempts to assimilate into society beginning with a “colony” in Los Angeles. Set in 1991, it explores many of the common themes prevalent in such films, which include xenophobia, extraterrestrial invasion, and alien life in general.
The aliens in the film, which are called the Tenctonese or, informally, the “Newcomers,” are for the most part very much like humans in appearance, apart from both sexes having bald heads that feature exotic patterns. Despite their similar appearance, they possess a number of physiological differences; namely, contact with salt water is deadly for the Newcomers.
Apart from this primary difference, the Newcomers in Alien Nation are more or less human-like (as are most aliens in science fiction, if they aren’t depicted in the other tired “octopoidal” trope). But if and when we eventually find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, how much like us will it really be? Would aliens enjoy the same sorts of things humans do–such as food, arts, and entertainment–and if not, how would they differ?
As far as having an appreciation for the arts, some have argued that aliens would absolutely be like us in that respect. Writing for Space.com in 2010, Clara Moskowitz noted that, “Art may attract aliens more than academics because any extraterrestrial civilization that we are able to get in touch with is likely to be much older than us and more technically advanced.” Moskowitz, reporting on the SETIcon Conference on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence held that year, noted that experts in attendance were optimistic about ET’s interest in the cultured side of human existence.
Part of this has to do with the fact that aliens likely wouldn’t be as interested in learning about math and science from us. Especially if they were able to travel to our planet from elsewhere in the cosmos since this would require more advanced knowledge of physics than we already possess. “However,” Clara wrote, “our art and music is singularly human, and could likely be fascinating to an alien species.”
While soaking in their fill of Earthly culture, aliens would no doubt be inclined to try our culinary offerings, too. However, aliens might want to take in more than just their fill of what Earth has to offer to interstellar diners, according to social scientist and chef Christy Spackman at ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society. Spackman (much like this author) began to think about the common stereotypes about aliens that emerge in common sci-fi depictions of them. This led her to consider what a “sensory meal” shared with aliens might be like if they were to visit Earth; among the things we might have to offer them include “feasts of light,” and how it interacts with the eyes (that is, if the aliens in question have ocular organs like ours). Also on the list were olfactory feasts (again, as with before, that’s if the aliens have noses, or something akin to one that assists in detecting aromas), and a host of other things.
“It calls for generosity of spirit,” Spackman said of her sensory feasts, “both in those who are producing and for those who are consuming, and a willingness to say, ‘This will never be perfect, so we can meet at the good enough’.”
Also, if aliens are really anything like us, after partaking in a feast, they may need to pencil in a bit of time for a nap afterward. Then again, one popular theory about our inability to find aliens already involves the notion that it’s because they may be hibernating, in which case going back to sleep may not be quite so appealing. However, part of the rationale for this theory involves alien life that has graduated beyond the stage of biology; that is, aliens who have shed their natural state in order to inhabit artificial or synthetic forms, which are hypothetically capable of sustaining themselves in harsh environments where biology simply could not thrive.
“Having essentially uploaded their minds onto powerful computers, the civilizations choosing to do this could enhance their intellectual capacities or inhabit some of the harshest environments in the universe with ease,” wrote Robert Hart in an ASU collaboration with Slate in 2017. The idea is that such aliens might estivate–that is, spend a particularly hot period in a state of near or complete dormancy–awaiting a period in the future where the universe has cooled to a point that they may operate more efficiently (entropically speaking, of course).
If we’re ever to know the full extent to which aliens may end up being like us, they will probably need to have something else in common with humans: just like we search for other forms of life, they will likely have to be searching for us. Of course, while we continue to look for intelligent life on other worlds, it remains to be shown whether or not we truly have much of it on this world… perhaps with time, and a little luck, aliens will eventually find us and can shed some light on that age-old earthly question, too.
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This is Really a Mirage? Glitch in Dimensions?
This is Really a Mirage? Glitch in Dimensions?
A Finnish border guard was, quite literally, stopped in their tracks Sunday after a ‘new island’ appeared in the middle of the frozen Lake Inari without warning.
Finland’s Lapland Border Patrol tweeted images of the strange, apparently geological, phenomenon; an impressive feat considering temperatures in the region had plummeted as low as -25 degrees Celsius.
And there was no sight nor sound of any volcanic activity in the area that might explain the sudden appearance of new rock formations, seemingly out of nowhere.
According to RT who refers to comments on Twitter, it was merely an optical illusion, light behaves differently when passing through atmospheric layers, which can lead to mirage-like effects along the horizon, reflecting and refracting distant landscapes in mind-bending ways.
They can say it just an optical illusion but is it possible that the border Patrol has photographed something from another world, a parallel universe, caused by a glitch in dimensions?
UFOs Sighted Over Lima International Airport In Peru, Feb 27, 2019, Video! UFO Sighting News.
UFOs Sighted Over Lima International Airport In Peru, Feb 27, 2019, Video! UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: February 27, 2019
Location of sighting: Lima, Peru Airport
A UFO was seen over the Lima, Peru Airport last week. While airplanes were coming and going, someone noticed a hovering object over the runway. The object tased for an hour before just disappearing and flights were delayed. Apparently aliens assume that alien UFOs over an busy airport with loads of planes is would be taken better than flying over your home and hovering. Why? Flying objects are expected at the airport...making even a UFO sighting more relaxed and less of a surprise. Honestly...alien are suppose to land at the airport not your house...right? I say...let them land. Give them clearance!
Scott C. Waring
Video states:
According to Peruvian media reports on February 27, 2019, two UFOs were sighted over Jorge Chávez International Airport at 0630 UTC and they remained for almost an hour over the Lima sky according to official information from the personnel of the control tower of the airport. Flights were delayed due to UFOs sighting. The staff of the Peruvian Corporation of Airports and Commercial Aviation ( Corpac ) witnessed the UFOs over the airport and even videotaped and photographed. Corpac issued the official report, and it is the first time Corpac provides a detailed report on UFOs over international airport.
According to the report, witnesses reported two UFOs over the main airport on February 27. In addition, they detailed that the objects remained for approximately one hour over the airport. The events occurred at dawn on Wednesday, February 27. The control tower workers said that the UFOs were positioned on runway 33.
According to information, the UFOs were also seen by the ground crew of two planes that covered the Lima-Córdova and Lima-Quito routes. One of the unidentified objects appeared for a few moments on the radar, but moments later, both disappeared from the view of the airport staff. In the down below image, you can see the official report of Corpac and signed by the technician José Zarabia Salas, who has confirmed the UFO sighting.
UFO Caught Disguised As Sun Sinking Into Ocean Off California, Video, Dec 2018, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Caught Disguised As Sun Sinking Into Ocean Off California, Video, Dec 2018, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: December 25, 2018 Location of sighting: California, USA This UFO was caught by spectators who observed a UFO disguised as the sun sinking into the ocean. I have heard of such things, but this is the first good video of such a phenomenon. Under water alien bases do exist, and since 75% of the earth is covered by water, I assume 75% of all alien bases are too. Scott C. Waring Video States:
Strange sunset do not you think? We are used to seeing the sunrise and sunset on the horizon line. But something illogical could be seen on December 25 in California. The sun went into the ocean. Strange sunset in California USA
UFO Seen Above Mount Adams, Washington At ECETI Ranch, March 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Seen Above Mount Adams, Washington At ECETI Ranch, March 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: March 1, 2019
Location of sighting: Mount Adams, Washington
This UFO was captured at the top of Mount Adams. This is the same location where people from around the world, including TV news and military generals have visited at night and have seen UFOs. James Gillian, the owner of the ranch noticed the UFOs decades ago and since then opened up a camping area for UFO researchers who see them nightly...with video to prove it. James Gillian himself says he was invited by an alien onboard a ship to see what its like. I have been following James for over 7 years...and he never fails to impress with his videos, photos and personal experiences with the aliens he says lives in a base 4-5 miles below Mount Adams. Want to prove him wrong? I dare you to go there and try. Bring the night vision, scopes and video recorders.
Scott C. Waring
Video states:
We made our way to the ECETI Ranch, at the base of Mount Adams, to make contact! During our stay, we recorded many anomalous objects floating in and around the mountain. At the beginning, we believed these were hitchhikers, but upon closer examination, in the thermal camera (which detects heat signatures), no heat (from a body) was detected. The truth is, up to 95% of what people think are ET craft, is explainable, but we are going after that 5% that are legitimate other worldly craft, in our search around the globe.
Popular conspiracy theory YouTube channel 'UFOmania' has recently uploaded a video that shows an eerie V-shaped flying object hovering in the skies of Failsworth, United Kingdom. Interestingly, the perfectly cut V-shape of theUFOseems very similar to the spacecraft which people have seen in Hollywood sci-fi films.
Even though the image was captured by the witness last October, pictures of this incident became viral after it was shared by a website named UFO Sightings Hotspot, and later by the YouTube channel UFOmania. The creepy photo is now being submitted to MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), and they are apparently investigating the authenticity of the image.
As the image went viral online, many people have started arguing that this UFO could actually be an alien vehicle from deep space. Most of these extraterrestrial buffs argue that aliens who live in the far nooks of the universe used to visit earth regularly to monitor human activities.
"It looks straight out a movi.. which makes you wonder what Hollywood knows?" commented Ninorc Sinned, a YouTube user.
In the meantime, a section of other conspiracy theorists claims that these V-shaped crafts could be secret military vessels developed by the United States Air Force. Conspiracy theorists have long been claiming that the USAF had developed a triangular craft allegedly named 'TR-3B' during the time of Gulf War. It should be noted that the shape of TR-3B often depicted by conspiracy theorists seems very similar to that of the flying object spotted in the United Kingdom.
"Incredible! It looks like the government! They've been working on these since the 40's," commented LeAnn Winter, another YouTuber.
However, sceptics were quick to dismiss both the alien and secret military weapon theory. As per these sceptics, the V-shaped object is actually the reflection from the car's window.
‘We were fishing on a pier, then aliens levitated us aboard UFO’ : The story of one of the world’s most sensational ‘alien encounters’
‘We were fishing on a pier, then aliens levitated us aboard UFO’ : The story of one of the world’s most sensational ‘alien encounters’
by Craig Campbell
An artist’s impression of the incident
It was one of the most sensational alien encounter stories ever.
On October 11 1973, Charles Hickson, 42, and Calvin Parker, 18, were fishing at the Pascagoula River, Mississippi, when they say something incredible happened.
A strange craft appeared near them, a door opened and three weird creatures levitated them onboard.
Having studied the two humans, shipyard workers Charles and Calvin were then put back where they had been, at the west bank pier.
One man who looked deep into the story and wrote a book about it with Parker is Philip Mantle, a top UFO researcher, from Pontefract.
The Pascagoula River site in 1973, the year of the reported abduction
Hickson sadly passed away eight years ago, but Parker is still with us, aged 64, and Philip was told by him that when they were taken onboard he was given some kind of injection to calm him down.
“Charles and Calvin were fishing off a pier when they heard a whirring or whizzing sound, saw two flashing blue lights, and reported that an oval-shaped craft, some eight feet across and eight or more feet high, suddenly appeared near them,” says Philip.
“A door opened on the ship, they said, and three creatures emerged and seized the men, floating or levitating them into the craft. Both men reported being paralysed and numb.
“Parker claimed he had fainted due to fright.
“They described the creatures as being roughly humanoid in shape and standing about five feet tall.
“The creatures’ skin was pale in colour and wrinkled, and they had no eyes that the men could discern, and slits for mouths.
“Their heads also appeared connected directly to their shoulders, with no discernible neck.
“There were three carrot-like growths instead – one where the nose would be on a human, the other two where ears would normally be.
“The beings had lobster-like claws at the ends of their arms, and seemed to have only one leg.
“Hickson later described the creatures’ lower bodies looking as if their legs were fused together, ending in elephant-like feet.
“Hickson also reported that the creatures moved in mechanical, robotic ways.
“Parker claimed that he could not recall what had happened to him inside the craft,” says Philip, “although later, during sessions of hypnotic regression, he offered some hazy details.”
Released about 20 minutes later, the men reported their story to the Keesler Air Force Base, but were told it had nothing to do with UFO reports.
They went to the Mississippi sheriff’s office, where sheriff Fred Diamond believed they were sincere and terrified, with Parker especially disturbed.
It was only after the book came out and was a bestseller that Philip uncovered a new document written by a doctor who said he believed the story.
Calvin Parker says: “It was the fear I felt that is hard to describe. As the alien made contact to my left arm I heard a whisk of what I thought was air, then all at once I became really relaxed, then all the fear was gone.”
Calvin Parker pictured last year
He said he heard doctors talking about puncture marks on his arm and added: “This document simply confirms what I have always known, and that is both Charlie and I were given injections by these creatures and we had the puncture wounds to prove it.”
The police secretly recorded both men, sure they would betray themselves when they thought nobody was listening.
They didn’t, and the recorded conversation demonstrated they were terrified and disturbed by what had happened.
“I have been involved in UFO research for over 40 years and spent a great deal of time investigating UFO events first-hand,” Philip points out.
“I have never come across any official documentation that confirms that ‘puncture wounds’ as described by the witnesses, have had their claims officially documented by a professional in such a manner.
“For me this is a world first. Calvin Parker’s encounter and his description of being given a shot injection by the creatures to make him relax now seems to have been confirmed.”
When Charles Hickson passed away on September 9 2011, he had never changed his story, despite ridicule and disbelief.
He had even taken a lie detector test – both men volunteered – and the examiner also believed his story.
Amazingly, other people have since come forward to say they, too, witnessed strange events on that date.
Mike Cataldo, a retired US Navy chief petty officer, said he had observed a strange craft at dusk on the same date.
Two others, Maria and Jerry Blair, were interviewed in January of this year, when they came forward after seeing Calvin Parker on TV.
Irena Scott PhD, who interviewed them, said the Blairs described how they had been sitting in their car, looking out from the east bank of the Pascagoula River. At that time, Parker and Hickson were on the west bank.
Maria saw what she “thought was an airplane because of its bright lights flashing on”.
She said it was going back and forth across the sky.
“She told Jerry that the plane must be lost because it ‘didn’t act like it knows what direction it wants to go’.”
Perhaps it knew exactly what it was doing – and perhaps we are one step closer to proving that there really are other beings out there…
The space object, which is the first interstellar phenomenon to reach our solar system, has been labelled ‘Oumuamua’ after the Hawaiian for ‘scout’. The head of astronomy at Harvard University, Avi Loeb, told Express.co.uk that he thinks it could be artificial in origin. He explained: “Oumuamua was the very first interstellar object. It was very strange on many counts.
“First, as it rotated, its brightness changed by at least a factor of ten which implies that it’s at least ten times longer than it is wide.
“That’s a very extreme shape compared to the asteroids or comets that we’ve found in the solar system.
“In addition, it has no trail around it or any traces of gases like carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide to a very tight limit.
“At the same time, the object showed a deviation from the orbit that one would expect - so there was an extra push exhibited by the orbit.
Alien Life: Harvard professor Avi Loeb thinks Oumuamua could be an alien probe
(Image: Getty )
“The possibility is that this object was extremely thin, less than a millimetre thick, and that it was pushed by sunlight.
“And that’s what we proposed in a scientific paper that was published in November 2018 where we suggested that it might be a light sail.
“Which is a technology that we’re currently developing for the purpose of propulsion in space.
“The advantage of this technology - where you basically push on a sail with light being reflected off it just like the wind is reflected off the sail of a sail boat - the advantage is that you don’t need to carry the fuel with you.
“And you can, in principle, reach a fraction of the speed of light with this technology.
“So we suggested that maybe this object is artificial in origin.
“And, of course, that got a lot of media attention.
“We didn’t intend to get this attention. We didn’t have a press release or anything.”
Some other scientists have criticised the hypothesis that the object is alien in origin.
A recent theory, posited by Zdenek Sekanina suggests that Oumuamua might be “a monstrous fluffy dust aggregate released in a recent explosive event.”
Researchers at the University of Zurich have developed a foldable drone to be used in disaster response scenarios.
It can enter inaccessible areas and stream footage to search and rescue teams.
However, experts say there are still issues with the drone that must be fixed before it is commercialized.
University of Zurich
A drone that can change shape in flight has been developed by researchers at the University of Zurich to assist with search and rescue missions.
Able to contract and fold, the aircraft can enter small cracks and spaces to stream footage to rescue teams via its two integrated cameras. The drone is designed for use in areas in disaster zones that become inaccessible to rescuers due to safety concerns or physical restrictions.
Davide Falanga, one of its developers, told CNBC on the phone that the drone could make rescue missions more efficient and effective.
”(This drone could have) multiple impacts – it can go into areas that would otherwise be inaccessible,” he said. “In the aftermath of an earthquake it could let rescuers enter and explore a collapsed building. We used the most efficient and stable systems allow it to fly longer, and have held public demonstrations in realistic scenarios which showed that this is a feasible product.
Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the project took six months to go from concept to prototype. However, as the drone is still in early development stages, its developers have no timescale for a wide rollout.
“We would be open to commercializing and discussing opportunities with investors, but at the moment there’s no commercial plan,” Falanga told CNBC. “We have sometimes had to tinker with the system when we’ve deployed it — we want it to be deployed and work immediately, so we need about six months to a year to improve the drone and make it more robust so it can work in more scenarios. But the idea itself is definitely feasible.”
University of Zurich
According to the research paper written by the drone’s developers, their aircraft “could lead to a shift in the research community towards morphing aerial vehicles.”
However, they noted that there were still several unsolved research questions, such as “automatic morphology selection,”which refers to the robot’s ability to autonomously take the best shape for the task at hand.
Unsolved problems
Mohan Sridharan, senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Computer Science, told CNBC via email that foldable drones were being explored by the wider robotics research community, with several concepts currently in development.
“This would indeed help in disaster response, but the stable navigation of such a drone is not a solved problem,” he said. “Also, complex applications such as disaster response pose other challenges related to perception, reasoning, and communication.”
Maria Kamargianni, lecturer in transport and energy at University College London, told CNBC on the phone that privacy concerns would need to be addressed before the drone could be commercialized.
“This is a very promising technology for search and rescue projects, and it’s much more economically viable than existing options. In circumstances where a helicopter or a drone could be used, a drone would be much cheaper to deploy,” she said.
“The technology has lots of other applications as well — for example, it could be used to examine the quality of materials on a collapsed bridge. But technologies must be developed in line with public acceptance of them, so these drones should be designed in a way that notifies the public they are being used by the authorities — this could be done by using distinctive colors. In rolling them out companies would also have to make sure they are not violating personal data regulations.”
An image used by Air Midwest on social media to represent the sighting.
(Image credit: Air Midwest / Facebook)
Air Midwest—a flight training and aviation service company—recently released information detailing a series of strange lights spotted by two of their aircraft south of Gloucester, England on February 14th between 8:15-8:45 p.m.
The has been a lot of interest in the fact that our pilots observed ‘UFO’s’ last night during night flying exercises... so here is a brief summary of the situation. Event - unidentified airborne nocturnal lights. Location- south of Gloucester. Timings - 20:15 - 20:45 ZULU Event outline- 2 of our aircraft were conducting night navigation exercises to the south and south east of our home airfield. At approximately 20:15 one of our aircraft was tracking south towards Gloucester at 7000ft after leaving the the Birmingham air traffic zone. At the same time one of our other aircraft was also tracking south towards Gloucester at 4000ft when both aircraft observed one red and one orange lights in the the sky south of Gloucester. Our aircraft approached the lights on an interception track but were unable to gain on the objects as they appeared to move further south of Gloucester as our aircraft approached. We were unable to identify the lights. One of our pilots filed the following report on the event -
“I observed Initially 2 large square orange lights. One on top of each but slightly off set however there was a gap in height between them.
The top object was constantly orange. The lower one occasionally flicked white but majority of time was orange. In addition to that on 2 occasions I observed 5 orange lights but that was momentary.
I initially observed them when leaving Birmingham control zone. I thought they were just south of Gloucester and definitely a lot higher then us. We then climbed 5000 ft and they seemed level at that height and stationary.
As we approached Gloucester came apparent they were now further south maybe beyond Bristol even as far as Weston super-mare but directly south of Gloucester airport.
On our return leg up to EGBO (our home base) by Worcester we climbed 7000 ft and commenced a turn to observe the lights. At this point they seemed lower than us in the same place and stationary.
I have no idea what these objects were”
That is all we can say on the matter. Night glow balloons? But unlikely as these do not move very fast at all. So what they were? We have no idea. An interesting event.
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According to a statement made by Air Midwest, two of the company's aircraft were conducting nighttime navigation exercises to the south and southeast of their home airfield when the encounter occurred.
Around 8:15 p.m, one of the aircraft was tracking south towards Gloucester at 7,000 feet after leaving the Birmingham air traffic zone. Meanwhile, a second aircraft was also tracking south towards Gloucester at 4,000 feet.
Both aircraft observed two lights—one red and one orange—in the sky south of Gloucester. The aircraft approached the lights on an interception track, but were unable to gain on the objects as they appeared to move further south of Gloucester as the aircraft approached.
The pilots and air traffic control were unable to identify the lights.
One of the pilot’s reports was included with the statement.
I observed initially 2 large square orange lights. One on top of each but slightly off set however there was a gap in height between them.
The top object was constantly orange. The lower one occasionally flicked white but majority of time was orange. In addition to that on 2 occasions I observed 5 orange lights but that was momentary.
I initially observed them when leaving Birmingham control zone. I thought they were just south of Gloucester and definitely a lot higher then us. We then climbed 5000 ft and they seemed level at that height and stationary.
As we approached Gloucester came apparent they were now further south maybe beyond Bristol even as far as Weston super-mare but directly south of Gloucester airport.
On our return leg up to EGBO (our home base) by Worcester we climbed 7000 ft and commenced a turn to observe the lights. At this point they seemed lower than us in the same place and stationary.
I have no idea what these objects were.
Air Midwest also released two radio transmissions related to the sightings.
"This first one is the pilot of callsign ‘Golf-Sierra India’ calling air traffic control our our home airfield," a statement included with the recording said. "In this radio call the pilot believes he may be under a laser attack from the ground. We are unsure if this event is involved with the main event. In this case a bright laser-like light illuminated the cockpit. Immediately after this the main lights were observed that we refer to in the post."
"This second recording is between two pilots of callsign ‘Golf-Sierra India’ and ‘Golf- Alpha Mike’. The response of ‘Alpha Mikes’ captain is humorous as at the time he believes the light must be a normal event," said a statement accompanying the second recording.
The company later clarified their previous statement by insisting they had never claimed to have "encountered an extraterrestrial situation."
"We encountered unexplained airborne lights that defied our normal expectation of standard aircraft or meteorological activity," said the second statement. "We considered it could be night glow hot air balloons, but we are not aware any any such activities taking place and the objects observed seemed to move from their original location to another with a rapidity not in line with balloon activity...but of course the apparent changes of location could have been an optical illusion due to night effect."
"In conclusion, our pilots, both senior flight instructors and highly experienced commercial airline pilots with over 25,000 flying hours between them, together with their crews observed airborne lights the nature of which they were unable to identify," continued the statement. "For this fact alone we obviously can only describe the observations as ‘Unidentified Flying or Airborne Objects’. Hence referring to them as UFO’s, as that is what they were."
"We have no idea as to the origin of the objects and as yet we have not yet come across any standard explanation for what the objects could have been," it concluded.
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Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader and Nevada Senator Harry Reid argued for continued study into UFO phenomena in an interview with CBS affiliate KLAS 8 in Las Vegas, citing competition from Russia and China—a UFO race, of sorts.
“I’ll bet you anything that China is spending some money checking this out. I’ll bet you anything KGB Putin is spending some money checking this out,” Reid told George Knapp of Las Vegas Now’s I-Team.
“Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid dropped major hints that he knows potential adversaries, Russia and China, have carried out their own military studies to figure out how UFOs work and how to build their own,” Knapp said during the broadcast, citing anonymous Pentagon sources to claim dozens of UFOs have been encountered off the coast of Florida and Virginia in the last three years.
Reid said he understands why officials within the Pentagon and other possible research avenues within the U.S. government might be skeptical about dedicating resources to studying Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP), but he also seemed to unwittingly undercut his own position by alluding to a rash of recent UFO sightings prompted by scheduled SpaceX launches.
“This has been going on for a long time. These sightings are said to have been set off by a rocket in California or something. People do not want—people in responsibility, whether it’s the Pentagon or whatever it might be—they don’t want to have to try to explain something that’s, many times, not explainable,” Reid said.
The interview with Reid also delved into classified UFO studies conducted by the Pentagon and revealed by The New York Times in 2017, including the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program (AAWSAP), which catalogued sightings by military personnel, such as the “Tic Tac” UFO captured on camera by F/A-18F fighter jets off the coast of California in 2004.
Through AAWSAP, the Defense Intelligence Agency awarded a $10 million contract to Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), owned by hotel billionaire Robert Bigelow, a close friend of Reid’s who has a long history of investigating the UFO phenomena.
Reid confirmed the resulting study included investigations of a mysterious ranch in northeastern Utah once owned by Bigelow (ownership has since transferred to Adamantium Real Estate and an anonymous owner). Known in UFO circles as “Skinwalker Ranch,” the site has been a hotbed of reported paranormal phenomena, including claims of cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, and even mysterious animals with piercing yellow eyes that were impervious to bullets.
The program also delved into research related to the UFO phenomena, including 38 scientific papers for the Defense Intelligence Agency with outlandish headlines like “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions” and “Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy.”
The papers were produced by BAASS scientists affiliated with EarthTech International, a research group founded by Dr. Hal Puthoff, a physicist with a long history of promoting pseudoscience, including endorsing psychic fraud Uri Geller and writing in defense of Scientology, which he described as “a highly sophisticated and highly technological system” in a letter from the 1970s.
Accordingly, the AAWSAP research so far made public has not found a positive reception. “It’s bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications, which it doesn’t.” Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech, told Business Insider in 2018. "This is not crackpot. This is not the Maharishi saying we're going to use spirit energy to fly off the ground—this is real physics. But this is not something that's going to connect with engineering anytime soon, probably anytime ever."
Beyond AAWSAP, and its successor within the Pentagon, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Reid said he believes further study is warranted and would like to see UFO research coordinated across multiple, existing classified projects. Reid believes the government currently possesses “different pieces of evidence” beyond the scope of studies he had worked to fund.
SpaceX began in 2002, when its founder, Elon Musk, took the first steps in his grand ambition to send a mission to Mars. More than 15 years later, the company is way beyond the space startup stage.
The Hawthorne, California-based company regularly reuses rockets, sends cargo missions to the International Space Station with the uncrewed Dragon spacecraft and will fly astronauts for NASA in the future. In 2018, SpaceX launched the massive Falcon Heavy and has plans for an even larger rocket to reach Mars: the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR).
Read more about SpaceX's history of rockets and spacecraft development in the following slideshow.
Falcon 1
SpaceX
The Falcon 1 was the first rocket manufactured by SpaceX. It had a proposed capacity to carry 670 kilograms (1,480 lbs.) to low Earth orbit, and it flew between 2006 and 2009. After three launch failures, Falcon 1 sent a dummy payload to space on Sept. 29, 2008. Its fifth and final launch, on July 14, 2009, sent RazakSAT, a Malaysian Earth-observation satellite, into orbit. Falcon 1 rockets launched from Omelek Island, part of the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. And in case you're wondering, Musk named the Falcon rockets after the Millennium Falcon ship from "Star Wars."
Developing Falcon 9
SpaceX
SpaceX quickly received interest from several companies looking for a heavier-lift rocket. The company had considered developing an intermediary rocket called the Falcon 5, but instead skipped ahead and began work on the Falcon 9. This rocket can send a payload to low Earth orbit weighing up to 28,991 lbs. (13,150 kg). It is a two-stage rocket. SpaceX first advertised plans for the Falcon 9 in 2005 and sent the debut Falcon 9 aloft on June 7, 2010, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Early customers of the rocket included Bigelow Aerospace; Avanti Communications; and MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates.
In 2015, SpaceX was also trying to land on drone ships in the ocean. While these landings kept ending with failure, Musk would post the videos and pictures on his Twitter feed, acknowledging mistakes made, and the company would work on improving for the next flight.
Dragon dreams
SpaceX
SpaceX kept the first 18 months of the Dragon cargo ship's development under wraps. Then, in March 2006, the company officially made Dragon public when the company submitted a proposal for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration program. The ultimate goal was to develop a private spacecraft to ferry cargo to the International Space Station.
After Spacex hit several milestones, NASA selected SpaceX's Dragon in December 2008 to be one of the companies providing commercial resupply services to the space station. SpaceX's contract value at that time was a minimum of $1.6 billion, with options to extend to $3.1 billion; the company has since received a new contract for cargo launch services. Musk has confirmed that he named Dragon after "Puff the Magic Dragon."
Early Dragon flights
SpaceX
Dragon made a successful maiden flight on Dec. 8, 2010, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Then, on May 22, 2012, Dragon launched for an important test: an attempt to berth the spacecraft with the International Space Station. Dragon made it to the station safely on May 25 of that year, despite experiencing some problems with a laser system that was supposed to judge the craft's distance to the orbiting complex. The milestone prompted worldwide acclaim. It was the first time a private spacecraft docked with the space station. SpaceX has since upgraded its uncrewed Dragon cargo ships to be reusable for at least two flights.
Grasshopper
Chris Thompson/SpaceX
Grasshopper was a rocket prototype flown at SpaceX's McGregor, Texas, proving grounds to give the company more experience in landing boosters vertically. While Grasshopper did not get as much media attention as SpaceX's other programs, it was key to furthering the development of Falcon 9's reusable first stage. The Grasshopper rocket made eight test flights between 2012 and 2013, with the final flight seeing Grasshopper soar to 2,440 feet (744 meters). The Grasshopper program was then retired so SpaceX could focus more resources on Falcon 9's development.
Falcon 9 Reusable Development Vehicle
SpaceX
SpaceX announced the Falcon 9 Reusable Development Vehicle in 2012, which was based on the first stage of the Falcon 9. The company made five flights of this system at the SpaceX McGregor site between April and August 2014, with the maximum altitude on some flights exceeding 3,280 feet (1,000 m). The last booster, which launched on Aug. 22, 2014, exploded due to a blocked sensor.
SpaceX's first rocket landing pad
SpaceX
This picture shows Landing Zone 1, a ground landing zone for the Falcon 9's first stage at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. This is where SpaceX made the first of its controlled ground landings, on Dec. 21, 2015. The company built the pad on land leased from the U.S. Air Force on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. (Landing Zone 1 is on land that used to host Launch Complex 13.) This landing was extra-sweet because the previous Falcon 9 flight, in June 2015, ended catastrophically with an explosion.
Reusing rockets
SpaceX
Right from the beginning of Falcon 9's history, SpaceX was interested in reusing the first stage of the rocket to save on launch costs. Early tests of the landing were unsuccessful, however. SpaceX made attempts on the first, second and sixth launches of the Falcon 9 to control the booster's landing, but in each case, the stage slammed down into the ocean. SpaceX finally achieved a controlled ocean landing on Falcon 9's ninth launch (the fourth controlled-landing attempt), on April 18, 2014. This was an important stepping stone in the path to eventual reusability.
Drone-ship landing
SpaceX
The persistence exhibited by Musk and his employees finally paid off on April 8, 2016, when a Falcon 9 first stage touched down softly on a drone ship called "Of Course I Still Love You" in the Atlantic Ocean. The Dragon spacecraft that this Falcon 9 carried aloft also had a milestone flight, delivering an inflatable module — the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module — to the International Space Station.
SpaceX's success rate with drone landings improved drastically after the April 2016 flight, although some boosters still missed the mark from time to time. The company's Falcon 9 flight success rate is also strong; its last failure, in September 2016, saw a rocket explode on the launch pad before taking off. SpaceX has a second drone ship, "Just Read the Instructions," which is used for Pacific Ocean landings after launches from Vandenberg Air Force Station in California. Both ships are named for fictional starships in the science fiction books of Iain M. Banks.
Falcon Heavy's maiden flight
SpaceX
The Falcon Heavy rocket, a heavy-lift version of the Falcon series, had a successful debut flight on Feb. 6, 2018, launching from NASA's Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket successfully launched a Tesla car into space. (Musk is also the CEO of Tesla Motors.) The Falcon Heavy is 230 feet tall (70 m) and can lift nearly 141,000 lbs. (64 metric tons) of payload to low Earth orbit. This is twice what its closest competitor, the United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy, can hoist into orbit.
Falcon Heavy's rocket landing ballet
SpaceX
This picture shows Falcon Heavy's twin side boosters landing successfully after the rocket's maiden flight, on Feb. 6, 2018. While the booster stages touched down safely at Landing Zones 1 and 2 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, near the Kennedy Space Center, the rocket's core stage hit the ocean at high speed. The rocket stage carrying the Tesla car underwent one last burn to send the car toward the orbit of Mars. However, as Space.com sister site Live Science reported, radiation could destroy the car within a year.
Riding inside the Dragon
SpaceX
While launching commercial missions, SpaceX also began developing a human-rated version of the Dragon spacecraft to bring astronauts to the International Space Station. The company received a contract in 2014 valued at a maximum of $2.6 billion for these launch services. In September 2015, SpaceX showed the world the inside of the crew quarters. The minimalist design has white walls, black bucket seats, several flat-panel displays and four windows for passengers to see outside.
Crew Dragon vs. cargo
SpaceX
SpaceX intended that the crew and cargo versions of Dragon be very similar, in order to speed up development of the crewed ship. "This commonality simplifies the human-rating process, allowing systems critical to crew and space station safety to be fully tested on unmanned cargo flights.," SpaceX stated.
Crew Dragon flight tests
Ben Cooper/SpaceX
SpaceX is hard at work on developing the crewed Dragon for two commercial crew test-flights, which will fly no earlier than late 2018. NASA is trying to wean itself off dependence on the Russian Soyuz vehicle that currently ferries all astronauts to the International Space Station. Each astronaut seat on the Soyuz costs NASA millions of dollars. Also, the agency tries to use U.S. launch services for launch when possible. The last crewed launch from U.S. soil took place in 2011, during the last flight of the space shuttle program.
More Falcon Heavy flights
SpaceX
Falcon Heavy launches are sold for about $90 million apiece, compared with $62 million for Falcon 9 launches. SpaceX plans to launch two more Falcon Heavy missions in 2018: one carrying the Arabsat 6A communications satellite and the other hoisting Space Test Program 2 for the U.S. Air Force (along with the Planetary Society's LightSail 2).
The Falcon 9 Block 5
Elon Musk/Instagram
In May 2018, SpaceX unveiled the fifth and final version of the company's Falcon 9 rocket: the Block 5 booster. Designed for maximum reusability (the target is at least 10 flights), this booster will launch astronauts into space on Dragon capsules for NASA. The first Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket was built to launch Bangabandhu-1, the first communications satellite for the country of Bangladesh.
Starship and Super Heavy
SpaceX
Starship and Super Heavy make up a futuristic system intended for Mars exploration. In its Red Planet configurations, the BFR will be 348 feet (106 m) tall (including the spaceship) and capable of bringing 150 tons (136 metric tons) to low Earth orbit. Each rocket will carry about 100 people, and the rocket will be fully reusable. Musk said he plans to use this rocket in fleets, bringing hundreds or thousands of passengers at a time to Mars. In the 2020s, Musk plans to halt all Falcon lines except for BFR, which would perform all sorts of missions. Destinations would range from Mars to the International Space Station to orbits that would launch satellites near Earth.
SpaceX's famous "Starman" dummy onboard the inaugural Falcon Heavy launch in 2018 is about to have some competition — from a new dummy, named Ripley, who will fly on the first test mission of the company'sCrew Dragon capsule.
Ripley is not onboard to be dead weight: It is packed with a range of sensors that SpaceX engineers will use to monitor the journey to and from the International Space Station.
"We call it a smartie, and her [sic] name is Ripley," SpaceX vice president of Build and Flight Reliability Hans Koenigsmann said of the dummy during a news conference Thursday (Feb. 28) previewing the mission's launch, which is scheduled for early in the morning of March 2. Liftoff is set for 2:49 a.m. EST (0749 GMT).
The name is a nod to Ellen Ripley, the main character of the 1979 movie "Alien" and some of its sequels. The name follows a SpaceX trend of naming things after science fiction icons. It's first spacesuit-clad figure (launched in a Tesla Roadster by a Falcon Heavy rocket in 2018) was called "Starman" in honor of David Bowie's sci-fi themed music. The Falcon rockets themselves are named after the Millennium Falcon from "Star Wars."
SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk unveiled the first glimpse of the Ripley dummy on Friday (March 1) via Twitter.
The dummy is part of a full suite of sensors aboard the uncrewed mission, which will produce data that SpaceX and NASA will rely on for future, crewed missions. "We instrumented the crap out of this vehicle; it's got data, sensors everywhere," Kathy Lueders, manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said during the news conference. "Actually having a re-entry, with Ripley in the seat, in the position, is critical."
The sensors inside the Ripley dummy will measure forces and acceleration experienced by a future human passenger, as well as the environment around them.
Ripley stars in the 1979 movie "Alien" and its later sequels.
"The goal is to get an idea of how humans would feel in her [sic] place, basically," Koenigsmann said. "I don't expect, actually, a lot of surprises there, but it's better to verify, make sure that it's safe and everything's comfortable for our astronauts going on the next flight of the capsule."
Fortunately, Ripley the dummy's odds of encountering any chestbursters on the flight are pretty slim.
Crew Dragon van SpaceX met succes gelanceerd. Nu brengt hij dummy ruimte in, deze zomer volgen echte astronauten - HLN.be
Crew Dragon van SpaceX met succes gelanceerd. Nu brengt hij dummy ruimte in, deze zomer volgen echte astronauten - HLN.be
SpaceXDe Crew Dragon vertrekt op hetzelfde lanceringsplatform als de legendarische Appolovluchten naar de maan. Links Ripley, die klaarzit voor vertrek. Naast haar een toestel dat de zwaartekracht registreert, zo meldt Elon Musk op Twitter.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETOp de Amerikaanse lanceerbasis Cape Canaveral in Florida is de Crew Dragon gelanceerd, een ruimtecapsule van het ruimtevaartbedrijf SpaceX van Elon Musk. De operatie is succesvol verlopen en de stuwraketten zijn teruggekeerd naar de aarde. De capsule vliegt nu zelfstandig in de ruimte. Als alles goed gaat, moet SpaceX in juli voor de allereerste keer astronauten naar het internationaal ruimtestation ISS brengen.
Het zou voor het eerst zijn dat een commercieel bedrijf zoiets doet. Vandaag is alleen een dummy aan boord: Ripley, naar de heldin uit de bekende Alien-films.
De ruimtecapsule werd om 8.49 uur Belgische tijd gelanceerd, 2.49 uur plaatselijke tijd. Vannacht meldde SpaceX dat alle systemen paraat waren en ook het weer goed zat. De Crew Dragon en de Falcon 9-raket - waarop die bevestigd is - vertrokken vanop het historische Launch Complex 39A op Cape Canaveral, waar in de jaren 60 en 70 ook de legendarische Apollovluchten van ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA naar de maan vertrokken.
De testvlucht zal in totaal zes dagen duren. Morgen komt de capsule met Ripley aan boord aan bij het ISS, waar ze volautomatisch zal aankoppelen. Als de drie bewoners van het ruimtestation de 200 kilogram materiaal en voorraden aan boord uitgeladen hebben en de spullen die ze niet meer nodig hebben ingeladen, zal de Crew Dragon op 8 maart terugkeren naar de aarde. Tijdens de vlucht zullen de NASA en SpaceX gegevens verzamelen. Ripley – die het strakke witte ruimtepak van SpaceX draagt dat ook toekomstige astronauten aan zullen hebben – is uitgerust met sensoren, die de impact van de reis op de dummy moeten meten. Dat zullen immers ook krachten zijn die de astronauten zullen ondervinden. Indien nodig zullen na de vlucht nog aanpassingen aan het toestel of de stuwraketten gebeuren. Als alles goed gaat, gaan dan in juli de allereerste echte astronauten aan boord van een toestel van SpaceX.
Dat zal overigens een historisch moment zijn. Het is intussen acht jaar geleden dat er nog astronauten naar de ruimte vertrokken vanop Amerikaans bodem. Ze moeten nu nog ‘meeliften’ met Russische toestellen.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETMarslander Insight, het jongste project van de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA op de rode planeet, is begonnen met boren in het oppervlakte van Mars. Helemaal vlotjes verloopt dat nog niet vanwege dwarsliggende stenen.
De door Polen en Duitsland gefabriceerde boormachine van de Marslander is op keien gestuit die het vooralsnog lastig maken dieper te gaan. Bedoeling was tot vijf meter diep te gaan maar vooralsnog komt de boor niet verder dan een centimeter of vijftig, bevestigt het German Aerospace Center. Volgens de ingenieurs werkt de ‘hamerboor’ goed, maar zit het tegen wat betreft de boorplek door onvoorziene stenen.
Als een diepte van vijf meter wordt gehaald is dat een buitenaards record, aldus NASA. Bedoeling van het boren is onder meer de ondergrondse temperatuur te meten. Volgens de ingenieurs kan de robotgestuurde arm met de boor de problemen oplossen, maar dat kost tijd.
InSight (de naam staat voor: Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is een missie van het zogeheten ‘NASA’s Discoveryprogramma’ om de inwendige structuur van Mars en andere planeten te onderzoeken. Insight landde afgelopen november op de rode planeet en heeft al prachtige foto’s gestuurd en ook opnames gemaakt van de wind op de rode planeet. Er is ook een seismometer geplaatst om eventuele aardbevingen te registreren.
Marslander InSight landde op 26 november 2018 geland in het gebied Elysium Planitia, een vlakte nabij de evenaar van Mars. Voor de liefhebber: op ongeveer 600 km afstand van de Gale krater waar in 2012 het Marswagentje Curiosity is geland.
APDe boor van de Marslander.
Bekijk ook: Marslander InSight succesvol geland op rode planeet
REUTERSDe iconische beelden op Paaseiland of Rapa Nui kijken allemaal uit naar de zee.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETZe staan er al meer dan 500 jaar, als stille en mysterieuze getuigen van een verloren gegane beschaving: de wereldberoemde beelden op het Chileense Paaseiland. Maar als er niet snel wordt ingegrepen, zal er over honderd jaar niets anders meer overblijven van de beelden dan rechthoekige stenen.
De eeuwen geleden uitgehouwen beelden vertegenwoordigen de voorouders van de Polynesische bevolking van Paaseiland, de Rapa Nui, en behoren tot het UNESCO Werelderfgoed. De honderden grote hoofden staan langs de kustlijn van het kleine eiland, een van de meest geïsoleerde ter wereld. Nog altijd vragen archeologen zich af hoe de inwoners de duizenden kilo’s zware beelden ooit op hun plaats hebben kunnen zetten. Paaseiland ligt op 3.500 kilometer van het vasteland en meer dan 2.000 kilometer verwijderd van het dichtstbijzijnde eiland, Pitcairn.
Maar de beelden lijden volgens wetenschappers aan een soort ‘lepra’. Ze krijgen witte vlekken op hun gezichten. De korstmossen, een combinatie van fungus en algen, vreten de beelden aan, waardoor het steen zacht als klei wordt en van vorm verandert. De beelden lijden bovendien door erosie, de stijgende zeespiegel, harde wind en vee dat tussen ze door graast.
REUTERS
70 procent al aangetast
Zeventig procent van de hoofden zou al zijn aangetast. Volgens archeologen kunnen de beelden nog worden gered als ze worden schoongemaakt en een coating krijgen die de poreuze steen beschermt, maar dan moet dat wel snel gebeuren. “Ik vermoed dat de Moai-beelden over een eeuw niet meer dan rechthoekige blokken zullen zijn”, aldus Tahira Edmunds, expert bij de Chileense overheid.
De kosten om alle beelden te beschermen zouden kunnen oplopen tot 500 miljoen dollar, reden waarom Paaseiland ook om internationale hulp vraagt. De inwoners en lokale wetenschappers halen het geld om de beelden te beschermen nu vooral uit het duurzame toerisme, maar dat volstaat niet.
De burgemeester van het eiland stelt daarom ook voor om geld te vragen van de landen die in het verleden beelden hebben meegenomen om in hun musea tentoon te stellen. Zo staat er een meer dan twee meter hoog beeld tentoongesteld in het British Museum in Londen, nadat het meer dan 150 jaar geleden door Britse zeevaarders werd meegenomen. In november al bezocht een Chileense delegatie het museum, dat bereid is na te denken over een vergoeding voor de ‘uitleen’ van het beeld. “Het museum kijkt uit naar samenwerking met partners van over heel de wereld en verwelkomt de voorstellen rond toekomstige projecten met Rapa Nui”, zegt het British Museum in een mededeling.
REUTERS
Verschillende beelden zijn er al slecht aan toe.
ThinkStock
AP
rv
Paaseiland is maar 25 op 12 kilometer groot en is een van de meest afgelegen bewoonde eilanden ter wereld.
The fabled Planet 9 orbiting beyond Pluto in the depths of the solar system will be discovered in the next ten to 15 years, scientists claim.
Two studies have been released stating the mythical planet is not only real but will be found before 2030.
One of the papers claims the planet will be 400 astronomical units (AU) away from Earth - approximately 37 billion miles - and be five to ten times the mass of our planet.
It has never been directly seen but its presence has been inferred from various calculations of its gravity on other objects.
These 'trans-Neptunian objects' lie beyond the furthest gas giant and in the Kuiper Belt.
Scroll down for video
Planet 9 is theorised but has never been seen before. It orbits beyond Pluto in the depths of the solar system and will be discovered in the next ten to 15 years, scientists claim. it is also said to be bigger than Earth but smaller than the existing gas giants (pictured)
Caltech researchers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin published data supporting the presence of 'Planet Nine' in 2016.
They identified wobbles in the orbits of the solar system's most distant objects and put this down to the gravitational pull of a vast and unidentified planet.
It was dubbed Planet 9 and the theory stating its existence is now widely accepted.
The researchers published their data in the journal The Astronomical Journal and looked into the likelihood previous observations indicating Planet 9's existence were down to chance.
They found the probability of this being down to bias was one in 500.
'Though this analysis does not say anything directly about whether Planet Nine is there, it does indicate that the hypothesis rests upon a solid foundation,' says Dr Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg, a professor of planetary astronomy.
Fred Adams, co-author of the study, said: 'With its proposed properties, Planet Nine is right on the edge of being observable.
'But this is a very dim object in a very big sky. Since we don't know exactly where it is, you have to survey the whole sky, or at least large portions of it, in order to find the planet.
'Over the course of the next 10 years we will have deeper and deeper—which means more sensitive—sky surveys.
'So I think by 2030 we will have seen it or will have a better idea of where it is. Of course, it's also possible that by then we could also have alternate explanations for the observed orbital anomalies.'
The second paper, published in Physics Reports, estimated the size of the planet.
Caltech researchers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin published data supporting the presence of 'Planet Nine' in 2016. They identified wobbles in the orbits of the solar system's most distant objects and put this down to the gravitational pull of an unidentified planet (artist's impression)
It claims it will be closer to the Sun than previously thought and will be up to ten time the mass of Earth.
Calculations from the researchers state it is likely to be 400 astronomical units (AU) away from Earth - approximately 37 billion miles.
One AU is the distance between Earth and the sun.
'At five Earth masses, Planet Nine is likely to be very reminiscent of a typical extrasolar super-Earth,' Dr Batygin said in a statement.
'It is the solar system's missing link of planet formation. Over the last decade, surveys of extrasolar planets have revealed that similar-sized planets are very common around other sun-like stars. Planet Nine is going to be the closest thing we will find to a window into the properties of a typical planet of our galaxy.'
Fred Adams, Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan, added: 'The strongest argument in favour of Planet Nine is that independent lines of evidence can all be explained by a proposed new planet with the same properties. In other words, there are multiple reasons to believe that Planet Nine is real, not just one.'
WHAT IS MYSTERIOUS 'PLANET X'?
Astronomers believe that the orbits of a number of bodies in the distant reaches of the solar system have been disrupted by the pull of an as yet unidentified planet.
First proposed by a group at CalTech in the US, this alien world was theorised to explain the distorted paths seen in distant icy bodies.
In order to fit in with the data they have, this alien world - popularly called Planet Nine - would need to be roughly four time the size of Earth and ten times the mass.
Researchers say a body of this size and mass would explain the clustered paths of a number of icy minor planets beyond Neptune.
First proposed by a group at CalTech in the US, this alien world was theorised to explain the distorted paths seen in distant icy bodies.
Its huge orbit would mean it takes between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make a single pass around the sun.
The theoretical Planet Nine is based on the gravitational pull it exerts on these bodies, with astronomers confident it will be found in the coming years.
Those hoping for theoretical Earth-sized planets proposed by astrologers or science fiction writers - which are 'hiding behind the sun' and linked with Doomsday scenarios - may have to keep searching.
Mysterieuze Planeet X wordt binnen 10 jaar gevonden, claimen deze astronomen
Mysterieuze Planeet X wordt binnen 10 jaar gevonden, claimen deze astronomen
Het gedrag van een aantal ijsdwergen in de buitenste regionen van ons zonnestelsel kan het beste worden verklaard door een nog onontdekte planeet. Dat schrijven Konstantin Batygin en Mike Brown in het tijdschrift Physics Reports.
Zij presenteerden drie jaar geleden hun theorie dat er ver buiten de baan van Neptunus nog een zware planeet om de zon draait.
Op basis van nieuwe berekeningen zeggen de astronomen vanCaltechdat deze planeet, ook wel Planeet X genoemd, ongeveer vijf tot 10 keer zoveel massa heeft als de aarde en 400 keer zo ver van de zon staat.
Superaardes
Daarmee zal de planeet erg doen denken aan superaardes die in andere zonnestelsels zijn ontdekt.
Batygin en Brown speuren al geruime tijd tevergeefs naar de planeet. Ze verwachten het hemellichaam binnen 10 tot 15 jaar te ontdekken.
Rond 2030
Coauteur van de studie Fred Adams zei: “Het is een heel zwak object en omdat we niet precies weten waar het staat moeten we de hele hemel afspeuren, of in ieder geval grote delen ervan, om het te vinden.”
“Ik denk dat we het rond 2030 hebben gevonden of in ieder geval weten waar het zich ongeveer bevindt,” voegde hij toe.
There’s something about the Jorge Chavez International Airport located in Callao, just 11 km (7 mi) from Lima, Peru, that seems to attract UFOs. There have been a number of sightings there in recent years, including two different incidents in 2017 that reportedly forced the airport to close and turn away incoming flights. The latest occurred this week when two UFOs were spotted by airport staff, who submitted a report showing the objects hovered over one runway for just under an hour. Is Jorge Cavez the UFO equivalent of the perpetual holding patterns over the Atlanta airport?
Jorge Chavez International Airport
“At 01:30 am we see from the tower two UFOs just west of the station, at approximately 9,000 feet. (…) One of the objects appears at times on the radar screen. At 02:12 am the objects no longer appear in view of the control tower.”
That’s from an official report submitted on February 27th by airport control tower employees of CORPAC (Peruvian Airports and Commercial Aviation Corporation), the private company which provides air traffic control services to the airport. According to translations, the report states that a number of pilots saw the UFOs or UAPs (Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena) and they appeared on radar shortly before disappearing. (Multiple photos here and here. Photo of the report here.)
“Since yesterday, Wednesday 27, it has already been confirmed from CORPAC , with an official document, the presence of two Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (FAN), which have been positioned on runway 33 of Jorge Chávez International Airport , and has been seen – among others- by the ground crew of two planes that covered the route Lima-Córdoba and Lima-Quito.”
Peruvian ufologist Anthony Choy is conveniently based in Lima and, while he didn’t witness the UFOs themselves, confirmed the validity of the control tower report. He also pointed out in an interview that:
” … in these 19 years that I have been investigating these issues, it is the first time that there is an official report, it is a fact without comparison in our country.”
“Official” is the key word in that comment, since there was a sighting of 12 UFOs at the same airport on February 12th, 2017, that halted all flights for three hours. However, there was no official report on that one and the media didn’t cover it until internal CORPAC reports were obtained somehow by ufologist Mario Zegarra, who leaked them to the press. A second UFO incident at the airport on February 7th was also leaked to the media.
As expected, the number one speculation about the 2019 UFOs is drones. If that’s the case, they’re probably not civilian drones because of the altitude (9,000 ft., 1.7 miles, 2.75 km) and the amount of time they were able to hover motionless (at least 42 minutes with some reports saying it was more like an hour). Also, a large international airport like Jorge Chavez – which handles 22 million passengers per year – would have at least called in the military or local police if the facility was truly shut down by personal drones.
That leads to the question … were they military drones? There’s no doubt military drones could handle the altitude and time aloft. It might also explain why the military wasn’t called in to deal with them. Was it a training or emergency exercise? That might make sense, considering the sighting occurred during the low-activity middle-of-the-night time period. It could also explain why it was kept quiet – did the exercise show flaws in the airport’s response system?
If not drones, military or otherwise, could it be … aliens? Why would aliens hover over an airport in Peru when the nearby mountains are full of cattle to mutilate and mines to steal silver and copper from? The report and the photos do not show flashing lights or other spacecraft indicators. A closer look at the radar image might give some clues, but it doesn’t seem that anyone asked for those.
Or did they?
For now, the latest UFOs over Jorge Chavez International Airport remain unidentified and mysterious.
Low-level clouds that cover the oceans could DISAPPEAR in the next century as a result of rising CO2 levels and cause climate change to spiral out of control, study warns
Low-level clouds that cover the oceans could DISAPPEAR in the next century as a result of rising CO2 levels and cause climate change to spiral out of control, study warns
Study found that marine stratocumulus clouds become unstable with high CO2
Researchers say the effect was seen with carbon levels at 1200 parts per million
Atmospheric carbon dioxide is currently at about 410 ppm, and continues to rise
If marine stratus clouds disappear Earth's temperature would dramatically spike
This is according to a new study, which found that high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide cause marine stratus clouds to break up and, eventually, disappear.
Without these clouds, the surface would be exposed to more extreme levels of sunlight, risking global temperature increases upwards of 14 degrees Fahrenheit.
Rising greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere could eventually drive low-level clouds out of the skies. And, this could make global warming much, much worse. A file photo of marine stratocumulus clouds is pictured
WHAT WAS THE PALEOCENE-EOCENE THERMAL MAXIMUM?
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a global warming event that occurred about 56 million years ago.
During this time, scientists estimate about 3,000 to 7,000 gigatons of carbon accumulated over a period of 3,000 to 20,000 years.
This lead global temperatures to spike by 5 to 8 degrees Celsius (9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit), bringing the average as high as 23 degrees Celsius (73 degrees Fahrenheit).
It lead to dramatic changes in Earth’s climate, driving major organisms to extinction and forcing others to migrate.
The shocking scenario could help to explain what happened during an extreme warming period roughly 56 million years ago, during what’s known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).
And, it provides worrying insight as to what could happen if global carbon emissions aren’t curbed, the researchers say.
During the PETM, Earth experienced a mysterious spike in carbon dioxide that caused the greenhouse gas to accumulate in the atmosphere at extreme amounts over thousands of years.
As a result, temperatures rose globally by 5 to 8 degrees Celsius (9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit), bringing the average as high as 23 degrees Celsius (73 degrees Fahrenheit).
According to the new study led by researchers at California Institute of Technology, CO2 concentrations higher than 1,200 parts per million (ppm) could push Earth to a tipping point in which marine stratus clouds become unstable.
When these clouds disappear, surface temperatures dramatically increase.
Stratus cloud decks cover about a fifth of subtropical oceans, and shade Earth’s surface from sunlight by reflecting it back to space.
Atmospheric carbon currently sits at around 410 ppm, and is still rising. If emissions continue at the current rates, the researchers say atmospheric CO2 could hit 1,200 in the next century.
‘I think and hope that technological changes will slow carbon emissions so that we do not actually reach such high CO2 concentrations,’ says Tapio Schneider, Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech, and senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
According to the new study led by researchers at California Institute of Technology, CO2 concentrations higher than 1,200 parts per million (ppm) could push Earth to a tipping point in which marine stratus clouds become unstable
‘But our results show that there are dangerous climate change thresholds that we had been unaware of,' the researcher says.
The supercomputer models also suggest the cloud decks won’t return until CO2 levels drop back down below 1,200 ppm.
And, there’s no telling how long that could take.
According to the researchers, these clouds are difficult to resolve in global climate models due to the small scale of the air motions that sustain them.
But, they’re a crucial player in regulating Earth’s surface temperature.
This research points to a blind spot in climate modelling,’ Schneider says.
Clouds May Eventually Disappear, Causing Earth To Heat Up Dramatically Jocelyne LeBlanc March 2, 2019 FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ If climate change continues at the rate it’s going now, one of the most important types of clouds could eventually dis
Clouds May Eventually Disappear, Causing Earth To Heat Up Dramatically
If climate change continues at the rate it’s going now, one of the most important types of clouds could eventually disappear for good, causing the Earth to reach extreme temperatures. According to a paper published in the journalNature Geoscience, if enough carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, the stratocumulus clouds – which are those puffy clouds we often see in the sky – could become extinct. If that happens, the temperature here on Earth could climb to heights that are unimaginable.
Clouds are very important to our atmosphere, as they reflect sunlight away from the surface of Earth. If you look up at the sky and notice a white blanket of clouds, those are stratocumulus clouds and researchers think that sudden jumps in the Earth’s temperature in the past could have potentially been caused by changes to these types of clouds.
Stratocumulus clouds
In newly conducted research, scientists used a supercomputer to model a small part of the sky. They noticed that if the carbon dioxide (or CO2) levels in the atmosphere reach approximately 1,200 parts per million (or ppm), stratocumulus clouds end up breaking apart. As of right now, CO2 levels have already reached past 410 ppm which is quite high considering that it was at 280 ppm prior to the industrial revolution.
Unfortunately, there is more carbon dioxide going into our atmosphere each year. If we continue at the rate we’re going now, Earth’s atmosphere could reach 1,200 ppm in only 100 to 150 years. Now that’s scary. Earth’s temperature could reach an average of 14 degrees Fahrenheit higher in addition to the dangerous changes that are already being created from greenhouse gases. Not to mention the fact that Earth’s ice would melt causing devastating rises in the water levels.
To put this scenario into better perspective, the last time that Earth was that warm, crocodiles were swimming in the Arctic and the area around the equator was pretty much lifeless and scorching hot.
Stratocumulus clouds
If the stratocumulus clouds disappeared from our atmosphere, they probably wouldn’t come back until the carbon dioxide levels dropped below where they are now. There is, however, questions regarding this current data, as the 1,200 ppm number could end up being higher or lower as scientists conduct more research on this issue. Nevertheless, I think it’s pretty clear that something needs to be done to protect our atmosphere and the dangerous issues surrounding climate change.
As theunexplained mystery boom phenomenon continues worldwide, more people are beginning to pay attention to these anomalous sounds. What’s behind the sudden and dramatic increase in unexplained noises around the world? Are they reflective of a singular phenomenon, or could there be many different explanations? While I’ve written and speculated extensively about these mysterious explosion sounds over the past few years and believe they’re related, a recent incident in Northamptonshire, England shows that these unexplained sounds may not be as connected as they may seem.
The vast majority of the hundreds of mystery booms I’ve documented over the last three years are quite similar: a ground-shaking boom scares residents but leaves behind no further evidence. In Kingsport, however, residents have reported a strange smell the morning after the anomalous noises are heard. Could the two be related?
The Sywell Aerodrome in Northamptonshire.
“Everyone’s so baffled,” Northampton resident Kerri Griffin wrote on the Kingsthorpe Crime Page on Facebook. “Did anyone hear six loud bangs in the Acre Lane area at 3:29 am this morning (26th Feb)?” Dozens of residents chimed in to add that they, too, had heard the noises, although the times reported vary. The Northampton Chronicle & Echo writes that the booms have been occurring steadily since Sunday, February 24 and have been reported throughout a wide swath of the town.
Like in other cases of mystery booms, residents have reported that the unexplained noises have shook the ground and triggered car alarms. Some residents described the noises as sounding like fireworks or gunshots, while others say they’re more like a distant thunderclap. A few residents say they’ve heard loud voices at the same time as the booms, while others say they’ve smelled a mysterious burning odor the morning after the noises.
A Eurofighter Typhoon at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire, England.
While I’d normally write this one off as teenagers having a bit of late-night fun, a similar string of booms in 2016 show that there may be more to these recent booms than meets the headline. In April 2016, dozens of people throughout Northampton reported a boom that was later confirmed by the Ministry of Defence to be caused by a pair of fighter jets scrambled from the RAF Coningsby base to intercept an “unresponsive aircraft” in UK airspace. Little other information was released.
RAF Coningsby is located just to the east of Northampton and is responsible for Britain’s Quick Action Alert missions which are tasked with responding to unidentified aircraft approaching UK airspace. Could the RAF have something to do with the recent booms heard throughout Northampton? After all, the Royal Air Force has been busy in recent months responding to unidentified aircraft in the UK’s airspace, and scores of pilots and other eyewitnesses have been reporting all sorts of strange lights, anomalous objects, and other aerial mysteriesabove England lately. Is the RAF testing new aircraft or conducting exercises, or might there be incursions into UK airspace that we’re not being told about?
Shocking Video Footage Shows Black UFO Over Britain Skies
Shocking Video Footage Shows Black UFO Over Britain Skies
A video allegedly showing a bizarre rectangular alien spaceship moving over East Sussex has gained a lot of attention this week.
For many UFO enthusiasts, seeing is believing, and they think the latest evidence of an extraterrestrial spaceship visiting Earth has landed recently.
The footage seemingly shows a rectangular-shaped UFO moving at high speeds over English skies.
UFO researchers pointed out that the mysterious flying object is seen in three frames of the video. They added that it was mind-blowing to see a UFO flying that fast.
Many are convinced that it is an alien UFO because strange tunnel clouds appear in the background. They think that the UFO may be responsible for making that cloud tunnel, which is believed to be used for moving from one base to another on Earth.
A sector of conspiracy theorists says that cloud tunnels allow UFOs to travel from the locations they want while keeping them hidden in the human eyes.
However, the video shows that the cloud maker is caught.
The alleged UFO sighting is dated July 27, 2018, but it only surfaced online for the first time this week.
This is the most detailed view of the distant object Ultima Thule. The photo is a processed composite combining nine individual images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft just 6.5 minutes before the spacecraft's closest approach to Ultima Thule on Jan. 1, 2019.
The best-ever photos of Ultima Thule have made it down to Earth, and they heighten the intrigue about the frigid and faraway world.
On New Year's Day, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past the 21-mile-long (34 kilometers) Ultima Thule, setting a record for themost distant planetary encounter in history. (Ultima lies about 1 billion miles, or 1.6 billion km, beyond Pluto, which New Horizons flew by in July 2015.)
New Horizons has been beaming flyby data and imagery home to its handlers ever since, and will continue to do so for another 18 months. The early returns have been spectacular, revealing Ultima Thule to be a weird snowman-pancake hybrid with mysterious features, such as a bright "collar' where the body's two lobes meet. [New Horizons at Ultima Thule: Full Coverage]
And now we have our best look yet. New flyby photos released today (Feb. 22) show Ultima in even more stunning detail, capturing bright circular features and dark pits, whose origins remain mysterious.
"Whether these features [the pits] are craters produced by impactors, sublimation pits, collapse pits or something entirely different is being debated in our science team," New Horizons Deputy Project Scientist John Spencer, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.
The newly released images boast a resolution of about 110 feet (33 meters) per pixel. They're the highest-resolution pictures New Horizons has ever taken, and may ever take during its operational life, mission team members said.
The photos were captured just 6.5 minutes before the craft's closest approach on Jan. 1. At the time, New Horizons was 4,109 miles (6,628 km) from Ultima Thule and 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion km) from Earth, mission team members said. (Closest approach brought the probe within a mere 2,200 miles, or 3,500 km, of Ultima.)
There was no guarantee we'd ever get to see Ultima Thule — whose official name is 2014 MU69 — in this dazzling light. Capturing the newly released images was a "stretch goal" that demanded a precise square-up of Ultima in the narrow field of view of New Horizons' telescopic camera.
"Getting these images required us to know precisely where both tiny Ultima and New Horizons were — moment by moment — as they passed one another at over 32,000 mph [51,500 km/h] in the dim light of the Kuiper Belt, a billion miles beyond Pluto. This was a much tougher observation than anything we had attempted in our 2015 Pluto flyby," New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, also of SwRI, said in the same statement.
"These 'stretch goal' observations were risky, because there was a real chance we'd only get part or even none of Ultima in the camera's narrow field of view," Stern added. "But the science, operations and navigation teams nailed it, and the result is a field day for our science team! Some of the details we now see on Ultima Thule's surface are unlike any object ever explored before."
New Horizons launched in January 2006 to lift the veil on Pluto, which had remained largely mysterious since its 1930 discovery. The Ultima Thule flyby is the centerpiece of an extended mission that runs through 2021.
New Horizons is in good health and has enough fuel to fly by yet another distant object, if NASA grants another mission extension, Stern and other mission team members have said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate) is out now.
Earth’s atmosphere contains about 21% oxygen today. Plants produce it, and animals – including humans – breathe it. Ancient rocks provide clues about when the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere began to arise.
Stromatolite in Shark Bay, Western Australia. These fossilized stromatolites are thought to be some of the most ancient forms of life on Earth and are comprised of organisms that probably contributed to the O2 scientists are inferring existed on ancient Earth (i.e., cyanobacteria).
Oxygen in the form of the oxygen molecule (O2), produced by plants and vital for animals, is abundant in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. But that hasn’t always been the case. When, and in what environments, did O2 begin to build up on Earth? A new study that looked at ancient rocks in Western Australia suggests it started happening earlier than we thought.
The O2 on Earth was relatively scarce for much of our planet’s 4.6 billion-year existence. But at some point, Earth underwent what scientists call the Great Oxidation Event or GOE for short, as ocean microbes evolved to produce O2 via photosynthesis. O2 first accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere at this time and has been present ever since. It’s been thought that this happened sometime between 2.5 and 2.3 billion years ago.
Through numerous studies in this field of research, however, evidence has emerged that there were minor amounts of O2 in small areas of Earth’s ancient shallow oceans before the GOE. The new study publishedFebruary 25, 2019 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience, has provided evidence for significant ocean oxygenation before the GOE, on a larger scale and to greater depths than previously recognized.
Stromatolite in Shark Bay, Western Australia.
Image via Ariel Anbar, ASU.
For this study, the team targeted a set of 2.5 billion-year-old marine rocks called stromatolites from Western Australia known as the Mt. McRae Shale. Stromatolites are sedimentary rocks formed by the growth of layer upon layer of cyanobacteria, a single-celled microbe that gets energy through photosynthesis, releasing oxygen as a by-product. Chadlin Ostrander, of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration is the study lead author. He said in a statement:
These rocks were perfect for our study because they were shown previously to have been deposited during an anomalous oxygenation episode before the Great Oxidation Event.
For this research, the team dissolved samples and separated elements of interest in a the lab, then measured isotopic compositions on a mass spectrometer. Their analysis determined that the rocks could only have their chemical signatures of the rock meant that O2 needed to have been present all the way down to the sea floor 2.5 billion years ago. Read more about how the scientists did the study here.
The 2.5 billion-year-old Mt. McRae Shale from Western Australia was analyzed for thallium and molybdenum isotope compositions, revealing a pattern that indicates manganese oxide minerals were being buried over large regions of the ancient sea floor. For this burial to occur, O2 needed to have been present all the way down to the sea floor 2.5 billion-years-ago.
The researchers suggest that accumulation of O2 was probably not restricted to small portions of the planet’s surface ocean prior to the GOE. More likely, they say, is that O2 accumulation extended over large regions of the ocean and far into the ocean’s depths – in some of areas, even all the way down to the sea floor.
Our discovery forces us to rethink the initial oxygenation of Earth. Many lines of evidence suggest that O2 started to accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere after about 2.5 billion years ago during the GOE. However, it is now apparent that Earth’s initial oxygenation is a story rooted in the ocean. O2 probably accumulated in Earth’s oceans — to significant levels, according to our data — well before doing so in the atmosphere.
Researcher Chad Ostrander with a 2.7 billion-year-old fossilized stromatolite in Western Australia.
Bottom line: A new study that looked at ancient rocks in Western Australia suggests the O2 in Earth’s atmosphere started building up earlier than thought.
3D printing technology has revolutionized the manufacturing process. After doing miracles in medical fields, automotive industry, and food industry, now it is going to do wonders in space industry.
Recently UK space company Orbex unveiled its Prime Rocket’s gigantic second stage —it is the “world’s largest 3D printed rocket engine,” It is Designed to deliver small satellites into Earth’s orbit.
Here are some of its features:
It is the first commercial rocket to work with bio-propane, a “clean-burning, renewable fuel source that cuts carbon emissions by 90 percent.”
Orbex Prime is “uniquely manufactured in a single piece without joins”, No joins implies rocket with better strength in bearing extreme temperature and pressure fluctuations.
The rocket is made up using carbon fiber and aluminum composite that makes it 30 percent lighter and 20 percent more efficient than other small launchers.
Orbex has plans to pull off its first launch from Scotland in 2021.
Orbex has signed up Switzerland’s Astrocast SA to launch 64 nanosatellites to build a global Internet of Things network.
Graham Turnock, Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency, said, “Orbex’s new rocket design facility brings Britain one step closer to having its own domestic commercial launch capability and firmly positions the UK as Europe’s frontrunner for those looking to Earth’s orbit and beyond for new opportunities”
The new Orbex Prime engine burns liquid oxygen and propane
Orbex reveals its new #Prime rocket which includes the world’s largest 3D printed rocket engine, made in a single piece without joins, giving it the edge over other engines, which can suffer from weaknesses associated with joining & welding. #OrbexRevealshttps://buff.ly/2SjmZtS
British spaceflight company Orbex, plans to open their headquarters and rocket design facility in Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands. The 2,000 square metre HQ in Forres, in the north east of Scotland. The new base will bring more than 130 jobs to the region
Prime has been designed to take satellites into Earth's orbit to altitudes of up to 776 miles (1,250 km). The new headquarters in Forres will combine a rocket design and integration facility. Here, the rocket launches proposed Sutherland site
What The Heck Are These Weird Tracks At The Bottom Of The Great Blue Hole? (Video)
What The Heck Are These Weird Tracks At The Bottom Of The Great Blue Hole? (Video)
What The Heck Are These Weird Tracks At The Bottom Of The Great Blue Hole? (Video)
Some Mysterious tracks are found at the bottom of the Great Blue Hole-the world’s largest ocean sinkhole, which is located about 60 miles from the coast of Belize.
In December this past year, a crew of explorers, which include billionaire Richard Branson and Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of French explorer Jacques Cousteau, took part in a quest to dive to the bottom of the hole to determine what was down there. At over 1,000 feet wide and 410 feet deep, it is a largely unexplored natural wonder.
It formed as a limestone cave hundreds of thousands of years ago when the sea level was far lower. At the end of the last ice age, ice caps melted and sea levels rose, submerging the cavern to become what is currently the Great Blue Hole.
In November and December this past year, teams carried out over 20 dives into the void in an effort to generate a 3D map of it. One of these dives was broadcast live on the Discovery Channel. In it, Branson and Cousteau, led by submarine pilot Erika Bergman, entered into the hole’s depths.
In an interview, Bergman has talked about what she observed within the Great Blue Hole. She stated they discovered never-before-seen stalactites at the base of the hole: “That was pretty exciting, because they haven’t been mapped there before. They haven’t been discovered there before.”
Even though the water was completely dark, high-resolution sonar equipment on board helped them to view concealed features of the formation. “You can be 20 or 30 meters away from a stalactite or a hunk of the wall and see it in every perfect detail, better than eyesight could even provide,” she explained.
They also discovered some unidentifiable tracks right at the base of the hole-the source of which are “open to interpretation,” Bergman stated.
Researchers are now near finishing the 3D sonar map of the hole. “It looks really cool-it’s this mesh-layered, sonar scan of the entire thousand-foot diameter hole,” Bergman said.
In addition to the mysterious tracks, Branson stated, they discovered plastic bottles sitting at the bottom of the Great Blue Hole. In a blog posting about the dive, he published: “As for the mythical monsters of the deep? Well, the real monsters facing the ocean are climate change-and plastic. Sadly, we saw plastic bottles at the bottom of the hole, which is a real scourge of the ocean. We’ve all got to get rid of single-use plastic.”
Not to long ago some comparable tracks were discovered on Google Earth which could be evidence of alien activity and that extraterrestrial beings mining the ocean floor for valuable resources.
The weird markings go on for miles and look almost as if someone has been driving a huge tank on the seafloor, and when I say huge, I mean HUGE. In fact, judging from the size of the tracks, the giant sea-tank would have to have treads around several city blocks wide.
Planet X: "You Have No Scientific Evidence", Deine Scientific Evidence! Observational Evidence!
Planet X: "You Have No Scientific Evidence", Define Scientific Evidence! Observational Evidence!
Let me know what you think of this channel if this does well. First time sharing from it. Welcome to March! Roar.
Planet Nine is hypothesized to follow a highly elliptical orbit around the Sun with a period lasting 10,000–20,000 years. The planet’s semi-major axis is estimated to be700 AU, roughly 20 times the distance from Neptune to the Sun, and its inclination to the ecliptic, the plane of the Solar System, to be about30°±10°.
Following the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, there was considerable speculation that another planet might exist beyond its orbit. Wikipedia
ev·i·dence
/ˈevədəns/
noun
1.
the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
SpaceXDummy Ripley (links) zal de testvlucht uitvoeren met de Crew Falcon.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET Het wordt morgen een belangrijke dag voor SpaceX, het ruimtevaartbedrijf van Elon Musk. Dan vindt vanop Cape Canaveral in Florida de eerste testvlucht plaats van de Crew Dragon, een gloednieuwe capsule die in de toekomst mensen de ruimte in moet brengen. Deze keer is er nog een dummy aan boord – Ripley, naar de heldin uit de legendarische Alien-films – maar als alles goed gaat, zullen er in juli de eerste astronauten mee naar het internationaal ruimtestation ISS vliegen.
Dat laatste zou een historische gebeurtenis zijn, want het is intussen acht jaar geleden dat er nog astronauten vanop Amerikaanse bodem de ruimte in gingen. De afgelopen jaren moest NASA haar astronauten meesturen met – dure – Russische toestellen. Met de hulp van private firma’s zoals SpaceX en Boeing hoeft de ruimtevaartorganisatie dat binnenkort niet meer te doen. Ze investeert daarvoor maar liefst 8 miljard in de bedrijven.
De testvlucht van dit weekend zal in totaal zes dagen duren. Na de lancering zal de Crew Dragon een dag later arriveren aan het internationaal ruimtestation ISS. Daar zullen de drie bewoners de dummy die aan boord is verwelkomen. Ripley zal het trendy witte ruimtepak van SpaceX aanhebben. Dat zal ook het pak zijn dat astronauten in de toekomst dragen.
Voor alle duidelijkheid: Ripley is geen dood gewicht. Ze draagt een heleboel sensoren waarmee de reis naar het ruimtestation en terug gemonitord zal worden door wetenschappers van SpaceX en ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA. In het bijzonder de krachten en versnellingen die de toekomstige astronauten zullen ervaren aan boord van het toestel. De informatie zal gebruikt worden om de bemande vluchten van de Crew Dragon succesvol te kunnen uitvoeren. (lees hieronder verder)
youtubeSigourney Weaver als Ellen Ripley in ‘Alien'. Zij was de inspiratie voor de dummy aan boord van de testvlucht van de Crew Falcon.
“Het doel is om een idee te krijgen van wat mensen zouden voelen in haar plaats”, verduidelijkte vicepresident Build and Flight Reliability bij SpaceX Hans Koenigsmann gisteren tijdens een persconferentie. “We verwachten niet echt grote verrassingen, maar het is beter om op zeker te spelen en ons ervan te vergewissen dat alles veilig en comfortabel is voor de twee NASA-astronauten die mee zullen gaan op de volgende vlucht van de capsule.”
Het belang van de missie kan niet onderschat worden, aldus ook voormalig astronaut Scott Kelly. Hij verbleef al eens een jaar lang in het ISS. “Grote stappen worden gezet dankzij een hele reeks kleinere stappen. Dit wordt alvast een grote stap”, twitterde hij gisteren.
Veilig en comfortabel
SpaceX deed de afgelopen zeven jaar 16 leveringen van materiaal aan het ISS. Daarvoor gebruikte het een capsule die luisterde naar de naam Dragon. Die werd nu omgevormd tot de Crew Dragon, die ook veilig en comfortabel moet zijn voor passagiers. Ze is iets groter – 8 meter hoog – en wordt net als de cargocapsule gelanceerd vanop een Falcon 9-raket van SpaceX. (lees hieronder verder)
NASA
Er zijn vier zitjes aan boord en drie ramen, maar op termijn moeten zeven astronauten meekunnen. De zonnecellen van de capsule zitten nu op het toestel zelf en niet op speciale vleugels. Mocht er zich een noodsituatie voordoen, zitten er ook acht motoren in de wanden van de capsule. Die kunnen de Crew Dragon van de draagraket schieten, mocht er iets fout gaan bij de lancering.
De missie die morgen van start gaat, heeft overigens niet alleen Ripley aan boord. Er zit ook voor 200 kilogram aan uitrustingen en voorraden voor het ISS in het toestel.
Live
Wie de lancering live wil volgen, kan terecht op de website van SpaceX. De raket zou morgenvroeg om 8.49 uur Belgische tijd aan haar missie moeten beginnen op een nieuw lanceringscomplex van het Kennedy Space Center, waar een halve eeuw geleden de historische Apollo-missies vertrokken. (lees hieronder verder)
SpaceX De Crew Falcon bovenop de Falcon 9-raket. Astronauten zullen in de toekomst via de uitschuifbare brug rechts in het toestel plaats kunnen nemen.
SpaceX Het ruimtepak dat de astronauten van SpaceX zullen krijgen.
De capsule zal zich na haar vlucht naar het ISS op 8 maart weer ontkoppelen en even na zonsopgang met een parachute landen in de Atlantische Oceaan, een paar honderd kilometer voor de kust van Florida.
Afhankelijk van hoe de testvlucht gaat en hoeveel aanpassingen er nog nodig zijn aan bijvoorbeeld de parachutes en de stuwraketten, wil SpaceX zijn eerste NASA-astronauten in juli lanceren. Concurrent Boeing zit het bedrijf van Elon Musk evenwel dicht op de hielen. Dat wil in april een eerste onbemande test doen met zijn Starliner en zou de eerste astronauten – dat zullen er drie zijn – in augustus de ruimte in brengen. Als alles goed gaat, welteverstaan.
Starman
Maar eerst is het dus aan Ripley en zij gaat zo Starman achterna, de dummy die vorig jaar in de knalrode Tesla van Elon Musk de ruimte in werd gebracht tijdens een testvlucht van de Falcon Heavy. Ripley wordt in tegenstelling tot Starman wél terugverwacht op aarde.
One very strange phenomenon that has become more popular and pervasive in the world of the paranormal is what has come to be called the Mandela Effect. It deals with the preponderance of people who have very vivid memories of things being differently than they are, of recalling people, events, and places differently than the way they are represented in actual reality, a sort of a mass misremembering of the same facts or details by a large number of people. This can apply to popular culture such as movies, or extend to historical events and beyond, and it has even popped up in the form of people remembering the actual geography of the world differently than what it is.
The theory itself has its origins in 2010 with a paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome, when she found that a fact she clearly remembered seeing on the news, that Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s, was actually wrong and that he in fact was still alive at the time, indeed living until 2013, when he died from a respiratory illness at his home. This perplexed her, as she so vividly and clearly remembered his death in the 80s, and when she voiced this puzzlement online there was a deluge of others who seemed to share this memory of the same thing, claiming that they clearly recalled seeing it on the news, could envision the reports, and even that they had been taught about it at school. The name eventually stuck as a new phenomenon that became a persistent feature of the lexicon of the paranormal, and the term “Mandela Effect” stuck, encompassing all manner of feature of our reality that for whatever reasons a massive number of people remember completely wrong, perhaps suggesting the possibility of alternate parallel dimensions beyond our comprehension.
A very common facet of the Mandela Effect with regards to geography is the surprisingly large number of people who distinctly and clearly remember whole countries being different shapes, sizes, or in different positions than they were before. The most dramatic of these are those places that seem to have completely changed location. A very famous example of this is the island nation of New Zealand. Without looking at a map, where do you picture it being? Does it lie to the northeast of Australia or the southeast? Is it to the east of the continent or the west?
The correct answer is that New Zealand is located to the far southeast of Australia, approximately 1,200 miles from the mainland, but for many this might be quite a jolt. It appears that there is a large and very vocal population of people, in rare cases even those who actually live in New Zealand, who insist that this is wrong according to their memory. Interestingly, there seem to be different camps of those who remember the location differently. For some it is supposed to be much farther south than it is, for others they learned it was to the northeast rather than the southeast, and usually remembered as much closer to the Australia mainland than actually is, and for others still it is supposed to lie completely on the other side of the Australian continent to the west rather than the east. One Reddit commenter says of this all:
I remember it west of Australia. Sixteen years ago I bought a globe. I was actually thinking about Australia and New Zealand and how I didn’t know much about either, so I thought I should really know where they are. So I looked at my globe and saw it as a big landmass west of Australia. I thought ‘this is a good way to remember it, it seems exotic to me because it is further away from the United States, further west.
This seems to be no minor quibble or random mistake for some of these people, as there are plenty of people who seem to be genuinely shocked and horrified to learn the real location. As another Reddit commenter says, it was practically life-changing for him to be confronted with this anomalous geographical discrepancy:
When this all came to my attention a couple days ago I go over to my sister’s room and look for this globe we’ve had for years. First place I look is for New Zealand northeast area of Australia… lo and behold, New Zealand is now southeast of Australia in the middle of nowhere. At that point it felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I won the geography award in grade school and have a plaque that my parents still have on display, and I’m willing to scan it to prove it. Geography is something I’ve always had a keen awareness of.
One commonly held memory of where people think New Zealand is
It is not only New Zealand either, and there are other island countries that people adamantly insist were once in different locations. A popular one is the country of Sri Lanka. Again, where do you remember it as being? If you said it is obviously directly to the south of India, then you are wrong. Sri Lanka actually lies to the southeast of India, a fact that seems to really bother a lot of people who insist that it should be directly to the south of the tip of mainland India. One commenter on the site TheMandela Effect has said of this:
I have interviewed 5 persons regarding the location of Sri Lanka(ceylon)and asked them to draw a map, all of them drew it as they remembered and it was far far downwards, further I asked them to draw a horizontal line touching the tip of India’s extremity, the line went over the sea, all clear… and all were cynics.
Almost everybody remembers the country located further south beyond the tip of India. Being Indian I have the advantage of getting genuine feed back, and the peculiarity of Sri Lanka is that India is the only neighbor and people in India are aware of this sensivity and are keen enough to notice the location.
Other island nations are also constantly remembered as being in the wrong place as well. Cuba is often remembered as having been closer to Florida than Mexico, but it is actually closer to the latter. It is 214 km from Mexico and 228 km from Florida. Japan is also hotly debated, with a great many people convinced that it used to be farther south, nearer to China, when it actually sits much farther north than is recalled, next to Russia. Greenland is also remembered as in the wrong place, and many are quite shocked to learn that it not only is only 14 miles from Canada, but that it is actually much larger than recalled, a full 836,000 Sq. miles in area, about 21 times the size of Iceland. Speaking of different sizes and shapes, a large number of people also remember Russia as looking much different than it does, claiming that it looks decidedly wrong when looking at it now, to the point that it is baffling for some.
To anyone who correctly remembers the location, shapes, and sizes of these places all of this talk of how they are remembered differently must seem absurd, but it’s interesting how persistent and uniform many of these false memories are, how badly they jar and unsettle those faced with cold, hard reality, and they are enough that there are whole forums devoted to heatedly discussing these issues. Just about as bizarre as remembering countries in different places are those locations that seem to have appeared from nowhere or to have conversely disappeared off the face of the Earth.
By far the weirdest and most intensely discussed of these among Mandela Effect theorists nowadays is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean called Svalbard, which is an Unincorporated area of Norway. It is a large land, 23,561 sq. miles in dimension, with a rich history spanning back to the 12th century and its own culture, traditions, and people. The problem is that for a lot of people it should not be there, and looks decidedly out of place on maps, just sitting out there where nothing existed before. How could so many people misremember this place as not existing? It might seem rather ridiculous if you remember correctly, but there is a very vocal contingent of people who are certain that Svalbard never existed until very recently for them.
Svalbard
Another place that quite a few people don’t remember existing before is the Canadian territory of Nunavut, which is the largest territory of Canada and is larger than Texas, California and France combined. Some people find this baffling, as they have never heard of it, and although it is a relatively new territory, being split from the Northwest Territories in 1999, it still is rather jarring for a surprising number of people. Perhaps even stranger is a country that was in existence from the Middle Ages all the way up until the 1800s, called Great Tartary. It was considered a major power at the time, and was vast in area, being even larger than Russia, positioned in the northern part of Asia and bounded by Siberia on the north and west. Although it is no longer a country, for such a large country with such an illustrious history it seems odd that so few people have ever heard of it, with many insisting that it never existed before.
Adding to all of the anomalies we have looked at so far are persistent and pervasive miscellaneous geographical conundrums that a lot of people remember wrong in the same way. A common one is that there is the vast number of people who swear that they distinctly learned that the United States has 51 states, or even 52, rather than the correct 50, and insist that in their remembered history Puerto Rico is a state. This might seem ludicrous to some, but they are adamant that their memory on this is very clear. Another is the location of Fort Knox, the military base famous for its gold reserves, which is located in the state of Kentucky, but which many very clearly remember as being in Tennessee. There are even those who claim to have been stationed there or know people who were, who insist that they were in Tennessee, not Kentucky. Weird.
Fort Knox
Again, for those who remember this all correctly, this must all seem pretty wild. It must seem to obviously be just the result of ignorance or stupidity mixed with the fact that most people don’t look at maps on a regular basis and their mind just sort of fills in the blanks of what they don’t know. Yet, a lot of the people who claim these discrepancies between what they remember and reality are well-educated, normal people, and these mistakes are so clearly remembered wrongly in a similar way across the board that it is at the very least an interesting psychological phenomenon, and perhaps something far stranger. People are so convinced that the world once looked differently that there are even whole maps available online of how the world should look to them versus how it actually appears. Why do these people remember these geographical details so wrongly and to such a degree that it is very often mentally troubling for them when confronted with the truth? It largely depends on who you ask.
For proponents of the Mandela Effect, this is all indicative of some sort of mysterious mass shift between two different realities. This relies on a concept known as the “multiverse,” which proposes that there are infinite parallel and offshoot universes coexisting with ours, with infinite permutations and infinite versions of you inhabiting many of them. In some of these alternate dimensions the difference could be very slight, such as you wearing a red t-shirt today instead of a blue one. In another, things could be more dramatic, such as having a different president, another one in which history is different, or even one in which the dinosaurs never went extinct.
In relation to the Mandela Effect, the idea is at some point a number of people has transferred over to a different timeline in a parallel dimension, while retaining the memories of how things were in their own reality. These two realities might be nearly identical, with the only differences being subtle yet jarring, such as in this case the location or size of a country or place. Making it even more bizarre is that this may have involved a straight swap with the you from this new reality and the other one, meaning that while one version of you wonders where, say, Svalbard came from, the other you from this reality is in the one you came from, wondering where in the world Svalbard went. For proponents of this cause of the Mandela Effect, it is all caused by the fact that the details and timelines of the two parallel universe don’t line up exactly, which can drive these people nuts and lodge into their psyche like splinters in the mind. How this shift happened or how many people were involved is anyone’s guess, and the ones who remember correctly are the ones who never left, and are safely in their home reality.
It’s all a very interesting, sci-fi sounding concept that is great as a thought experiment, but unfortunately there is ultimately no evidence at all that this has actually happened to any degree other than the insistence of those who are absolutely sure that reality does not match what they so clearly and potently remember. This forces us to look at more mundane possible explanations, and this mainly comes down to pointing out just how unreliable and malleable memories can be. Indeed, it has been show that memories can be influenced or even created with enough suggestion and belief, and false memories are surprisingly common. Although we still don’t fully understand how memories work or how our brain processes them, it has been found that memories can be subject to changes and evolve or be warped over time, and this can be influenced by how confident you are in that memory, even if it’s wrong, and what those around you think. As the site Stuff.com New Zealandsays:
It seems that the act of remembering something over and over again builds your confidence in that memory – even if you are more and more wrong every time. Which, really, explains the Mandela Effect well. You may stumble upon the community with a few things misremembered, a few details out of place, then by virtue of reading about hundreds of others who agree with you, set that wrong memory in stone. Suddenly you aren’t thinking “oh I thought that was there,” you’re thinking “I definitely know that it was in a different place”. Your ideology is rewarded and reinforced, as it is in any community.
Is that what is going on here? Are so many people just conjuring up these memories in their heads? Is this the result of some sort of mental short circuit or psychological trick, or is there something else at work to it all? Has the world changed from one universe and timeline to another for some people? There are numerous other examples of the Mandela Effect and geography, and I have only presented some of the odder and more widely discussed, but they all seem perplexing and widespread enough to give food for thought, regardless of whether one remembers it the “right way” or not. Considering there is not much we are able to do to prove the existence of other realities, or that people have traveled unwittingly between them, it is likely that the debate will continue, with those who think it is all an illusion on one side and those individuals for whom the world looks different than their memory on the other.
NASA is not content with merely looking for aliens visiting Earth or sending us messages from their home planets … now it’s creating alien DNA on its own. What could possibly go wrong … and how can you get in on this ground floor opportunity and make alien DNA at home for fun and profit?
“For a long time we’ve had hints that life evolved from G, A, T, C, not because they were exactly the right raw materials but because they were simply available. Steve’s four letters [S, P, Z, B] are, at least in terms of stability, in every way equivalent to nature’s four letters.”
No, that’s not a strategy for winning the National Spelling Bee but a simple description of how Steven A. Benner, a synthetic biologist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida, doubled the number of chemical building blocks (adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T)) or nucleotides that make up all DNA by adding the synthetic chemical pairs purine (P, B) and pyrimidine (Z, S) to make an 8-letter synthetic DNA Benner’s team named “hachimoji DNA” from the Japanese words for eight (hachi) and letter (moji). The research was published recently in the journal Science and funded by NASA, whose press release touts this as a really big deal.
“Life detection is an increasingly important goal of NASA’s planetary science missions, and this new work will help us to develop effective instruments and experiments that will expand the scope of what we look for.”
Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, explains that this essentially proves that there can be other forms of DNA on other planets or moons in our solar system and beyond. And yes, Benner’s team created real 8-letter DNA which can line up with RNA and transfer its genetic information into proteins essential for life. And that brings us back to the question: “What could possibly go wrong?”
“We’re starting to think of it as ‘cryptogenetics’. An expanded alphabet gives you the opportunity to make bigger, better, stronger, faster things in general.”
Things like what? University of Texas biochemist Andrew Ellington, a co-author of the study, reveals in Nature that he evolved the enzymes to turn hachimoji DNA into RNA in his lab and made a strand of synthetic RNA that resembles a sequence found in spinach. The synthetic spinach that got loose in the environment, destroyed the world’s crops and drove humanity to extinction? Not yet, but Benner has more noble causes – he’s made hachimoji RNA that can find and bind to liver tumors and breast cancer cells in a petri dish and foresees a day when it could help detect viruses or environmental toxins.
Is this really alien DNA? If your definition of ‘alien’ is ‘not found in nature on Earth’, then the answer is yes. And it’s just the beginning. Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, was not part of the study but told Nature that this opens the possibility to create DNA with ten or 12 letters, requiring the need to learn more Japanese numbers. But eight is already a really big deal.
“It’s already doubling what nature has.”
Something nature doesn’t have, while funded by NASA, is in the hands of corporate entities who could easily keep it to themselves. If it’s happening here, it’s happening elsewhere too.
For years, scientists have recognized the limitations of radio astronomy in the search for extraterrestrial life. Utilizing the electromagnetic spectrum to search for alien signals is problematic partly because it relies on searching for quiet areas in an otherwise noisy medium, as viewed from Earth. To be able to search for possible signals from far off places, astronomers have had to rely on finding regions where natural noise is minimized; and although such a “quiet” region exists between 1.42 and 1.67 gigahertz, affectionately known as the “Cosmic Water Hole,” one might compare this to trying to examine an entire ocean while peering through a straw.
Because of these obvious limitations, astronomers have been looking at new ways to engage the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and this includes forms of optical SETI that search for the presence of laser pulses that might originate from other places in our universe.
The prospects for such technologies have been exciting, but perhaps nowhere more than with the discovery of KIC 8462852 or “Tabby’s Star, an unusual star whose odd behavior has raised questions about everything from cosmic particulate that may encircle it, to the unlikely (but not impossible) supposition that it may represent an alien “megastructure.”
One group that has been exploring such possibilities is the SETI team at UC Berkeley, which garnered attention last year for one of its project leaders: David Lipman, who is now a student attending Princeton, had still been in high school at the time he began working with the project. In their most recent published study, the team has been sourcing data from the Breakthrough Listen Project “in an effort to detect potential laser signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.”
Lipman and his team decided to observe Tabby’s Star for evidence of laser light sources greater than 24 megawatts, which marks the lower regions of light a telescope would be able to detect at the distance between Earth and KIC 8462852. The survey relied on source data mined from the Lick Observatory’s Automated Planet Finder telescope, part of the Breakthrough Listen Project and one of the many systems that scientific organizations–some of them on the civilian level–have been using to scour the cosmos for signs of life.
The team’s paper, submitted for peer review in December, relates that they analyzed 177 high-res spectra of KIC 8462852, of which they say the “top candidates from the analysis can all be explained as either cosmic ray hits, stellar emission lines or atmospheric air glow emission lines.” Although they did not find evidence of any anomalous light sources, a number of insights were made into how future studies may be conducted to search various promising regions of space.
As advanced as laser SETI and its potentials are, varieties that have been developed in recent years have their own limitations, which have led SETI researchers to consider ways that more complex arrays that incorporate larger data sets might be instituted.
According to astronomer Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute has its sights set on incorporating just such a system. In July, 2017 the astronomer wrote, “The SETI Institute has developed an instrument that, at relatively low cost, could continuously survey the entire night sky for brief laser pulses. This is completely unlike the optical SETI efforts that have been made in the past, and continue to be made today: experiments that use sensitive photomultiplier detectors, but are limited to one star system at a time. That’s akin to a radio SETI search able to only monitor a single frequency channel. Extremely limited.”
Whether or not Tabby’s Star and its unusual characteristics ever prove to be the “smoking gun” in the search for extraterrestrial life, new technologies that will continuously search for laser pulses emanating from distant planets, as Shostak describes, could eventually be a game-changer as far as finding evidence of life on other worlds. As such, the future for SETI research looks very promising, indeed.
Cracks growing across the Brunt Ice Shelf are poised to release an iceberg about twice the size of New York City. A scientific presence on the ice shelf since 1955 has an uncertain future.
Cracks in Brunt Ice Shelf, as of January 23, 2019. Note the research stations, part of the British Antarctic Survey, whose presence on the ice shelf began in 1955. Halley IV had to be closed in 1992, due to destabilized ice. In 2016-2017, the Halley VI station was relocated to a safer location (Halley VIa) upstream of the growing crack.
Cracks growing across Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelfreveal that the shelf is poised to release an iceberg with an area about twice the size of New York City. The crack along the top of the January 23, 2019, image above — the so-called Halloween crack — first appeared in late October 2016 and continues to grow eastward from an area known as theMcDonald Ice Rumples(see image below). The more immediate concern is the rift visible in the center of the image. Previously stable for about 35 years, this crack recently started accelerating northward as fast as 2.5 miles (4 km) per year.
NASA said:
It is not yet clear how the remaining ice shelf will respond following the break, posing an uncertain future for scientific infrastructure and a human presence on the shelf that was first established in 1955.
Location of the Brunt Ice Shelf.
Image via NASA Earth Observatory.
When the fast-growing crack cuts all the way across the ice shelf, the area of ice lost from the shelf will likely be at least 660 square miles (1,700 square km). Although that’s not an enormous iceberg by Antarctic standards, it might be the largest berg to break from the Brunt Ice Shelf since observations began in 1915.
Scientists are watching to see if the loss will trigger the shelf to further change and possibly become unstable or break up. What will happen? Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said:
The near-term future of Brunt Ice Shelf likely depends on where the existing rifts merge relative to the McDonald Ice Rumples. If they merge upstream (south) of the McDonald Ice Rumples, then it’s possible that the ice shelf will be destabilized.
McDonald Ice Rumples. The rumples happen when ice flows over an underwater formation, where the bedrock rises high enough to reach into the underside of the ice shelf. The rocky formation impedes the flow of ice and causes pressure waves, crevasses, and rifts to form at the surface.
The growing cracks have prompted safety concerns for people working on the shelf, particularly researchers at the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley Station. This major base for Earth, atmospheric and space science research typically operates year-round, but has been closed down twice in recent years due to unpredictable changes in the ice. The station has also been rebuilt and relocated over the decades.
Calving – the breaking of ice chunks from the edge of a glacier – is a normal part of the life cycle of ice shelves, but the recent changes are unfamiliar in this area. The edge of the Brunt Ice Shelf has evolved slowly since Ernest Shackleton surveyed the Antarctic coast in 1915, but it has been speeding up in the past several years.
These 2 satellites images – this one and the one below – of Brunt Ice Shelf show a big change in the size of the shelf over decades. This one was taken on January 30, 1986.
MICHIO KAKU: The US scientist believes aliens could have cybernetic features (Pic: GETTY)
ALIENS: Many people believe there is intelligent life beyond Earth (Pic: GETTY)
“I think one day when we actually meet aliens from outer space, they will not be totally biological, they may be part cyborg, part biological.
“We’re so brainwashed into thinking they must look like Captain Kirk, right, that we neglect the fact that if they are that advanced, then they realise there are limitations to a biological body.
“They may be part cybernetic and not totally biological so I think we are missing the boat there.”
AVI LOEB: The Harvard University scientist admitted he thinks there is alien life in space (Pic: GETTY)
Avi Loeb, 57, chair of the prestigious university’s astronomy department, told The New Yorker: “I do not view the possibility of a technological civilisation as speculative, for two reasons.
“The first is that we exist. And the second is that at least a quarter of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have a planet like Earth, with surface conditions that are very similar to Earth, and the chemistry of life as we know it could develop.
“If you roll the dice so many times, and there are tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way, it is quite likely we are not alone.”
NASA has turned its attention away from the planets in our solar system in the search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system and is focusing on the moons orbiting some of the larger planets. One such object of study is Saturn’s moon Enceladus, seen in the image below.
In this image, the rainbow-like spire jutting from the side of the moon is a false color image of icy particles and water that spew into space from an ocean deep under the icy surface of the moon. Scientists believe that life on Earth originally started deep in the ancient ocean, conditions that could exist in the oceans of Enceladus. A NASA experiment has recreated how scientists think that life on Earth could have started in the ancient ocean inside a lab.
NASA scientist Laurie Barge and her team were working on ways to find life on other planets by studying how life started on Earth. The research specifically focused on how the building blocks of life form in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. In the experiment, the team formed mini seafloors in beakers filled with a mixture that mimicked the primordial oceans of Earth.
The experiments showed that the beaker oceans acted as nurseries for amino acids, which are essential to life as we know it. Amino acids build on each other to create proteins, which make up all living things on the planet. The experiments looked at hydrothermal vents where natural chimneys form as heated fluid from deep inside the Earth flows out.
Where the heated fluids exit into the ocean creating an environment where life was able to grow and flourish and still does to this day despite the cold ocean depths, this same process could mean life exists on icy worlds like Enceladus. The experiment used water, minerals, and precursor molecules pyruvate and ammonia, all needed to make amino acids. The solution was heated to 158-degrees Fahrenheit, the same temperature found in thermal vents. Another mineral called iron hydroxide was used, which reacted with the little oxygen found in primordial oceans to produce alanine, an amino acid, and alpha hydroxyl acid lactate. Ultimately, the team found that the experiment led the building blocks for life to occur.
A Russian Soyuz rocket lifts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to deliver the Egyptian Earth-observation satellite EgyptSat-A into orbit on Feb. 21, 2019.
A Russian Soyuz rocket launched an Egyptian Earth-observation satellite into orbit on Thursday (Feb. 21) despite experiencing technical problems a few minutes after liftoff.
The three-stage Soyuz rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:47 a.m. EST (1647 GMT), topped with the satellite EgyptSat-A, which was attached to the rocket's Fregat upper stage. Although Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, and the satellite's manufacturer, RSC Energia, reported that the satellite had reach its intended orbit, multiple Russian news reports "suggested [that] the mission may have experienced a close call during the climb into orbit," Spaceflight Now reported.
According to Spaceflight Now, EgyptSat-A and the Fregat upper stage had entered a "lower-than-expected orbit" after separating from the Soyuz rocket 9 minutes after liftoff — likely due to a problem with the rocket's third-stage engine. However, the Fregat upper stage "appeared to have corrected the apparent performance shortfall," boosting the satellite to its intended polar orbit, at an altitude of about 400 miles (650 kilometers).
The $100 million EgyptSat-A will provide high-resolution images of Earth for Egypt's National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space Sciences (NARSS). EgyptSat-A was built as a replacement for EgyptSat-2, which failed in April 2015, three years into its planned 11-year mission.
Thursday's anomaly led the European launch provider Arianespace to postpone lofting the first 10 OneWeb communications satellites by one day, to Tuesday (Feb. 26), because that mission will also use a Soyuz rocket. "That flight is slated to use a Soyuz ST-B rocket, a variant that uses the same third-stage design as the Soyuz-2.1b launcher that flew Thursday with EgyptSat-A," Spaceflight Now reported.
"At least one day slip for the launch. Ugh," Greg Wyler, founder and executive chairman, tweeted after EgyptSat-A's launch on Thursday. "Glad to see EgyptSat-A launch was successful but need to review more data on that launch before proceeding. Waiting patiently."
You can now ride along withVirgin Galacticat the edge of space. An incredible new video shows footage from the SpaceShipTwo-class suborbital rocket VSS Unity launching from its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo.
With a mountain range below, Unity lights up its engines. A few frames later, the spacecraft soars into a black sky, the curve of the Earth underneath it. Unity clocked a peak altitude of 55.87 miles (89.9 kilometers), which is slightly above the U.S. Air Force's defined boundary of space — the second time a Virgin Galactic spacecraft has surpassed that boundary.
In the video Unity slowly rotates against the black backdrop of space, displaying black-outlined diagrams of several airplanes and space planes along its hull.
"Welcome to space," one of the two pilots says. In addition to pilots Dave Mackay and Michael "Sooch' Masucci, a third Virgin Galactic staff member, Beth Moses, was also on board. Moses is the company's chief astronaut instructor and served as the company's first test passenger.
"Welcome to the club, astronauts," says one of the ground controllers.
Part of the flight's purpose was to provide more data about how the human body adapts to space during SpaceShipTwo flights, and how passengers feel. Unity also carried four NASA payloads, with the aim of studying data such as dust particles, payload vibration and liquid/gas interactions.
Unity's Feb. 22 voyage brought it to a maximum altitude some 4.4 miles (7 km higher) than its historic flight of Dec. 13, which was the first time Virgin Galactic breached the Air Force's space boundary. However, both spaceflights' ascent was well short of the Kármán Line of 62 miles (100 km) that the International Astronautical Federation considers to be the beginning of space.
Hundreds of potential space tourists have already claimed a spot for suborbital flights aboard Virgin spacecraft, paying $250,000 apiece for the privilege. Entrepreneur Richard Branson, who founded the company, said he hopes to fly for the first time on July 16, 2019 — the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's launch of three humans to the moon.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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about 16 miles above the Bering Sea, far enough way to pose no threat. 
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@MikeWehner
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