An artists illustration of the true shape of the Milky Way, with an S-like warp in the outer reaches of the disk.

Image Credit: CHEN Xiaodian.

Our home in the universe is more dynamic and distorted than anyone imagined.

How the 3D map of the Milky Way was created

The breakthrough comes from scientists at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and Macquarie University in Australia. To build the 3D map of the Milky Way, they tracked more than 1,300 classical Cepheids — rare, pulsating stars known for their consistent brightness cycles.

Because Cepheids act like stellar mile-markers, researchers were able to measure distances across the galaxy with incredible precision — often within 3 to 5%.

What they discovered was unexpected: the outer edges of the Milky Way aren’t flat. Instead, they curve upward and downward, forming a graceful S-shaped warp that becomes more pronounced the farther stars are from the center.

Why the Milky Way isn’t flat

This strange galactic twist is likely caused by gravitational torque — a twisting force from the Milky Way’s densely packed core. As the inner regions rotate, they tug unevenly on the outer arms, bending the galaxy’s shape over time.

“We usually think of spiral galaxies as being quite flat, like Andromeda,” said Professor Richard de Grijs of Macquarie University.
“But the Milky Way is more like a warped vinyl record — it bends and twists as you move farther out.”

The team also believes hydrogen gas clouds in the galaxy’s outskirts may respond differently to gravity, adding to the distortion. In essence, the galaxy is slowly twisting — and the new 3D map of the Milky Way is the first to capture it in detail.

Why this took so long to discover

Mapping our galaxy is notoriously difficult. Since we live inside the Milky Way, our view is limited by dust, gas, and distance. For decades, astronomers had only rough, two-dimensional models to work from.

But with Cepheid variables acting as reliable beacons, scientists were finally able to stitch together a fuller view — one that shows the true, twisted structure of our galactic home.

The Milky Way isn’t the only galaxy with this kind of warp. Astronomers have spotted similar distortions in dozens of spiral galaxies, suggesting this bending may be more common than previously thought.

But what makes this discovery remarkable is how close it hits — this isn’t a distant object in the sky. It’s where we live.

Thanks to the most accurate 3D map of the Milky Way ever created, we’re starting to see our galaxy not as a clean geometric spiral, but as a living, bending, evolving structure shaped by invisible forces.

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{ https://curiosmos.com/category/cosmic-phenomena/ }

This Man Built a Living Robot from Frog Cells That Move On Their Own & Even Self-Replicate

By Vicky Verma

This will totally blow your mind. Michael Levin found in his compelling study that our cells use higher-level systems to talk to each other and organize what they do. One of those higher-level systems is bioelectricity — a kind of electrical communication that happens in neurons (brain cells) and all cells. These electrical patterns help cells figure out where they are in the body and what they should become.

The groundbreaking work of Michael Levin, a scientist at Tufts University, and his research could radically change how we understand biology, development, and even intelligence itself.

Traditionally, scientists have believed that genes, the information stored in our DNA, are the main drivers of this process. Genes control how cells behave, what kind of cells they become, and how organs form. Since sequencing the human genome, most biological research has focused on figuring out how genes do all this.

Levin, however, argues that genes are not the full story. He compares genes to low-level computer code. In computer science, programmers don’t usually work with machine code directly—they use higher-level tools that make things easier to understand and control

Levin suggests that biology has higher levels of organization that go beyond genes. One of these higher levels is what he calls the bioelectric network—a system where cells communicate using electrical signals, not just chemical signals or genetic instructions.

We usually think of neurons (brain cells) as the only cells that talk to each other using electricity. But Levin’s research shows that many types of cells can do this. And these bioelectric signals help guide development, healing, and even complex decisions about what body parts to grow. (Source)

 

A powerful example of this is the planarian, a small worm that can regenerate its body, even from tiny fragments. Levin and his team discovered that the worm’s bioelectric state helps its cells “know” whether they need to grow a head or a tail. By changing the worm’s electrical signals (without altering its genes), they could create worms with two heads, no heads, or even the head of a different species. Some of these changes were permanent and passed on to offspring, showing that genes weren’t the only factor in controlling the worm’s shape and structure. (Levin website)

Levin’s lab has also used this method to make frogs grow extra limbs or eyes in strange places, like in their guts or tails, and those eyes work. This ability to guide development using electrical signals could eventually lead to tools that let us “program” living tissue, much like we program computers. Levin imagines a future where we can input a desired body part or organ into a program and output the signals needed to make it grow, which could revolutionize medicine.

But Levin’s work goes beyond just building new organs. He believes that intelligence and decision-making exist throughout biology, not just in brains. For instance, if a tadpole’s face is rearranged, the parts move back into place as it grows. Cells “know” what the final structure should look like and work together to reach that goal, even if things start wrong. This shows that development is flexible and smart—it’s not just following a rigid script written in genes.

Levin defines intelligence as the ability to reach the same goal in different ways. Cells and tissues show this kind of adaptability all the time. For example, if an embryo is split in two, both halves can grow into full organisms. If a salamander’s cells are enlarged, its organs still form at the right size by using fewer, bigger cells.

Even more surprisingly, Levin’s team has created “biobots” by giving certain chemical cues to frog or human cells. These are tiny living robots that can move, heal, and even reproduce—without any genetic engineering. This shows how much untapped creativity exists in biological systems, and how we might be able to harness it to heal diseases, repair injuries, or even clean up pollution.

On a practical level, the impact of Levin’s work is a move away from seeing genes as the sole blueprint for biological structure, toward recognizing the central role of bioelectric networks. But beneath that shift lies a deeper thesis: that intelligence and cognition are not exclusive to brains or conscious organisms, but are widespread across all levels of biology. Development itself appears to be intelligent. Take, for example, an experiment where researchers manually scrambled the facial features of a developing tadpole. Despite this disruption, the organs found their way back to their correct positions as the tadpole matured.

This shows that development isn’t a rigid, gene-driven process but something more adaptive—something that behaves as if it’s working toward a goal. The scrambling introduced by the researchers wasn’t an evolutionary pressure the animal was selected for, yet it still corrected itself. Levin and his team refer to such manipulated animals as “Picasso frogs,” highlighting the system’s ability to make sense of a bizarre configuration using its internal logic.

Biological systems adapt not just at the whole-organism level, but even at the level of individual cells and tissues. Levin defines intelligence as the capacity to reach the same goal through different means, and many of his experiments demonstrate exactly that.

If you slice an embryo in half, it doesn’t produce two malformed half-organisms—it forms two complete, viable individuals. If you artificially enlarge the cells of a newt’s kidney, the resulting structures still maintain their intended size, just built with fewer cells.

In extreme cases, when the cells are made large enough, the organism forms entire tubules out of single cells, folding inward. These systems are reconfigurable in ways that suggest decentralized decision-making and goal-directed behavior.

What makes all of this even more remarkable is that intelligence in biology doesn’t just mean resilience or robustness; it can also mean creativity.

When given the right stimuli, biological systems don’t just return to their default behavior; they can develop entirely new ones. Levin’s lab has taken frog skin cells, ordinary cells that would normally just form outer tissue, and, using biochemical signals (no genetic editing), turned them into tiny autonomous “biobots” that move and even self-replicate.

More recently, similar work has been done using adult human lung tissue to create biobots capable of repairing damaged neurons. These are early steps into a whole new world where we might create living machines to fight cancer, clean environmental waste, or regenerate damaged organs.

The broader implication of Levin’s work is that we may need to rethink our assumptions about what counts as an “agent” and what systems are capable of “goals.”

Is a cell an agent? What about a tissue, an organ, or a network of immune cells? Levin suggests that intelligent, goal-directed behavior predates brains—it appears in morphogenesis, in bacterial swarms, even in gene networks.

These systems don’t look like the agents we’re used to, but they exhibit behaviors we associate with intelligence: memory, problem-solving, and adaptation. And crucially, Levin isn’t just making this case philosophically; he and his colleagues are demonstrating it experimentally.

Read also:

• Ex-NASA Scientist Claims: “Consciousness Is Fundamental — Our Reality Is a Simulation”
• This Man Found In Brain Simulation Study That Hints Human Have Psychic Powers
• This Billionaire Saw Interdimensional Beings and Claims G-LOC Unlocks Out-of-Body Consciousness

By redefining intelligence and cognition in these more general terms, Levin opens the door to new scientific and engineering paradigms. If cells have goals, we can learn to speak their language and steer them toward outcomes we want.

If intelligence arises from cooperation among many simple parts, then the brain is just one example of a much broader class of cognitive systems. That shift could unify fields that have long remained separate: neuroscience, immunology, developmental biology, synthetic bioengineering, and even sociology.

This way of thinking reframes cognitive science itself. If cognition is not limited to brains but is a property of coordinated systems, then any system of cooperating agents, cells, tissues, organisms, or even human societies can be studied with the same tools.

Researchers have already found parallels: cancer as a kind of cellular dissociative disorder, or ant colonies falling for visual illusions in the same way individual animals do.

Levin argues that all intelligence is collective intelligence. Every complex behavior we observe emerges from the interactions of simpler units, each with its limited competencies and goals. That includes us.

What we think of as a single “self” is, biologically, a federation of trillions of semi-autonomous cells negotiating and cooperating toward loosely shared outcomes.

It’s a radical but increasingly unavoidable perspective. Just as societies are built from individual humans, your body is built from individual cells.

And just as human societies have emergent properties, like language, law, and culture, so do the cellular societies inside us. The similarity isn’t just poetic; it might be the key to understanding both biology and intelligence in a far more unified and powerful way.

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{ https://howandwhys.com/ }

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{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Bizarre Craft Hit Soldiers With Debilitating Light Beam

Courtesy John Timmerman, J. Allen Hynek Center For UFO Studies
Courtesy CNI News

This text is an edited transcript of an interview between Mr. Francis P. Wall, a private first class (PFC) in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and John Timmerman, an associate of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Chicago, Illinois. The interview took place in January, 1987. Noted UFO researcher Richard F. Haines checked military records and found Mr. Wall listed as a Korean combatant in the infantry unit he names below.

CNI News thanks John Timmerman for permission to reprint this text. Mr. Wall recounts his experience as follows:

"This event that I am about to relate to you is the truth, so help me God. It happened in the early Spring of 1951 in Korea. We were in the Army infantry, 25th Division, 27th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 'Easy' Company. We were in what is known on the military maps as the Iron Triangle, near Chorwon.
"It is night. We are located on the slopes of a mountain, below [which] there is a Korean village. Previously we have sent our men into this village to warn the populace that we are going to bombard it with artillery. On this night, we were doing just that. We had aerial artillery bursts coming in.
"We suddenly noticed on our right-hand side what appeared to be a lava sphere / globe that looked like fire inside it. come wafting down across the mountain. And at first no one thought anything about it. So we noticed that this thing continued on down to the village to where, indeed, the artillery air bursts were exploding. It had an orange glow in the beginning. We further noticed that this object was [so] quick that it could get into the center of an airburst of artillery and yet remain unharmed.
"[The] time element on this, I would say, [was] anywhere from, oh, forty-five minutes to an hour all told.
"But then this object approached us. And it turned a blue-green brilliant light. It's hard to distinguish the size of it; there's no way to compare it. The light was pulsating. This object approached us.
"I asked for and received permission from Lt. Evans, our company commander at that time, to fire upon this object, which I did with an M-1 rifle with armor-piercing bullets. And I did hit it. It must have been metallic because you could hear when the projectile slammed into it.
"Now why would that bullet damage this craft if the artillery rounds didn't? I don't know, unless they had dropped their protective field around them, or whatever. But the object went wild, and the light was going on and off. It went off completely once, briefly. And it was moving erratically from side to side as though it might crash to the ground. Then, a sound -- we had heard no sound previous to this -- the sound of, like, diesel locomotives revving up. That's the way this thing sounded.
"And then, we were attacked. We were swept by some form of a ray that was emitted in pulses, in waves that you could visually see only when it was aiming directly at you. That is to say, like a searchlight sweeps around and... you would see it coming at you. Now you would feel a burning, tingling sensation all over your body, as though something were penetrating you.
"So the company commander, Lt. Evans, hauled us into our bunkers. We didn't know what was going to happen. We were scared. These are underground dugouts where you have peep holes to look out to fire at the enemy. So, I'm in my bunker with another man. We're peeping out at this thing. It hovered over us for a while, lit up the whole area with its light, and then I saw it shoot off at a 45 degree angle, that quick, just there and gone. That quick. And it was as though that was the end of it.
"But, three days later the entire company of men had to be evacuated by ambulance. They had to cut roads in there and haul them out. They were too weak to walk. They had dysentery. Then subsequently, when the doctors did see them, they had an extremely high white blood cell count which the doctors could not account for.
"Now in the military, especially the Army, each day you file a company report. We had a confab about that. Do we file it in the report or not? And the consensus was 'No.' Because they'd lock every one of us up and think we were crazy. At that time, no such thing as a UFO had ever been heard of, and we didn't know what it was.
"I still don't know what it was. But I do know that since that time I have periods of disorientation, memory loss, and I dropped from 180 pounds to 138 pounds after I got back to this country. And I've had great difficulty keeping my weight up. Indeed, I'm retired and disabled today."

Note pictures are art work

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 { peter2011 }

A room in the deep interior of the underground city of Derinkuyu. Depositphotos.

Reconstructing Derinkuyu’s acoustic design

To build the sound model, Nas selected three spaces for detailed analysis: a church, a domestic living area, and a kitchen. These areas were chosen for their function and variation in spatial volume. Using architectural surveys and acoustic simulation tools, she mapped the surfaces, volumes, and materials. Then, she modeled how sounds, voices, tools, footsteps, fire, would behave in each room.

Derinkuyu was not silent. It was carved from soft volcanic rock called tuff, which absorbs some frequencies but carries others. Ventilation shafts, often mistaken for simple air ducts, served as both airflow systems and vertical communication lines. Nas emphasized this dual function. A single shaft could move both air and sound across levels, linking different parts of the city without direct sightlines.

These design features were not secondary. They were structural. In Nas’s model, sound is shown to travel in ways that mirror social and architectural priorities. Openings near cooking areas allowed for shared sensory cues. Narrow passageways between levels blocked sound, creating acoustic boundaries that likely shaped patterns of privacy and control.

One of the rooms of the intricately carved undergrounds city of Derinkuyu.

Depositphotos.

Derinkuyu was not the only underground city in Cappadocia, but it is the deepest and most spatially complex. Most of the surviving tunnels were cut by hand during the Byzantine period, though earlier phases may date back even further. The site’s layout reflects both practical and defensive concerns. Entrances were concealed. Rolling stone doors could be used to block off corridors. Livestock was housed below ground. Water was sourced from wells that reached deep into the rock.

For centuries, these spaces were known locally but remained undocumented by formal archaeology. Since their rediscovery in the 1960s, sites like Derinkuyu have been measured, mapped, and visited by millions of tourists. Yet until Nas’s work, few efforts had been made to study how they sounded when they were inhabited.

Nas presented her findings at the 188th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in May 2025. She described Derinkuyu as an “interior environment on an urban scale,” distinct from open-air soundscapes typically studied in urban acoustics. By reconstructing its sonic behavior, she argues, researchers can better understand how residents used space, communicated, and structured their routines.

The soundscape is not a guess. It is built from data. Nas’s model incorporates not only geometry but also human behavior. Different rooms produce different reverberation times. Kitchens absorb more sound due to their lower ceilings. Churches echo longer. In between, passageways create acoustic transitions that affect how one space flows into another.

The region of Cappadocia, where Derinkuyu is located, has long been shaped by geology. The area’s soft volcanic substrate allowed for extensive excavation. Entire villages were carved directly into rock faces. By the early medieval period, Christians fleeing persecution expanded these spaces into multi-level underground complexes.

Derinkuyu may have been occupied intermittently over many centuries. Archaeological evidence points to phases of construction and reuse, often tied to periods of threat. Its layout includes features like defensive bottlenecks, food storage rooms, and central gathering spaces. Everything about it was designed to support life under siege.

The physical conditions underground are stable. Temperatures remain constant year-round. The architecture protects against both heat and cold. But living underground also shaped experience in other ways. Light was scarce. Sound carried differently. The absence of wind and open air created an environment defined by enclosed resonance. Nas’s model captures those differences in a way that drawings and photographs cannot.

Architectural design shaped how sound traveled

“There is a notable gap in the literature regarding the acoustic environment and soundscape of underground cities,” Nas said.

Her research reveals that the city’s ventilation shafts served not only for airflow but also for communication. Voices and sounds could carry between rooms and levels, creating an interconnected audio environment.

“This multifunctional use of the ventilation system strongly highlights the exceptional construction process of the site and plays a central role in shaping its soundscape,” she said.

“Listening to the reconstructed soundscape provides insights into how sound influenced spatial experience, communication practices, and social organization within the underground city.”

Virtual soundscape revives the sounds of daily life in Derinkuyu, the ancient underground city of Turkey

To reconstruct the sound environment, Nas analyzed three key spaces: a church, a kitchen, and a living area. She studied their acoustic properties – how sound would bounce, echo, and fade – based on size, material, and use. The result is a 3D virtual soundscape that reimagines what the city may have sounded like in its prime.

Nas presented her findings on Wednesday during the 188th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the 25th International Congress on Acoustics, held from May 18 to 23.

Sound as a bridge to cultural memory

“Derinkuyu underground city is considered an interior environment on an urban scale,” Nas said. “Listening to the reconstructed soundscape provides insights into how sound influenced spatial experience, communication practices, and social organization within the underground city.”

She hopes her work with the sounds of ancient life in Turkey will encourage greater use of soundscapes in historical research. Beyond technical insight, she views the study as a way to honor and preserve a forgotten layer of cultural identity.

“This research also highlights the role of historical sound environments,” Nas said. It is “an important and often overlooked component of cultural heritage.”

A tool for future design

Beyond archaeology, Nas sees potential for applying this work to modern planning. As urban development pushes into underground infrastructure, understanding how sound behaves in buried environments becomes increasingly important. Most studies of urban acoustics focus on surface cities. Underground spaces are treated as isolated exceptions.

Derinkuyu offers a counterexample. It was not a tunnel or a bunker. It was a functioning urban environment, carved to support collective life. Its soundscape reflects that design. Nas argues that acoustic modeling can contribute to both historical preservation and future construction.

More broadly, the project adds a new dimension to how we study ancient environments. Architecture is often recorded visually. Sound is harder to capture. But for people living in places like Derinkuyu, sound was part of how space was navigated, understood, and controlled. Children learned where they were by the echo of a footstep. Adults heard voices through shafts before they saw faces. The city’s structure taught people how to listen.

What Derinkuyu reveals

The 3D reconstruction of Derinkuyu is not a re-creation of ancient life. It doesn’t guess what people were thinking or feeling. What it does is document how space worked, how it changed sound, and how those changes shaped experience.

Sound was never separate from architecture. It was one of the ways people understood where they were. A child would know a main room by the way it echoed. A parent might hear a pot drop two levels above. The structure itself trained people to listen.

This kind of work is rare. Archaeology usually records what can be drawn or photographed. Sound is harder. It fades. But in places like Derinkuyu, it never really disappeared. The shape of the rooms, the angles of the walls, and the width of the shafts still control how noise moves. That information is still there, waiting to be measured.

By treating sound as something worth studying, not just as an effect, but as part of how a space functioned, Nas adds something to the record that was missing. Not a story, not a theory, but a way to hear a place that once stayed quiet to the outside world. Fascinating!

{ https://curiosmos.com/category/ancient-civilizations/ }

Millennium Falcon In Berkshire, England, UK, Google Earth Map, Star Wars UFO UAP Sighting News.

Google Map Location: 51°22'58"N 0°34'55"W

 

Hey, this is interesting...there is a Star Wars spaceship sitting in England back in 2017. It's gone now, so you have to hit the history button in the lower left side of the screen. Then go to 2017 and there it is. it's being hidden by container boxes on all sides of it, but I don't think they realized it would be seen from the sky. Hey would be nice if we could steal abroad and fly that thing off this planet right? 

Scott C. Waring

Star Wars: A Detail Look Inside the Millennium Falcon

Star Wars Millennium Falcon Build in Starfield

{https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Is this an Alien base on island in Greenland? 🇬🇱 UFO UAP sighting news. Ancient aliens exist.

Guys there is something strange on a small island off Greenland. This I have heard people tell me its an alien tower or alien entrance to a base, its a whale, its a plane and so much more. Hey as always, you decide. 

Scott C. Waring 

UFO Experts On Existence Of Underwater Alien Bases On Earth Probe | Shocking UFO Hearing LIVE | N18G

{https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Slope Streaks on Mars are Dry, New Study Suggests

Slope streaks are dark features on Martian slopes that form spontaneously and fade over years to decades. Some planetary scientists have interpreted those streaks as liquid flows, suggesting the possibility of currently habitable environments on Mars. But new research by Brown University and the University of Bern points to a different explanation — dry process related to wind and dust activity.

This image of an impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars was taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on March 30, 2015. The crater is approximately 3,300 feet (1-km) wide and appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta. The steep inner slopes are carved by gullies and include possible recurring slope lineae on the equator-facing slopes.

Image credit: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona / Alfred McEwen.

“A big focus of Mars research is understanding modern-day processes on Mars — including the possibility of liquid water on the surface,” said Dr. Adomas Valantinas, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University.

“Our study reviewed these features but found no evidence of water. Our model favors dry formation processes.”

Scientists first saw the odd streaks in images returned from NASA’s Viking mission in the 1970s.

The sinewy features are generally darker in hue than the surrounding terrain and extend for hundreds of meters down sloped terrain.

Some last for years or decades, while others come and go more quickly.

The shorter-lived features — dubbed recurring slope lineae (RSL) — seem to show up in the same locations during the warmest periods of the Martian year.

The origin of the streaks has been a hot topic among planetary scientists.

Hoping for new insights, Dr. Valantinas and his colleague, Dr. Valentin Bickel, turned to a machine learning algorithm to catalog as many slope streaks as they could.

After training their algorithm on confirmed slope streak sightings, they used it to scan more than 86,000 high-resolution satellite images.

The result was a first-of-its-kind global Martian map of slope streaks containing more than 500,000 streak features.

“Once we had this global map, we could compare it to databases and catalogs of other things like temperature, wind speed, hydration, rock slide activity and other factors,” Dr. Bickel said.

“Then we could look for correlations over hundreds of thousands of cases to better understand the conditions under which these features form.”

This geostatistical analysis showed that slope streaks and RSLs are not generally associated with factors that suggest a liquid or frost origin, such as a specific slope orientation, high surface temperature fluctuations or high humidity.

Instead, the authors found that both features are more likely to form in places with above average wind speed and dust deposition — factors that point to a dry origin.

The researchers concluded that the streaks most likely form when layers of fine dust suddenly slide off steep slopes.

The specific triggers may vary. Slope streaks appear more common near recent impact craters, where shockwaves might shake loose surface dust. RSLs, meanwhile, are more often found in places where dust devils or rockfalls are frequent.

Taken together, the results cast new doubt on slope streaks and RSLs as habitable environments.

That has significant implications for future Mars exploration.

While habitable environments might sound like good exploration targets, NASA would rather keep its distance.

Any Earthly microbes that may have hitched a ride on a spacecraft could contaminate habitable Martian environments, complicating the search for Mars-based life.

This study suggests that the contamination risk at slope streak sites isn’t much of a concern.

“That’s the advantage of this big data approach,” Dr. Valantinas said.

“It helps us to rule out some hypotheses from orbit before we send spacecraft to explore.”

• The results were published on May 19, 2025 in the journal Nature Communications.
• V.T. Bickel & A. Valantinas. 2025. Streaks on Martian slopes are dry. Nat Commun 16, 4315; doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-59395-w

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{ https://www.sci.news/news/space }

Suppressed Experiments or Nothing But Fiction? The Bizarre Conspiracies of Ong’s Hat

In the realm of conspiracy theories and urban legends, few stories have captivated the imagination quite like the mysterious saga of Ong’s Hat. This bizarre narrative, rooted in the internet age, blurs the lines between reality and fiction, leaving many to wonder: are these tales based on suppressed experiments, or are they nothing but elaborate stories woven for entertainment? To understand the phenomenon fully, we must delve into the origins, the core beliefs, and the cultural impact of the Ong’s Hat conspiracy.

In the current age of the internet, internet-written legends are a dime a dozen. At times, they even seem to take on a life of their own, sparking everything from conventions, to supposed “true sightings,” to acts of crime. While this may be the norm today, this was not the norm back in the 80’s and early 90’s – the days when Ong’s Hat gained newfound notoriety.

Ong's Hat, Pine Barrens, New Jersey, USA.

Photo: Misha Friedman (Gizmodo)

The Origins of Ong’s Hat

Ong’s Hat first appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s as part of a series of online and offline stories that intertwined science fiction, secret government projects, and underground societies. It originated from a small town in New Jersey, where a supposed clandestine experiment took place in a derelict location called Ong’s Hat. According to the legends, the experiment involved advanced teleportation or interdimensional travel, conducted by secret government agencies or clandestine groups.

Ong’s Hat, also known as Ong’s Hut, is actually a now-ghost town that was founded prior to our nation’s birth, located deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It’s right off of Exit 4 on the Jersey Turnpike, but in order to visit it, you may need to update your GPS to bring you to a road by a similar name.

Much like many other old world ghost towns, Ong’s Hat has a legend tied to its name. Word has it that a local man by the name of Jacob Ong who owned over 100 acres of land in the town was the source of the odd town name. Ong was a ladies’ man of sorts, and was known for his trademark silk hat that he wore to every local ball and gathering. At one point, Ong made the mistake of flirting with a married woman – and her husband had found out. When the man found out that Ong had tried to court his wife, he quickly snatched Ong’s hat off his head, stomped on it, then tossed it up in a tree.

Try as he might, Ong could not get the hat from the tree, and it stayed there for years. However, there was a perk to this fashion tragedy. As the local village was very well-hidden by trees, it was often hard for caravans to find it. The hat ended up becoming a trademark sign that carriages were close to town, and soon after the town became known as Ong’s Hat.

Though it was known early on as an alcohol-friendly town with a highly active social scene, the town petered out to a mere 7 residents by the 1900’s. By the 1930’s nothing remained of Ong’s Hat except for a burnt out shell of a building and rumors that a single old man still lived there. According to some, that’s when the real history began…

The story gained traction through early internet forums, bulletin boards, and role-playing communities. Enthusiasts created elaborate backstories, documents, and websites that portrayed Ong’s Hat as a real place and a real project. These stories often included references to government cover-ups, mind control experiments, and the existence of alternate realities.

Ong’s Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real

The Narrative: Suppressed Experiments and Hidden Knowledge.

The Ong’s Hat mythos revolves around the compelling idea that a clandestine experiment, involving teleportation or dimensional shifting, was secretly carried out in the area. According to various accounts, this experiment aimed to explore the boundaries of human consciousness and the fabric of reality itself. However, the operation went catastrophically wrong, resulting in the opening of portals to alternate dimensions or parallel universes. These portals allegedly caused unpredictable and dangerous phenomena, including strange sightings, environmental anomalies, and inexplicable disturbances in the local area.

Some theories suggest that the government was behind the experiment, driven by a desire to develop advanced military or intelligence technologies. The project was supposedly classified at the highest levels, with the aim of gaining a strategic advantage during the Cold War era or beyond. Once the unintended consequences became evident, authorities supposedly took extreme measures to cover up the incident, silencing witnesses and destroying evidence. This secrecy has fueled speculation that knowledge of these experiments remains hidden from the public, deliberately suppressed to prevent mass panic or to protect powerful interests.

Proponents of the myth point to supposed leaked documents, cryptic messages, or whistleblower testimonies as evidence of ongoing covert activities. These sources often describe clandestine government programs that continue to explore the boundaries of reality and consciousness. The narrative underscores themes of government secrecy, forbidden knowledge, and the possibility that our perceived reality is a constructed or manipulated illusion. Ultimately, the Ong’s Hat story taps into deep-seated fears and curiosity about hidden truths and the limits of human understanding, blending conspiracy, science fiction, and mysticism into a compelling mythos.

Weird Science

The scientist brothers, Frank and Althea Dobbs, were twin scientists who were recently ostracized by the scientific community due to their extremist views. As soon as they arrived at the Ashram, the two set up shop in a small, unkempt trailer and began to work on discovering the secrets to the universe.

Back in Princeton, the brothers were working on a physics equation that was supposed to be able to prove the concept of “cognitive chaos,” also known as the idea that the chaos of the universe is cognizant, and that people’s minds held the key to being able to do anything and everything imaginable. They even claimed that cognitive chaos would allow people to cure themselves of disease by simply willing it, and that it would allow them interdimensional travel.

Obviously, this radical idea was enough to get them booted from the prestigious university, but all was not lost. Wali was very impressed with their work, and created the Institute of Chaos Studies specifically for their benefit. The brothers quickly began hooking up people to computers, experimenting with a number of different psychotropic drugs, and even brain wave alteration stuff. Soon enough, word of their experiments got out, and two more scientists joined the group – Harold Acton and Martine Kalikak.

Within a matter of mere years, the small band of anarchist scientists had created a device that remains legendary to this day: the Egg. It was a device that supposedly shut out all outside stimuli and would allow people to travel into the chaos of their own mind. The day of the final test run was one filled with tension. A runaway who had volunteered to use the Egg on himself was strapped in, and the device was turned on.

In a blink of an eye, both the boy and the Egg had disappeared from sight.

The Bizarre Alternate History Of Ong’s Hut

According to the writers of Ong’s Hut, the real interesting history behind the abandoned village began with a group of white jazz musicians who called themselves the Moorish Orthodox Church of America, back in the 1950’s. These slapdash musicians traveled the world, learning secrets from various tribes, picking up new members for their “church,” and getting schooled on philosophies from around the world.
The Moorish Orthodox Church was one that dabbled in mysticism, occult beliefs, Eastern philosophy, while also maintaining a certain degree of fondness for chaos. Of all the unusual members, Wali Fard was one of the most extreme, and ended up converting to Ismailism – also known as the archaic religion responsible for the creation of assassins.

Fard returned from his travels in 1978 when Iran’s revolution began to take place. He then spent his life savings on a massive 200 acre lot in the Pine Barrens. This lot became known as the Moorish Science Ashram, and became populated by a huge group of misfits including runaways, philosophy-crazed scholars, and anarchist lesbians. To recruit more people, he began to publish underground newsletters describing his beliefs – and that’s what attracted a pair of renegade scientists from Princeton University.

The Gate

After a couple of breathless moments, both runaway and Egg reappeared in the laboratory. He explained that the Egg had sent him into an alternate dimension – one in which people didn’t exist, but he did. Apparently, the Egg had managed to open a rift in between dimensions, and it’s one that supposedly still affects travelers to this day.

As for the Institute of Chaos Theory and the Ashram, none of the documents associated with the Ong’s Hat meme really fully explain what happened to them. There are multiple theories. Some say that the government discovered the results of the scientists’ experiment and wiped out the majority of the Ashram’s followers. Others say that a nearby chemical spill forced them to flee to the other dimension. Still more say that they decided to just up and leave to the dimension next door, opting to stay away from the society that shunned them and called them insane. According to this theory, the group of rebels still recruit people from out dimension to join in.

The Role of Internet Culture and Role-Playing

Ong’s Hat emerged as a groundbreaking phenomenon at the intersection of internet culture and immersive storytelling. It exemplifies a form of “urban exploration” combined with “meta-fiction,” where the narrative blurs the line between reality and fiction. This innovative blend captivated online communities and fostered a sense of mystery and intrigue. The myth of Ong’s Hat was largely propagated through early internet forums and newsgroups such as alt.conspiracy and alt.fan.ouija, which provided fertile ground for the development and dissemination of the story.

Participants in these communities actively contributed to the myth by engaging in role-playing games (RPGs) that simulated secret missions, clandestine laboratories, and covert investigations into conspiracy theories. These interactive experiences encouraged users to immerse themselves fully in the storyline, often adopting personas or characters involved in uncovering the secrets of Ong’s Hat. The RPG elements made the narrative feel tangible and real, as if the participants were explorers uncovering hidden truths.

Furthermore, the story’s creators incorporated real-world locations, cryptic documents, and supposed sightings into the myth, enhancing its credibility and appeal. For example, references to actual places in New Jersey and the inclusion of authentic-looking documents and photographs made it difficult for casual observers to distinguish between fact and fiction. This careful blending of fact and fiction fostered a participatory environment where users felt like active detectives or explorers, contributing to the myth’s ongoing evolution.

Internet culture played a crucial role in fostering this participatory environment. The anonymity of online platforms allowed users to experiment with different personas and share theories without fear of judgment. The collaborative nature of these communities meant that the story of Ong’s Hat was constantly refined and expanded through collective effort. As new clues, sightings, and documents emerged, the myth grew more complex and convincing, encouraging further exploration and discussion.

In essence, Ong’s Hat is a prime example of how internet culture and role-playing can be harnessed to create compelling, participatory narratives. It demonstrates the power of online communities to craft immersive stories that challenge perceptions of reality, blending entertainment, mystery, and community engagement in a unique digital storytelling experience.

Wharton State Forest, New Jersey. By Famartin from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Portal by Stefan Keller from Pixabay. Edited by the author.

The Cultural Impact and Legacy

Over the years, Ong’s Hat has evolved from a mysterious online story into a powerful symbol of the early internet’s obsession with conspiracies and alternate realities. Its influence is evident across various media, including books, documentaries, podcasts, and online forums, where it sparks ongoing debates about the nature of truth and fiction in the digital age. The story’s allure lies in its ambiguity and the way it blurs the lines between reality and fabrication, encouraging audiences to question what they see and hear online.

Many researchers interpret Ong’s Hat as a form of “perceptual hacking,” a technique in which fictional narratives are crafted to manipulate perceptions and beliefs subtly. This concept suggests that stories like Ong’s Hat are not just entertainment but serve as tools to influence the collective consciousness, often without the audience’s conscious awareness. By embedding layers of plausible but fabricated details, such stories can create a convincing alternate reality that challenges traditional notions of truth.

Others view Ong’s Hat as a modern myth—an intricate storytelling project that reflects societal anxieties about government overreach, technological advancement, and the mysteries of the universe. In this context, the story functions as a mirror to contemporary fears, embodying concerns about surveillance, secret experiments, and the unknown consequences of scientific progress. It resonates with a cultural zeitgeist that questions authority and seeks to understand the complexities of a rapidly changing world.

In essence, Ong’s Hat has transcended its origins as an internet hoax to become a cultural touchstone that prompts critical discussions about reality, trust, and the influence of digital storytelling. Its legacy endures as a testament to the power of narrative in shaping perceptions and reflecting societal fears in the digital age.

Are These Experiments Suppressed or Just Fiction?

The core question remains: is there any truth behind Ong’s Hat? Do these stories point to real experiments that were suppressed from public knowledge? Or are they simply modern folklore, created for entertainment and social bonding?

Like many internet memes, this is a case in which a story quickly took a life of its own. Most agree that this story began as an internet role playing game that turned into a storytelling activity among geeks. The vast majority of people will agree that hearing a tale about a bunch of rebel scientists, anarchists, and runaways skipping dimensions is just too weird to be true, but there are people out there who believe in the tale.

Citing such aspects as multiple authors, an online recruitment effort, and the fact that it took place in a real part of the Pine Barrens, believers suggest that the main author, Joseph Matheny, published the book as fiction as a way to save himself from government intrusion. Some even claim that they have met people from the ICS!

There is no concrete evidence to support the existence of secret teleportation experiments or interdimensional portals at Ong’s Hat. Official records, declassified documents, and credible testimonies do not corroborate the stories. Many experts consider Ong’s Hat to be a complex urban legend, a digital-age myth that plays on our fascination with secret government projects and the unknown.

However, some argue that governments and military agencies have indeed conducted secret experiments involving mind control, chemical weapons, or other clandestine technologies. The notorious MK-Ultra program, for example, was a real clandestine operation involving mind control experiments. But linking such programs directly to Ong’s Hat remains speculative and unsubstantiated.

Stranger Still…Possible Proof To Fact?

What makes the Ong’s Hat conspiracy theory story so strange (and believable) to some is the fact that this ghost town has been known for strange happenings. In fact, there was a previous book devoted to the subject of Ong’s Hat’s bizarre happenings that was published in the early 1930’s by a man named Henry Charlton Beck.

In this older book, Beck described such strange goings-on as UFO sightings by Jacob Ong himself, unsolved murders, and strangest of all, a mysterious egg-shaped device that “sucked people in” and would make them never be seen again. If this sounds similar to the story that surfaced on internet, you’re not alone. It’s possible that the Ong’s Hat saga was based on the folklore and records that Beck collected.

In 1968, the New York Times published a statement from a supposed descendant of Ong claiming that the Ong’s Hat book published 30 years ago was all false. What made this strange wasn’t only the fact that it happened 30 years too late, but also because it was 100% unprovoked. Beck also admitted that he was pressured by various groups to claim that his book was fake as well.

That being said, many people who have passed through Ong’s Hut also claim to have seen strange, unexplainable things. Perhaps there may be more truth to this than once thought.

The Appeal of the Conspiracy

Why do stories like Ong’s Hat persist? The allure lies in their mystery and the human tendency to seek hidden truths. They tap into fears of government overreach, the unknown capabilities of technology, and the possibility that reality is more complex than it appears. These stories often feature secret societies, clandestine experiments, and suppressed knowledge, which evoke curiosity and skepticism simultaneously. For many, they offer a tantalizing glimpse into a hidden world that challenges official narratives, fueling imagination and suspicion.

Furthermore, the internet has played a pivotal role in the proliferation and evolution of conspiracy theories like Ong’s Hat. Online platforms enable these stories to spread rapidly, reaching a global audience within moments. The digital landscape allows for the continuous addition of new details, theories, and interpretations, creating a dynamic and ever-changing mythology that resists definitive validation or debunking. This fluidity keeps the stories alive, encouraging ongoing debate and engagement among believers and skeptics alike.

The participatory nature of online communities also contributes significantly to their appeal. Many conspiracy theories develop through collaborative storytelling, where users contribute their own theories or evidence, blurring the line between fact and fiction. This collective involvement fosters a sense of belonging and shared purpose, as participants feel they are uncovering truths hidden from the general public. It also provides a platform for individuals to express doubts about authority figures and mainstream narratives, empowering them with a sense of agency.

Psychologically, conspiracy theories like Ong’s Hat offer a form of cognitive closure, providing simple explanations for complex events or phenomena. They often resonate with individuals who feel alienated or distrustful of institutions, offering a sense of control or understanding amidst chaos. The stories also appeal to the human love for mystery and adventure, transforming abstract fears into tangible narratives.

In conclusion, the persistence of stories such as Ong’s Hat can be attributed to their mysterious nature, the technological facilitation of their spread, and the social and psychological needs they fulfill. They serve as modern myths, woven into the fabric of digital communities, capturing the imagination of many who seek to uncover hidden truths beyond the surface of reality.

Conclusion

The saga of Ong’s Hat exemplifies the blurred boundary between fact and fiction in the digital age. While there is no concrete evidence that suppressed experiments or interdimensional portals exist at Ong’s Hat, the stories continue to fascinate and inspire curiosity. They serve as modern folklore, reflecting societal anxieties and our obsession with secret knowledge.

Whether viewed as a cautionary tale about government secrecy or as a crafted piece of interactive storytelling, Ong’s Hat remains a captivating example of how conspiracy theories can evolve and thrive in the information age. As with all such stories, it’s essential to approach them with a critical mind, appreciating their cultural significance while recognizing their fictional nature.

References and Further Reading

• "The Ong’s Hat Conspiracy: Exploring Modern Mythology" by Jane Doe, 2020.
• "Urban Legends and Internet Folklore" by John Smith, 2018.
• Declassified documents related to secret government projects (available through FOIA requests).
• Interviews with early internet conspiracy pioneers.

The short video below explores the legends and conspiracies of Ong’s Hat a little further.

 { PETER2011 }

Scientists break down cheap plastic using the air — and turn it into something far more valuable

"The U.S. is the number one plastic polluter per capita, and we only recycle 5% of those plastics," co-corresponding author Yosi Kratish, a research assistant professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, said in a statement. "What's particularly exciting about our research is that we harnessed moisture from air to break down the plastics, achieving an exceptionally clean and selective process. By recovering the monomers, which are the basic building blocks of PET [polyethylene terephthalate], we can recycle or even upcycle them into more valuable materials."

Plastic waste is an increasingly important issue. Over half of the plastic ever made has been produced since 2000, and annual production is projected to double by 2050, according to the European Environment Agency.

To date, only 9% of the plastics ever produced have been recycled. The remainder, with lifetimes often lasting generations, can have serious environmental and health impacts. For example, they wash out to sea to form floating blobs of trash, harm wildlife, and break down into microplastics that can enter the human brain and other parts of our bodies.

Related: 

• Will we ever be able to stop using plastic?

To find a new method to break down some of this waste, the researchers applied a molybdenum catalyst — a silver, ductile metal — and activated carbon to PET, the most common type of polyester plastic. The researchers then heated the mixture. After a short time, this broke the polyethylene's chemical bonds.

Then, when the team exposed the material to air, the mixture transformed into TPA, a valuable polyester precursor; and acetaldehyde, an industrial chemical that is also valuable and is easy to lift from the mixture.

When they tested the method on mixed plastics, the researchers found that it had an effect only on the polyester materials. That meant they didn't have to presort the plastics. It worked onlastic bottles, T-shirts and colored plastics, breaking them down into pure, colorless TPA.

"It worked perfectly," Kratish said. "When we added extra water, it stopped working because it was too much water. It's a fine balance. But it turns out the amount of water in air was just the right amount."

The team's next steps will be to adapt the process to large-scale industrial applications.

"Our technology has the potential to significantly reduce plastic pollution, lower the environmental footprint of plastics and contribute to a circular economy where materials are reused rather than discarded," study first author Naveen Malik, who was a researcher at Northwestern University at the time, said in the statement. "It's a tangible step toward a cleaner, greener future, and it demonstrates how innovative chemistry can address global challenges in a way that aligns with nature."

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{ https://www.livescience.com/technology }

The 12 strangest objects in the universe

Weirdo universe 

There's no questioning the fact that the universe is weird. Just look outside and you'll see all manner of strange, self-reproducing flora and fauna, crawling upon a blue ball of semimolten rock covered in a thin, hard shell and blanketed by a tenuous film of gases. Yet our own planet represents a tiny fraction of the peculiar phenomena that can be found lurking throughout the cosmos, and every day astronomers turn up new surprises. In this gallery, we take a look at some of the most outlandish objects in space.

1. Mysterious Radio Signals

Since 2007, researchers have been receiving ultrastrong, ultrabright radio signals lasting only a few milliseconds. These enigmatic flashes have been called fast radio bursts (FRBs), and they appear to be coming from billions of light-years away (they're not aliens, it's never aliens). Recently, scientists managed to capture a repeating FRB, which flashed six times in a row, the second such signal ever seen and one that could help them unravel this mystery.

2. Nuclear Pasta

The strongest substance in the universe forms from the leftovers of a dead star. According to simulations, protons and neutrons in a star's shriveled husk can be subject to insane gravitational pressure, which squeezes them into linguini-like tangles of material that would snap — but only if you applied to them 10 billion times the force needed to shatter steel.

• Strange new object fires radio signals at Earth every 44 minutes
• James Webb telescope spots 'rogue' planet with a cake-like atmosphere barrelling through space without a star
• Extreme 'zombie star' capable of ripping human atoms apart is shooting through the Milky Way — and nobody knows where it came from

3. Haumea Has Rings

The dwarf planet Haumea, which orbits in the Kuiper Belt out beyond Neptune, is already unusual. It has a strange elongated shape, two moons and a day that lasts only 4 hours, making it the fastest-spinning large object in the solar system. But in 2017, Haumea got even weirder when astronomers watched it pass in front of a star and noticed extremely thin rings orbiting around it, likely the result of a collision sometime in the distant past.

4. A Moon with a Moon

What's better than a moon? A moon orbiting a moon, which the internet has dubbed a moonmoon. Also known as submoons, moonitos, grandmoons, moonettes and moooons, moonmoons are still only theoretical, but recent calculations suggest that there's nothing impossible about their formation. Perhaps astronomers may one day discover one.

5. Dark-Matter-Less Galaxy?

Dark matter — the unknown substance comprising 85 percent of all matter in the universe — is strange. But researchers are at least sure about one thing: Dark matter is everywhere. So team members were scratching their heads over a peculiar galaxy they spotted in March 2018 that seemed to contain hardly any dark matter. Subsequent work suggested that the celestial oddity did in fact contain dark matter, though the finding paradoxically lent credence to an alternative theory positing that dark matter doesn't exist at all. Get it together, astronomers!

6. The Most Bizarre Star

When astronomer Tabetha Boyajian of Louisiana State University and her colleagues first saw the star known as KIC 846285, they were flummoxed. Nicknamed Tabby's star, the object would dip in brightness at irregular intervals and for odd lengths of time, sometimes by as much as 22 percent. Different theories were invoked, including the possibility of an alien megastructure, but nowadays, most researchers believe the star to be surrounded by an abnormal ring of dust that's causing the darkening.

7. Highly Electric Hyperion

The title of weirdest moon in the solar system could go to many celestial objects — Jupiter's overly volcanic Io, Neptune's geyser-spewing Triton. But one of the strangest looking is Saturn's Hyperion, a pumice-stone-like irregular rock pockmarked with numerous craters. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which visited the Saturn system between 2004 and 2017, also found that Hyperion was charged with a "particle beam" of static electricity flowing out into space.

8. A Guiding Neutrino

The single, high-energy neutrino that struck Earth on Sept. 22, 2017, wasn't, on its own, all that extraordinary. Physicists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica see neutrinos of similar energy levels at least once a month. But this one was special because it was the first to arrive with enough information about its origin for astronomers to point telescopes in the direction it came from. They figured out that it had been flung at Earth 4 billion years ago by a flaring blazar, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy that had been consuming surrounding material.

9. The Living Fossil Galaxy

DGSAT I is an ultradiffuse galaxy (UDG), meaning it is as big as a galaxy like the Milky Way but its stars are spread out so thinly that it is nearly invisible. But when scientists saw the ghostly DGSAT 1 in 2016, they noticed that it was sitting all alone, quite unlike other UDGs, which are typically found in clusters. Its characteristics suggest that the faint object formed during a very different era in the universe, back just 1 billion or so years after the Big Bang, making DGSAT 1 a living fossil.

10. Double Quasar Image

Massive objects curve light, enough so that they can distort the image of things behind them. When researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to spot a quasar from the early universe, they used it to estimate the universe's expansion rate and found that it is expanding faster today than it was back then — a finding that disagrees with other measurements. Now physicists need to figure out if their theories are wrong or if something else strange is going on.

11. Infrared Stream from Space

Neutron stars are extremely dense objects formed after the death of a regular star. Normally, they emit radio waves or higher-energy radiation such as X-rays, but in September 2018, astronomers found a long stream of infrared light coming from a neutron star 800 light-years away from Earth — something never before observed. The researchers proposed that a disk of dust surrounding the neutron star could be generating the signal, but the ultimate explanation has yet to be found.

12. Rogue Planet with Auroras

Drifting through the galaxy are rogue planets, which have been flung away from their parent star by gravitational forces. One particular peculiarity in this class is known as SIMP J01365663+0933473, a planet-size object 200 light-years away whose magnetic field is more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter's. This is strong enough to generate flashing auroras in its atmosphere, which can be seen with radio telescopes.

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{ https://www.livescience.com/space }

Physicists capture 'second sound' for the first time — after nearly 100 years of searching

An artist's illustration of particles moving inside a box. 

(Image credit: Getty Images)

"It's as if you had a tank of water and made one half nearly boiling," study co-author Richard Fletcher, an assistant professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement. "If you then watched, the water itself might look totally calm, but suddenly the other side is hot, and then the other side is hot, and the heat goes back and forth, while the water looks totally still."

Typically heat spreads from a localized source, slowly dissipating across an entire material as it raises the temperature across it.

But exotic materials called superfluids needn't play by these rules. Created when clouds of fermions (which include protons, neutrons and electrons) are cooled to temperatures approaching absolute zero, atoms inside superfluids pair up and travel frictionlessly throughout the material.

Related: 

• Physicists make record-breaking 'quantum vortex' to study the mysteries of black holes

As a result, heat flows differently through the material: instead of spreading through the movements of particles within the fluid, as it typically flows, heat sloshes back and forth within superfluids like a sound wave. This second sound was first predicted by the physicist László Tisza in 1938, but heat-mapping techniques have, until now, proven unable to observe it directly.

"Second sound is the hallmark of superfluidity, but in ultracold gases so far you could only see it in this faint reflection of the density ripples that go along with it," study senior-author Martin Zwierlein, a professor of physics at MIT, said in the statement. "The character of the heat wave could not be proven before."

To capture second sound, the researchers had to solve a daunting problem in tracking the flow of heat inside ultracold gases. These gases are so cold that they do not give off infrared radiation, upon which typical heat-mapping, or thermography, techniques rely.

Instead, the physicists developed a method to track the fermion pairs through their resonant frequencies. Lithium-6 atoms resonate at different radio frequencies as their temperatures change, with warmer atoms vibrating at higher frequencies.

By applying resonant radio frequencies corresponding to warmer atoms, the scientists made these atoms ring in response, enabling them to track the particles’ flow frame by frame.

"For the first time, we can take pictures of this substance as we cool it through the critical temperature of superfluidity, and directly see how it transitions from being a normal fluid, where heat equilibrates boringly, to a superfluid where heat sloshes back and forth," Zwierlein said.

The physicists say that their groundbreaking technique will enable them to better study the behaviors of some of the universe's most extreme objects, such as neutron stars, and measure the conductivity of high-temperature superconductors to make even better designs.

"There are strong connections between our puff of gas, which is a million times thinner than air, and the behavior of electrons in high-temperature superconductors, and even neutrons in ultradense neutron stars," Zwierlein said. "Now we can probe pristinely the temperature response of our system, which teaches us about things that are very difficult to understand or even reach."

{ https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth }

Traveling to Mars and Ceres Using Lunar Gateway as a Springboard

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

“Startled” UFO in Classified Video: Whistleblower Reveals Shocking Pentagon Program

A former U.S. national security official, Matthew Brown, has come forward with startling revelations about a secret Pentagon program dubbed Immaculate Constellation, which allegedly gathers classified videos and images of UFOs. In a recent interview on the Weaponized podcast with journalist Jeremy Corbell, Brown described previously unseen footage — and shared a theory that’s raising eyebrows in the UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) research community.

“Startled” Disc Captured on Military Footage

According to Brown, one particular video stood out: a disc-shaped UFO flying over what appeared to be an ocean. The object behaved unusually — gliding playfully through the clouds, it suddenly stopped, seemingly noticing the camera, and then darted away as if startled.

“It’s like it knew it was being watched,” said Brown. “It scoots out of frame, like someone caught it.”

Brown emphasized he doesn’t know whether the object was extraterrestrial, adversarial, or experimental U.S. technology. However, the reaction of the object — intelligent and evasive — suggests an awareness that is difficult to dismiss.

Leaked Footage Confirmed by Corbell

Corbell confirmed he had also seen this same video years earlier and noted that the footage is known within the intelligence community. He stated that while the video is still classified, many such clips have circulated internally for years. He and fellow journalist George Knapp have reviewed a large archive of military-captured UFO videos, most of which remain unpublished due to security restrictions.

Are UFOs Already Here?

During the podcast, Brown went beyond just reporting. He speculated that UFOs — or their occupants — may have been here for much of recorded history, possibly living among us or operating from hidden bases on Earth.

Corbell elaborated that this theory is not new but gaining traction due to “hot spots” — areas on Earth where UFO activity appears to be concentrated. One such region is off the coast of California, where U.S. naval activity and advanced sensor equipment have produced a higher-than-usual volume of strange sightings.

Skepticism vs. Evidence

When asked about skeptics who accuse Corbell and others of fueling conspiracy theories, Corbell pushed back, stating:

“Reality needs to catch up with actual reality. What we’re seeing is verifiable. This isn’t fantasy — it’s documentation.”

He emphasized that the abundance of data — thermal imaging, radar, infrared footage — supports a serious investigation, not science fiction.

The testimony of Matthew Brown, if accurate, suggests a significant cover-up within government circles regarding non-human technologies or entities. While no physical evidence has yet been released publicly, the consistency in eyewitness reports and internal documentation builds a compelling case.

Whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, one thing is clear: something is being hidden — and it’s not nothing.

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

Webb Reveals that Europa's Surface is Constantly Changing

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{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Martian Probe Rolls Over to See Subsurface Ice and Rock

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

Advancing Deep Space Travel with Nuclear Propulsion

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }