Large UFO Hovers Over Mountain In Indonesia, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Oct 29, 2019
Location of sighting: Indonesia

This UFO was caught moving  toward a mountain in Indonesia a few days ago. I can easily see the round disk shape with the huge lower dome on it. Since its moving toward the mountain top, its logical to assume that there is a alien base below this mountain at a depth of about 5-6km. Aliens often chose base locations based on the difficulty for other species to access their location. Often making bases in the depths of the ocean, below volcanos and mountains. This way aliens reduce the chances of encountering humans. 
Scott C. Waring-Taiwan

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

Mysterious tunnels have been discovered on the Moon near the Apollo missions. These two tunnels of 1 km. and 1.7 km long and 5 meters wide, a few meters from the station 6 of the Apollo 17 mission, were discovered by the Argentine researcher Marcelo Irazusta,

However, as seen in the video, some versions of Google Moon, have removed these pictures.

What could be the reason that they have put a white layer over that area covering these tunnels? What are they trying to hide?

Luckily, Marcelo Irazusta preserved the original images and makes them available to everyone through this video.

The images are from NASA published by Google Moon. If someone wants to verify them you can see these coordinates: 20°18'17.13"N 30°47'28.68"E

  

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

Have you seen a triangle UFO lately? If so, you’re not alone … well, not in the “we are not alone because the aliens are here” sense, but because those triangular crafts have been seen everywhere. Now, the US Air Force may finally have to admit that it’s to blame for at least some of those sightings. A new report in Aviation Week reveals that the RQ-180 spy drone, a mini-me of a stealth bomber, has been flying out of Beale Air Force Base in northern California and other bases for nine years! While the Air Force has declined to comment, Aviation Week stands by its strong evidence that Northrup Grumman’s RQ-180 is up and flying. What should triangle spotters be looking for to determine if they’re seeing a UFO or an RQ-180 – other than the lack of an image on their radar screen?

“Although Aviation Week commissioned an artists’ impression of the aircraft incorporating a cranked-kite wing configuration when it broke the RQ-180 story, industry sources have since said the aircraft differs in detail from the published concept. Additional evidence now suggests the final configuration may be closer to the company’s more familiar flying-wing designs, with a simpler trailing edge similar to that seen in the Air Force’s official rendering of the B-21 Raider. Northrop Grumman originally crafted the same basic trailing edge configuration for the B-2 under the Advanced Tactical Bomber program but changed it to the stronger load-carrying sawtooth design when the Air Force added the low-level penetration role.”

That first artist’s rendition (shown on the cover of the December 9, 2013 issue of Aviation Week shown here) is much cooler and more modern than the Northrup Grumman’s X-47B drone combined with the trailing edge of the B-21 Raider stealth bomber it’s said to be based on. (See an artist’s rendition of the RQ-180 here.)

Artist rendering of the rumored B-21 Stealth Bomber

X-47B demonstrator

Fortunately for the secretive Air Force, no confirmed photographs of the RQ-180 have surfaced yet, despite the fact that it’s big (10 meters (33 feet) long with a wingspan of 40 meters (131 feet)) and has apparently been flying since 2010, starting with tests at the Groom Lake testing facility at Area 51 and secretly moving to other bases like Edwards AFB in southern California before ending up at Beale, with secondary operations at Nellis AFB in Nevada and Andersen AFB in Guam and possibly other locations. Now you can see why triangle UFOs have been seen in so many places. During that time, Aviation Week claims to have evidence of secret tests code-named Project Magellan at extremely high latitudes over the geographic North Pole.

Beale AFB is a logical choice for the RQ-180 since it is home to U-2 spy planes (a few are still in operation) and the SR-71 Blackbird (retired in 1999) it was designed to replace. And yet, despite all of the evidence Aviation Week has collected from open sources and insider information that the RQ-180 is housed in Beale hangars, there’s not a confirmed single picture of one anywhere.

You know what that means. Get your cell phones and head on down to Marysville, California, the North Pole, Guam or one of the other places the RQ-180 may be flying and be the first to capture a photo or video.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Asteroid Impacts Might Wipe Out Alien Life Around Dwarf Stars

By Rafi Letzter - Staff Writer - Space 

What's the recipe for a living planet? A new paper suggests that the right number of impacts is a key ingredient.

A NASA illustration shows an asteroid striking a planet.

(Image: © NASA/Don Davis)

What's the recipe for a living planet? Astronomers aren't sure — we haven't found any other than Earth yet. 

But we have some educated guesses: Life probably needs water, carbon, and enough light and heat to power a world without burning it to a crisp. The gravity shouldn't be too high, and an atmosphere wouldn't hurt either. But a new study proposes another essential ingredient: major asteroid and comet impacts, in just the right amounts.

When a large object strikes a planet, two things happen: The material from the object gets added to the planet's mass, and some of the atmosphere around the impact zone gets kicked off into space, said Mark Wyatt, a University of Cambridge astronomer and lead author of the new paper. In truly giant impacts, like the one that formed Earth's moon, some atmosphere gets booted off the far side of the planet as well, which means a bit more gets lost. But that doesn't mean a wannabe home world should skip the impacts entirely. If a planet is to develop the conditions thought necessary for life, it's best to belong to a middle category of planets that absorb plenty of major impacts — but not so many that they lose their atmospheres.

• Related: 9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for Why Humans Haven't Found Aliens Yet

That's because planets almost certainly need "volatiles" in their atmospheres in order to sprout life, Wyatt told Live Science. Volatiles are chemicals, like water and carbon dioxide, that can boil at low temperatures. All life that we know of relies on water and carbon to sustain itself at a basic chemical level, and scientists believe that the properties of those chemicals make them necessary for life to arise anywhere in the universe.

