Experts disagree that photos taken by Curiosity rover suggest life on Mars

Considering the fact that a microbial expert recently made news by claiming the photos transmitted back to Earth by the Curiosity rover on Mars are suggestive of earlier life on the Red Planet – a team of researchers disagree strongly that the said photos showing natural features on Mars are made by some form of alien life.

A geologist and associate professor at Old Dominion University, Dr. Nora Noffke, was participating at a NASA event when she came across the said photos taken on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The photos have telltale features that are very similar to those made by microbial life on Earth, and according to Noffke, the images “reminded me of polygons formed by microbial mats in very shallow pools that dry out during the summer months.”

However, she disagreed that the natural formations could have been made by aliens or any microbial life on Mars, even though she conceded that they looked very much alike to many natural features on Earth. But Noffke is leaving the hypothesis open – she submitted that the only way to know for certain if the formations were made by alien or microbial life was to task the rover to bring back rock samples to Earth for analysis.

Ashwin Vasavada, mission project scientist for the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, stated that having examined these images and the domes, cracks, and pockets of features contained in them, he was of the view that these couldn’t have been made any ancient microbial life. Explaining that the images in the photos could be fluvial sandstone, it stands to reason the marks could have been made by a natural process of water transporting sand. But water on Mars?

Just as Noffke had suggested, Vasavada was open to better explanations from other knowledgeable space scientists.

The Curiosity rover is however equipped to examine any natural features of interest more closely, take close-up photos, and to even drill and then extract soil or rock samples for analysis aboard the space machine – and what’s more – the onboard lab has the capability to detect organic molecules from taken samples.

Having arrived Mars since August 2012 when it landed at the Gale Crater, NASA’s Curiosity rover spent a year in Yellowknife Bay before moving out to Mount Sharp, its ultimate destination, and it reached the mountain September 2014.

{ http://www.thetimesgazette.com/ }

13-01-2015 om 20:47 geschreven door peter  

Daily UFO Headlines 1/13/15

(Before It's News)

openminds.tv

• NASA live stream cuts out after alien UFO sighting, claims blogger – The Houston Chronicle
• Road without end – Sarasota Herald-Tribune
• ‘Maury Island Incident’ benefit for Des Moines Historical Society will be Feb. 11 – The Waterland Blog
• Experts disagree that photos taken by Curiosity rover suggest life on Mars – Times Gazette
• ‘Super-Earths’ May Have Stable Oceans That Are Key For Alien Life – Huffington Post

The post Daily UFO Headlines 1/13/15 appeared first on Openminds.tv.

Source: http://www.openminds.tv/daily-ufo-headlines-11315/31665

13-01-2015 om 20:39 geschreven door peter  

BBC Recorded A UFO Over London  (Video)

(Before It's News)

(N.Morgan) In this incredible capture from the BBC, we can see a UFO passing by in the background, while a man is being interviewed. It’s a bright object that seemingly passes through the air with ease. As we’ve discussed in previous articles, these crafts are getting pretty bold in making appearances and now they are being seen more during daytime hours, as well as at night.

Check the sky to the right of the main guy talking. A large light enters the frame and continues to pass from right to left.

More Stories Contributed By N. Morgan

13-01-2015 om 20:34 geschreven door peter  

UFO mania: Totally Amazing Mars! A perfectly cut rectangle and giant face carved on a rock

MSL Curiosity panorama at Sol 840

Nasa Source: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/167350

Watch also this amazing video from Thomas Mikey Scrøder Jensen
Also visit his site at http://whatsupinthesky.com/index.php/2013-04-24-00-44-09/mars/773-giant-face-carved-into-the-rock

13-01-2015 om 20:29 geschreven door peter  

Maak plaats, Nessie: dit Schotse zeemonster is echt - HLN.be

Bron: NPR, University of Edinburgh 

Een impressie van hoe de Dearcmhara shawcrossi er moet hebben uitgezien in de tijd van de dinosaurussen. © Todd Marshall/University of Edinburgh.

Archeologie Schotland heeft iets met zeemonsters. Wetenschappers hebben een prehistorische kolos ontdekt die in de periode van de dinosaurussen de wateren rond Schotland onveilig maakte. Ditmaal gaat het niet om een fictief beest, maar Nessiebelievers die hopen op een verband met hun favoriete monster mogen die hoop opbergen. Volgens de onderzoekers heeft deze nieuwe reptielsoort niets te maken met het monster van Loch Ness.

13-01-2015 om 20:17 geschreven door peter  

Was this Nessie’s ancestor? Giant prehistoric monster roamed Scottish waters

A new species of dolphin-like sea creature named 'Dearcmhara shawcrossi' was   discovered in the Isle of Skye

An artist's impression of the ichthyosaur recently unearthed in Scotland Photo: Todd

Marshall/PA

 By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor

A giant killer reptile which resembled a dolphin merged with a crocodile once   roamed the ancient seas around Scotland. 

13-01-2015 om 17:44 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Observe Solar System Planets Like Alien Worlds

Adam Hadhazy, Astrobiology Magazine

What would our solar system's rocky bodies look like if seen at a distance of dozens of light years?
CREDIT: NASA

"It takes one to know one," as the old truism goes. When it comes to unraveling the mysteries of far-off exoplanets, the same holds true — one more reason why astronomers want to thoroughly understand the local planets right here in our Solar System.

A new scientific paper moves the ball forward in this regard by simulating how several rocky Solar System bodies would look if glimpsed at the light-years distance of alien worlds. Across such great spans, exoplanets are just dim specks. But what little light does get to us could, the study suggests, imply intriguing details about their surface features, provided we know what to look for.

Previous studies of Earth have demonstrated that oceans, continents and ice caps bounce back strikingly different amounts of light into space. Models demonstrate that even from considerable distances, an observer would be able to pick out the different types of surface materials of water, land and ice. [Our Solar System: A Photo Tour of the Planets]

The new study extends this concept to solid worlds unlike Earth, such as Mars and the Galilean moons, to broaden our basis for comparison.

"We eventually want to investigate the surface environments of Earth-like exoplanets, and for this purpose the observable signatures of Earth have been widely studied," said lead author Yuka Fujii, a postdoctoral research scientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Earth-Life Science Institute. "To interpret the data of unknown planets obtained in the future, we also need to know the possible variety of observable features of other, non-Earth-like planets."

The study, titled "Geology and Photometric Variation of Solar System Bodies with Minor Atmospheres: Implications for Solid Exoplanets," has been accepted for publication in the journal Astrobiology.

The Hubble Space Telescope's view of the star Fomalhaut and a directly imaged object encircling it, Fomalhaut b, thought to be an exoplanet.

Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Staring right at you

Although astronomers have discovered nearly 2,000 exoplanets to date, we know very little about any of them. For the vast majority, we merely possess either a mass or a size measurement. Exoplanets are simply too remote and faint for our current suite of instruments to glean tangible, worldly properties like color, surface features and cloud cover.

Our most detailed exoplanetary information so far has it that a handful of these worlds harbor gases, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide, in their atmospheres. That knowledge comes from signatures imprinted by those gases onto light that has passed through the atmosphere. The measurement, though, is indirect. The light assumed to pertain to the exoplanet is separated out from the overwhelming glare of its star.

Fujii's study goes a step further in considering worlds that we will "directly image." The distinction: The light from a directly imaged world is just from the world itself, not inferred from within a star's comparatively blinding glare. This happens to be how we study planets in the Solar System: We look right at them rather than teasing their presence out from a blaze of light.

Less than two dozen exoplanets have been directly imaged to date. The potential advantage of this technique is to be able to distinguish features on small, rocky exoplanets, the best places we think for life to arise.

Today's top-notch telescopes, like the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, will not be up to this task, however. Instead, we must wait for next-generation telescopes and specialized instruments that can collect the planetary light more efficiently than today's instruments, separately from the host star. Several of these instruments in the works may utilize the James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2018, and the "thirty meter" class of telescopes on the ground.

Oceans absorb more light than continents and ice caps and thus look darker.

Credit : NASA/ NOAA

From here to there

To lay a foundation for this future work, Fujii's study rendered Solar System worlds as far-off, dim exo-worlds. Fujii and colleagues collected existing data, as well as some fresh observations of Mercury, the Moon, Mars and the four Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto).

Because these bodies are all relatively close, detailed maps have been made of their surfaces, consisting of thousands of pixels. Exoplanets, however, owing to their distance, can occupy only a single pixel — a so-called point source. To render Solar System bodies as point sources, Fujii averaged the total color, or brightness, of their numerous pixels down to a single pixel. (Ice, for instance, reflects more light than land, so it has a brighter color.)

As a world rotates, the brightness of this single pixel varies over time if the world's surface is not all the same. For example, when Earth rotates such that the vast Pacific Ocean faces toward an observer, the planet's overall brightness changes compared to when, say, the giant landmass of Asia swings into view.

"Due to the spin rotation, we see different slices of the surface at different times," said Fujii. "So if the brightness varies as the planet rotates, it indicates non-uniform surface material." [10 Planets That Could Host Alien Life]

The pockmarked, colorful surface of Io.

Credit : NASA

Telltale light changes

The various worlds considered in the study did demonstrate average color variations over time that could be explicitly tied to factors affecting their surface compositions.

For a waterless body like the Moon, regions with potentially large contrasts to elsewhere on the lunar surface are "maria," the dark lava fields that form the pareidolic "Man in the Moon" patterns. And sure enough, the Moon stood out as a Solar System object with discernibly dissimilar light-reflecting regions.

Mercury, though it has a fairly uniformly gray color, has smooth plains covering 40 percent of its otherwise heavily cratered surface. The effect on its light reflectance patterns was similar in some ways, but not as dramatic as that of the two-tone Moon.

Io, meanwhile, jumped out thanks to its raging volcanoes, which have slathered the surface in yellows and reds, famously looking like pizza. The brightnesses of the other three Galilean moons, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, fluctuated because of patches of darker material deposited on lighter, water ice. Ganymede's light patterns also hinted at its rumpled surface, with grooves and ridges owing to past internal heating events.

Mars, interestingly, had a lot of light variability at longer wavelengths, because fine-grained particles on the Red Planet's surface scatter these forms of light. The iron oxides, or rust, that covers a significant portion of Mars, however, are efficient at absorbing shorter wavelength light. So the notable presences and absences of certain wavelength of light told a convincing tale of what large expanses of the Mars' surface are like.

Overall, over the course of a single rotation of a planet or moon, these geological characteristics caused changes in brightness ranging from five percent to a quote noticeable 50 percent.

"Other Solar System bodies are also distinct, exhibiting various interesting surface features, some of which affect their characteristic surface colors, highlighting the amazing diversity that awaits future reconnaissance, and thus the need for continued study," said Fujii. [Photos: The Search for Water on Mars]

A super-Venus, illustrated on the left, would have a very different-looking surface brightness-wise from a super-Earth, drawn at right, with varying surface features, such as oceans and continents.

Credit : NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ames

Getting the basics down

The results point to how we might, with direct imaging, begin to pick out exoplanets with distinct, yet familiar geologic histories and perhaps even habitable conditions.

One major aspect that the study sidesteps is the lack of atmospheres in the chosen worlds. Intervening gases, and especially clouds, can make surface characterization difficult or impossible using direct imaging. For example, the thick, cloudy atmospheres of Venus or Saturn's moon, Titan, completely hide their faces.

But in the case of Earth, although clouded here and there, the primary surface entities of continents, oceans and ice caps, can clearly be identified even at tremendous distance, the evidence suggests.

Although indirect atmospheric characterization of habitable exo-worlds will surely precede direct surface imaging, both of these techniques will need to be brought to bear to figure out if, and what sort of, alien life has developed.

"We think this kind of survey is useful," said Fujii, "because in terms of astrobiology, we will be interested in the details of the planetary surfaces after we know the atmospheric profiles."

Along with setting aside atmospheres for now, another caveat of Fujii's study is that the first solid, potentially life-friendly exo-worlds we will likely directly image will be significantly heftier than Earth. These "super-Earths" are on the order of up to twice Earth's width and several times its mass. Per their bigness, super-Earths will be easier to find and examine.

"We wish we had super-Earth counterparts in the Solar System, because then we would definitely study their properties first," said Fujii.

Even so, building upon Fujii's results, astronomers should be well-placed to get a bead on super-Earth surfaces — at least compared to familiar Solar System objects.

"Now that we have a handful of planets and satellites in the Solar System whose properties we know in some detail," said Fujii, "we want to make the most of that knowledge, which we consider as necessary target practice."

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+.

{ http://m.space.com/ }

13-01-2015 om 17:32 geschreven door peter  

UFO mania: 20 Facts About the Black Knight Satellite

This “Artificial Satellite” has caused mayor media interest since the late 50′s, and it has become one of the most talked about objects in space.

First thought to be an Russian spy satellite, the Black Knight satellite has gripped the interest of millions worldwide. 

Here are some interesting facts about this mysterious object: 

1. According to monitoring agencies around the world, The Black knight satellite has been transmitting radio signals for over 50 years now.
2. The USA and Soviet Union have shown particular interest in this “unidentified space object”
3. Rumors are that it was Nikola Tesla the first man to “intercept” a signal from the black knight satellite in 1899 after building a high-voltage radio device in Colorado Springs.
4. Since the 1930′s Astronomers worldwide have been reporting strange radio signals which allegedly come from the “Black Knight”.
5. In 1957, Dr. Luis Corralos of the Communications Ministry in Venezuela photographed it while taking pictures of Sputnik II as it passed over Caracas.
6. The story of the Black Knight made its media debut in the 1940′s when the St. Louis Dispatch and The San Francisco Examiner wrote about the “Satellite” on May 14th 1954.
7. The Time Magazine wrote about the Black Knight Satellite on the seventh of March, 1960.
8. In 1957, an unknown “object” was seen “shadowing”  the Sputnik 1 Spacecraft. According to reports, the “unidentified object” was in Polar orbit.
9. In 1957. The United Stated nor the Russians possessed the technology to maintain a spacecraft in Polar Orbit.
10. The first Polar orbiting satellite was launched in 1960.
11. Polar orbits are often used for earth-mapping, earth observation, capturing the earth as time passes from one point and reconnaissance satellites. This would put the Black Knight in the category of a observational Satellite.
12. In the 1960′s the Black Knight satellite was located once again in Polar Orbit. Astronomers and Scientists calculated the objects weight to be over 10 tons which would be at that time the Heaviest Artificial Satellite to orbit our Planet.
13. The Black Knight’s orbit was unlike any other object orbiting Earth.
14. The Grumman Aircraft Corporation gave much importance to this mysterious “Satellite”, On September 3, 1960, seven months after the satellite was first detected by radar, a tracking camera at Grumman Aircraft Corporation’s Long Island factory took a photograph of the Black Knight satellite.
15. The Grumman Aircraft Corporation formed a committee to study the data received from the observations made but nothing was made public.
16. In 1963, Gordon Cooper was launched into space. On his final orbit, he reported seeing a glowing green object in front of his capsule in the distance moving towards his Spacecraft. The Muchea tracking station, in Australia, which Cooper reported the object to, picked up this Unidentified object on Radar travelling East to West.
17. It was the Ham Radio operator who apparently  decoded a series of signals received from the UFO Satellite and interpreted it as a star-chart centered on the Epsilon Bootes Star System
18. According to the decoded message, the Black Knight satellite originated from the Epsilon Bootes Star System 13.000 years ago.
19. On August 23, 1954 the technology magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology released a story about the Black Knight Satellite that angered the Pentagon who were trying to keep the information secret.
20. NASA has released official images which apparently show the Black Knight Satellite.

13-01-2015 om 16:38 geschreven door peter  

Texas couple describes triangle UFO at 20 feet

A Texas couple near Leon Valley and San Antonio reported watching a slow moving, silent, triangle-shaped object just 20 feet off of the ground that appeared to be partially transparent move behind their home and yard, according to testimony in Case 62530 from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

The reporting witness reveals the encounter from both her and her husband’s point of view. The two were outside having a cigarette at 11:45 p.m. on November 26, 2014, when the object first came into view.

“Me and my husband went out to the front yard by our trucks to smoke a last cigarette and my husband wanted to wait until midnight to wish me happy birthday,” the reporting witness stated. “We didn’t bring our phones with us because we weren’t planning on taking long.”

The husband first pointed out the object to his wife just as she was going to pass him a cigarette lighter.

“I turn around and see ‘it’ going through the top portion of the tree across the street and hovering about 20 feet low and it was going like 2 mph over us and into my backyard and house.”

The husband’s illustration of the object. (Credit: MUFON)

The following is told from the wife’s point of view.

“In my opinion it had a shape like a Ouija hand piece with four ports/circles – and something in the middle of it between the ports? ‘It’ was made of some sort of metal material. I saw this from about 20-25 feet above me so I see the belly of this ‘thing.’”

But the scene had additional unusual details.

“The trippy thing about this was it was cloaked or transparent to me. In my opinion ‘it’ had a predator’s cloak/transparency, not totally invisible, like you can see some of it, but it was kind of blurry like summer’s heat haze. The main color to me was dull black/gray with some bronzish-like color, not bright at all. It had four port – two on each side – that color was reddish/orangish/yellowish – very dim glow to it with a defined black trimming around ports and there was something in the middle of ‘its’ center in between the ports?”

The object looked like a single piece.

“’It’ looked like it was made out of one sheet of metal. There were no panels, rivets, sections, windows, fumes, smell. When I first saw this I couldn’t believe my eyes or brain. Me and my husband were frozen out of shock. All we could do is rotate around. I wanted to run to the middle of street to see if it sees me, but I couldn’t move. Then I wanted to throw the lighter at it to see if it makes a sound or see what its reaction was, but I was afraid that it would zap me or something.”

They watched the object move.

“We saw it go over us and behind my house and yard. My feelings to this were scared, nervous, curious, adrenaline, denial, reality shattered. My husband did not want to be involved with this report, so he gave me his POV and his sketch.”

The wife’s illustration of the object. (Credit: MUFON)

The wife then explains what happened from her husband’s point of view.

“He was asking for a lighter when he heard some leaves fall across the street. That’s when he saw ‘it’ creep up in the top portion of the tree. It went through the tree’s top. His description of ‘it’: Color: flat black/gray, tan, reddish/orange. My husband says he doesn’t know if ‘it’ itself was organic. There were no smells or trails/vapors. In his opinion it had a moth-like body with wings closed upside down. To him ‘its’ transparency was like bee wing material I guess membrane-ish. He felt excited, nervous, shocked.”

The movement of nearby leaves caused her husband to look in the direction of the craft.

“If it wasn’t for him hearing the leaves fall I wonder if we would have noticed ‘it.’ After this happened, I had told him to just draw it – don’t talk. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t delusional. He drew his sketch. I drew mine. It was so eerie. I knew we had seen something.”

The couple then noticed other odd things happening in the immediate area.

“As we were reflecting back at what happened we notice a lot of weird things. First, we live in major city, one block away from a busy street and concrete plant and in the hood – there’s always some sort of sound. About 10 seconds before this happened, there was zero noise. No animal, traffic, environmental noise. The street light or house lights didn’t flicker or dim when this ‘thing’ went over us. The street light didn’t illuminate ‘it.’ And ‘it’ didn’t cast a shadow. It seemed to reflect light. It kind of seemed holographic.”

The witness described the object.

“’It’ was about 20 feet above us. Its measurements were about 5-7 feet long and 3-5 feet wide and 1-3 feet in height.”

The next day they explored the area where the object had been seen.

“We went out the next morning to see if anything happened to the tree or street or house. Nothing happened – no broken/bent branches, nothing burnt. Not one trace of anything. Birds still gather there. We have no idea of where it went after that. We don’t know if it went through my backyard’s trees or the houses behind us. We just saw it go behind our house and yard.”

The two wonder about what exactly they saw.

“That is so freaky. Was something in there? Was there a purpose in being so low and slow? Did ‘it’ see us? Both of our concepts of reality are shattered.  My husband never once doubted himself of what he saw. I’m sometimes in denial, but I know what I saw. It’s just hard for me to accept what happened and my mind permanently tattooed the event. How can this be? Will it come back? Now I’m constantly looking at the trees and sky. I don’t know if it will return. Please anybody have any info/experience please share with me?”

Illustration of the witness area where the object was seen. (Credit: MUFON)

Leon Valley is a city in Bexar County, Texas, that is an enclave on the northwest side of San Antonio and is part of the San Antonio-New Braunfels Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population is 10,151.

Please remember that most UFO sighting can be explained as something natural or man-made. The above quotes were edited for clarity. Please report UFO activity to MUFON.com.

13-01-2015 om 16:31 geschreven door peter  

Broken Pottery and Shield Shaped Artifacts Imaged By Curiosity Rover

Mars sure is an amazing place.

Whatsupinthesky37 from YouTube found again some interesting objects.

It does look like some broken pottery and some sort of emblem or hyde skinner just sitting there wasting away on the Martian surface!
 
Link original image:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00309/mcam/0309MR0012750230204049E01_DXXX.jpg

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1 }

13-01-2015 om 16:21 geschreven door peter  

13-01-2015 om 16:11 geschreven door peter  

Latest Mass UFO Sighting In Several Argentinian Towns

Thousands of people reportedly observed an unidentified flying object (UFO) on Sunday in and around the Argentinian town of Gualeguaychu.

The sighting made rounds in many Argentinean news outlets, but no other details were provided. Many videos have surfaced online that show a bright light moving slowly above the city. According to the report by Noticias Villaguay, an Argentinian news website, one witness described the unusual light as white, large, and down green.

Some witnesses claim they saw the light blinked on and off periodically then also disappeared at one point. This claim is backed by at least one of many videos posted to YouTube.

Reports about the object also reached in the town of Larroque, which is approximately 20 miles west of Gualeguaychu. Residents in Larroque say they saw the same object the night before on January 3, Saturday.

Some believe it was just a drone or a lit up glider. But Maxima Online reported that various others disagree because a drone or plane would not have been observed by people as far away as 20 miles.

Different videos online only show light in the sky that appears to be stationary. But other videos show movement and blinking of the mysterious light.

Several witnesses looking up the light can be seen in at least one video. The video description says that thousands of UFO sighting reports came in Gualeguaychu, Larroque, and Pueblo Belgrano neighborhood. These people reportedly saw a powerful and zigzag light moving through the sky.

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

13-01-2015 om 16:05 geschreven door peter  

Falling ORBs over England on 23rd December 2014

Interesting video footage of multiple ORBs falling down in the daytime above England on 23rd December 2014.

Witness said:
A group of white orbed UFOs filmed in West London by UFO Watch UK.co.uk, join in and share your opinions.

13-01-2015 om 13:31 geschreven door peter  

Future Human Evolution During Space Travel And What We Might Look Like

Human beings have been fascinated with the unknown of space for thousands of years and more recently, traveling to other worlds. We have sent satellites to distant planets and received images of places you thought only existed in our dreams or nightmares. NASA along with other agency’s are working around the clock to get us to Mars, to send humans to a new planet. The kind of stuff you see in science fiction movies. But mankind plans to not only land on, but in the end settle on and terraform Mars, while exploiting both of its moons. Once we have conquered mars and we are happily settled on the red planet, hopefully our technology has advanced to the point where we can travel light years, then mankind will venture in to the darkness of the universe, away from the comfort of our solar system. Obviously our technology will have to be largely advanced, As we all need a supply of oxygen, heat, water and food to survive in space indefinitely and with interstellar travel, we will need lots of it. But let’s assume that the human race has worked out all these problems, built a ship capable of things like artificial gravity to help prevent bone loss and discovered a propulsion engine that can get us to light speed etc.

How would interstellar travel change the human body? Would we start to evolve in to a different state to those on Earth? Well on Earth humans have been evolving for millions of years, our early ancestors led the way in human evolution, and interstellar traveling could lead us to a new direction of evolution. A direction of space humans. Multigenerational ships would provide new conditions like breathing-gas compositions, pressures, gravity and radiation environments along with other things that could act on the early stages of embryo and fetus development. This will be natural selection of new selective agents on the human body.The types of new characteristics that could evolve would be very hard to predict, because mutation is ultimately random, and mutation is the origin of new characteristics. It’s not entirely possible to say precisely what will happen. However we do know that the human body does change under different conditions. Some people have migrated to higher elevations, where they are under somewhat less pressure. Their biology has changed to account for that, or to make it possible to live there. High-altitude adaptation in humans is an instance of evolutionary modification in human populations. Study’s have shown that there blood oxygen levels are different than say a low altitude persons. They also have deeper chests that allow better breathing, this special adaptation is now recognised as one of the finest examples of natural selection in action and has become the fastest case of human evolution in the scientific record, as it is estimated to of occurred in less than 3,000 years. So if these changes have happened to people living on Earth, but just in a different conditions. Then the chances of the human body adapting to an off earth condition is very high. But evolution takes time, a lot of time, and if our technology is as advanced at this point to take us to new systems then maybe we will control our own evolution. Maybe we will genetically adapt our body’s to be more sufficient in deep space conditions. Ideas such as eliminating our lungs, so that we don’t need oxygen or maybe getting rid of parts of the digestive system so we don’t need food. In the future there may be ways of energising our bodies fully, by using nano bots. Some other ideas are to develop an advanced inner ear that could prevent motion sickness or genes for bone regeneration. Other suggestions are that we need to be smaller in stature, utilise our energy better and even to lose our hair. All of this May sound a little far fetched, and predicting what will happen is practically impossible. We might become 8 armed jelly humans for we know, but the fact of the matter is we will have to change in some way or form to survive long distance space travel. Potentially becoming a new race of human beings.

13-01-2015 om 13:26 geschreven door peter  

UFO sighting above Buckeye, Arizona on 8th January 2015

Interesting video footage of two bright UFO lights recorded above Buckeye, Arizona on 8th January 2015.

Witness said:
When driving east on the 1-10 freeway around 8:10pm on 1/8/15 I witnessed 3 bright orange orbs hovering over the mountains behind buckeye toward I-8 freeway the 3 orbs moved toward each other the back into position then disappeared. Moments later 2 bright Orbs appeared in the same spot and I was able to pull my vehicle over and record this footage from my cell phone. I went all the way home which is twenty minutes away got my girlfriend to return to the spot and on my back they disappeared. That means they were there for more than 30 minutes so there defiantly not flares. Sorry for the horrible footage the orbs are allot bigger in real life. So i take back every bad thing i said about all the crappy ufo videos out there cell phones suck for this kind of thing!

13-01-2015 om 13:17 geschreven door peter  

Petra: City of Mystery

(Before It's News)

Source:  Inhabited since prehistoric times, this Nabataean caravan-city, situated between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea, was an important crossroads between Arabia, Egypt and Syria-Phoenicia. Petra is half-built, half-carved into the rock, and is surrounded by mountains riddled with passages and gorges. It is one of the world's most famous archaeological sites, where ancient Eastern traditions blend with Hellenistic architecture.

This was established around the 6th century BC in a town called Nabataea. The tombs are up high in the mountain and to be reached by stairs. One entombed there was believed to be Malchus II who died in 70 AD. It would appear that the Nabateaens had arrived and utilized a sophisticated town that was built in the 6th century BC.

The city has an amazingly sophisticated water system with clay pipes and hundreds of underground cisterns. 

There are stone obelisks and “block gods” around the entire area in niches all over including this one with three “block gods.”

This block god (above) has a crescent that pre-dates Islam.

Source:  In early Nabataean history, the Nabataeans had gods with Arabic names. Some of these were: (1) Al Qaum – the warrior god who guards the caravans, (2) Al Kutbay – the god of learning, commerce, writing, and divination (3) Allat – the goddess of spring and fertility (4) Al Uzza – the powerful and (5) Manawat – the god of destiny or fate.

It is interesting to note that American Native Cultures like Incas, Aztecs and Mayans had similar gods of different industries, as well as the Norse, and the Greeks, whom some researchers think the Nabataeans got their concepts from, though we still do not know who these people were.

Stone gods:  In the Greco-Roman world as well as the Parthian East, people have always accorded the gods with human form. Those of us who studied Greek mythology in school should know a little of how human the gods seemed to be. The Nabataeans on the other hand represented their gods in the form of stelae. These stelae could take the form of rocks set upon end, blocks, or shapes carved into a stone wall, or elaborately carved square djin blocks set up at the entrance to their cities.

Source:  Built between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, Mada’in Saleh is an architectural marvel and a testimony to the skill and craftsmanship of the Nabataean who, 2,000 years ago, carved more than 131 tombs into solid rock, complete with decoration, inscriptions, and water wells. The enigmatic Nabataeans were originally a nomadic tribe, but about 2,500 years ago, Nabataean settlements began to flourish.  As well as their agricultural activities, they developed political systems, arts, engineering, stonemasonry, and demonstrated astonishing hydraulic expertise, including the construction of wells, cisterns, and aqueducts. These innovations stored water for prolonged periods of drought, and enabled them to prosper. They expanded their trading routes, creating more than 2,000 sites in total in the areas that today are Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Archaeologists still try to unravel the history of the Nabataeans, which in large remains unknown.

Is it just me, or does it seem rather ridiculous that as early as 6th Century BC a group of nomads suddenly built a city in the mountain, carved into rock, of exquisite craftsmanship, cisterns, clay pipes for carrying water and more – yet had no past experience in any of this as nomads? It sounds to me like these folks moved into a city that had been evacuated or brought in as potential slaves who eventually took it over.

More info
Block gods
Nabataean pantheon

Source: http://www.ghosthuntingtheories.com/2015/01/petra-city-of-mystery.html

13-01-2015 om 12:49 geschreven door peter  

Elk Alien Abduction Witness By Many In Washington

(Before It's News)

ELK ALIEN ABDUCTION WITNESS BY MANY IN WASHINGTON

FEBURARY 25, 1999    ……..     FOREST OF WASHINGTON STATE

13-01-2015 om 12:38 geschreven door peter  

USAF UFO Project Blue Book files go online for free

(Before It's News)

openminds.tv

Finally, decades after the United States Air Force closed their official investigations into the UFO phenomenon, the files are online in their entirety for free.

Project Blue Book is regarded as the third  UFO investigation project by the USAF. The first was Project Sign, which began in 1947, then Grudge, which ran from 1949 to 1951, and the final project, Blue Book, ran from 1951 to 1969. The files surrounding the investigation of the sightings are all included in the Project Blue Book files. That is, unless, as some suggest, there are secret investigations that the public still does not have access to.

The United States National Archives Building in Washington D.C. (Credit: The United States National Archives)

Either way, although these files have all been declassified, since the close of Project Blue Book, it has taken a trip to the National Archives to get full access to them. Some websites have put up portions of the files, and one website, Fold3, finally posted all of them a few years ago. However, visitors could just view them and had to pay a membership fee to download them.

Now researchers and UFO enthusiasts, including myself, can save some money. The files have been placed online by John Greenewald who runs a website called The Black Vault. Greenewald has been submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests since he was a teenager to get the government to share what it knows about UFOs and other clandestine matters.

He has posted these files online, and over the years has amassed the largest online repository of such materials. He has over one million pages hosted there. Now that he has finally finished the daunting task of making the Blue Book files available, he know has over 130,000 more.

The staff of Project Blue Book. Sitting in the center is Hector Quintanilla, the last chief officer of Project Blue Book.

I interviewed Greenewald to ask him some of his thoughts about posting the Blue Book files.

Why did you decide to post the files?

Greenewald: Plain and simple, they are UFOlogical history.  There are a few sources for these records out there, some of which are incomplete, while others are harder to navigate or are not geared towards the actual researcher. So, I wanted to compile these in a straight forward, easily searchable database, and that in itself is unlike what is out there and makes this new site powered by The Black Vault a bit unique.

Why do you think these files are important after all of these years?

Greenewald: Project Blue Book (along with Sign and Grudge) holds a special place in UFO history. Whether or not it TRULY investigated UFO sightings in the sense we wanted it to, it doesn’t matter.  It is a project that lasted for over 20 years, and they investigated thousands of cases. Sure, many of them they claimed were all explanatory, but you still have a few gems that remain a mystery. But further, you can use this data to compare and contrast to what it is today and start drawing conclusions, or rather, maybe pose new questions that investigators haven’t thought of yet.

For years, this data sat on microfilm in the National Archives.  Now with the power of the internet, they were brought online, but in ways that were not easily used, incomplete, or plain and simple, didn’t get the exposure it deserved.  I hope this new resource changes that, spotlights this era in UFO history, and offers a research point that those in the coming years of UFO investigation can learn from, utilize, and reference.

Why have they not been available online for free until now?

Greenewald: To convert and archive 130,000 pages is no easy task.  There are some sites that tried to create the archive… but really didn’t gear it towards the researcher or the investigator.  Some charge for the information (if it’s even complete), others make it hard to download or read, and others are just incomplete.

I tried with this new site to ensure that everyone could use it and learn from it.  When I started The Black Vault when I was 15 years old, I was stunned by the lack of information on the internet. Now, nearly 2 decades later, many sites have caught on and archiving the data – but they want to charge you for it.  Almost 20 years later, and roughly 1.5 million pages that are given away for free, I am happy to say I have kept the promise I made to myself to never charge anyone to learn.

– End of Interview –

I know for myself, and for other researchers and journalists, the posting of these files will make it much easier to explore some of the hidden gems in the files. There are hundreds of files that the USAF regarded as genuine “unknowns.” The exact number is somewhat murky.

The USAF claims that Blue Book included 12,618 sightings reports, 701 of which remained “unidentified.” This would account for about 5.5% of the files. However, official lists of these “unidentified” cases only include 560 or so cases. Other researchers have gone through the files and found there are actually more like 14,000 cases, with about 1600 “unknowns.”

The National Archive’s page on UFOs. (Credit: Archives.gov)

As the debate over how many USAF UFO investigation cases were truly never explained continues, due to Greenewald’s work, the citizen researcher now has the ability to peruse the files without having to travel or subscribe to a membership.

You can find the Project Blue Book cases all at this link at TheBlackVault.com.

The post USAF UFO Project Blue Book files go online for free appeared first on Openminds.tv.

Source: http://www.openminds.tv/usaf-ufo-project-blue-book-files-go-online-free/31656

13-01-2015 om 12:31 geschreven door peter  

VIDEO: Orbs over London 23-Dec-2014

Here’s a very interesting footage of a bright orbs hovering in the daytime sky above London in United Kingdom. This was filmed 23rd December 2014.

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

13-01-2015 om 12:15 geschreven door peter  

Here's How Many Intelligent Alien Civilizations Might Live In Our Galaxy

• Andy Kiersz and Jessica Orwig

BI Answers: How many planets in the universe have intelligent alien life?

More important than finding life on another planet would be communicating with those life forms. Do aliens engage in practices like philosophy, religion, mathematics, medicine, and war? The only way to truly find out is to communicate with them.

Until the 1960s, however, no one had even thought about how many intelligent civilization might be out there. It took the innovative mind of Frank Drake, an astronomer and early pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial life, to find a way to answer this question. His simple, yet comprehensive, equation that he developed in 1961 is named the Drake Equation in his honor.

The Drake Equation is intended to help clarify the kinds of things we would need to know to figure out how many intelligent civilizations like ours exist in our galaxy. It estimates the number of intelligent civilizations that we could detect or communicate with in our galaxy based on seven parameters.

Drake's equation looks like this: N=R*f_pn_ef_lf_if_cL. That's a big pile of symbols, but when you break it down into individual components, it's more clear and comprehensible:

• R*: How fast stars form in our galaxy.
• f_p: The percentage of stars that have planets.
• n_e: The number of earthlike planets around each star that has planets.
• f_l: The percentage of earthlike planets that develop life.
• f_i: The percentage of planets with life that develop intelligent life.
• f_c: The percentage of intelligent species that go on to create technology that could be detected by an outside civilization like ours. One example of this is radio signals.
• L: The average number of years the advanced civilizations release detectable signals.

When you multiply the first three numbers (R*f_pn_e) together, you get the rate at which earthlike planets are formed in our galaxy. The next three components (f_lf_if_c) tell us how likely it is that an advanced civilization like humans would evolve on an earthlike planet.

Raphael Perrino on FlickrDr. Frank Drake speaking at a gala celebration, honoring the life and work of Dr. Jill Tarter

Multiply those values with the length of time that advanced civilizations communicate and voila: you have calculated the overall number of civilizations around us today.

Unfortunately, exact values for each of these components, especially the last four that involve life and intelligent civilizations, are not known. We can only make logical guesstimates.

While planet detection projects like the Kepler space telescope have given us a better understanding of the number of planets in our galaxy, we know very little about the origins of life and the evolution of intelligent life, since we only have a single example. And this plague of not knowing is a big problem when it comes to using the Drake Equation.

This is because putting different values into the equation can lead to dramatically different results.

If we consider "optimistic" values, in which it's fairly common for life to arise and somewhat similar to those used by Drake and his associates at the conference where the equation was first described, we would expect a huge number of civilizations in our galaxy.

On the other hand, if the Universe makes it hard for intelligent life to emerge, as the advocates of the "Rare Earth Hypothesis" suggest, we might be alone in the universe:

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz

The total number of civilizations that we calculate relies very heavily on our assumptions. Our optimistic estimates suggest a fairly crowded galaxy, with around 140,000 species like us living in the Milky Way. Turn the inputs down a couple orders of magnitude, as we do in our pessimistic assumptions, and life is so rare that only around 1% of galaxies like our own will be likely to host even one complex civilization.

The rate of star formation in our galaxy, at about seven per year, was estimated as a result of a NASA and ESA study based on data from the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL satellite. The other values are based on either pessimistic or optimistic assumptions about life in the universe.

The Kepler mission and other planet searches have made it pretty clear that planets themselves are common in our galaxy. There are even 47 exoplanets that have been dubbed potentially habitable due to their similarity to Earth.

Furthermore, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics just announced that Kepler had found eight new planets that were similar in size to Earth and were orbiting in a region where the planets' temperatures would allow them to harbor liquid water — a key ingredient for life on Earth and potentially other planets, too.

And Kepler only looks at a small portion of our galaxy:

Painting by Jon Lomberg, Kepler mission diagram added by NASA.

The biggest differences between being alone in our galaxy and a busy network of alien neighbors come from the values we know the least about: the likelihood of life evolving on a planet, the likelihood of intelligent life, the likelihood of intelligent life developing advanced technology, like radio broadcasts and telescopes, that make communication possible, and the average lifespan of technological civilizations.

NASA/Ames/JPL-CaltechArtist's rendering of Kepler-10c, one of the "Super-Earth" planets discovered by the Kepler mission

Nailing down some of these values is a hot area of research. Another group of scientists recently announced that they have found a way to determine if planets in other solar systems are rocky, like Earth, or gaseous, like Jupiter.

"To find a truly Earth-like world, we should focus on planets less than 1.6 times the size of Earth, because those are the rocky worlds," said Courtney Dressing of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in a statement. Dressing is lead author of a paper detailing her team's results that has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

While most of the specific values in the Drake Equation remain unknown to us, Frank Drake's goal back in 1961 was to clarify what we should be looking for. As we continue looking deeper into the cosmos, and more closely at our sun's neighborhood, Drake's elegant and simple summary of the factors that determine how common life is in the Universe continues to be a useful guide in our search for another Earth and another intelligent civilization.

This post is part of a continuing series that answers all of your "why" questions related to science. Have your own question? Email science@businessinsider.com with the subject line "Q&A"; tweet your question to @BI_Science; or post to our Facebook page.

Read more:  http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-drake-equation-exoplanets-and-alien-life-2015-1?r=US#ixzz3OeH0xpge

{ http://uk.businessinsider.com/ }

12-01-2015 om 23:22 geschreven door peter