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It's possible that the story of the Men in Black, the mysterious figures that would become the subject of fascination in UFO conspiracy circles and eventually break into mainstream popular culture, can be traced back to one day: June 27, 1947. It's quite possible that it all started with a man, a boy and a dog on a boat.

As the story goes, Harold Dahl was on a conservation mission on the Puget Sound near the eastern shore of Washington’s Maury Island, gathering logs, when he saw six donut-shaped obstacles hovering about a half a mile above his boat. Before long, one of them fell nearly 1,500 feet, followed by raining, metallic debris, some of which hit Dahl’s son, Charles, on his arm, as well as the family dog, who didn’t survive the ordeal. Dahl was able to take some pictures of the aircraft with his camera, which he later showed to his supervisor, Fred Crisman. A skeptical Crisman went back to the scene to look for himself and saw a strange aircraft with his own eyes.

READ MORE: 

• Meet J. Allen Hynek, the Astronomer Who First Classified UFO 'Close Encounters.' 

The following morning, Dahl was visited by a man in a black suit. They end up at a local diner, where the man was able to recount in extraordinary detail what Dahl had just experienced. “What I have said is proof to you that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe,” the man said, according to author Gray Barker’s 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.

Dahl was told not to speak of the incident. If he did, bad things would happen.

The supposed events of Maury Island have continued to fuel conspiracy theories to this day, even though a U.S. government investigation deemed it a hoax after Dahl and Crimson later admitted as much. In particular, the mention of the man in the black suit would evolve into a key obsession for UFO enthusiasts and spread into American popular culture, thanks to a comic-book series and a blockbuster movie trilogy.

READ MORE: 

• Interactive Map: UFO Sightings Taken Seriously by the U.S. Government

In all of their different incarnations, the Men in Black (MIB) usually have one main purpose: to muzzle witnesses of strange, paranormal phenomena. They almost always wear black suits and hats with dark sunglasses, drive black cars and arrive in groups of two or three. Some describe them as one would an FBI agent, while others recall the MIB as having strange appearances, sometimes with supernatural features like glowing eyes and strange complexions.

So how did we get from Harold Dahl to Will Smith?

"The transformation of the story from a first press report to a folkloric tale to a comic book and now to a film illustrates how the myth is transformed,” wrote Phil Patton in The New York Times around the time the first Men in Black movie was released in 1997. “That process is not unlike the children's game of 'telephone' or what the literary critic Harold Bloom calls 'innovation by misinterpretation.' "

Sticking with the telephone analogy, the first call was made to Kenneth Arnold, a pilot who had his own alleged UFO sighting on June 24, 1947 near Mt. Rainier, Washington. Though it happened three days after the Maury Island incident, it was the first widely reported sighting and it “touched off the saucer sensation,” as was written in a 1949 government report on “Flying Saucers.”

READ MORE:

•  The First Alien-Abduction Account Described a Medical Exam with a Crude Pregnancy Test

The report states that Dahl and Crimson reached out to a Chicago magazine in an attempt to sell their story, and the magazine editor then contacted Arnold, hoping he could help verify their account. Arnold then “summoned two officers of Army A-2 Intelligence to aid in the investigation of Dahl and Crisman's claim,” according to the report.

In July 1947, two Army A-2 Intelligence officers came to investigate. After leaving in their B-25 the next day, the plane caught fire and crashed, killing both officers and doing nothing to quiet UFO conspiracists.

But the Maury Island story gained little notice in the UFO community until Barker’s 1956 book, in which he wrote of his “file on the Maury Island case” that largely consisted of the writings by Ray Palmer, the Chicago magazine editor referred to in the government’s report. Barker went on to connect the dots between “the man, who wore a black suit” who took Dahl to breakfast and three similarly dressed men who allegedly visited a young UFO enthusiast named Albert K. Bender in 1953.

It was Bender who “almost single-handedly ushered in the plague of the Men in Black—just as Arnold inaugurated the era of the UFO,” Ufologist Nick Redfern wrote in his book The Real Men in Black. But it was Barker’s book that told Bender’s story, thus introducing the concept of the MIB to a much wider audience.

(The telephone-game analogy is still holding.)

READ MORE: 

• America's First UFO Sighting.

“It still has an important legacy,” said Robert Sheaffer, a UFO researcher. “Before its publication, nobody outside a very narrow group of subscribers to flying-saucer newsletters had ever heard of Bender, or his MIB.”

Barker described Bender’s visitors as: “Three men in black suits with threatening expressions on their faces. Three men who walk in on you and make certain demands. Three men who know that you know what the saucers really are!”

Bender, in his own 1962 book Flying Saucers and the Three Men, described the MIB in much more frightening language.

“They floated about a foot off the floor… They looked like clergymen, but wore hats similar to Homburg style. The faces were not clearly discernible, for the hats partly hid and shaded them… The eyes of all three figures suddenly lit up like flashlight bulbs… They seemed to burn into my very soul as the pains above my eyes became almost unbearable,” wrote Bender.

Barker would go on to write several more books related to the paranormal and UFOs, including 1970’s The Silver Bridge, which helped spread the story of another popular paranormal figure, the creature known as Mothman. But how much of his writing was done in good faith has been called into question by many in the UFO-research community.

“Barker made it clear to me that he did not take the MIB or Mothman very seriously,” says Sheaffer, who corresponded with Barker on occasion. “However, he believed that there was still 'something mysterious' about the whole UFO and paranormal thing.”

Regardless of Barker’s motives, countless MIB encounters have been reported since They Knew Too Much was published nearly 60 years ago, and at least one more movie is on the way.

• WATCH: Full episodes of Project Blue Book online now.

{ https://www.history.com/ }

Australia’s oldest cave painting is 17,000-year-old kangaroo art

I mean, what else could it be?

Dating rock art is really hard. Aboriginal art uses iron oxide pigments and no organic material — which means any radiocarbon analysis isn’t possible. So instead, Finch got creative (and a bit lucky). He found that some of the rocks nearby contained the remains of ancient wasp nests, which can be carbon dated. He found these mud wasp remains both under and above the painted surfaces — so by dating both of these, he could pincer in on the age of the art.

It’s not the first time the method has been used, Finch says. It was used as early as 1997 when pollen extracted from a wasp nest (not over rock art) was dated, but it was less than 2,000, the researcher says. Now, researchers have adapted the technique and made it more reliable, even for small wasp remnants.

“By studying wasps building nests and then analyzing modern nests back in the laboratory, we determined that they frequently contained charcoal fragments. So we concentrated on methods to date charcoal rather than pollen which was less abundant. Radiocarbon dating has been used to date charcoal for more than 50 years and has been the mainstay of archaeological dating. Our radiocarbon dates on wasp nests built on top of paintings tell us that the painting must be older than the age of the nest. Similarly, if the nest is underneath the painting the age of the nest provides a maximum age for the painting.”

Overall, they found 27 such remains above and below 16 rock paintings. The paintings include a snake, a lizard-like figure, and three macropods (a family of marsupials including kangaroos, wallabies, and quokkas). However, one painting of a kangaroo (or a kangaroo-like creature) was dated to between 17,500–17,100 years ago, making it the oldest dated painted figure in Australia to date.

Unfortunately, however, not much is known about the people who created this art. Not much archaeological information has been retrieved, but Finch hopes we can learn something from this art.

“I don’t know that we can say too much about a culture as it was 17,000 years ago. We struggle to understand the culture at the time of the pyramids and that was only 5,000 years ago.  But now, for the first time, we can combine what we see in the paintings with what we know about the environment as it existed at the same time, around the end of the Last Ice Age. Science can tell us about the prevailing climate and sea-levels as well as the plants and animals available at that time.  I am sure future researchers will draw these threads together with what we now know about the age of the rock art to come up with further insights about the lives of these ancient people,” Finch tells ZME Science.

The kangaroo is unlikely to be Australia’s oldest painting — it’s only the oldest one we’ve found so far. Considering that humans reached Australia some 65,000 years ago, the chances are more ancient art is just waiting to be discovered.

In the meantime, this is a sobering reminder of how much we’ve yet to learn about these ancient peoples. Bit by bit, Finch hopes to fill in the gaps.

“It was surprising just how few records existed and how little was known about them in the non-indigenous community. Through our research, we aim to improve this situation.”

Journal Reference:

• Ages for Australia’s oldest rock paintings, Nature Human Behaviour (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-01041-0 

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Remember Dolly the sheep? On July 5, 1996, Dolly became the first mammal ever born via cloning – it was created using a mammary cell from sheep and the DNA from another, and carried to term by a third. Twenty-five years later, more mammals have been successfully cloned – including monkeys, pigs, cattle, wolves, dogs, cats and others. And humans? Ethics aside, while no one has publicly admitted to it, the possibility is there. However, the most interest recently has been in using cloning to de-extinct extinct mammals whose DNA can be obtained from frozen or preserved carcasses and carried by a similar species. Wooly mammoths and Tasmanian tigers seem to be likely candidates for this, but it hasn’t happened yet. However, the next best thing has. A black-footed ferret – a mammal on the brink of extinction — has been successfully cloned. Is this good or bad news? Is cloning a better solution to preventing extinction than changing the environment to allow the species to repopulate itself? Will this be the ethical debate that finally produces a human clone?

“In November, ViaGen used the 32-year-old Willa cell line to develop cloned embryos. These were implanted into a domestic surrogate mother. Mid gestation, when the pregnancy was deemed safe, the mother was transferred to the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center. On December 10th, “Elizabeth Ann” became the first successfully cloned Black-footed ferret to be born. She is also the first endangered species native to the US to be cloned.”

This week, Revive & Restore – a “wildlife conservation organization promoting the incorporation of biotechnologies into standard conservation practice” – announced the birth of the first cloned black-footed ferret and the successful growth and development of “Elizabeth Ann.” She is the clone of a ferret named Willa who died in 1988 and was frozen because the black-footed ferret was believed to be nearly extinct – wiped out by the poisoning of prairie dogs, their primary source of food. That changed in 1981 when a dog brought a recently-killed specimen to its owner in Wyoming. The surviving group was found, but it nearly became extinct because of canine distemper and sylvatic plague, so the Fish and Wildlife Service captured the remaining 18 ferrets. Unfortunately, they lacked the genetic diversity to save the species.

Enter the late, frozen Willa and Revive & Restore, which sequenced the black-footed ferret genome in 2013. In 2018, Revive & Restore partnered with the commercial cloning company ViaGen Pets & Equine and obtained permission to clone Willa. Using basically the same process that created Dolly, they created embryos, implanted them into a tame domestic ferret surrogate (not a black-footed ferret) and welcomed Elizabeth Ann on 12/10/20. (Pictures here.) While Elizabeth Ann is of a different lineage than the remaining colony, the researchers will not introduce her into the surviving colony, fearing what that might cause, and will instead develop a new line. There are no plans to reintroduce Elizabeth Ann or any future clones back into the wild … yet.

Is it right? What about for species that aren’t cute?

(Not Elizabeth Ann)

Is this the right solution to saving species from extinction or bringing them back from it? One of the researchers says his goal is to bring back the passenger pigeon – birds are more difficult to clone than mammals. While this is the first cloning of an endangered species in the U.S., it has been done before in other countries (mouflon sheep, gaur, banteng, Pyrenean ibex, wild coyotes) but none have survived to adulthood. Revive & Restore co-founder and executive director Ryan Phelan told AP that they see it as a tool, not a sole solution to preventing extinction or propagating de-extinction.

“How can we actually apply some of those advances in science for conservation? Because conservation needs more tools in the toolbox. That’s our whole motivation. Cloning is just one of the tools.”

Sadly, cloning is glamorous technology, while preventing climate change, stopping the destruction of forests, eliminating toxic pollution and other more conventional ‘tools’ require hard work, government funding, big business buy-in and political support.

If you’re not ready for cloning, will you support the alternatives?

NOTE PETER2011:

Is cloning a solution to bring extinct or threatened animals back to life? Personally, this is a solution if it is done in an objective manner without interfering with the DNA of the cloned animal. But in the field of cloning there will also be abuses, because people like to deviate from the rules ...

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Food for Life Found in 3.5 Billion Year Old Rocks in Australia

For the first time, biologically-relevant organic molecules have been detected in Archaean fluid inclusions, which most likely served as nutrients for early life on Earth.

• Jan Voelkel
  University of Cologne
• Dr. Helge Mißbach
  Arbeitsgruppe Geobiologie
  Institut für Geologie und Mineralogie
  University of Cologne

Publication:

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21323-z

Source:

•  http://www.ineffableisland.com/2021/02/food-for-life-found-in-35-billion-year.html

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

First Black Hole Ever Detected Much More Massive Than First Suspected

New observations of the first black hole ever detected have led astronomers to question what they know about the Universe’s most mysterious objects.

Published today in the journal Science, the research shows the system known as Cygnus X-1 contains the most massive stellar-mass black hole ever detected without the use of gravitational waves.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

UFO Sightings! UFO l Activity Recorded On Camera!!

UFO Sightings! UFO l Activity Recorded On Camera!!

 Military Pilot Photographs Cylindrical Shaped UFO over Italy

Real UFO Sightings! UFO Paranormal Activity Recorded On Camera | Must Watch in 2019

UFO SIGHTINGS 2020! RED ALIENS CAUGHT ON VIDEO!

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Protogalaxy Cluster Found When the Cosmic Fog Was Starting to Clear, When the Universe Was Just 750 Million Years Old

Origin stories are a focus of many astronomical studies.  Planetary formation, solar system formation, and even galaxy formation have long been studied in order to understand how the universe came to be where it is today.  Now, a team of scientists from the Lyman Alpha Galaxies in the Epoch of Reionization (LAGER) consortium have found an extremely early “protogalaxy” that was formed approximately 750 million years after the big bang.  Studying it can provide insights into that early type of galaxy formation and everything that comes after.

750 million years ago was near the end of the period in the history of the universe called “reionization”.  During this epoch, which lasted approximately 370 million years, the first galaxies and large scale structures in the universe began forming.  The protocluster (a high density cluster of galaxies) that Jorge González-López, a postdoc member of the LAGER team, found was created around this epoch.  It is the furthest protocluster discovered so far. 

To find such a distant object required a lot of observational time on a variety of instruments. The team originally leveraged the Dark Energy Camera attached to the Victor M. Blanco Telescope and then performed follow-up observations with the Magellan telescope in Las Campanas, both located in Chile.  Las Campanas has the added advantage of extra “seeing”, which allows ground-based telescopes to capture very faint objects, such as this new protocluster, which might be unobservable in the sky of other parts of the world.

While the protocluster might be faint, it is certainly not physically small.  The LAGER team estimated the amount of mass that was most likely present in the detected protocluster.  Push forward to modern day sizing, and there is a high likelihood that it would be a supercluster similar in size to the Coma Group.

So far, the protocluster has not yet received a similar name, but it might be worthwhile to distinguish it as the farthest ever seen.  The LAGER group is continuing to search for early stage galaxy formations in similar areas of the universe.  The more they find, the more we will understand about our early universe.  The and the important it is to distinguish each discovery with a name as part of its own origin story.

Learn More:

• Carnegie Science: Large Proto-Cluster Of Galaxies Discovered In The Midst Of Clearing The Cosmic Fog
• S&T : Astronomers Spot Galaxies Clustering in Early Universe
• UT: Hubble Finds a Distant Proto-Cluster of Galaxies

Lead Image:

• Graphic depicting the locations of the galaxies LAGER found.
• Credit: Carnegie Institution for Science

The post Protogalaxy Cluster Found When the Cosmic Fog Was Starting to Clear, When the Universe Was Just 750 Million Years Old appeared first on Universe Today.

Source: 

• https://www.universetoday.com/150220/protogalaxy-cluster-found-when-the-cosmic-fog-

was-starting-to-clear-when-the-universe-was-just-750-million-years-old/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

UFO Over Newark, New Jersey On Oct 6, 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Oct 6, 2020, but reported this week
Location of sighting: Newark, New Jersey, USA

 

Now here is a strange UFO flipping around in the sky as if it were turning around to look in different directions. The UFO has a main diamond metallic shape with a curved area sticking out of each of its four sides. Its darting around trying to find a place to hide in the clouds, but the blue sky makes it too obvious and the eyewitness noticed it as it was moving from one cloud to anther. I just have never seen this shape of UFO before...that right there makes me believe...this is a real alien craft. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

 

Eyewitness states: 

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

Glowing Orbs Over Metairie, Louisiana On Feb 21, 2021, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Feb 21, 2021
Location of sighting: Metairie, Louisiana, USA

Source: MUFON 1213759

 

These glowing lights don't just move about, but change speeds as well. You can see them staying relatively close to one another as if they are watching out for each other. The eyewitness states that he saw upwards of 30 UFOs, but we only get to see a few of them here. Apparently he was mesmerized at what he was seeing and suddenly remembered to record it on his phone. 

Scott C. Waring 

Eyewitness states: 

strange lights in the sky with no sound. Lights in the sky flying from the East to the West in the evening with no sound and a glowish reddish pink hue. No running lights observed.

 

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

Zooming in on the first underwater structure then it looks like a gigantic bridge with a length of 38 km. It looks like as if there is some sort of passage under the bridge leading to a square structure behind the bridge. 

A possible road connects the bridge to Discovery tablemount which is part of a chain seamonts, called Discovery Seamonts. The seamounts formed between 41 and 35 million years ago and once rose above sea level. 

Assuming that these structures are a bridge and a road and were built in ancient times, at a time the Discovery Seamounts once rose above sea level than who built it millions of years ago? 

Another strange structure can be found next to Bouvet Island which is an uninhabited subantarctic volcanic island. The size of the zigzag structure is enormous and covers an area of about 255 km x 136 km. 

It is remarkable that the lines in the zigzag structure all have the same dimensions It almost looks like an enormous electrical conductor.

Coordinates: Bridge: 43°21'8.50"S 0°51'12.19"W 

Zigzag structure: 51°28'16.59"S 6° 5'12.12"W

  

NOTE peter2011:

What happened to our planet in our past? Have there been earlier civilizations on Earth with a higher intelligence on our Earth? Was there a major natural disaster that destroyed parts of the civilizations of the time? A recent study shows that 42,000 years ago the poles flipped ... And then we probably don't forget the impacts of various asteroids.
By using satellites, researchers are finding more and more ruins on the mainland and in the depths of seas, oceans and lakes ... We travel to the moon and Mars, but our own planet still hides so many secrets.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

Why Pentagon Is Releasing UFO Info in 6 Months

There has been a trend of the US Military releasing declassified footage depicting unidentifiable flying objects or UFOs, possibly preparing the mass public for some groundbreaking revelations in 2021! Check out today’s new video predicting the pentagon’s acknowledgement of aliens in 6 months! It’s time people learned the truth about our mysterious visitors from above and it starts right here!

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

WHEN WILL THE MARS HELICOPTER FLY? INGENUITY IS NOW ON THE RED PLANET

FOLLOWING A NEAR-SEVEN MONTH JOURNEY THROUGH SPACE, NASA's Perseverance rover has finally landed on its target destination Mars on Thursday.

However, the SUV-sized robot did not travel by itself. Perseverance is joined by a smaller, more agile companion: the Ingenuity helicopter. If all goes well, Ingenuity could be the first aircraft to fly on another planet.

READ MORE 

• PERSEVERANCE ROVER NEWS FROM INVERSE

Ingenuity is only 19 inches tall, with two four feet long carbon-fiber rotors spinning in opposite directions. It's so small, in fact, that it spent the duration of the trip to Mars tucked inside the bottom of the Perseverance rover.

The team behind Ingenuity are not yet sure whether it is even possible for a helicopter to hover above the Martian surface. Mars' atmosphere is less than one percent the density of Earth’s, so it may be too thin for the helicopter to successfully fly. If it succeeds, then space agencies can add aerial exploration of Mars to future missions.

"The thing that has me the most excited as the NASA administrator is getting ready to watch a helicopter fly on another world," former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a press conference that previewed the mission on June 17. "That's something that's never been done before in human history, and here we are."

HOW WILL INGENUITY FLY ON MARS?

The team behind Ingenuity won’t get to test out the helicopter until at least a month after the pair have landed on Mars.

Shortly after their landing, the shield covering will drop and Ingenuity will separate from its robotic companion. After it detaches itself from the rover, the team on the ground has to ensure that Ingenuity passes a few initial milestones before they launch its first test flight. Ingenuity is powered through solar panels that charge up its lithium-ion batteries for one 90-second flight per Martian day.

Once the helicopter is able to charge itself through its solar panel, and communicate with the team through the Mars Helicopter Base Station on the rover, then they can begin testing the helicopter's flight abilities. But that likely won't happen until at least a month after landing on Mars.

Over the course of 30 Martian sols (a sol, the equivalent of a day, on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth), a team of NASA engineers on the ground will test out Ingenuity's ability to fly. But they're going to take things slow.

"We don’t have hard specific dates right now because the Perseverance and Ingenuity teams need time to check their robots and we cannot totally predict how long that will take," Jia-Rui Cook, supervisor of news events and projects at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tells Inverse.

For its first flight, the helicopter will take off a few feet off the ground and hover in the air for around 20 to 30 seconds. Although brief, those first seconds of flight will be a major milestone in space exploration. Subsequent flights will attempt further distances and higher altitudes than the one before it. The helicopter could fly for up to 90 seconds, to distances of almost 980 feet at a time and about 10 to 15 feet above the ground.

Once it does take off, NASA engineers will have not only proven that they can fly an aircraft on another planet, one that has a vastly different atmosphere than Earth, but will then get to work deploying more helicopters to Mars and perhaps other worlds — including a plan to send a drone to Saturn’s moon Titan.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

When Earth’s magnetic field flipped 42,000 years, the climate changed too

It was a big climate disaster that could have wiped out Neanderthals.

 by Fermin Koop

A reversal in Earth’s magnetic field and a decline in solar activity 42,000 years ago caused major climate shifts that led to global environmental change and mass extinctions, according to a new study. The researchers called it the “Adams Event”after sci-fi writer Douglas Adams who declared the number 42 as the ultimate answer.

The Earth has a magnetic field that works as a protective shield against damaging electromagnetic radiation. But when the poles switch, as it has happened many times in the planet’s geological history, the shield weakens significantly and leaves the planet exposed to high-energy particles. The last time this happened was 42,000 years ago and lasted for about 1,000 years, during what scientists refer to as the Laschamp event.

Previous studies couldn’t find much evidence of the impact of the event on the planet, probably because the focus wasn’t on the period in which the poles were actually reversing, Turney and his team argue. Now, they discovered that the pole switch could have been the reason for a wide array of climate and environmental phenomena with severe consequences.

For the study, the researchers carried out radiocarbon analyses of the rings of ancient kauri trees located in northern New Zealand wetlands, some of which were more than 42,000 years old. This allowed tracking over time the increase of carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere, which is generated by the increasing levels of high-energy cosmic radiation reaching the Earth.

“For the first time ever, we have been able to precisely date the timing and environmental impacts of the last magnetic pole switch,” co-author Chris Turney from the University of New South Wales said in a statement. “The findings were made possible with ancient New Zealand kauri trees, which have been preserved in sediments for over 40,000 years.”

The researchers looked at numerous records and materials from all over the world, including from lake and ice cores, and found that a host of major environmental changes happened at the same time as the carbon-14 levels peaked. This included a shift in tropical rain belts in the West Pacific and a large growth of the ice sheet over North America, for example.

They used a model to understand how the chemistry of the atmosphere might change if the Earth’s magnetic field was lost and there was a prolonged period of low solar activity, which would have further reduced Earth’s protection against cosmic radiation. Ice core records suggest such drops in solar activity, known as the “grand solar minima”, coincided with the Laschamps event.

The atmospheric changes would have caused big environmental and climate changes, the researchers believe. This would have accelerated the growth of ice sheets and contributed to the extinction of Australian megafauna. Plus, it could explain the emergence of red ochre handprints, as humans might have used the pigment as a sunscreen to cope with the increased levels of ultraviolet radiation.

But that’s not all. The harsh climate conditions would explain the larger use of caves by our ancestors, as the underground spaces offered shelter. This would have increased competition and could have contributed to the end of the Neanderthals. “It’s the most surprising and important discovery I’ve ever been involved in,” Alan Cooper, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

While the last time the poles switched was 42,000 years ago, the researchers said there’s currently rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere. This could eventually lead to another reversal. The magnetic field has already weakened by about 9% over the past 170 years.

“Our atmosphere is already filled with carbon at levels never seen by humanity before. A magnetic pole reversal or extreme change in Sun activity would be unprecedented climate change accelerants,” Turney said in a statement. “We urgently need to get carbon emissions down before such a random event happens again.”

The study was published in the journal Science.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Minihelikopter Ingenuity meldt zich voor het eerst vanop Mars

Ingenuity, de kleine helikopter die de Amerikaanse robotjeep Perseverance vergezelde op de reis naar Mars, heeft zijn eerste statusrapport doorgezonden naar het controlecentrum van het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartagentschap NASA. Het rapport heeft vrijdag (Californische tijd) het centrum in Pasadena bereikt.

 Bron: Belga

"Alles lijkt goed te werken", zo reageerde projectleider Tim Canham volgens een mededeling van NASA.
Ingenuity (Vindingrijkheid) zit momenteel nog vastgehecht aan de onderkant van Perseverance (Volharding). Maar binnen 30 tot 60 dagen wordt van de helikopter verwacht dat hij Mars vanuit vogelperspectief zal verkennen. De heli zal daarbij wel extreme weersomstandigheden moeten trotseren: op Mars kan de temperatuur 's nachts tot -90 graden Celsius zakken.

Perseverance was donderdag na een reis van zeven maanden en ruwweg 480 miljoen km veilig aangekomen op de rode planeet. De robotjeep maakte een landing in de Jezerokrater, een uitgedroogd meer. Daar zal de komende twee jaar op zoek worden gegaan naar sporen van vroeger microbiologisch leven. 

Lees ook

• 

  NASA toont machtige landingsfoto van Perseverance

• 

  PREMIUM

  Waarom zijn we zo gefascineerd door Mars, terwijl we al zeker weten dat er geen leven is op de planeet?

© Photo News

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Mars rocks! NASA and European Space Agency reveal ambitious plan to bring a piece of the Red Planet back to Earth by 2031

• The space agencies revealed their wild plan in a virtual meeting held this week

• NASA's rover Perseverance will land on Mars next Feb to collect rock samples 

• In 2026, NASA then will send another rocket to Mars to collect these bits of rock

• This will launch into Mars orbit where yet another craft will pick up the samples

• Third shuttle will land in 2031 and deliver samples to eagerly awaiting scientists  

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE

Perseverance, as it was finally christened last month, will roam the surface of the planet, collecting dust and rock samples in test tubes.

The agencies will then launch a pair of spacecraft to Mars in 2026 – one of which will collect the sample from Perseverance on Mars when it lands in 2028. 

This spacecraft will then launch the samples into Mars orbit for the third spacecraft to collect and return to Earth in 2031.

If the plan works, scientists will finally get the very first hands-on analysis of samples of the planet in around 11 years’ time. 

The multi-billion dollar project to bring back a piece of Mars to Earth will involve three separate launches and would only be successful as soon as 2031. The mission will start when Perseverance, NASA's new exploration rover, launches this summer

When Perseverance lands at Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, it will be the first spacecraft in the history of planetary exploration with the ability to accurately retarget its point of touchdown during the landing sequence

‘This is by no means a simple task,’ said Jim Watzin, head of NASA’s Mars exploration programme in Washington DC. ‘But we have kept it as simple as possible.’

‘What we can learn about Mars in our own laboratories is going to be fantastic,’ said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars exploration programme at NASA headquarters in Washington DC.

The full plan, as reported by Nature, begins when Perseverance lands in the Jezero crater, which is home to an old river delta that could reveal signs of ancient life.

As the six-wheeled lander Perseverance drives around for miles, it will scoop up enough material to fill around 30 geological sampling tubes.

The samples will be captured from the Jezero crater near a fossilised four billion year old river delta that could contain signs of ancient life

In 2026, NASA and ESA will launch two more spacecraft that would reach Mars in 2028.

The first will deploy a small rover, which will make its way to Perseverance, pick up the filled sampling tubes and transfer them to a ‘Mars ascent vehicle’ – a small rocket.

This rocket will blast off – in the process becoming the first object launched from the surface of Mars – and place the container into Martian orbit, meaning it will essentially be floating in space.

At this point, the third and final spacecraft involved in the tricky operation will manoeuvre itself next to the sample container, pick it up and fly it back to Earth.

Providing its re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere is successful, it will plummet to the ground at a military training ground in Utah in 2031.

NASA will build the sample-retrieval lander and the Mars ascent vehicle, while the ESA is tasked with the all-important third phase of the task – building the spacecraft that gets the samples home.

The third spacecraft involved in the project will rendezvous in space to collect the Martian rock samples and return them to Earth

Nature reports that ESA officials committed to the plan at a ministerial meeting last November. 

Watzin declined to comment on how much it will cost, but it is likely to require at least several billion dollars from each agency, the report said. 

Regardless of whether it goes ahead or is even successful, NASA is launching Perseverance this summer. 

Perseverance is described by NASA as a ‘robotic scientist’ weighing just under 2,300 pounds (1,043 kilograms).

It will search for signs of past microbial life, assess Mars' climate and geology, collect samples and help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.

The launch period for the rover – which NASA is adamant will remain unchanged despite the coronavirus pandemic – extends from July 17 through to August 5.

Regardless of when it launches during this period, it is set to alight in the Jezero Crater just after 3:40 pm EST (8:40pm GMT) on February 18, 2021.

The rover's name was picked from a 'Name the Rover' essay contest that received 28,000 entries from school children.

The name was revealed in March during a live streaming and was chosen by seventh grader Alex Mather whose winning essay compared the rover to the human race.

The name was revealed on Thursday during a live streaming and was chosen by seventh grader Alex Mathers (pictured) who's winning essay compared the rover to the human race. 'The human race will always persevere towards the future,' he said while reading his essay aloud in front of thousands of people'

'Curiosity. InSight. Spirit. Opportunity,' Mather wrote. 'If you think about it, all of these names of past Mars rovers are qualities we possess as humans.'

'We are always curious, and seek opportunity. We have the spirit and insight to explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

‘But, if rovers are to be the qualities of us as a race, we missed the most important thing. Perseverance.'

Perseverance, which was built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is now at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for final preparations.

NASA MARS 2020: THE MISSION WILL SEE THE PERSEVERANCE ROVER AND INGENUITY HELICOPTER SEARH FOR LIFE

NASA's Mars 2020 mission will search for signs of ancient life on on the Red Planet in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on Earth. 

Named Perseverance, the main car-sized rover will explore an ancient river delta within the Jezero Crater, which was once filled with a 1,600ft deep lake.

It is believed that the region hosted microbial life some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago and the rover will examine soil samples to hunt for evidence of the life.

Nasa's Mars 2020 rover (artist's impression) will search for signs of ancient life on Mars in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on our own planet

The $2.5 billion (£1.95 billion) Mars 2020 spaceship launched on July 30 with the rover and helicopter inside - and landed successfully on February 18, 2021.

Perseverance landed inside the crater and will collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for further analysis.

A second mission will fly to the planet and return the samples, perhaps by the later 2020s in partnership with the European Space Agency.

This concept art shows the Mars 2020 rover landing on the red planet via NASA's 'sky-crane' system

Read more:

• Revealed: How a spacecraft will bring Mars rocks to Earth

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UFO RECORDED FROM A PLANE IN RIO VERDE SAN LUIS, POTOSI MEXICO 2-18-2021 

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Recent UFO Sightings in the LA Area! - What's Going on in California?

I recently discovered a number of really intriguing UFO sightings out of California, right around the Los Angeles area. Are these UFO sightings a sign that Disclosure is coming, or are these simple misidentifications? Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Just Some of the Planets That TESS Has Found Nearby

Ever since NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope was launched in 2009, there has an explosion in the study of the extrasolar planets. With the retirement of Kepler in 2018, it has fallen to missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to pick up where its predecessor left off. Using observations from TESS, an international team of astronomers recently discovered three exoplanets orbiting a young Sun-like star named TOI 451.

The research was led by Elisabeth R. Newton, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. She was joined by researchers from NASA JPL, NASA Goddard, NASA Ames, the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, the SETI Institute, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy, the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and multiple universities and observatories.

Using data from TESS, the team examined stars in the Pisces-Eridanus stream, a collection of stars located ~260 to 737 light-years from Earth. This stream measures about 1,300 light-years in length, extends across 14 constellations, and is named for those that contain the greatest concentrations. This stream was discovered in 2019 by a team led by Stefan Meingast using data obtained by the ESA’s Gaia mission.

Later that year, researchers led by Jason Curtis – an astronomer and National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow at Columbia University (and a co-author on the study) – analyzed TESS data for several of these stars. What they found was that they had fast spin rates and prominent starspots (which caused periodic dips in luminosity), an indication that they are significantly younger than previously thought.

Based on these results, Curtis and his colleagues found that the stream was only 120 million years old (3% as old as our Sun). When Newton and her colleagues examined data collected on this same stream by TESS between October and December 2018, they noted the presence of three exoplanets around one star in particular. Known as TOI 451 (aka. CD-38 1467), this star lies about 400 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus.

TOI 451 is a G-type (yellow dwarf) star that is about 88% as large as our Sun, 95% as massive, and also slightly cooler and dimmer (being a young star). Another indication of its youth is the fact that it rotates once every 5.1 days – or five times faster than the Sun. According to the transits detected by TESS, all three of its planets orbit TOI 451 closer than Mercury does to our Sun, making them all hot and inhospitable to life (as we know it).

Follow-up observations were conducted in 2019 and 2020 using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (which retired on Jan. 30^th, 2020) and archival data obtained by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) between 2009 and 2011 (which was still WISE, at the time). Additional observations were made by the Las Cumbres Observatory global network and the Perth Exoplanet Survey Telescope in Australia.

All of these confirmed the presence of these three exoplanets that fit the designation of “hot Super-Earth.” The WISE data further revealed that TOI 451 is unusually bright in infrared light at wavelengths of 12 and 24 micrometers. This suggests the presence of a debris disk, which the team estimates to be centered about as far from the star as Jupiter is from our Sun.

The team also investigated a faint neighboring star that appeared to be in close proximity to TOI 451 in the TESS images. Using data from the ESA’s Gaia Observatory, Newton’s team determined that this star may actually be a binary system of two M-type (red dwarf) stars that’s a gravitationally-bound companion to TOI 451. As Prof. Newton explained in a recent NASA press release:

“This system checks a lot of boxes for astronomers. It’s only 120 million years old and just 400 light-years away, allowing detailed observations of this young planetary system. And because there are three planets between two and four times Earth’s size, they make especially promising targets for testing theories about how planetary atmospheres evolve.”

• https://www.universetoday.com/150182/just-some-of-the-planets-that-tess-has-found-nearby/
  

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