But not all planets start off with the necessary concentrations of volatiles. Early in a star's lifetime, it's much brighter. And that extra shine is hot enough to bake all the loose dust in the region that will become the star's habitable zone — the not-too-hot, not-too-cold area — later on. Those hot early temperatures likely strip water and other volatiles from the dust that will eventually become habitable planets. So after planets form and the star cools down, these rocky orbs need to acquire their volatiles from somewhere else in the solar system. In other words, they've got to smash into a bunch of big stray objects.

The researchers found that the best candidates for delivering volatiles while not stripping the planet's atmosphere and sterilizing it are medium-size objects. Impacts from 60-foot-wide (20 meters) to 3,300-foot-wide (1 kilometer) asteroids and comets are very efficient at delivering volatiles and will tend to add more to the atmosphere than they subtract, the authors found. Bigger asteroids, between about 1 and 12 miles (2 and 20 km) across, will tend to strip more atmosphere than they add.

Giant impacts like the one that formed Earth's moon, the authors found, don't mess with that story as much as you might expect. Such events are pretty rare, and while they can change the composition of an atmosphere, they won't completely remove it.

One of the important lessons from this paper is that small "M class" stars — the most common category of stars, too dim to see with the naked eye, many of them red dwarfs — are likely bad candidates for life, the authors wrote. That's significant, because a great many potentially habitable exoplanets have turned up around those sorts of stars.

"For M stars, their low luminosity means that the habitable zone is much closer to the star than for a star like the sun," Wyatt said.

To get enough light, an Earth-like planet circling an M-class star might have to be as close to that star as Mercury is to our sun.

And it gets worse. Right up next to a small, low-mass star, asteroids and comets fly around at much higher speeds and crash more dramatically into planets.

"Higher-velocity impacts are much more efficient at stripping an atmosphere," Wyatt said.

That's bad news for life on M worlds. And it's not the only factor that makes M-world life unlikely.

"There are a number of reasons why habitable planets orbiting M dwarfs might not have an atmosphere, including stripping from stellar winds and the planets being much closer in to their host star," said Sarah Rugheimer, an expert in exoplanet atmospheres at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in this research.

So is there any hope for life on M worlds?

"I think, ultimately, we will answer this question observationally with [the James Webb Space Telescope] soon after it launches: Do habitable planets orbiting M dwarfs have atmospheres?" Rugheimer said. "We know that slightly hotter and bigger planets orbiting M dwarfs do have thick atmospheres. But this question still remains for habitable planets: Can they retain a thin enough atmosphere, something like Earth rather than Venus?"

The authors emphasized in the paper that many of their conclusions are based on uncertainties: Where does life form? How much do other star systems out there resemble our solar system?

Edwin Bergin, an expert in planet formation and water at the University of Michigan who was not involved in this research, agreed with the authors that there are what he called "significant complications" in the calculations behind this paper.

"But the general trends they present are quite interesting and could be important," he said.

He pointed to his own work, which has suggested that Earth started out with a thicker, nitrogen-rich atmosphere but lost much of it to impacts. The authors of this new paper suggested in their model that impacts from comets and asteroids might have shaped the atmospheres of Earth, Mars and Venus.

Down the road, the researchers said, there's more to learn about how this work can explain our own solar system, particularly the role of giant impacts here. This paper has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and is available on the preprint server arXiv.

• Fallen Stars: A Gallery of Famous Meteorites
• The 12 Strangest Objects in the Universe
• Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.livescience.com/ }

Bronze Age monument discovered in Forest of Dean using airborne laser scanning could have been ritual BURIAL ground, archaeologist claims

• Dating back to 2,000 BC the ritual ring was found during a LiDAR laser scan 
• Archaeologist Jon Hoyle discovered site, near Tidenham, Gloucestershire
•  The 'very significant' Bronze Age monument was hidden in the Forest of Dean

By MILLY VINCENT FOR MAILONLINE

A 'very significant' discovery of a Bronze Age monument has been uncovered after being hidden under foliage in the Forest of Dean.

Dating back to about 2,000 BC the circular ritual ring was found during a LiDAR laser scan of the area.

The findings, known as a ring cairn, consist of a circular bank with limestone standing stones.

Archaeologist Jon Hoyle discovered the site, near the village of Tidenham, Gloucestershire, which he first believed could be a World War Two gun emplacement due to its 'extremely circular' nature. 

Archaeologist Jon Hoyle said nobody knows precisely what ring cairns were used for. An artists impression of the 2,000 BC the circular ritual ring

Dating back to about 2,000 BC the circular ritual ring was found during a LiDAR laser scan of the area

This is the only Bronze Age monument of its type to be discovered in Gloucestershire, however the cairns are common in Derbyshire, Northumberland and Wales, said Mr Hoyle.

Mr Hoyle told the BBC: 'It was very exciting. I was expecting to find quite a lot of new sites with the LiDAR, but nothing as interesting as this.'

Adding: 'Nobody knows precisely what they were used for. 

'Some have been found in association with burials, and often there appear to be residues of charcoal in places like this, suggesting rituals that involved fire.' 

This is the only Bronze Age monument of its type to be discovered in Gloucestershire, however the cairns are common in Derbyshire, Northumberland and Wales

Archaeologist Jon Hoyle discovered the site, near the village of Tidenham, Gloucestershire

The large ring is about 80ft wide and contains a circular bank formed with rubble that is 16ft wide.  

White limestone standing stones were found on top of the bank, about 3ft high each.'

LiDAR (light detection and ranging) can be used to expose structures hidden by folliage or other structures by bouncing light off a target to measure distances and build a 3D map.

The archaeologist first believed the ring could be a World War Two gun emplacement due to its 'extremely circular' nature

Read more:

• Bronze Age monument discovered in Forest of Dean - BBC News

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Scientists Just Found a 'Needle in the Haystack' Black Hole Once Hidden From View

By Chelsea Gohd - Science & Astronomy 

Finding this hidden black hole could lead to more discoveries.

An artist's impression of a black hole. In a new study, scientists identify a black hole in a non-interacting binary with a star, a discovery that could support future black hole findings.

(Image: © Shutterstock)

Researchers have discovered a strange black hole-star pair, a finding that could open our eyes to millions of new black holes that, until now, have been hidden in the cosmos.

For years, scientists have assumed that there are millions of black holes in our galaxy. However, researchers can often only spot black holes that are in binary pairs with stars in which the black hole orbits and siphons matter from the star. This is because, when black holes accrete matter from their partner star, they emit bright, easy-to-spot X-rays.

But many black holes in these pairings don't orbit their star close enough to accrete mass and emit this bright signal, so they go undetected. 

However, in a new study, scientists demonstrated how dimmer black holes can be spotted in the night sky.

• Related: Dying Star Robbed of Its Stellar Mass by Covert Companion

A labeled still from the animation details different parts of a black hole's anatomy.

(Image credit: Jeremy Schnittman/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

In the study, scientists looked at a binary star system made up of the giant star 2MASS J05215658+4359220 and a companion, which, through a unique approach, they found is likely a low-mass black hole, lead author Todd Thompson, a professor in the Department of Astronomy at The Ohio State University, told Space.com.

Black hole in a haystack

To spot this dim, low-mass black hole, the research team "had to develop a new type of search," Thompson said. Spotting the elusive black hole was a "needle-in-the-haystack kind of search," he added. 

To find the hidden black hole, the team began by poring through data from APOGEE, a survey that uses spectroscopy data to scour the sky for stars. After observing over 100,000 stars, the team identified which stars had significant doppler shift, or redshift and blueshift. Redshift occurs when the wavelengths of light coming from objects moving away from Earth get longer, and the object appears red; blueshift occurs when the wavelengths of light coming from objects moving closer shorten, and the object appears blue. 

The team combined data on stars exhibiting doppler shift with data from the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) project, in which robotic telescopes worldwide monitor the night sky and collect data on millions of stars. With this data, scientists can see the brightness of stars over time. 

The researchers whittled down the list of stars to those "that showed the most extreme doppler shift, Thompson said. They then looked at the stars' light curves, or how the brightness of those stars changed over time in the ASAS-SN data.

The "combination of those two factors led us to this one particular star, this giant star in the outer galaxy," Thompson said about 2MASS J05215658+4359220.

The star's brightness kept changing, brightening and dimming back and forth. The team assumed, and later confirmed, that the brightness variations were in line with the orbital period of an object orbiting the star, Thompson said. 

When they studied the system further, the researchers determined that the object must have a mass of around 3.3 solar masses (though they did give a fairly wide margin of error, from 2.6 to 6.1 solar masses). This mass is consistent with a low-mass black hole. 

Uncovering the unseen

Identifying this black hole which, because it doesn't emit bright X-rays, had previously escaped detection by astronomers, is an important step forward in allowing researchers to more easily identify these "hidden" black holes, Thompson said. 

This black hole is approximately 3.3 times the mass of the sun. That makes it much less massive than black holes in bright, X-ray-emitting systems, which are usually five to six solar masses. It's also less massive than black holes that merge across the universe in gravitational waves, which are often 20 to 30 solar masses, Thompson said. "There are very few or possibly no systems that contain a black hole of around 3 or 3.3 [solar masses] … This is a very-low-mass system for a black hole," he said.

What's more, if this object is found to have the lowest mass deemed possible in its margin or error, it could turn out to be a neutron star — the collapsed core of a giant, dead star — at its maximum mass, Thompson said. Alternatively, if this object is closer to the upper range of its estimated mass, it would add to the definition of what qualifies as a black hole. 

If 3.3 solar masses holds up, it's going to be "quite important," Thompson said, adding that it "will show us that these types of black holes are out there." 

In other words, if the black hole is, in fact, 3.3 solar masses as these researchers think it likely is, it will provide evidence for the assumption that there are possibly plenty of black holes in the cosmos that don't emit X-rays. 

"This was our first candidate," Thompson said, adding that the team is "working on trying to find new candidates using the same search method."

The work was published today (Oct. 31) in the journal Science. 

• Black Hole Quiz: How Well Do You Know Nature's Weirdest Creations?
• The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe
• Stephen Hawking's Most Far-Out Ideas About Black Holes

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Among Anglos, no name reminds them more of Mexico than Montezuma, the first Aztec to encounter Europeans and whose death during the Spanish conquest led by Hernán Cortés spawned the legendary curse of diarrhea on gringo travelers to Mexico to avenge the slaughter and enslavement of the Aztec people by Cortés. What’s less known is that this was Montezuma II. Montezuma I (also known as Moctezuma I and Moteuczomatzin Ilhuicamina) was the second Aztec emperor and the fifth king of Tenochtitlan (Montezuma II was the ninth king) and his name popped up in the news again this week, nearly 500 years after his death in 1520. Archaeologists have discovered a secret Aztec tunnel world believed to have been built by Montezuma I in honor of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of water and fertility. What mysteries does this pre-Hispanic tunnel hold?

Montezuma I

“The most surprising thing is that we found a wooden hatch, which is a unique find in all that are the levee systems of the basin of Mexico, because in general, these types of elements are hardly preserved.”

Raúl García Chávez, coordinator of the archaeological salvage and enhancement project for the Mexican Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), told Turquesa News that the tunnel found underneath the city of Ecatepec de Morelos, north of and second in size to Mexico City, was densely decorated with inscriptions, carvings and paintings as well as this well-preserved wooden hatch which indicated that the tunnel was used to control the waters of the nearby lakes of Zumpango and Xaltocan, a task associated with the god of water, who was also blamed for floods and storms. (Photos of the excavation can be seen here.)

La presencia de los glifos y estucados se debe a que habitantes de los pueblos prehispánicos de Ecatepec y Chiconautla participaron para erigir el dique.

Foto: INAH

En el conjunto de petroglifos se distinguen las tallas de un chimalli o escudo de guerra, la cabeza de un ave de rapiña y una punta de pedernal.

Foto: Especial, INAH

Se han encontrado materiales de relleno como vidrio, porcelana, mayólica, un metate seccionado, una escultura sedente decapitada y la base de una efigie humana.

Foto: INAH

According to García Chávez, the excavation project has been going on for fifteen years – far longer than it took the people of the 15th century to build the tunnel, which he estimated to be eight months to dig this 4 km (2.5 mile) structure. It’s not clear if the decorations and artifacts were completed in the same timeframe. Those include petroglyphs depicting a chimalli (war shield), the head of a bird of prey and a flint point. The wall carvings show a temple and raindrops that “indicates that the size and the temple it represents, have a link with Tlaloc.”

The west end of the tunnel was the access point to the waterways and there the excavators found four iron nails, two wooden beams 6.50 meters long and organic material that may be a decomposed gate attached to the dike holding back the waters.

The wall coverings and stuccos are more interesting to archeologists. García Chávez believes they show that inhabitants of the pre-Hispanic towns of Ecatepec and Chiconautla worked together on the project with indigenous people in the region to build the dike – cooperation that was unheard of in those times.

Areas conquered by Aztec rulers.

The discovery of this tunnel is important to archeologists because it will help discover more of the unwritten history of the pre-Hispanic era, whose history has been inaccurately rewritten by the post-Hispanics. It’s also important to modern Mexicans because they’re struggling with water shortages, pollution and flooding – problems which their ancestors worked together to solve.

Can today’s Mexicans cooperate to solve their current water problems like their ancestors did? If that happened, both Montezumas would be pleased.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Legendary nuclear physicist and UFO researcher, Stanton Friedman, will now have his UFO files catalogued. The well-known scientist passed away earlier this year on May 13^th at 84 years of age.

Throughout his career as a UFO researcher, he gave lectures at more than 600 colleges and over 100 groups in 50 U.S. states as well as in 19 different countries. He had at least 80 papers published on UFO phenomena, wrote numerous books, and appeared on several radio shows and television documentaries.

Stanton Friedman

Friedman studied the UFO phenomena for approximately 60 years; so needless to say, he has a lot of material that needs to be catalogued. In fact, it is said that he has the largest single collection of UFO files in the entire world. Prior to his passing, officials at the Provincial Archives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, were already in the process of preserving his files so that someday the public can view all of his work. They predict that it could take up to ten years to catalogue all of his files.

Joanna Aiton Kerr, who is the manager of the Provincial Archives, told Motherboard that archivists contacted Friedman after they found out that he was retiring to ask him if they could preserve his collection of UFO files. After he agreed, it took them five cargo vans in order to collect all of his work.

The archivists’ biggest task will be going through all of his files as they are extremely disorganized. “We can find a single page of a letter or document in one pile, another page somewhere across the room, another page tucked into a book, and so on,” Kerr explained. She went on say that so far they have gone through and processed around 25 boxes of Friedman’s work that is now accessible to visitors of the Provincial Archives, however, it’s not yet available for viewers to read online.

Stanton Friedman

One of the most interesting aspects of going through his work is reading through the letters he received from people all over the world describing their UFO encounters. “People wrote him from all over the world. People phoned him – he recorded many of these calls and we have tapes too. It’s fascinating stuff,” Kerr said.

Whether it takes just a few years or closer to a decade to get through all of Friedman’s files, it will definitely be worth it in the end when his years of dedicated UFO research will be available for everyone to read.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Many Alien Bases In Craters On Earths Moon, Top Secret, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Oct 29, 2019
Location of discovery: Earths Moon
Source: NASA Link To be released in 1 week

These are just a few of the alien structures I have found. I will post them periodically off and on. They are from a NASA source, but I will hold that back till I am finished with my reporting...since discoveries can be stolen and not credited if I release it early. 
Scott C. Waring 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

Ancient Alien Bases In Craters On Earths Moon, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Oct 28, 2019
Location of discovery: Earths moon
Source: NASA Source released in one week. 

I made a video below of five artificial craters on earths moon in a NASA photo. In each crater is an actual alien structure. Each is unique in design and color. All of which are extraordinary examples of alien bases that NASA tries to hide from the public. 

I am not releasing the NASA URL until I have made more videos of these alien bases. I will release the link in about one week. Often other Youtubers follow my info and I want to prevent my discoveries from being stolen. I make no money from Youtube or blogging. I only want to teach the world the truth. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

NASA news: Hubble snaps galaxy 'like a portal to another dimension straight out of sci-fi'

NASA’S Hubble Space Telescope took this incredible picture of a galaxy that looks like a “gaping portal to another dimension”.

Rock-breathing aliens? NASA researcher says we must think beyond anything we know

Here's How NASA Might Bring Home Pieces of Mars (In a Darth Vader Helmet)

By Meghan Bartels - Spaceflight 

An artist's depiction of a Mars sample-return mission.

(Image: © NASA/JPL)

WASHINGTON — Scientists studying Mars have wanted pieces of the Red Planet here on Earth for decades, and they are finally getting their shot at designing a mission to acquire such souvenirs.

The Apollo program's legacy of carefully collected moon rocks here on Earth reshaped the science of the moon and Earth alike. A Mars sample-return mission could offer the same sort of potential, but the Red Planet is a more daunting target than the moon. More daunting but well worth the effort, Brian Muirhead, who is leading the effort to develop a Mars sample-return mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a presentation here at the 70th International Astronautical Congress.

"It's the consensus of science community today," Muirhead said, "that if we're going to answer the hardest questions about Mars — like, for example, whether life showed up on Mars — we're going to need to bring material from Mars to our terrestrial laboratories."

• Related: In Photos: NASA's Mars 2020 Rover Mission to the Red Planet

Arranging a mission to bring the samples back is a challenge, one that NASA intends to tackle in a partnership with the European Space Agency. "This process is remarkably interrelated, everything is connected to everything else in some way," Muirhead said. There are a host of spacecraft components: NASA's Mars 2020 rover to select the samples, a "fetch rover" to pick up those samples, a rocket to launch them off the Red Planet, a capsule to bring them back to Earth.

Mars 2020 will depart next summer and head toward Jezero crater for a February 2021 landing. It will be conducting its own investigations and stashing away intriguing rocks for its successor to bring home.

That mission could launch in 2026, Muirhead said. The mission's early days would be fairly typical for any Red Planet mission. One of the first key challenges of the mission is for spacecraft engineers to land much more weight on Mars than previous missions have done. That will stretch out the anxiety-inducing landing process that haunts Mars spacecraft personnel, as the vehicle risks crashing into the surface.

"Once at Mars, we're going to do entry, descent and landing, our famous seven minutes of terror," Muirhead said. "We're going to make that probably about eight or nine minutes of terror." But he said the team has found a way to deliver significantly more bulk to the surface safely than the techniques that NASA will use to land the Mars 2020 mission.

Once that spacecraft lands, it will deploy the fetch rover, which will drive out to collect the sample containers Mars 2020 has so carefully prepared. The fetch rover will be smaller than that machine and Curiosity — more like the size of Spirit and Opportunity, Muirhead said.

The fetch rover is inspired by the Rosalind Franklin rover that the European Space Agency is sending to Mars on a similar timeline to Mars 2020, but it will end up looking very different from its older sibling. "ExoMars is a serious science rover; this is a speedster," Muirhead said. "That's a fast-moving, highly autonomous rover," he said of its planned travel stats.

Next on the task list is to pack up the samples for the long journey to Earth. Scientists are designing a return capsule that can safely carry as many as 30 rock samples and two air samples. "All of that fits into Darth Vader's helmet," Muirhead said, referring to the shape of the container, which will then itself be packed into a capsule for the long voyage. At around this point of the mission, the sample container will be sealed and sterilized to make sure no loose Martian material sneaks free on Earth.

While plenty of spacecraft have journeyed out to the Red Planet, none have ever retraced their steps. "To fly to Mars, that one-way trip is fairly traditional," Muirhead said. "It's the return trip that's particularly challenging." The vehicle will rely on electric propulsion to make its way to Earth, where it will eject the sample assembly in 2031.

The team doesn't want to use parachutes, which Muirhead called "notoriously tricky"; instead, the capsule will navigate its own way through Earth's atmosphere. That means the vehicle will need to carefully slow down enough not to splatter on the surface, but not slow down so much that atmospheric friction burns it.

At the end of his presentation, Muirhead tackled several questions from the audience quibbling with specific aspects of the mission design under discussion. One audience member expressed dismay that the return capability would not test the sorts of vehicles that could bring humans home. Another thought the mission could be cheaper if it ignored the risk of letting Martian material loose in Earth's biosphere.

In both cases, Muirhead emphasized that a Mars sample-return mission would be about the scientific secrets held in those samples. "This mission is about bringing samples back," he said with regards to planetary protection. "From an architecture point of view and from ensuring the integrity of the science samples, I'm not sure there's a much simpler solution than the one we're considering."

• Ancient Mars Could Have Supported Life (Photos)
• 1st Drilling on Mars by NASA's Curiosity Rover (Photos)
• NASA Puts Mars 2020 Rover's Space Ride to the Test (Photo)

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/news }

Are Cats Spies Sent by Aliens? A Deep Examination of One of the Internet's Best Conspiracy Theories

Recent polling shows Americans love their conspiracy theories. They also love cats. This was bound to happen.

By Austin Considine

IMAGE: KEITH KISSEL VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Attention cat people. There's a burgeoning theory around the internet that begs reckoning. It's not the theory that parasites in cat poop are turning you into crazy cat ladies, though that's certainly cause for alarm. It's much worse than that.

Domestic house cats, it seems, may be alien sentinels—sent to spy on us and report their findings back to the mother ship. Or, as some theorists have put it, they're like alien camcorders tracking our every move.

Well, maybe. We humans love our conspiracy theories, and there's a decent chance this is just another among them. As a poll published just yesterday reveals, 51 percent of Americans believe the JFK assassination was a conspiracy; 15 percent believe "the government or the media adds mind-controlling technology to TV broadcast signals"; and 4 percent believe reptilian shapeshifters control the government.

It's impossible to know just how pervasive cats-as-alien spies theory is without an adequate polling apparatus (if you have one, please get in touch). One guesses it's fairly low. Then again, 4 percent is much higher than one might have expected for the lizard people theory, and, according to the same poll, some 29 percent of Americans believe aliens exist and 14 percent believe in Bigfoot, so who knows?

As with most conspiracy theories, the cats-as-alien-spies theory is surprisingly well-developed—and based on a few kernels of truth and genuine ambiguity. How much? Motherboard decided to take a look at some of the supporting premises, one-by-one. A user who goes by the moniker "RedSpider" summarizes the prevailing wisdom in a handy list on the British tech message board, Digital Kaos. I've appropriated his/her list here (lightly edited for style and clarity), with the original points bolded.

Examine the evidence and decide for yourself:

1. There is no documentation before ancient Egypt that mentions the existence of cats. And in ancient Egypt, they were worshipped as gifts from the gods.

As with several of these premises, these propositions are mostly true, but also somewhat disputable. To find out more about the fossil record, I emailed Ryan Haupt, a paleontologist at the University of Wyoming who, as he described it for a previous interview, "studies the lives of modern mammals to better understand what their extinct relatives were doing in the past." He said Egypt was "the best guess" for the origin of the domestic cat species, but noted that "cat skeletons have been found at older sites."

