Three UFOs Over Las Vegas, Nevada On Nov 15, 2016 Using Night Vision Technology, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Three UFOs Over Las Vegas, Nevada On Nov 15, 2016 Using Night Vision Technology, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Bronze UFO Caught Over Sand Dunes In Idaho During Day, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Inexplicable Bright Lights Rock A Canadian City

Bright lights in the sky have sparked fears of space alien arrival in a city. An online video shows four lights flying in formation before one suddenly vanishes from view.
The terrified man who captured the video claimed that the UFOs followed him for 12 miles down the highway in Brandon, Canada.
The city has recorded 30 sightings in 2015.
In the background of the video, which was uploaded on Saturday, the man can be heard saying he was shaking. He added that the UFOs followed him along the highway and he could not believe he was holding the camera steady.
There have been some unbelievable claims of UFO sightings recently, including alien bases on the Moon.
There were also claims involving crashed spaceship on Mars and a UFO passing the Supermoon.
Manitoba Museum UFO expert Scott Young said the city had experienced an increase in the number of UFO sightings.
Scott said that seeing UFOs in the flesh could give a weird sensation. He added that it is no surprise people seeing these unexplained lights find them bizarre and take videos.
Local astronomer Chris Rutkowski said there might be alien spaceships as people have seen V-shaped formations of orange lights. He revealed that 50% of the sightings reported recently were puzzling and worth further study.
UFO Hunters Claim To Have Spotted A Crashed UFO On Mars

UFO hunters have spotted another Martian surface anomaly that adds to the series of bizarre claims about the Red Planet.
YouTube channel UFOvni2012 has put photographs released by NASA on a video to point out a dark shape on Mars.
While the shape looks remarkably like a rock, the YouTube channel speculated that it could be a crashed spacecraft from an alien civilization.
In the video description, the so-called anomaly is the Medusa Fossae formation, a large geological unit on the planet of uncertain origin.
European Space Agency described the formation as an extensive unit of mysterious origin, which is found close to the boundary between the Tharsis and Elysium centers of volcanic activity.
The YouTube video highlights parts of the UFO through drawing two lines. It shows the detailed shape of the UFO as if it was a spaceship.
According to the uploader, they discovered a crash site with the UFO, which measures around 190 meters wide. The apparent object allegedly hit on Mars that impacted the surface at a low angle, and it ended half buried on the Red Planet’s soil.
Some UFO hunters suggested that the UFO tried to land as gently as it could because of the long and turned landing tracks left behind.
Some UFO enthusiasts speculated that the discovery is a base that opens the door. Others said that it could be a meteor that crashed.
There are also commenters who think that it is more likely to be a natural geological formation.
Stephen Hawking waarschuwt: “We bevinden ons in gevaarlijkste moment in geschiedenis van de mensheid”
De beroemde wetenschapper en astrofysicus Stephen Hawking waarschuwt voor de vernietiging van onze planeet in een open brief aan de Britse krant The Guardian.
Volgens de Brit bevinden we ons in het gevaarlijkste moment in de geschiedenis van de mensheid. Hij verwijst daarbij onder andere naar de verkiezing van Donald Trump. “Wat we ook denken van de Brexit en van de verkiezingen van Donald Trump, er is geen twijfel mogelijk dat dit een roep van woede was van mensen die het gevoel hebben dat ze in de steek werden gelaten door hun leiders. Het is het moment waarop de vergetenen hebben gesproken. Ze vonden hun stem om het advies en de richtlijnen van de experts en de elite te verwerpen”, zegt Hawking, die afgelopen weekend onverwacht moest worden opgenomen in een ziekenhuis in Rome, al is de 74-jarige wetenschapper, die aan ALS lijdt, niet in levensgevaar.
“En belangrijker nog dan die specifieke keuzes in Groot-Brittannië en in Amerika, is hoe de elite hierop zal reageren. Moeten we die stemmen de rug toekeren en het beschouwen als uitlopers van populisme die de feiten niet kennen? Dat doen zou een grote fout zijn.”
Grotere ongelijkheid
Hawking begrijpt de angsten van het volk voor de gevolgen van globalisering en technologische vooruitgang. Die evoluties zullen namelijk ook gevolgen hebben voor de jobs van de gewone mens. En dat zal dan weer de ongelijkheid in de wereld doen toenemen. Het internet speelt daar ook een rol in: het laat toe dat een kleine groep mensen enorme fortuinen verdient terwijl ze maar weinig mensen aan het werk zetten. “Dat is sociaal destructief”, zegt Hawking.
“We leven dus in een wereld waarin niet alleen financiële ongelijkheid is die alleen maar groter wordt, maar waarin de levensstandaard en de mogelijkheid om geld te verdienen steeds sneller en vaker verdwijnt. In die context is het geen verrassing dat mensen hun toevlucht zoeken in mensen als Trump of in iets als de Brexit.”

Miljoenen migranten
Die evolutie wordt versneld door internet en sociale media, meent Hawking. De ongelijkheid wordt zo namelijk steeds meer zichtbaar. Mensen zien via sociale media hoe het er elders aan toegaat. Dat kan een stroom van miljoenen migranten op de been brengen die op zoek gaan en zijn naar een beter leven. “De economie en de infrastructuur in de landen waar de migranten dan terechtkomen, komt verder onder druk te staan. En dat ondermijnt de tolerantie en is een voedingsbodem voor politiek populisme.”
En dat terwijl we net in tijden leven waarin we meer dan ooit moeten samenwerken, zo vindt Hawking. “We staan voor immense uitdagingen, met de klimaatverandering, overbevolking, het verdwijnen van meerdere soorten, ziektes, de verzuring van onze oceanen of problemen met voedselproductie,...We leven in het gevaarlijkste moment in de ontwikkeling van de mensheid. We hebben momenteel de technologieën om de planeet waarop we leven te vernietigen. Maar we hebben nog geen technologieën ontwikkeld waarmee we van onze aarde kunnen ontsnappen. Misschien hebben we dat wel binnen 100 jaar. Maar momenteel hebben we maar één planeet, en we moeten samenwerken om die te beschermen.” Hawking geeft daarbij ook een sneer aan Donald Trump, die een muur wil optrekken tussen Mexico en Amerika. “We moeten dat doen door muren neer te halen, in plaats van door muren te bouwen. “We moeten geen extra grenzen optrekken tussen landen.”

“Politieke elite moet erkennen dat ze gefaald heeft”
Hawking richt zich tenslotte nog eens naar de politieke elite. Die moeten erkennen dat ze gefaald hebben, en dat ze veel burgers in de steek hebben gelaten. “We gaan veel meer dan dat we nu doen moeten leren om te delen”, zegt hij nog. “Als landen de migratiestroom niet aankunnen, dan moeten we meer doen om de globale ontwikkeling te bevorderen. Want dat is de enige manier om miljoenen migranten ervan te overtuigen dat hun toekomst ook wel eens in hun thuisland zou kunnen liggen.”
Hawking is ervan overtuigd dat we dat ook kunnen doen. “Ik ben een enorme optimist voor onze soort. Maar de elites, van Londen tot Harvard, van Cambridge tot Hollywood, zullen lessen moeten trekken en moeten leren uit het afgelopen jaar.”
Planet Mercury: Facts About the Planet Closest to the Sun

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. As such, it circles the sun faster than all the other planets, which is why Romans named it after their swift-footed messenger god.
The Sumerians also knew of Mercury since at least 5,000 years ago. It was often associated with Nabu, the god of writing. Mercury was also given separate names for its appearance as both a morning star and as an evening star. Greek astronomers knew, however, that the two names referred to the same body. Heraclitus believed that both Mercury and Venus orbited the sun, not Earth. [Latest Photos: Mercury Seen by NASA's Messenger Probe]
Because the planet is so close to the sun, Mercury's surface temperature can reach a scorching 840 degrees Fahrenheit (450 degrees Celsius). However, since this world doesn't have a real atmosphere to entrap any heat, at night temperatures can plummet to minus 275 F (minus 170 C), a temperature swing of more than 1,100 degrees F (600 degree C), the greatest in the solar system.
Mercury is the smallest planet — it is only slightly larger than Earth's moon. Since it has no significant atmosphere to stop impacts, the planet is pockmarked with craters. About 4 billion years ago, an asteroid roughly 60 miles (100 kilometers) wide struck Mercury with an impact equal to 1 trillion 1-megaton bombs, creating a vast impact crater roughly 960 miles (1,550 km) wide. Known as the Caloris Basin, this crater could hold the entire state of Texas. Another large impact may have helped create the planet's odd spin.
As close to the sun as Mercury is, in 2012, NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft discovered water ice in the craters around its north pole, where regions may be permanently shaded from the heat of the sun. The southern pole may also contain icy pockets, but MESSENGER's orbit did not allowed scientists to probe the area. Comets or meteorites may have delivered ice there, or water vapor may have outgassed from the planet's interior and frozen out at the poles. [Related: First Photos of Water Ice on Mercury Captured by NASA Spacecraft]
As if Mercury isn't small enough, it not only shrank in its past but is continuing to shrink today. The tiny planet is made up of a single continental plate over a cooling iron core. As the core cools, it solidifies, reducing the planet's volume and causing it to shrink. The process crumpled the surface, creating lobe-shaped scarps or cliffs, some hundreds of miles long and soaring up to a mile high. In the past, the surface was constantly reshaped by volcanic activity, some fairly recently in the planet's past.
"The young age of the small scarps means that Mercury joins Earth as a tectonically active planet with new faults likely forming today as Mercury's interior continues to cool and the planet contracts," Tom Watters, Smithsonian senior scientist at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.
Mercury is the second densest planet after Earth, with a huge metallic coreroughly 2,200 to 2,400 miles (3,600 to 3,800 km) wide, or about 75 percent of the planet's diameter. In comparison, Mercury's outer shell is only 300 to 400 miles (500 to 600 km) thick. The combination of its massive core and abundance of volatile elements has left scientists puzzled for years.
A completely unexpected discovery Mariner 10 made was that Mercury possessed a magnetic field. Planets theoretically generate magnetic fields only if they spin quickly and possess a molten core. But Mercury takes 59 days to rotate and is so small — just roughly one-third Earth's size — that its core should have cooled off long ago.
"We had figured out how the Earth works, and Mercury is another terrestrial, rocky planet with an iron core, so we thought it would work the same way," Christopher Russell, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement.
An unusual interior could help to explain the differences in Mercury's magnetic field when compared to Earth. Observations from MESSENGER revealed that the planet's magnetic field is approximately three times stronger at its northern hemisphere than at its southern. Russell co-authored a model that suggests that Mercury's iron core may be turning from liquid to solid at the core's outer boundary rather than the inner.
"It's like a snow storm in which the snow formed at the top of the cloud and middle of the cloud and the bottom of the cloud too," said Russell. "Our study of Mercury's magnetic field indicates iron is snowing throughout this fluid that is powering Mercury's magnetic field."
The discovery in 2007 by Earth-based radar observations that Mercury's core may still be molten could help explain its magnetism, though the solar wind may play a role in dampening the planet's magnetic field.
Although Mercury's magnetic field is just 1 percent the strength of Earth's, it is very active. The magnetic field in the solar wind — the charged particles streaming off the sun — periodically touches upon Mercury's field, creating powerful magnetic tornadoes that channel the fast, hot plasma of the solar wind down to the planet's surface.
Instead of a substantial atmosphere, Mercury possesses an ultra-thin "exosphere" made up of atoms blasted off its surface by solar radiation, the solar wind and micrometeoroid impacts. These quickly escape into space, forming a tail of particles.
Mercury speeds around the sun every 88 Earth days, traveling through space at nearly 112,000 mph (180,000 km/h), faster than any other planet. Its oval-shaped orbit is highly elliptical, taking Mercury as close as 29 million miles (47 million km) and as far as 43 million miles (70 million km) from the sun. If one could stand on Mercury when it is nearest to the sun, it would appear more than three times as large as it does when viewed from Earth.
Oddly, due to Mercury's highly elliptical orbit and the 59 Earth-days or so it takes to rotate on its axis, when on the scorching surface of the planet, the sun appears to rise briefly, set, and rise again before it travels westward across the sky. At sunset, the sun appears to set, rise again briefly, and then set again.

Atmospheric composition (by volume):
No atmosphere: Mercury possesses an exosphere containing 42 percent oxygen, 29 percent sodium, 22 percent hydrogen, 6 percent helium, 0.5 percent potassium, with possible trace amounts of argon, carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen, xenon, krypton and neon.
Magnetic field: Roughly 1 percent the strength of Earth's.
Internal structure: Iron core roughly 2,200 to 2,400 miles (3,600 to 3,800 km) wide. Outer silicate shell about 300 to 400 miles (500 to 600 km) thick. [Inside Planet Mercury (Infographic)]
Orbit & rotation
Average distance from the sun: 35,983,095 miles (57,909,175 km). By comparison: 0.38 Earth's distance from the sun.
Perihelion (closest approach to sun): 28,580,000 miles (46,000,000 km). By comparison: 0.313 times that of Earth
Aphelion (farthest distance from sun): 43,380,000 miles (69,820,000 km). By comparison: 0.459 times that of Earth
Length of Day: 58.646 Earth-days
The first spacecraft to visit Mercury was Mariner 10, which imaged about 45 percent of the surface and detected its magnetic field. NASA's MESSENGERorbiter is the second spacecraft to visit Mercury. When it arrived in March 2011, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, where it continues to study the planet. [First Photos of Mercury from Orbit]
In 2012, scientists discovered a group of meteorites in Morocco that they think could have originated from the planet Mercury. If so, it would make the rocky planet a member of a very select club with samples available on Earth; only the moon, Mars and the asteroid belt have verified rocks.
Additional reporting by Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com contributor
Additional resources
US Military Develops 'Multi-Object Kill Vehicle' to Blast Enemy Nukes
Defensive weapons that can intercept and destroy enemy missiles before they can harm the United States or its allies have been a key part of military strategy for decades, but the rules of the game are changing.
More countries have or are developing long-range missile technology, including systems that can carry multiple warheads, known as Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) and/or decoys.
"Both China and Russia possess the MIRV capability for their ballistic missiles. In 2014, reports confirmed that Iran too had developed Multiple Re-entry Vehicles (MRVs) for their ballistic missiles. Cold War literature suggests that MIRVs are first strike weapons and could be strategically destabilizing," independent consultant Debalina Ghoshal wrote in a June 2016 report for the Federation of American Scientists.
"The United States realizes these threats and is working towards a robust missile defense system," she said.
RELATED: The Outer Space Treaty Promised Peace In Space
Last year, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency awarded contracts to Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing to begin designing what is known as a "Multi-Object Kill Vehicle" or MOKV, which could destroy several objects in space with a single launch.
"Ten years ago, we had a single kill vehicle on a single interceptor. Kill vehicles today are the size of a toaster … This MOKV program is the latest iteration," John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told Seeker.
Raytheon's plan, which is scheduled for a concept review in December, is to load multiple MOKVs onto a single missile for launch. Each MOKV would be outfitted with sensors, a steering and propulsion system and communications equipment that will allow them to zero in on an individual target and hit it, destroying the object by sheer kinetic forces.
The impacts would take place beyond Earth's atmosphere, but on a trajectory that would send the resulting cloud of debris back into the atmosphere, where it burn up, Pike said.
RELATED: Is Russian Mystery Object a Space Weapon?
A major technological challenge is figuring out how to differentiate between bombs and decoys, such as balloons that look like they might have a hydrogen bomb aboard.
The military hopes to begin proof-of-concept demonstrations late next year and a non-intercept flight test in 2018. If successful, the Missile Defense Agency would conduct an intercept test in 2019.
Originally published on Seeker.
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Roswell UFO BREAKTHROUGH? 'Welder at crash site saw TWO dead ALIENS in flying saucer'
Audi gaat naar de maan - HLN.be

© reuters.
Twee elektrische voertuigen van Audi gaan volgend jaar naar de maan. De Audi Lunar Quattro is geen normale auto, maar een speciaal ontwikkeld maanvoertuig. Audi-ingenieurs werkten samen met een team van Duitse wetenschappers bij de ontwikkeling.
De twee wagentjes wegen 30 kilo per stuk. Met zonnepanelen wordt een lithium-ion-accu opgeladen. De karretjes hebben vier elektromotoren per stuk, een voor ieder wiel. De vier camera's per Lunar Quattro worden gebruikt om de voertuigen mee te besturen, maar ook om 3D- en 360 gradenopnames te maken. Audi ondersteunde de ontwikkeling op het gebied van vierwielaandrijving, lichtgewicht bouwwijze, elektrische aandrijving en autonoom rijden.
De twee Audi's worden door de ALINA-maanlander naar de Taurus-Littrow-vallei op de maan gebracht. Daar bezoeken ze onder mee het ruimtevoertuig dat Apollo 17-astronauten Eugene Cernan en Harrison Schmidt in 1972 achterlieten aan het einde van de laatste bemande vlucht naar de maan. Voor het zover is worden ze eerst in het Midden-Oosten intensief getest.
Competitie
De Lunar Quattro's maken deel uit van de Duitse inzending voor de Google Lunar XPRIZE-competitie. Zestien teams doen mee aan die door de zoekgigant uitgeschreven competitie. Het eerste team dat een voertuig op de maan laat landen, 500 meter aflegt en hd-video en -foto's terug naar aarde stuurt wint 20 miljoen dollar, een kleine 19 miljoen euro. Het tweede team dat aan alle eisen voldoet krijgt een kwart daarvan. De zestien teams moeten voor het einde van dit jaar een contract voor de lancering van hun voertuig kunnen overleggen. Het Duitse team heeft dat nu gedaan door een contract met Spaceflight, Inc. te tekenen.
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Could Pluto’s Subsurface Ocean Support Alien Life?
Pluto is hiding a massive secret. The tiny icy world in the outer depths of the solar system could in fact, be concealing a subsurface ocean beneath its frozen, heart-shaped region known as Sputnik Planitia. The big question is: Could that subsurface ocean support extraterrestrial life?
First spotted by the New Horizons spacecraft during its historic 2015 flyby, the heart-shaped region that captured the affections of space-lovers everywhere was found by scientists to be was naturally divided into two lobes: A smooth, icy lobe named Sputnik Planitia, and a rougher region known as Tombaugh reggio.
The region informally named Sputnik Planitia is a deep basin thought to be a remnant of an ancient collision. The would-be crater has been filled in over time with a mixture of three kinds of ices — frozen nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide — and is located on the surface opposite of Charon (which is Pluto’s large, tidally locked moon).
“Sputnik Planitia is one of Pluto’s crown jewels, and understanding its origin is a puzzle,” New Horizons Principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, explained in a news release.
William McKinnon, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis is a member of the New Horizons team as well as a co-author on several Pluto papers, including one earlier this summer explaining that Pluto’s modest internal heat, is creating a lava lamp effect in Sputnik Planitia. McKinnon also co-authored another paper suggests any potential subsurface ocean would span some 600 miles wide and more than 50 miles thick. He also estimates that such an ocean would have an abundance of ammonia.
The New Horizons team previously detected the presence of ammonia on Charon, and also on one of Pluto’s small moons. “So it’s almost certainly inside Pluto,” McKinnon explained in a news release. “What I think is down there in the ocean is rather noxious, very cold, salty and very ammonia-rich almost a syrup.”
Could life survive in such an environment? If we’re talking about life as we know it, probably not. (Sorry Jeff Goldblum).
“It’s no place for germs, much less fish or squid, or any life as we know it,” McKinnon elaborated. “But as with the methane seas on Titan — Saturn’s main moon it raises the question of whether some truly novel life forms could exist in these exotic, cold liquids.”
Life on Earth can tolerate a lot. Organisms known as extremophiles don’t just live, but thrive in the harshest environments. For instance, there are organisms that can tolerate extreme temperatures, as well as very salty conditions, or even the tardigrade, which can dry out for long periods of time and then reanimatethanks to a few drops of water.
It’s cold as hell out in the Kuiper Belt, so in order for a subsurface ocean on Pluto to remain a liquid, there must be some sort of anti-freeze, such as ammonia. Although scientists are not convinced there’s an organism out there that could survive in the viscous, ammonia-rich ocean on Pluto, certain types of bacteria found here on Earth are able to convert nitrogen into ammonia.
If there is an ocean lurking beneath Pluto’s icy heart, it would be a major discovery. Pluto is just one of thousands of worlds taking up residence in the Kuiper Belt, and if an exotic — meaning different than what we find here on Earth — subsurface ocean could be confirmed, the probability of other KBO’s harboring exotic oceans (and maybe life) increases exponentially.
New Horizons was decades in the making, and there are no other missions to explore Pluto currently on the books. If we want to definitively confirm a subsurface ocean exists, we will need to send another orbiter (or better yet, a lander) to collect crucial gravity measurements.
Photos via NASA, Giphy
Chinese Science Fiction Is the Future of Science Fiction
Chinese science fiction writers are having more fun with the genre than anyone else, and in fact, might even be producing its best new works. And now, in the years following the success of Liu Cixin’s award-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, western audiences are starting to take notice.
For an easy introduction to this massive subgenre, see Ken Liu’s new anthology of short fiction, Invisible Planets, which highlights his favorite contemporary translated Chinese science fiction. And for readers who want to dive more deeply, three essays at the end of the book argue over the actual definition of Chinese science-fiction. In his essay “The Worst of All Possible Universes,” Liu Cixin himself believes that The Three-Body Problem actually helped to recontextualize science fiction in China very recently. In 2006, at the time of Three-Body’s publication in China, he wrote, “China’s science fiction market was anxious and depressed. The long marginalization of science fiction as genre led to a small and insular readership.”
Liu suggests that it has something to do with the book’s thick layer of imagination placed atop its realism. Liu implies that an adherence to strict realism is what shackled Chinese science fiction prior to 2006. “Writers struggled to attract readers outside the tribe and felt they had to give up their Campbellian science fiction fundamentalism and raise the genre’s literary qualities of realism.”
Jarringly, this is not unique to China, because what Liu Cixin is talking about is universal to science fiction publishing. If The Three-Body Problem was a big deal in Chinese science fiction in 2006, when Ken Liu’s translation showed up in American in 2014, it was also greeted as a breath of fresh air.
A contemporary science fiction writer is supposed to somehow reach a mainstream audience, demonstrate a convincing grasp of feasible science on the page, and also pay homage to previous sci-fi. If there’s one overwhelming trend from Liu Cixin or any of the other authors in Invisible Planets, it would seem to be that they looked at all those impossible criteria and said, “Fuck it.” And then, they wrote science fiction that could be realistic, but didn’t have to be. Finally, they were having fun with the genre.

Make no mistake, Invisible Planets is 100% Ken Liu’s baby. And though he might be known as the translator of Liu Cixin’s The Three-BodyProblem, the anthology wasn’t exclusively born out of that novel becoming popular in translation. “I had published 40+ translations of short Chinese fiction, and I realized that I had enough material to create a compelling anthology for readers interested in hearing new voices,” Ken Liu told Inverse. “It had nothing to do with The Three-Body Problem other than the fact that one of the stories in the anthology is adapted from a chapter in [that novel.]”
That’s why “whimsy” is the pervasive thread holding all the stories in Invisible Planets together, and “Grave of Fireflies” by Cheng Jingbo is one of its stand-out stories. In it, the author describes a future in which starships are seemingly evacuating the remnants of humanity in a mad dash to find the last remaining stars that might still be burning. Stars are going out left and right all around the universe, and no one knows why. Meanwhile, a kind of portal helps to guide the main character, Rosamund, to safety. “To the south was the Door Into Summer, built from floating asteroids like a road to heaven,” Cheng writes.
Xia Jia’s own story “Night Journey of the Dragon Horse” is another good example: it features a sentient, mechanical creature lumbering through a decayed, vaguely future-dystopian landscape. Xia Jia based the Dragon Horse on “real” dragon horses on planet Earth; it’s a kind of parade float, an attraction that would delight children. Imagining what a living version of a complex parade float might look like wouldn’t occur to most American science fiction writers. Is lack of imagination to blame? More likely, science fiction has been long dominated by western imagery and tropes, meaning everything about the imagination in Chinese science fiction seems fresh.
But how does one define “Chinese Science Fiction”? The essays in Invisible Planetsdon’t totally agree. In his essay “What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?” Xia Jia writes that the “disparate stories” found in the anthology “speak of something in common, and the tension between Chinese ghost tales and science fiction provides yet another way to express the same idea.” That’s not to say that there was ever a plan to present one unified theme with this anthology. Editor Ken Liu told Inverse that the book hopefully gives “… an overall sense of Chinese science fiction as a diverse category that includes many themes and approaches,” but Liu stopped short of saying that the book claims any “comprehensiveness” in terms of covering all of Chinese science fiction, ever. “It was conceived of as a showcase for some wonderful works of contemporary Chinese science fiction as gathered by an American writer and fan: me.” Ken Lui said. “I’m an American writer, so I write in the tradition of the Western canon … and I can’t claim that I’m too heavily influenced by any single school of thought.”

Regardless of motivation or total comprehensiveness, Invisible Planets is a wake-up call for a serious fan of science fiction. The message here is: ultra-realistic hard science fiction isn’t the global future of the genre, nor is a blend of literary fiction with borrowed “edginess” from the New Wave of the 20th century. Instead, Invisible Planets puts print sci-fi firmly where it should be: on the edge of what still isn’t quite possible in life, but can be glimpsed in art.
Quoting Gilles Deluze, Xia Jia reminds readers that science fiction is always in a state of “becoming.” There, finally, a true definition for science fiction — Chinese or otherwise might have been discovered. Chinese science fiction’s influence on the rest of the world has opened up a whole new frontier of discovery. Invisible Planets is probably just the beginning.
Invisible Planets is out now from Tor Books.
Photos via Tor, Tor Books
Tisulsky Princess — Girl in a Casket — Is at Least 800 Million Years Old!


SHOCK CLAIM: ELITE PREPARING FOR NIBIRU APOCALYPSE NEXT YEAR BUT THE REST OF US ARE DOOMED
Scientists Catch "Virtual Particles" Hopping In and Out of Existence
The quantum effect known as vacuum birefringence was predicted in the 1930s, but this is the first observational evidence of the phenomenon in action.
About 400 light-years from here, in the area surrounding a neutron star, the electromagnetic field of this unbelievably dense object appears to be creating an area where matter spontaneously appears and then vanishes.
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) describes the relationships between particles of light, or photons, and electrically charged particles such as electrons and protons. The theories of QED suggest that the universe is full of "virtual particles," which are not really particles at all. They are fluctuations in quantum fields that have most of the same properties as particles, except they appear and vanish all the time. Scientists predicted the existence of virtual particles some 80 years ago, but we have never had experimental evidence of this process until now.
How can we possibly see such a thing? One of the properties virtual particles have in common with actual particles is that they both affect light. In addition, intense magnetic fields are thought to excite the activity of virtual particles, affecting any light that passes through that space more dramatically.
So a team of astronomers pointed our most advanced ground-based telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), at one of the densest objects we know of: a neutron star.
Neutron stars have magnetic fields that are billions of times stronger than our sun's. Using the VLT, Roberto Mignani from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and his team observed visible light around the neutron star RX J1856.5-3754 and detected linear polarization—or the alignment of light waves according to external electromagnetic influences—in the empty space around the star. This is rather odd, because conventional relativity says that light should pass freely through a vacuum, such as space, without being altered. The linear polarization was to such a degree (16 degrees to be precise) that the only known explanations are theories of QED and the influence of virtual particles.
"According to QED, a highly magnetized vacuum behaves as a prism for the propagation of light, an effect known as vacuum birefringence," Mignani says. "The high linear polarization that we measured with the VLT can't be easily explained by our models unless the vacuum birefringence effects predicted by QED are included."
Vacuum birefringence was first predicted in the 1930s by Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler. It was an exciting time for the development of quantum mechanics, when many of the advanced theories still studied today were developed.
In the quantum realm, matter behaves very strangely to say the least. It violates both Newton's classical laws of physics and Einstein's theories of relativity and gravity. Matter can exist in two separate places at once. Entangled particles, separated by miles, can influence each other instantaneously. As far as we can tell, the smallest building blocks of matter exist with multiple, or even infinite properties, known as quantum states, until they are observed or measured.
Fortunately, we can model and even predict some quantum phenomena, and we do this using wave functions. A wave, such as a sine curve, is represented by an equation that has multiple correct values to make it a true mathematical statement. This same basic principle can be applied to physical models of particles that exist in different locations, or with different properties, or sometimes don't exist at all. When the particles are measured, the wave function collapses, and the matter only exists with one set of properties like you would expect. The researchers were able to measure the virtual particles around a neutron star indirectly, by measuring the light that passes through them.
These concepts are so profound that Einstein and Niels Bohr famously debated, at length, whether the universe even exists as a tangible smattering of matter across the void, or if it is a fluid conglomerate of infinite possible realities until we observe it. The first experimental evidence of vacuum birefringence—absurdly strong electromagnetic forces tugging at the very foundations of matter—reminds us that this is still an open-ended question.
Source: European Southern Observatory
Kosmische toverkunsten: Materie verschijnt en verdwijnt spontaan rond verre ster

Er gebeurt iets spookachtigs rond een neutronenster op 400 lichtjaar van de aarde. Materie lijkt er spontaan te verschijnen en vervolgens weer te verdwijnen.
Het is net alsof bij de ster een kosmische tovenaar aan het werk is.
Wetenschappers ontdekten dit vreemde fenomeen toen ze de Very Large Telescope van het Europese Zuidelijke Sterrenwacht (ESO) op neutronenster RX J1856.5-3754 richtten.
De ster heeft een magnetisch veld dat miljarden keer sterker is dan dat van onze zon, schrijft Popular Mechanics.
Waarnemingen met de telescoop in het noorden van Chili hebben laten zien dat het licht van de neutronenster een sterke lineaire polarisatie vertoont.
Die polarisatie zou niet moeten optreden omdat de ruimte rond een ster normaal gesproken leeg is. Het licht kan erdoorheen gaan zonder veranderingen te ondergaan.
In dit geval kan er maar één verklaring zijn: de ruimte rond de ster was niet leeg, maar bevatte ‘virtuele deeltjes’ die nu eens verschijnen en dan weer verdwijnen.
De kwantumelektrodynamica (QED), die gaat over de relatie tussen lichtdeeltjes (fotonen) en elektrisch geladen deeltjes, voorspelt dat zeer sterke magnetische velden de lege ruimte zodanig veranderen dat de polarisatie van passerend licht wordt beïnvloed.
Dit effect, dat ook wel vacuüm-dubbelbreking wordt genoemd, werd al in de jaren dertig voorspeld, maar is nog nooit eerder aangetoond.
De virtuele deeltjes zijn geen echte deeltjes, maar fluctuaties in kwamtumvelden. Deze fluctuaties gedragen zich desalniettemin als deeltjes en kunnen licht beïnvloeden.
Volgens de QED wemelt het universum van virtuele deeltjes. Er was een magnetisch veld van een verre neutronenster voor nodig om ze eindelijk aan ons te onthullen.
[Popular Mechanics]