Exporting domestic cats was illegal in ancient Egypt, according to Wild Cats of the World, a book by Mel and Fiona Sunquist, which may explain why they don't appear definitively in the records of other civilizations until thousands of years later than early cat records in Egypt. What older feline skeletons have been found elsewhere don't provide clear "evidence as to whether they were domesticated or not," Haupt said, adding, however, that they "probably" weren't.

"Looking at just skeletons it's basically impossible to say when cats stopped being wild and started being domesticated." Haupt said.

As for cat worship, the picture is a bit more complicated than the conspiracy theorist asserts. Cats were, indeed, revered by the ancient Egyptians, the Sunquists write. Cats were beloved as pets; they were mourned like family members when they died; they were embalmed and buried with varying degrees of pomp according to its owner's wealth; cat cemeteries were plotted along the banks of the Nile; the penalty for killing a cat was death. But cats weren't simply viewed as gifts from the gods. Some of the Egyptian gods were cats, like Bastet, the goddess of joy and love. One ancient Egyptian papyrus depicts Ra, the sun god, as a knife-wielding cat with spots.

I tried by Twitter and e-mail to contact everyone's favorite Ancient Aliens theorist and founder of Legendary Times Books, Giorgio Tsoukalos to get his opinion, but he didn't reply.

2. Science is baffled by a cat's purr, and cannot determine how the sound is produced. (Feedback, much?)

I'm not entirely sure what "Feedback much?" means, unless it means that a cat's purr is some kind of transmission feedback, similar to a cell phone's when held near a speaker. But the broader assertion is, again, partly true.

For this, I started with a bit of internet research. That science doesn't know why cats purr is often taken for granted around the internet, but that only tells part of the story. It's true that cats possess no special organ for purring. But science does know a thing or two. As noted in a WebMD article:

A rhythmic, repetitive neural oscillator [in the brain] sends messages to the laryngeal muscles, causing them to twitch at the rate of 25 to 150 vibrations per second (Hz). This causes a sudden separation of the vocal cords, during both inhalation and exhalation - the unique feline vibrato.
"Opera singing for cats," is what animal behaviorist Karen L. Overall, VMD, PhD calls it. But the purr is usually so low-pitched that we tend to feel it as much as hear it.

I contacted Dr. Ken Simpson, of Monon Animal Hospital, my vet back in my hometown of Indianapolis to ask what the latest veterinary science said. (Full disclosure, he's also my uncle.) He said the "physiology remains a slight enigma," but noted that vets have learned a few fascinating things about purring over the years.

"To me, purring is a method of communication that may be derived when the laryngeal folds are dilated with blood due to excitement from stimulation," he wrote to me. "As air flows through the folds, a vibration occurs which creates the sound heard. I have also heard that diaphragm movement against over-inflated lung tissue contributes sounds to the purr. In my experience, cats with asthma and hyperinflated lungs have a slightly louder purr."

There's evidence the behavior is learned, he noted. He described a deaf cat, for example, who never purred. Another cat patient of his had meningitis as a kitten and was learning-impaired as a result; that cat never purred either. Case studies like that lend themselves to the notion that cat purring does indeed, originate in the brain, and Simpson said he saw "no reason to doubt" the "neural oscillation" theory.

Still there's a certain point where the knowledge plateaus: What, exactly, is the neural oscillator? Why, exactly, does neural oscillation exist? And why, in behavioral terms, do cats purr? Those questions remain a bit of a mystery. Alien bio-technology? Transmission signals? It's doubtful, considering some wild cats, like cheetahs, purr as well.

3. If you hold a cat's ears back and describe what you see, it is a perfect match to the classic "grey alien," with its almond-shaped eyes, small mouth, and small nose.

Obviously true. See below. Next premise.

LEFT TO RIGHT, IMAGES VIA FLICKR AND WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

4. A cat can see exponentially better than you. Making it appear that it must be more advanced evolutionarily speaking. How?

The extrapolated version of this, as I've gathered from other cat-as-alien-spy internet detritus, says that cats stare at us with those big eyes because they are, in fact, alien cameras, recording and beaming our actions back to the grey aliens that put them here. I can't find any evidence of anything but standard neuronal circuitry in a cat's brain, but one never knows. We humans have recently managed to build a computer out of living cells, so who knows what alien technology may be hidden in the feline brain?

Leaving that aside, the idea of a cat's eyes being "exponentially better" and that translating into evidence of irrationally advanced evolution is, of course, absurd.

Cats eyes have more "rods" in them than "cones"—the former are responsible for providing black-and-white images, which makes them crucial for night vision; the latter add color and help us discern details. Cats, thus, have better night vision, but they only "see better" depending on your definition. I like seeing in color, so if you suddenly gave me cat's eyes, I wouldn't describe my vision as "better" at all.

A cat's eyes do have a second advantage with regard to night vision. As this New York Times article explains:

Cats also have elliptical pupils that open and close faster and can become larger than our round ones. In addition, cats and some other nocturnal animals have a mirrorlike membrane, the tapetum, on the back of their eyes, which reflects the light passing through the rods back through them in the opposite direction. This "double exposure" allows cats to see well in near darkness.

But suppose we were to grant that cats had "better" vision because they can see better in some ways. That would mean, yes, that its eyes (but not the whole cat) were "more advanced evolutionarily speaking." But dogs smell better than we do. So do bees and mice, for that matter. Cheetahs run faster, birds fly better and elephants kick more ass generally. Are they aliens, too? Doubtful. If any species presents a real anomaly, it's us, with our enormous brains, which are three times bigger than nature typically grants its animals proportionally. I would like to go on the record here to state that if anything is related to aliens, it's probably us.

5. Ever watch a cat wake from a deep sleep and run out of the room in an instant? Transmissions from the mothership coming in, and they must be alone.

We've all seen this happen and I can't find an answer. Evidence of alien collaboration? Put it in the "maybe" column.

ALIEN SPY CAT, RECEIVING ITS LATEST INSTRUCTIONS.

IMAGE BY RENEDEPAULA VIA PHOTOPIN

6. All things that come out of cats are totally unnatural. (Not of this earth.)

This, too, is absurd. Hairballs are disgusting but totally natural considering cats are hair and all they do is lie around and lick themselves all day. As for their urine and excrement, I don't see how it's any different than any other mammal's, other than its smelling particularly foul.

7. Cats survive situations that any earthbound animal would surely perish in. How can a cat fall out of a four-story building backwards, and land on its feet? (Anti-gravity properties.)

This is partly true. Cats are great hunters, and would probably outlive us humans in the wild if we and our cats were suddenly stranded on an uncharted desert isle or in a post-apocalyptic situation. But so would a lot of wild animals. The landing-on-feet scenario notwithstanding (more on that below), it's hard to conceive of a natural situation in which cats will always survive better than "any earthbound animal."

But that landing-on-its-feet thing is no joke. It's nuts. Folks at the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel offer some great slow-motion footage of a few cat-drops using a high-speed camera. As the host explains, the flipping cat problem was a mystery since time immemorial. Today physicists know a lot more about it, and the physics observed in flipping cats has helped teach scientists how to operate space telescopes.

As series host Destin Sandlin, a mechanical engineer and rocket tester, notes, on the surface a cat appears to violate the physical law of conservation of angular momentum. "I've studied freefalling bodies—my own, in fact—in several different environments, and once I get my angular rotation started in one direction, I can't stop it," he says.

But when the cat's freefall is slowed down, it's clear the cat does not violate the law. It's just extremely, extremely agile. In physics terms it's complicated, but it has everything to do with the way the cat arches its back, extends and retracts its legs, and, in doing so, rotates its body along two separate rotational axes.

So while the theory of anti-gravity properties is certainly appealing, it doesn't, shall we say, carry weight.

8. If you die, your cats will eat you. Not really a link between cats and Aliens, but still pretty creepy.

By all accounts this is true. In 2010, for example, about a dozen cats were found eating the corpse of a northwestern Pennsylvania man who was found dead there with his mother.

But as Chris Gayomali notes for The Week, cats aren't the only pets that eat their owners after they die. Some pets kill their owners then eat them. Gayomali's article includes examples of pet pigs, pythons, a pet hippo, lizards and others, including a pair of Nebraskan pugs who survived on their owner's body for two weeks after he killed himself.

Now may be a good time for a bit more journalistic disclosure by saying that I am, in fact, a dog person. I would happily believe that cats are the only pets that eat their owners if so compelled. But it simply isn't true. Brian Palmer notes in this Slate article that history is rife with examples of dogs eating dead humans, even the corpses of their owners. (Apparently, Palmer notes, there is even a theory among some scholars that Jesus' body was eaten by dogs and that "his acolytes fabricated the story of a reverential entombment as a sort of coping mechanism.")

Our conspiracy theory friends are correct that this is creepy, indeed. But it's hardly evidence that cats are alien drones.

• @AustinConsidine

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Aztec breakthrough: Archaeologists discover shock tunnel world hidden beneath Mexico City

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered a secret Aztec tunnel world nestled below the busy streets of Mexico’s capital city.

3D Ribcage Indicates Neanderthals Looked Nothing Like We Thought

An international team of scientists has completed the first 3D virtual reconstruction of the ribcage of the most complete Neanderthal skeleton unearthed to date, potentially shedding new light on how this ancient human moved and breathed.

The team, which included researchers from universities in Spain, Israel, and the United States, including the University of Washington, focused on the thorax - the area of the body containing the rib cage and upper spine, which forms a cavity to house the heart and lungs. Using CT scans of fossils from an approximately 60,000-year-old male skeleton known as Kebara 2, researchers were able to create a 3D model of the chest - one that is different from the longstanding image of the barrel-chested, hunched-over "caveman." The conclusions point to what may have been an upright individual with greater lung capacity and a straighter spine than today's modern human.

The study is published Oct. 30 in Nature Communications .

"The shape of the thorax is key to understanding how Neanderthals moved in their environment because it informs us about their breathing and balance," said Asier Gomez-Olivencia, an Ikerbasque Fellow at the University of the Basque Country and the study's lead author.

And how Neanderthals moved would have had a direct impact on their ability to survive on the resources available to them, said Patricia Kramer, professor in the UW Department of Anthropology and corresponding author on the paper.

"Neanderthals are closely related to us with complex cultural adaptations much like those of modern humans, but their physical form is different from us in important ways," she said. "Understanding their adaptations allows us to understand our own evolutionary path better."

Our Upright Ancestor?

Neanderthals are a type of human that emerged about 400,000 years ago, living mostly from what is today Western Europe to Central Asia. They were hunter-gatherers who, in some areas, lived in caves and who weathered several glacial periods before going extinct about 40,000 years ago. Studies in recent years have suggested that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens interbred , because evidence of Neanderthal DNA has turned up in many populations .

Over the past 150 years, Neanderthal remains have been found at many sites in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. This team worked with a skeleton labeled Kebara 2, also known as "Moshe," which was found in Kebara Cave in Northern Israel's Carmel mountain range in 1983. Though the cranium is missing, the remains of the young adult male are considered one of the most complete Neanderthal skeletons ever found. Two different forms of dating of the surrounding soil, thermoluminescence and electron spin resonance, put the age at somewhere between 59,000 and 64,000 years.

the same research team created a virtual reconstruction of the Kebara 2 spine, the first step in updating theories of Neanderthal biomechanics. The team's paper, published in the book "Human Paleontology and Prehistory," reaffirmed the likelihood of upright posture but pointed to a straighter spine than that of modern humans.

This image from the virtual reconstruction shows how the ribs attach to the spine in an inward direction, forcing an even more upright posture than in modern humans.        

Source: Gomez-Olivencia, et al.

For this model of the thorax, researchers used both direct observations of the Kebara 2 skeleton, currently housed at Tel Aviv University, and medical CT scans of vertebrae, ribs and pelvic bones, along with 3D software designed for scientific use. "This was meticulous work," said Alon Barash, a lecturer at Bar Ilan University in Israel. "We had to CT scan each vertebra and all of the ribs fragments individually and then reassemble them in 3D."

They then used a technique called morphometric analysis to compare the images of Neanderthal bones with medical scans of bones from present-day adult men.

"In the reconstruction process, it was necessary to virtually 'cut' and realign some of the parts that showed deformation, and mirror-image some of those that were not so well-preserved in order to get a complete thorax," said Gomez-Olivencia.

The reconstruction of the thorax, coupled with the team's earlier finding, shows ribs that connect to the spine in an inward direction, forcing the chest cavity outward and allowing the spine to tilt slightly back, with little of the lumbar curve that is part of the modern human skeletal structure. "The differences between a Neanderthal and modern human thorax are striking," said Markus Bastir, senior research scientist at the Laboratory of Virtual Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History in Spain.

"The Neanderthal spine is located more inside the thorax, which provides more stability," said Gomez-Olivencia. "Also, the thorax is wider in its lower part." This shape of the rib cage suggests a larger diaphragm and thus, greater lung capacity.

"The wide lower thorax of Neanderthals and the horizontal orientation of the ribs suggest that Neanderthals relied more on their diaphragm for breathing," said senior author Ella Been of Ono Academic College. "Modern humans, on the other hand, rely both on the diaphragm and on the expansion of the rib cage for breathing. Here we see how new technologies in the study of fossil remains is providing new information to understand extinct species."

What that means for how Kebara 2 lived is ripe for further research, Kramer said. How did Neanderthals breathe, and for what physical demands might they have needed powerful lungs? What does that tell us about how they moved, and the environment in which they lived? Did any of these physical traits make them more or less adaptive to climate change?

Reconstructing the thorax was an exercise in starting from scratch, deliberately trying to avoid being influenced by past theories of how Neanderthals looked or lived, Kramer said.

"Thinking through all the permutations of the different fragments, it was like a jigsaw without all the pieces. What do the pieces tell us?" she said. "People have told you it should be a certain way, but you want to make sure you're not over-reconstructing, or reconstructing it the way you think it should be. You're trying to maintain a neutral approach."

Other authors of the study were Daniel Garcia-Martinez of the National Museum of Natural History and Mikel Arlegi, of the University of the Basque Country.

• Top image: Neanderthal man with spear in hand.     Source : ginettigino / via Fotolia
• The article, originally titled ‘ Neanderthal ribcage reconstructed, offering new clues to ancient human anatomy ’ was first published on Science Daily .

Source: 

• University of Washington. "Neanderthal ribcage reconstructed, offering new clues to ancient human anatomy." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 30 October 2018.  

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181030121921.htm

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

Archaeologists Say They’ve Solved Mystery of How Pyramids were Built After Unearthing 4,500-Year-Old Ramp

Has the riddle of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids finally been solved?  A multi-national team of experts say yes, after they unearthed an ancient ramp, which they say was used to haul giant blocks into place.

Despite centuries of research into the pyramids of Giza, there has still been no definitive explanation as to how the ancient Egyptians cut, transported, and assembled millions of limestone and granite blocks, each weighing an average of 2.3 metric tons. “For the construction of the pyramids, there is no single theory that is 100% proven or checked; They are all theories and hypotheses,” said Hany Helal, Vice President of the Heritage Innovation Preservation institute. But many have speculated that ramps played a very important role in the construction of pyramids such as the three world-famous pyramids at Giza.

This 4,500-year-old ramp was discovered at Hatnub, an ancient quarry in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Two staircases with numerous postholes are located next to the ramp. An alabaster block would have been placed on a sled, which was tied by ropes to the wooden poles.

( Yannis Gourdon/Ifao )

A combined team of archaeologists from the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology based in Cairo and the University of Liverpool from the UK were excavating at the Hatnub alabaster quarry, which is near Luxor. It was here, according to Science Alert , that they found a  ‘4,500-year-old ramp’ that was apparently used to move blocks of alabaster cut from the steep slopes of the quarry. This type of  stone was used in the construction of tombs and for paving the floors of pyramids and temples.

• The Great Pyramid of Giza: A Modern View on Ancient Knowledge, Earth and Water – Part I
• Unraveling the Mystery of the Great Pyramid Air-Shafts
• Analysis Begins on Cosmic Particles in the Egyptian Bent Pyramid – Will This Help Explain How the Pyramids Were Built?

The System for Moving Huge Alabaster Blocks

The archaeologists believe that they have discovered the Egyptian system for moving the large building blocks based on their investigations in the quarry. This system involved the construction of a large ramp, which was lined by flights of stairs on each side where large wooden posts were fixed. The co-director of the excavation told Live Science that the archaeologists believe that a ‘sled carried a stone block’  and was tied to the wooden posts on the stairs. By pulling on the ropes, workmen could maneuver the stone down the ramp. The system, using wooden poles, ropes, and gravity, allowed huge blocks to be taken out of the quarry.

Fox News reports that ‘this kind of system has never been discovered anywhere else" . The Anglo-French team, with the support of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, investigated the tool marks and linked them to some inscriptions found in the quarry. The archaeologists believe that the ramp  dates back to the reign of the Pharaoh Khufu (died 2566 BC) who constructed the Great Pyramid at Giza .

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }