Extraterrestrial life difficult to study with existing knowledge: NASA scientists

By ​Rahul K R

{ http://www.ibtimes.sg/ }

16-01-2018 om 21:08 geschreven door peter  

Alien abduction or KGB? The baffling case of the miner whose body was found on a pile of coal

'Ziggy' Adamski disappeared from his home and his body was found 20 miles away on a coal pile

ByAndrew Robinson

The disappearance of a Yorkshire miner in 1980 left police baffled and prompted ‘alien abduction’ conspiracy theories.

Zigmund Adamski went missing in mysterious circumstances from his home in Thornfield Crescent at Tingley, near Wakefield, in June 1980

The 56-year-old miner at Lofthouse Colliery – who was known to many as ‘Ziggy’ – had set off on June 6 on a walk to the local shops to buy groceries.

It was the last time that Polish-born Mr Adamski was seen alive. His wife Lottie’s initial suspicion was that he had been kidnapped.

Five days after he disappeared, coal yard worker Trevor Parker found his body on top of a 10ft high pile of coal at his father’s coal yard in Todmorden, around 20 miles from Tingley.

He was wearing a suit but his shirt was missing, as were his watch and wallet. His clothes were said to be ‘improperly’ fastened and he had only one day of beard growth.

Mr Adamski’s hair had also been cropped short in a ‘roughly cut’ manner.

His body was also covered in burn marks, on his head, neck and shoulders. His face, it was reported, showed ‘absolute terror’ but there were no injuries to explain the cause of death.

The burns were said to be covered in a strange ointment which could not be identified by scientists.

What had happened to him and how did he end up in Todmorden?

Those questions haven’t been answered but this hasn’t stopped speculation and the development of some quite outlandish theories.

At the time, a famous UFO expert, a Polish-American citizen also called Adamski (George) offered up his own theory on what happened to his namesake.

George Adamski, who had previously claimed to have met with friendly aliens, said he believed that Zigmund had been abducted by aliens by mistake.

One tabloid newspaper suggested that Zigmund had been abducted and killed by aliens and his body dumped on top of the coal pile.

Others put forward theories that he had been killed by KGB forces or had been left dazed and confused after being struck by ‘ball lightning’ or some other unidentified phenomenon.

The ‘alien abduction’ theories were given a further boost by Alan Godfrey, the policeman who had been called to the Todmorden coal yard when Mr Adamski’s body had been found.

In November 1980, five months after Mr Adamski’s body was found, Constable Godfrey had his own encounter with a UFO less than a mile away from the coal yard.

The respected policeman made a sketch of the UFO and later, under hypnosis, told a story about being taken aboard the UFO and given a physical examination by two non-human entities. The policeman’s UFO story made headlines around the world.

Mr Godfrey, now 70, told the Examiner that the story he told under hypnosis was probably merely a dream, adding: “I never said I was abducted by aliens.”

However, he believes it’s possible that Adamski WAS taken by aliens.

“I am open minded. I can’t rule it out.”

Mr Godfrey doesn’t believe Mr Adamski was murdered, although he said a more senior police colleague in 1980 believed he had been killed.

He thinks that Mr Adamski didn’t die where he was found but had been placed there “by someone or something.”

He added: “He was on top of the coal pile on his back with not a bit of coal on him. His eyes were wide open and he had burn marks. Why would he climb up a stack of coal?”

Although the coroner recorded an open verdict, ruling that Mr Adamski had died of a heart attack, Mr Godfrey says there are unanswered questions.

“There was some ointment on the back of his neck. Samples were sent to a Home Office laboratory which couldn’t identify it.”

Mr Godfrey said he would never forget the look on Mr Adamski’s face.

“Those eyes were staring up at me. I was looking down on him from a foot away. Those eyes sent a shudder down my spine. They were wide open. He had a look of someone who had seen something or someone that had scared him to death.”

He added: “Something or someone put him on top of that pile of coal. And something scared him to death.”

Later, Mr Godfrey spoke to the pathologist who carried out the post mortem on Mr Adamski’s body.

“He said it was a classic case of someone who had been scared to death.”

The former policeman has no idea how the body ended up on the coal pile.

“How he got there I don’t know. I think something put him there.”

Mr Godfrey, who recently self-published a book which includes details of the Adamski case, said it had similarities with the alleged alien abduction of American logger Travis Walton in Arizona in 1975.

“He (Travis Walton) went missing for five days and he turned up alive. There are similarities.”

Almost 40 years on the case continues to fascinate investigators and those interested in unexplained deaths.

In Tingley local people still talk about the case.

Neil Beecham, who in 1980 was a reporter on the Morley Observer, said: “Mr Adamski’s mysterious disappearance 37 years ago has always troubled me and is a topic of conversation for the tight-knit community of Tingley, even to this day.”

Some commentators have suggested that Mr Adamski may have been abducted – but not by extra-terrestrials.

Ten years ago, two British UFO investigators looked again at the case. According to reports, they discovered that at the time he disappeared Mr Adamski was in the midst of a feud with a family member who was having marital problems and had moved in with the Adamski couple.

The investigators believed that Mr Adamski’s disappearance may have been an abduction linked to the feud.

Mr Godfrey has no information on this angle but said: “We had no reason to suspect any members of the family.”

Les Hewitt, in an article for Historic Mysteries, says the family members believed Mr Adamski had been abducted and held in a barn before having a heart attack.

He concludes: “The bizarre facts of this case – clothes that were improperly fastened, the body dumped atop a coal heap without noticeable disturbance, burns that were reported to be only two days old with an unidentified gel substance, only one day of beard growth, and another strange encounter with a UFO by the police investigator – lead us to imagine all kinds of possible outcomes.”

A writer for website The Iron Skeptic concluded that aliens played no part in Mr Adamski’s death.

“This case is just another example of a story that sounds good at first, but that dissolves under direct scrutiny. As are so many stories of space alien abduction.”

James Turnbull, the coroner who dealt with Mr Adamski’s death, told the BBC in 2003 that it was the biggest mystery of his career - but he wasn’t convinced by any of the theories relating to paranormal activity.

He said: “The question of where he was before he died and what led to his death just could not be answered.”

The questions are unlikely to ever be answered.

A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police said this week: “The Adamski case is not part of any current investigation by the Protective Services (Crime) department.”

* Alan Godfrey’s book, Who or What Were They? is available through eBay.

{ http://www.examiner.co.uk/ }

16-01-2018 om 20:53 geschreven door peter  

Het is zover: machines kunnen nu officieel beter begrijpend lezen dan mensen (en wat dat betekent) - HLN.be

De test werd gecreëerd door experts van Artificial Intelligence (AI) aan de Amerikaanse Stanford University om de leesmogelijkheden van AI-software te meten. Het wordt gezien als ’s werelds beste in zijn soort. Ook bekende namen als Google, Facebook, IBM, Tencent en Samsung hebben intussen hun AI-modellen bij het Stanford-project ingediend. 

Lees ook

Artificial Intelligence, vriend of vijand? Een gesprek met robot Sophia, die ooit zei dat ze mensen wilde vernietigen

De software van de Chinese online retailer Alibaba was vorige week donderdag de eerste die erin slaagde de mens te kloppen op de test. Het werd een nipte overwinning: Artificial Intelligence: 82.44 punten, mens: 82.304 punten. Een dag later slaagde ook de software van Microsoft erin te winnen, met een score van 82.65. In beide gevallen waren de machines beter in het beantwoorden van vragen over moeilijke net ‘gelezen’ teksten. Pranav Rajpurkar, één van de onderzoekers aan Stanford University die de leestest mee ontworpen heeft, spreekt trots van “een grote start van 2018”. 

“Een ware eer”, noemt Luo Si, hoofdwetenschapper van natuurlijke taalverwerking van de AI-onderzoeksgroep van Alibaba het. Bij ‘Natural language processing’ (NLP) imiteren machines het menselijke bevattingsvermogen van woorden en zinnen. Deze keer gingen de machines dus ‘erop en erover’. 

Jobs

Si erkent in één adem dat de mijlpaal hoogstwaarschijnlijk betekent dat verschillende mensen in de toekomst hun job zullen verliezen aan een machine. De leestechnologie kan immers gradueel toegepast worden op talrijke applicaties zoals klantenservices, tutorials, online antwoorden op medische vragen van patiënten, … “Daardoor daalt de nood aan menselijke input daar op een ongeëvenaarde manier”, aldus Si. Alibaba zette de technologie overigens al eens aan het werk op ‘Singles Day’, ’s werelds grootste shoppingfeest. De technologie werd gebruikt om vragen van klanten te beantwoorden, met succes. 

“Deze tests zijn handige maatstaven om te zien hoe ver we staan op het AI-pad”, stelt Andrew Pickup van Microsoft. “Hoewel AI pas echt een voordeel heeft als het in harmonie met de mens wordt gebruikt”, voegt hij toe. Maar Artificial Intelligence verstoort intussen al wel danig het ‘gewone’ leven van de mens: in verschillende sectoren en processen werden mensen al vervangen door robots, auto’s worden zelfrijdend, … De Russische president Vladimir Poetin voorspelde in september dat wie de leider in AI wordt, ook de heerser van de wereld wordt.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

16-01-2018 om 20:32 geschreven door peter  

Wetenschappers denken 500 jaar oud mysterie ontrafeld te hebben over hoe Azteken zo plots aan hun einde kwamen - HLN.be

Bron: Nature, The Guardian

‘Cocoliztli’ noemde de lokale bevolking de plaag die hen had getroffen. In het Nahuatl – een taal die de Azteken gebruikten – betekent dat ‘de pest’. Het was een van de dodelijkste epidemieën die de mensheid ooit trof en kwam in de buurt van de Zwarte Dood, de builenpest die in de 14de eeuw naar schatting 25 miljoen mensen het leven kostte in West-Europa, zo wat de helft van de bevolking.

Lees ook

Hij stond bekend als woeste en genadeloze piraat, maar ontdekking in wrak van zijn schip toont andere kant van Zwartbaard

Pest

In de daaropvolgende eeuwen werd gezocht naar wat die pest precies was en dat leidde tot hypothesen als waren het de pokken, de mazelen, de bof of de griep. Maar nergens werd hard bewijs gevonden om dat te staven. Wetenschappers kwamen gisteren met een nieuwe these, nadat ze DNA-materiaal geanalyseerd hadden op tanden van enkele van de slachtoffers van wie het lichaam was bewaard. Ze schreven over hun ontdekking in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Nature Ecology and Evolution. (lees hieronder verder)

“De plaag was een van de vele epidemieën die Mexico overspoelden na de aankomst van de Europeanen op het Amerikaanse continent”, aldus coauteur Ashild Vagene van de universiteit van Tübingen in Duitsland. De kolonisten brachten bacteriën mee die de lokale bevolking niet kende en waartegen ze ook geen resistentie hadden. “Het was de tweede van drie epidemieën die een hoge dodentol eisten. Twee decennia eerder hadden de pokken al eens tussen de 5 en 8 miljoen doden gemaakt en een tweede uitbraak van ‘cocoliztli’ roeide tussen 1576 en 1578 nog eens de helft van de resterende bevolking uit.”

Greppels

Fransiscaans historicus Fray Juan de Torquemada maakte een verslag van de periode en omschreef het zo: “In de steden en grotere dorpen werden diepe greppels gegraven. Priesters deden van ’s morgens tot ’s avonds niets anders dan daar lijken naartoe brengen en ingooien.” (lees hieronder verder)

De wetenschappers van de universiteit van Tübingen onderzochten het DNA van 29 van zulke skeletten en ontdekten er sporen in van de salmonella enterica-bacterie, paratyphi C. Die kan een darminfectie veroorzaken, zoals buiktyfus. “Het is de eerste keer dat er direct bewijs wordt gevonden die naar de oorzaak van de ondergang van de beschaving kan wijzen”, aldus Vagene.

Van salmonella enterica is bekend dat het in de middeleeuwen voorkwam in Europa. Heel wat van de salmonellastammen verspreidden zich via geïnfecteerd voedsel of water en kunnen meegekomen zijn naar Mexico met de dieren die de Spanjaarden bij zich hadden, volgens het researchteam. “We hebben alle bacteriële ziekteverwekkers en DNA-virussen getest waarvan we genetische data hebben en vonden alleen salmonella enterica”, aldus coauteur Alexander Herbig.

Kanttekening

Ze maken zelf echter ook een kanttekening. Het is immers mogelijk dat er ziekteverwekkers zijn die niet meer te detecteren waren of die we gewoonweg niet kennen. “We kunnen niet met 100 procent zekerheid zeggen dat salmonella enterica de oorzaak was van de ‘cocoliztli’-epidemie”, aldus onderzoekster Kirsten Bos. “Maar we denken wel dat het een hele sterke kanshebber is.”

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

16-01-2018 om 19:02 geschreven door peter  

KCE: “3D geprinte implantaten niet beter, veiliger of goedkoper dan klassieke implantaten” - HLN.be

Bron: Belga

Op dit moment is er evenmin bewijs dat 3D-printen besparingen zouden opleveren voor de gezondheidszorgverzekering, aldus het KCE in een dinsdag verschenen studie.

Lees ook

‘Pacemaker’ in hersenen moet depressies onderdrukken

In de medische sector kent 3D-printen de laatste jaren een toenemende belangstelling en groei. Bij die techniek wordt een product in laagjes door een printer opgebouwd, op basis van een computerbestand. 3D-printen wordt vooral in de orthopedie en de tandheelkunde steeds meer gebruikt.

Volgens de voorstanders zou het gebruik van 3D-implantaten de duur van de operatie inkorten, met een minder vermoeid chirurgisch team dat minder fouten maakt. Daarnaast zouden de ziekenhuizen kosten besparen omdat de operatiezalen minder lang worden ingenomen. De KCE-onderzoekers vonden hiervan echter geen unanieme bevestiging. Het is niet aangetoond dat ze beter, veiliger of meer kosteneffectief zijn dan de ‘klassieke’ implantaten. Er is meer evidentie nodig, aldus het KCE in een persbericht. 

Hogere prijs

Het KCE beveelt aan om het gebruik van deze nieuwe hoogrisico-3D-implantaten eerst te beperken tot gespecialiseerde centra en daarbij wetenschappelijke data te verzamelen. “De terugbetaling van een 3D-implantaat aan een hogere prijs dan het bestaande alternatief is in principe enkel mogelijk als de fabrikant kan aantonen dat zijn 3D-hulpmiddel beter is dan dit alternatief. Indien de fabrikant de werkzaamheid nog niet kon aantonen of indien de gevraagde prijs te hoog is, kan het RIZIV de terugbetaling weigeren. 

In dat geval kan de kost van het implantaat aan de patiënt worden aangerekend of is het mogelijk dat het ziekenhuis deze draagt. Dit is ook het geval indien de fabrikant ervoor kiest om (nog) geen terugbetalingsdossier bij de ziekteverzekering (RIZIV) in te dienen.”

Het RIZIV zou de veilige 3D-hulpmiddelen waarvoor de toegevoegde waarde (nog) niet is aangetoond, toch kunnen terugbetalen, maar aan hetzelfde bedrag als dat van het reeds bestaande ‘klassieke’ alternatief.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

16-01-2018 om 18:56 geschreven door peter  

Back in 2012, David Weatherly’s then-much-awaited book, Black Eyed Children was published. So, you may well ask, why am I mentioning this now, six years later? The answer is simple: Just recently, David decided to put out a new version of the book, a revised 2nd edition, and which has a cool cover courtesy of Sam Shearon. If you aren’t fully conversant with the BEC phenomenon, the sub-title to the new edition will give you a good idea of what you can expect in its 240 pages: “The B.E.K.s – They Reside On The Fringes Of The Paranormal. Are They A Diabolical Threat, Or The stuff Of Urban Legend?”

As I have noted in several of my books and articles over the years, the Black Eyed Children are, in many ways, similar to the Men in Black (no, not the Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones type. The very weird, pale, cadaverous and creepy types are the ones I mean). The BEC so often turn up at night, knock on peoples’ doors and do their absolute utmost to try and get an invite inside. Fortunately, most people get a distinctly weird and creepy vibe from the BEC, something which generally ensures the “kids” don’t manage to get into the home of the targeted person. On occasion, however, some unfortunate souls have seen exactly what the BEC are capable of when they succeed in getting inside.

In his book, David not only provides us with numerous eyewitness-reports of encounters with the BEC, but also theories for what they might be. Those theories that David takes a look at include Changelings, Hungry Ghosts, the Djinn, Alien-Human Hybrids, Tricksters and more. But, there is one particular section of the revised Black Eyed Children that I want to draw your attention to. It’s a brand new section that deals with a man named Brian Bethel.

If you don’t know who Brian Bethel is, I’ll tell you. He’s the guy who really got the BEC ball rolling, after a creepy encounter with a pair of Black Eyed Children in the late 1990s. The location being Abilene, Texas. In the years since Bethel’s story surfaced, numerous others have come forward talking about their own encounters with the Black Eyed Children and that predated Bethel’s experience. But, it was definitely his report that got the wheels turning, so to speak. In that sense, Bethel’s is a very important case. As for what Bethel has to say now, more than twenty years later, let’s take a look.

There is no doubt in my mind that Bethel’s words – revealed at length in the book – are gripping and thought-provoking. And he shares the details of some chilling and sinister things that happened to him in the wake of the 1997 encounter. Bethel tells us how, in the immediate aftermath of the late-night incident, he “felt unsafe” going to sleep. Insomnia gripped him. He experienced what I have termed here at MU in earlier articles as a form of “psychic backlash.” And the list of supernatural negativity and menace goes on and on.

In terms of what Bethel thinks the Black Eyed Children are, he doesn’t waste any time in getting to the point. Indeed, he refers to them as “a predator species” and suggests that “we are the food.” Bethel adds that he believes the BEC are “dangerous entities.” He also concludes that “we have something they don’t, something they desperately want.” That something, Bethel suggests, is the human soul. He also suggests they can be beaten at their own game, particularly as a result of their “strange sets of rules,” such as not being able to get into a home or a vehicle unless specifically invited to do so.

If you are interested in the BEC phenomenon, then I would urge you to get a copy of the revised edition of David Weatherly’sBlack Eyed Children, and particularly so because of the revealing interview with Brian Bethel.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

16-01-2018 om 18:45 geschreven door peter  

Is there a prize for being designated as the world’s newest (or biggest or fastest-growing) UFO hotspot? Even if there isn’t, the fine folks of Basingstoke, England, may want to put their name in the running. A recent video showing five lights moving in a line is the latest in a string of UFO reports in that southeast England town since 2008, as well as others in the 1980s and 70s. What’s up, Basingstoke?

The latest sighting comes from MUFON and was reported by Express.co.uk, which also noted some of the previous sightings in Basingstoke. Along with the video (seen here), the unnamed witness submitted a report (portions here – misspellings in original)

“i have ruled out them being any kind of servilian craft as these would have had some sort of flashing light on them and with it being dark and foggy we would have seen this. it couldnt have been search lights shinning up from the ground as we could clearly see the lights surface area getting wider as it shon down meaning the light source was in the sky … the sighting lasted around 30mins and managed to take around 4mins of video”

Fortunately, the good people of Basingstoke keep their cellphones locked and loaded. In April 2016, uploaded this video of four red blinking lights he saw near the Basingstoke train station. Chinese lanterns?

They always get the blame from someone

It looks like one common thread in these Basingstoke sightings is the lights. Another witness took this video of a dozen orange lights overhead on a night in June 2008 between 10.40pm and 11.10pm

That time of the night may be a common theme as well. There were reportedly numerous sightings on night in May 2012 at around 10:30 pm. That incident elicited a government response that hints at what at least some of these sightings might be. The RAF Odiham helicopter base is nearby in Hampshire and had choppers in the sky that night, although no one admit responsibility.

Not all of the Basingstoke sightings were lights. A famous photograph (seen here) taken of a sighting in June 2013 of two discs was examined by former Ministry of Defence UFO expert Nick Pope, who said:

“It’s one of the best UFO photos I’ve seen for a while. The shape and colour seems to rule out things like aircraft lights or Chinese lanterns.”

The news report said this was the second sighting in Basingstoke in 2013, following another in February.

Going back to August, 12 1983, a 77-year-old man was fishing on the Basingstoke Canal when he claimed a disc-shaped UFO landed near him and two English-speaking humanoids took him on the ship, examined him and let him go back to fishing because he was “too old.”

Take a young one … like Justin Bieber.

Other than the RAF helicopter base, there doesn’t seem to be anything in Basingstoke that would cause so many UFO sightings. Sure, it has artifacts dating back to the Paleolithic era, but so do many other English towns. There’s no nuclear plant or precious metal mines nearby – it sits on a mound of chalk and clay. It’s the birthplace of Jane Austen. Are aliens fans of her novels?

Whatever the cause, Basingstoke residents are wise to keep their cellphones charged and ready, and always tell humanoids doing probes that you’re older than you look.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

16-01-2018 om 18:33 geschreven door peter  

16-01-2018 om 17:59 geschreven door peter  

Black Knight-Like Spacecraft Passing The Moon

The following image has been captured by a photographer from Cornwall Ontario, Canada and shows a remarkable unidentified flying object that passes the moon. An object that looks like a black knight craft.

The photographer says that he has never witnessed anything like this and wonders whether it could be military, dimensional, other-worldly…

He states: I was out shooting images with my kids on the side of my house, just randomly shooting the moon and clouds. I captured images using a Canon SX60HS which has zoom capabilities allowing you to zoom in on the moons craters.

I did not notice the object while shooting, in this particular moment I was using 3 shot burst and just trying to get the circumference of the moon.

It was only when I was going thru the images when I noticed an object in view of the moon. The object seems to resemble a hat shape, likely metallic, and what I would call a disc with an elevated dome of sorts. It does not look to have many attachments at all.

I was immediately shocked by what I had captured; however, with my kids there I asked them "what do you think this is?" They all respectively said they thought it was a "UFO" or "Spacecraft".

Unfortunately, this was a still image, However, there was no object in the two subsequent images, meaning it was either faster than the shutter speed on 3 burst, or it was there and gone, disappearance.

I was utterly afraid to report this object, photographed in 2015, because I did not want to be subject to ridicule, but some friends and family, who have all encouraged me to report the sighting and get my story out there. Mufon case 89578.

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

16-01-2018 om 17:43 geschreven door peter  

This article was originally published by Scientific American.

{ https://www.salon.com/category/news }

16-01-2018 om 01:36 geschreven door peter  

Get Your First Look at the Future of Hypersonic Flight

 

U.S. Air Force

IN BRIEF

Boeing has revealed a new design of their in-development hypersonic plane. The aerospace giant is racing against competitors in the U.S. and abroad to develop a viable hypersonic aircraft.

Aerospace companies are in a heated race to create a hypersonic plane to replace the SR-71 Blackbird. Though retired in 1990, the SR-71 still holds the record as the fastest plane ever built, achieving a top speed of 3,540 kmh (2,200 mph). The goal now is to build a plane capable of reaching speeds above Mach 5 (6,171 kmh/3,835 mph), and Boeing thinks they may have the design that could do it.

During the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ SciTech Forum in Florida last week, Boeing unveiled a model of their next-generation demonstrator hypersonic aircraft. The twin-tail, tapered-wing concept hasn’t yet been approved for full-scale development, but Boeing’s head of hypersonic research told Aviation Week Aerospace Daily that it is a feasible design.

Popular Mechanics reports that Boeing’s current design works off of previous successes in hypersonic aircraft, including the unmanned X-51, which broke records in 2013 when it flew at Mach 5.1 for three-and-a-half minutes before running out of fuel and crashing into the ocean. The big challenge is building a plane that can not only reach Mach 5, but that can also decelerate to land.

To that end, both Boeing and Lockheed Martin are researching designs that utilize turbojets, a type of engine that has long been used in commercial aircraft, to achieve Mach 3 speeds before swapping to a dual ramjet/scramjet. Those types of compression engines only function at speeds above Mach 3, and they would provide the power to propel the aircraft to Mach 5 speeds and higher.

Lockheed Martin’s planned SR-72, which they are developing with the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has a similar design to the craft revealed by Boeing last week. The tentative release date for the SR-72 is 2030, though sightings of an unmanned demonstrator aircraft at Lockheed’s California facility suggest the company may be further along in development than expected.

China also has several programs currently researching and developing hypersonic flight systems, including a hypersonic space plane and scramjets that have already been tested at speeds of Mach 7 (8,642 kmh/5,370 mph).

Regardless of who wins this race, the development of hypersonic flight promises to change the future of travel, exploration, and military engagement — for everyone.

References: 

• Popular Mechanics, 
• Popular Science

{

16-01-2018 om 01:22 geschreven door peter  

Cahokia; An Ancient American City Covered in Pyramids

Around four centuries before the arrival of Columbus to the American continent, the Native Indians of Illinois erected a city that came to support a population of more than 20,000 inhabitants. But not only did they create a sophisticated city, for some reason they built more than a hundred mysterious earthen Pyramids, which, until this day, remain a profound enigma, as well as the general history of the site and its inhabitants.

Scholars consider Cahokia as one of the most significant and most influential ancient settlements in the Mississippian culture that developed and built massive structures five hundred years before Europeans came to the New Continent.

The original name of this ancient city is unknown. The name Cahokia is borrowed from a tribe that lived nearby in the 1600’s.

The Cahokia site covered an area of nine square miles.

Illustration: Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

Cahokia is an ancient settlement with a history that is more profound than we currently are willing to acknowledge.

Washington University’s John Kelly, a longtime stalwart of Cahokian archaeology, sums up the present understanding of Cahokia nicely: “People aren’t sure what it is.”

The first man to write about this ancient city was Henry Brackenridge, a lawyer and amateur historian who noted he was left amazed by what he had seen in 1811:

“I was struck with a degree of astonishment, not unlike that which is experienced in contemplating the Egyptian pyramids. What a stupendous pile of earth! To heap up such a mass must have required years, and the labors of thousands.”

The city, its monuments, and cultures are of great value.

Experts believe that Cahokia was the apogee and may have even been the origin of what scholars refer to as the Mississippian culture which spread across the American Midwest and Southeast starting before A.D. 1000 and peaking around the 13th century.

The building process of the city is another mystery. Researchers say that everywhere they dug, they found something of value, houses, buildings, monuments. The discoveries made at Cahokia indicate that it was a massive city, which, mysteriously, was built in an extremely brief span of time.

Image Credit: cahokiamounds.org

In other words, researchers say that it seems as if the entire city ‘sprang to life almost overnight around 1050’.

People from all over the area started moving to Cahokia which allowed the creation of complex infrastructure. The Cahokians built MASSIVE mounds—earthen Pyramids, a playa with the size of 45 football fields and different ceremonial and religious monuments.

Image Credit: cahokiamounds.org

To get an idea of how big the Cahokian earthen Pyramids were if you climb on top of Monks Mound, composed of 156 steps, you’d find yourself atop a structure that is larger at its base than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Now imagine the amount of work that needed to be done to create something like this around 1050.

The base circumference of Monks Mound is larger than the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan. It is believed that the inhabitants of Cahokia began building it around 900–950 CE, and was completed around 1100 CE.

Image Credit: cahokiamounds.org

At its peak around 1100, the city of Cahokia covered more than five square miles and was made up of 120 earthen pyramids. The inhabitants of Cahokia were skilled farmers, traders, and hunters, but they were also excellent urban planners and used astronomical alignments—like many other cultures in the American Continent—to build a small metropolis which was more extensive than many European cities during that tie.

The Cahokians did not leave behind a written language; we don’t know what they called themselves, where they came from, why they build these massive earthen Pyramids, why so many of them, and why they disappeared.

In fact, by the time Columbus got to the Americas, the city was already a ghost town. Experts only know that the city came into existence during a favorable climate phase and began shrinking around the time the climate became cooler, drier, and less predictable.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

16-01-2018 om 01:10 geschreven door peter  

Zoom Through the Famous Orion Nebula with NASA's Incredible 3D Video

16-01-2018 om 00:56 geschreven door peter  

The Biggest Space Stories of the Week

Photo Credit: X-ray NASA/CXC/University of Colorado/J. Comerford et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI

Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: SpaceX

Photo Credit: NASA/Retro Space Images

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/USGS

Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: X-ray NASA/CXC/University of Colorado/J. Comerford et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI

Photo Credit: Danielle Futselaar/UC Berkeley

Photo Credit: Katy Mersmann/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Photo Credit: Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles/NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

16-01-2018 om 00:41 geschreven door peter  

Out-of-This-World Diamond-Studded Rock Just Got Even Weirder

15-01-2018 om 23:39 geschreven door peter  

5 Things You Probably Did Not Know About Tutankhamun

Tutankhamun was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh belonging to the 18th dynasty of Egypt and reigned from 1336 to 1327 B.C. In hieroglyphs, the name Tutankhamun was typically written Amen-tut-ankh.

His original name, Tutankhaten means “living image of Aton,” while Tutankhamun means “living image of Amun.”

Although it is formally defined that the XVIII Dynasty ends with the reign of Horemheb Egyptologists are convinced that the young Pharaoh was the last ruler of royal blood of the dynasty.

His reign was marked by the return to normalcy in the socio-religious plane after the interlude starring the monotheism of Akhenaten.

Tutankhamun is one of the most famous Pharaohs to rule over Egypt.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Said return was gradual, restoring the cult and architecture of the abandoned temples belonging to gods such as Amón, Osiris or Ptah, placing the priestly caste in office and allowing the celebration of the pertinent rites.

So, let’s go through some fascinating details about one of the most famous Pharaohs to rule over Egypt.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was so small that it took centuries to meet. In particular, it took 3,245 years until his tomb, found on November 4, 1922, was discovered by the English Egyptologist Howard Carter.

Tutankhamun’s reign

Tutankhamun was between 8 and 9 years old when his reign began. Therefore, the important decisions of government fell to two older figures: the father of Nefertiti, named Ay, and a military general named Horemheb. The Boy Pharaoh ruled for a decade, from 1333 to 1324 B.C. He is considered the youngest Pharaoh to rule over Egypt.

The Course of King Tut

Despite the fact that many believe there’s a course related to Tutankhamun, there isn’t one.

When Howard Carter first entered King Tut’s tomb in 1922, he was accompanied by his financial backer, George Herbert. Four months after having entered the tomb, Herbert died of alleged blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite. Soon, newspapers would go crazy and started writing about a course, and how the Herbert was victim of King Tut’s course, which was supposedly outlined on a clay tablet just outside the tomb.

But despite the fact that others who visited the tomb also died, there is not a single piece of evidence that suggests their deaths were connected to a course.

Tutankhamen reversed the radicalism of his father, Akhenaten, and restored the ancient belief system.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

When Carter entered into King Tuts tomb, he found a treasure trove of priceless funerary objects, including gold figurines, ritual jewelry, small boats which are said to represent the journey to the afterlife and a shrine made for the pharaoh’s embalmed organs.

But, in addition to all of those treasures, Carter discovered a chamber which contained two small coffins with two fetuses. According to DNA testing, one of the mummies was Tutankhamen’s stillborn daughter, and the other mummy was most likely also his child.

The artifacts recovered from Tutankhamun’s tomb are considered as some of the most viewed archaeological treasures in the world.

His Family

The family and the ancestry of the Tutankhamun is a little confusing.

Tutankhamun was the son of Akhenaten, the husband of Nefertiti, with whom he had six daughters. However, at the same time, Akhenaten had a ‘lesser wife’ named Kira, which is supposed to be the mother of the famous pharaoh.

Tutankhamun was married, in turn, to Ankhesenpaaten one of the daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and his half-sister.

Tutankhamun’s name, nearly erased from history

Even though Tuthankhamun is, and will remain as one of the most famous Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, evidence of his reign was obliterated after his death, when, his successor Horemhe replaced Tutankhamun’s name with his own on countless monuments.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 23:17 geschreven door peter  

NASA Present New Tires That Are Almost Indestructible

Ever since man has thought about reaching out to extraterrestrial planets, he has thought of what will he be driving once he gets there. Building vehicles and, more specifically, wheels and tires that will be up for the challenge is no easy task, and so NASA has been experimenting with many different materials over the years.  

Take NASA’s one-ton, car-size, nuclear-powered Mars Curiosity robot: After just a year of cautious 0.144 kilometers-per-hour roving, small rocks began ripping large holes in its tires.

However, NASA engineers have reinvented the wheel into a form that may one day conquer Mars.

They’ve created a nearly invincible tire made of woven-mesh metal that “remembers” its ideal shape and immediately springs back into form after taking a beating.

NASA Engineer Colin Creager and his colleagues initially built a woven-mesh wheel made out of spring steel. It gripped soft sand well and supported a lot of weight, yet kept hitting a major snag. “We always came across this one problem of where the tires would get dents in them,” Creager said in a NASA video.

Then Creager started using a shape-memory alloy — a super-elastic metal that pops back into place after intense strain.

NASA has been developing space-grade tires since the 1960s, starting with its moon-landing program.

The space agency later set its sights on Mars, spurring development in off-planet wheels. Yet the list of requirements for roving the red planet is daunting. It has to be an All-terrain tire, lightweight, durable, and able to survive wild temperature swings.

To handle scaling a veritable mountain, Curiosity’s designers made 20-inch-high aluminum wheels, that were strong and stiff. Yet mission controllers began noticing worrisome dents, holes, and tears in those tires in 2013 — about a year into the mission. Today Curiosity is instructed to avoid small pointy rocks, limiting damage, but the wheels continue to degrade.

“When the current rover wheel damage occurred, we thought it was worth taking a look at that wheel and adapting it for the future,” Creager told Businessinsider.com.

After years of research, the team settled on a nickel-titanium (NiTi) alloy and figured out the best process to form and treat it.

NASA airless nickel titanium shape memory alloy tires 4 « Inhabitat – Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building

As a result, the new wheels boast some impressive stats: They can bear nearly 10 times the weight of Curiosity’s wheels, function between -202 and 194 degrees Fahrenheit, have better grip over rocks and sand, and can climb slopes about 23% steeper.

“We [can] actually deform this all the way down to the axle and have it return to shape, which we could never even contemplate in a conventional metal system,” another NASA official said of the new spring tire in another NASA video.

Phillip Abel, a mechanical systems expert at NASA, said the key to the tire’s performance are the stretchy bonds of the crystal structure in shape-memory alloys.

“With super-elastic materials, what you’re doing is storing the energy of deformation in the [crystal structure]. All of the atoms are more or less where they were,” but the crystal structure shifts.  “The alloy, at the temperatures we’re seeing, is always in its ‘return to my original shape’ mode. So after you deform it, it pops back to its original crystal structure.”

In the toughest test to date, the wheels aced 10 kilometers of driving — more than half the total mileage of Curiosity on Mars — on punishing simulated terrain.

“The rim was a little dinged up, but the spring mesh tire was like brand-new,” Creager said, adding the caveat that the test did not occur at blistering Martian conditions.

“In theory, they should work, but NASA JPL is building a cryogenic test chamber to verify operation at cold temperatures,” he said.

However, those wheels will not be installed on the next Mars rover that will be launched in a few years, the Mars 2020, because it takes a grueling number of tests to prove the viability of a wheel for use on a space mission.

“You can buy nickel-titanium alloy off the shelf, but you can’t just use it on Mars. There’s a treatment process,” Creager said.

On the other hand, they could be ready to roll for the Mars-sample-return mission in 2024.

The wheel’s applications aren’t limited only to the red planet, though; the researchers are working with Goodyear to put them on Earth-based vehicles. So far, one they attached to a Jeep hugged around rocks without inflicting any damage to the spring tire.

“I could definitely see it being used for any application where you’re driving off-road, and the risk of a puncture and a flat is a big deal, like with a military vehicle,” Creager said. “But I would love to see this technology branching off to passenger vehicles.”

NASA airless nickel titanium shape memory alloy tires 3 « Inhabitat – Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building

{ https://i-hls.com/iHLS/news }

15-01-2018 om 23:03 geschreven door peter  

What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.

ROSS ANDERSEN

Liu’s trilogy begins in the late 1960s, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when a young Chinese woman sends a message to a nearby star system. The civilization that receives it embarks on a centuries-long mission to invade Earth, but she doesn’t care; the Red Guard’s grisly excesses have convinced her that humans no longer deserve to survive. En route to our planet, the extraterrestrial civilization disrupts our particle accelerators to prevent us from making advancements in the physics of warfare, such as the one that brought the atomic bomb into being less than a century after the invention of the repeating rifle.

Science fiction is sometimes described as a literature of the future, but historical allegory is one of its dominant modes. Isaac Asimov based his Foundation series on classical Rome, and Frank Herbert’s Dune borrows plot points from the past of the Bedouin Arabs. Liu is reluctant to make connections between his books and the real world, but he did tell me that his work is influenced by the history of Earth’s civilizations, “especially the encounters between more technologically advanced civilizations and the original settlers of a place.” One such encounter occurred during the 19th century, when the “Middle Kingdom” of China, around which all of Asia had once revolved, looked out to sea and saw the ships of Europe’s seafaring empires, whose ensuing invasion triggered a loss in status for China comparable to the fall of Rome.

This past summer, I traveled to China to visit its new observatory, but first I met up with Liu in Beijing. By way of small talk, I asked him about the film adaptationof The Three-Body Problem. “People here want it to be China’s Star Wars,” he said, looking pained. The pricey shoot ended in mid-2015, but the film is still in postproduction. At one point, the entire special-effects team was replaced. “When it comes to making science-fiction movies, our system is not mature,” Liu said.

The next morning, I went down to my hotel lobby to meet the driver I’d hired to take me to the observatory. Two hours into what was supposed to be a four-hour drive, he pulled over in the rain and waded 30 yards into a field where an older woman was harvesting rice, to ask for directions to a radio observatory more than 100 miles away. After much frustrated gesturing by both parties, she pointed the way with her scythe.

We set off again, making our way through a string of small villages, beep-beeping motorbike riders and pedestrians out of our way. Some of the buildings along the road were centuries old, with upturned eaves; others were freshly built, their residents having been relocated by the state to clear ground for the new observatory. A group of the displaced villagers had complained about their new housing, attracting bad press—a rarity for a government project in China. Western reporters took notice. “China Telescope to Displace 9,000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials,” read a headline in The New York Times.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (seti) is often derided as a kind of religious mysticism, even within the scientific community. Nearly a quarter century ago, the United States Congress defunded America’s seti program with a budget amendment proposed by Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada, who said he hoped it would “be the end of Martian-hunting season at the taxpayer’s expense.” That’s one reason it is China, and not the United States, that has built the first world-class radio observatory with seti as a core scientific goal.

seti does share some traits with religion. It is motivated by deep human desires for connection and transcendence. It concerns itself with questions about human origins, about the raw creative power of nature, and about our future in this universe—and it does all this at a time when traditional religions have become unpersuasive to many. Why these aspects of seti should count against it is unclear. Nor is it clear why Congress should find seti unworthy of funding, given that the government has previously been happy to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on ambitious searches for phenomena whose existence was still in question. The expensive, decades-long missions that found black holes and gravitational waves both commenced when their targets were mere speculative possibilities. That intelligent life can evolve on a planet is not a speculative possibility, as Darwin demonstrated. Indeed, seti might be the most intriguing scientific project suggested by Darwinism.

Even without federal funding in the United States, seti is now in the midst of a global renaissance. Today’s telescopes have brought the distant stars nearer, and in their orbits we can see planets. The next generation of observatories is now clicking on, and with them we will zoom into these planets’ atmospheres. setiresearchers have been preparing for this moment. In their exile, they have become philosophers of the future. They have tried to imagine what technologies an advanced civilization might use, and what imprints those technologies would make on the observable universe. They have figured out how to spot the chemical traces of artificial pollutants from afar. They know how to scan dense star fields for giant structures designed to shield planets from a supernova’s shock waves.

In 2015, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner poured $100 million of his own cash into a new seti program led by scientists at UC Berkeley. The team performs more seti observations in a single day than took place during entire years just a decade ago. In 2016, Milner sank another $100 million into an interstellar-probe mission. A beam from a giant laser array, to be built in the Chilean high desert, will wallop dozens of wafer-thin probes more than four light-years to the Alpha Centauri system, to get a closer look at its planets. Milner told me the probes’ cameras might be able to make out individual continents. The Alpha Centauri team modeled the radiation that such a beam would send out into space, and noticed striking similarities to the mysterious “fast radio bursts” that Earth’s astronomers keep detecting, which suggests the possibility that they are caused by similar giant beams, powering similar probes elsewhere in the cosmos.

Andrew Siemion, the leader of Milner’s seti team, is actively looking into this possibility. He visited the Chinese dish while it was still under construction, to lay the groundwork for joint observations and to help welcome the Chinese team into a growing network of radio observatories that will cooperate on seti research, including new facilities in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. When I joined Siemion for overnight seti observations at a radio observatory in West Virginia last fall, he gushed about the Chinese dish. He said it was the world’s most sensitive telescope in the part of the radio spectrum that is “classically considered to be the most probable place for an extraterrestrial transmitter.”

Before I left for China, Siemion warned me that the roads around the observatory were difficult to navigate, but he said I’d know I was close when my phone reception went wobbly. Radio transmissions are forbidden near the dish, lest scientists there mistake stray electromagnetic radiation for a signal from the deep. Supercomputers are still sifting through billions of false positives collected during previous seti observations, most caused by human technological interference.

My driver was on the verge of turning back when my phone reception finally began to wane. The sky had darkened in the five hours since we’d left sunny Guiyang. High winds were whipping between the Avatar-style mountains, making the long bamboo stalks sway like giant green feathers. A downpour of fat droplets began splattering the windshield just as I lost service for good.

The week before, Liu and I had visited a stargazing site of a much older vintage. In 1442, after the Ming dynasty moved China’s capital to Beijing, the emperor broke ground on a new observatory near the Forbidden City. More than 40 feet high, the elegant, castlelike structure came to house China’s most precious astronomical instruments.

No civilization on Earth has a longer continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a “mandate of heaven.” More than 3,500 years ago, China’s court astronomers pressed pictograms of cosmic events into tortoiseshells and ox bones. One of these “oracle bones” bears the earliest known record of a solar eclipse. It was likely interpreted as an omen of catastrophe, perhaps an ensuing invasion.

Liu and I sat at a black-marble table in the old observatory’s stone courtyard. Centuries-old pines towered overhead, blocking the hazy sunlight that poured down through Beijing’s yellow, polluted sky. Through a round, red portal at the courtyard’s edge, a staircase led up to a turretlike observation platform, where a line of ancient astronomical devices stood, including a giant celestial globe supported by slithering bronze dragons. The starry globe was stolen in 1900, after an eight-country alliance stormed Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Troops from Germany and France flooded into the courtyard where Liu and I were sitting, and made off with 10 of the observatory’s prized instruments.

The instruments were eventually returned, but the sting of the incident lingered. Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to think of this general period as the “century of humiliation,” the nadir of China’s long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak. Back when the ancient observatory was built, China could rightly regard itself as the lone survivor of the great Bronze Age civilizations, a class that included the Babylonians, the Mycenaeans, and even the ancient Egyptians. Western poets came to regard the latter’s ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted. Its emperors presided over the planet’s largest complex social organization. They commanded tribute payments from China’s neighbors, whose rulers sent envoys to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the emperors’ pleasure.

In the first volume of his landmark series, Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, the British Sinologist Joseph Needham asked why the scientific revolution hadn’t happened in China, given its sophisticated intellectual meritocracy, based on exams that measured citizens’ mastery of classical texts. This inquiry has since become known as the “Needham Question,” though Voltaire too had wondered why Chinese mathematics stalled out at geometry, and why it was the Jesuits who brought the gospel of Copernicus into China, and not the other way around. He blamed the Confucian emphasis on tradition. Other historians blamed China’s remarkably stable politics. A large landmass ruled by long dynasties may have encouraged less technical dynamism than did Europe, where more than 10 polities were crammed into a small area, triggering constant conflict. As we know from the Manhattan Project, the stakes of war have a way of sharpening the scientific mind.

Still others have accused premodern China of insufficient curiosity about life beyond its borders. (Notably, there seems to have been very little speculation in China about extraterrestrial life before the modern era.) This lack of curiosity is said to explain why China pressed pause on naval innovation during the late Middle Ages, right at the dawn of Europe’s age of exploration, when the Western imperial powers were looking fondly back through the medieval fog to seafaring Athens.

Whatever the reason, China paid a dear price for slipping behind the West in science and technology. In 1793, King George III stocked a ship with the British empire’s most dazzling inventions and sent it to China, only to be rebuffed by its emperor, who said he had “no use” for England’s trinkets. Nearly half a century later, Britain returned to China, seeking buyers for India’s opium harvest. China’s emperor again declined, and instead cracked down on the local sale of the drug, culminating in the seizure and flamboyant seaside destruction of 2 million pounds of British-owned opium. Her Majesty’s Navy responded with the full force of its futuristic technology, running ironclad steamships straight up the Yangtze, sinking Chinese junk boats, until the emperor had no choice but to sign the first of the “unequal treaties” that ceded Hong Kong, along with five other ports, to British jurisdiction. After the French made a colony of Vietnam, they joined in this “slicing of the Chinese melon,” as it came to be called, along with the Germans, who occupied a significant portion of Shandong province.

Meanwhile Japan, a “little brother” as far as China was concerned, responded to Western aggression by quickly modernizing its navy, such that in 1894, it was able to sink most of China’s fleet in a single battle, taking Taiwan as the spoils. And this was just a prelude to Japan’s brutal mid-20th-century invasion of China, part of a larger campaign of civilizational expansion that aimed to spread Japanese power to the entire Pacific, a campaign that was largely successful, until it encountered the United States and its city-leveling nukes.

China’s humiliations multiplied with America’s rise. After sending 200,000 laborers to the Western Front in support of the Allied war effort during World War I, Chinese diplomats arrived at Versailles expecting something of a restoration, or at least relief from the unequal treaties. Instead, China was seated at the kids’ table with Greece and Siam, while the Western powers carved up the globe.

Only recently has China regained its geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment that is undimmed in Chinese culture today. The country is on pace to outspend the United States on R&D this decade, but the quality of its research varies a great deal. According to one study, even at China’s most prestigious academic institutions, a third of scientific papers are faked or plagiarized. Knowing how poorly the country’s journals are regarded, Chinese universities are reportedly offering bonuses of up to six figures to researchers who publish in Western journals.

It remains an open question whether Chinese science will ever catch up with that of the West without a bedrock political commitment to the free exchange of ideas. China’s persecution of dissident scientists began under Mao, whose ideologues branded Einstein’s theories “counterrevolutionary.” But it did not end with him. Even in the absence of overt persecution, the country’s “great firewall” handicaps Chinese scientists, who have difficulty accessing data published abroad.

China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The “Celestial Kingdom” looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.

China has largely focused on the applied sciences. It built the world’s fastest supercomputer, spent heavily on medical research, and planted a “great green wall” of forests in its northwest as a last-ditch effort to halt the Gobi Desert’s spread. Now China is bringing its immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of “god particles” out of the ether, in the same time it took cern’s Large Hadron Collider to strain out a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the technopoetic idiom of the 21st century, nothing would symbolize China’s rise like a high-definition shot of a Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet. Nothing except, perhaps, first contact.

At a security station 10 miles from the dish, I handed my cellphone to a guard. He locked it away in a secure compartment and escorted me to a pair of metal detectors so I could demonstrate that I wasn’t carrying any other electronics. A different guard drove me on a narrow access road to a switchback-laden stairway that climbed 800 steps up a mountainside, through buzzing clouds of blue dragonflies, to a platform overlooking the observatory.

Until a few months before his death this past September, the radio astronomer Nan Rendong was the observatory’s scientific leader, and its soul. It was Nan who had made sure the new dish was customized to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He’d been with the project since its inception, in the early 1990s, when he used satellite imagery to pick out hundreds of candidate sites among the deep depressions in China’s Karst mountain region.

Apart from microwaves, such as those that make up the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, radio waves are the weakest form of electromagnetic radiation. The collective energy of all the radio waves caught by Earth’s observatories in a year is less than the kinetic energy released when a single snowflake comes softly to rest on bare soil. Collecting these ethereal signals requires technological silence. That’s why China plans to one day put a radio observatory on the dark side of the moon, a place more technologically silent than anywhere on Earth. It’s why, over the course of the past century, radio observatories have sprouted, like cool white mushrooms, in the blank spots between this planet’s glittering cities. And it’s why Nan went looking for a dish site in the remote Karst mountains. Tall, jagged, and covered in subtropical vegetation, these limestone mountains rise up abruptly from the planet’s crust, forming barriers that can protect an observatory’s sensitive ear from wind and radio noise.

After making a shortlist of candidate locations, Nan set out to inspect them on foot. Hiking into the center of the Dawodang depression, he found himself at the bottom of a roughly symmetrical bowl, guarded by a nearly perfect ring of green mountains, all formed by the blind processes of upheaval and erosion. More than 20 years and $180 million later, Nan positioned the dish for its inaugural observation—its “first light,” in the parlance of astronomy. He pointed it at the fading radio glow of a supernova, or “guest star,” as Chinese astronomers had called it when they recorded the unusual brightness of its initial explosion almost 1,000 years earlier.

In Beijing, I told Liu that I was holding out hope for a beacon. I told him I thought dark-forest theory was based on too narrow a reading of history. It may infer too much about the general behavior of civilizations from specific encounters between China and the West. Liu replied, convincingly, that China’s experience with the West is representative of larger patterns. Across history, it is easy to find examples of expansive civilizations that used advanced technologies to bully others. “In China’s imperial history, too,” he said, referring to the country’s long-standing domination of its neighbors.

But even if these patterns extend back across all of recorded history, and even if they extend back to the murky epochs of prehistory, to when the Neanderthals vanished sometime after first contact with modern humans, that still might not tell us much about galactic civilizations. For a civilization that has learned to survive across cosmic timescales, humanity’s entire existence would be but a single moment in a long, bright dawn. And no civilization could last tens of millions of years without learning to live in peace internally. Human beings have already created weapons that put our entire species at risk; an advanced civilization’s weapons would likely far outstrip ours.

I told Liu that our civilization’s relative youth would suggest we’re an outlier on the spectrum of civilizational behavior, not a Platonic case to generalize from. The Milky Way has been habitable for billions of years. Anyone we make contact with will almost certainly be older, and perhaps wiser.

Moreover, the night sky contains no evidence that older civilizations treat expansion as a first principle. setiresearchers have looked for civilizations that shoot outward in all directions from a single origin point, becoming an ever-growing sphere of technology, until they colonize entire galaxies. If they were consuming lots of energy, as expected, these civilizations would give off a telltale infrared glow, and yet we don’t see any in our all-sky scans. Maybe the self-replicating machinery required to spread rapidly across 100 billion stars would be doomed by runaway coding errors. Or maybe civilizations spread unevenly throughout a galaxy, just as humans have spread unevenly across the Earth. But even a civilization that captured a tenth of a galaxy’s stars would be easy to find, and we haven’t found a single one, despite having searched the nearest 100,000 galaxies.

Some seti researchers have wondered about stealthier modes of expansion. They have looked into the feasibility of “Genesis probes,” spacecraft that can seed a planet with microbes, or accelerate evolution on its surface, by sparking a Cambrian explosion, like the one that juiced biological creativity on Earth. Some have even searched for evidence that such spacecraft might have visited this planet, by looking for encoded messages in our DNA—which is, after all, the most robust informational storage medium known to science. They too have come up empty. The idea that civilizations expand ever outward might be woefully anthropocentric.

Liu did not concede this point. To him, the absence of these signals is just further evidence that hunters are good at hiding. He told me that we are limited in how we think about other civilizations. “Especially those that may last millions or billions of years,” he said. “When we wonder why they don’t use certain technologies to spread across a galaxy, we might be like spiders wondering why humans don’t use webs to catch insects.” And anyway, an older civilization that has achieved internal peace may still behave like a hunter, Liu said, in part because it would grasp the difficulty of “understanding one another across cosmic distances.” And it would know that the stakes of a misunderstanding could be existential.

First contact would be trickier still if we encountered a postbiological artificial intelligence that had taken control of its planet. Its worldview might be doubly alien. It might not feel empathy, which is not an essential feature of intelligence but instead an emotion installed by a particular evolutionary history and culture. The logic behind its actions could be beyond the powers of the human imagination. It might have transformed its entire planet into a supercomputer, and, according to a trio of Oxford researchers, it might find the current cosmos too warm for truly long-term, energy-efficient computing. It might cloak itself from observation, and power down into a dreamless sleep lasting hundreds of millions of years, until such time when the universe has expanded and cooled to a temperature that allows for many more epochs of computing.

{ https://www.theatlantic.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 22:38 geschreven door peter  

A wolf has been spotted in Belgium for the first time in 100 years

 BY ELENA MOTIVANS

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the wolf disappeared from most areas of Western Europe. They were seen as dangerous pests and were actively hunted or restricted by industrialization and landscape fragmentation. However, the tides have turned and the wolf is viewed as an important protected species. Its return to Europe has been accordingly encouraged.

Wolves are back

Wolves are important keystone predators. They control prey species populations, like deer, which then causes positive effects that trickle down to other animals, plants, and even the landscape. The largest documented success has been in Yellowstone Park, where the recent reintroduction of wolves has the caused the increase of a large number of unexpected species, such as trout, birds of prey, and the pronghorn.

The Bern Convention in 1979 was fundamental in changing the way that wolves are viewed. They are now considered “a fundamental element of our natural European heritage” andgiven protection and there are strategies in place to aid their re-colonization of Europe.

A European grey wolf.

Image credits: Katerina Hlavata.

The last country in continental Europe to have wolves return is Belgium. Now a wolf has been spotted earlier this month in Flanders, a region in the north of the country. It had an electronic tracking collar and was thus identified as coming from Germany. It had previously been touring in the Netherlands around Christmas time. A camera may have captured night footage of a wolf in southern Belgium in 2011, but it was never confirmed and therefore not considered an official spotting.

“Our country was the only one in continental Europe to have not been visited by a wolf,” since the animal began recolonizing the continent, the environmental group Landschap said.

Coexisting

Environmental groups have welcomed the news and are asking the government to further encourage the wolves’ return and to implement a system where farmers whose livestock is killed by wolves are compensated. Indeed, the social aspect is a very important one to consider when bringing back large predators to Western Europe.

The greatest conflicts since the return of wolves have been with farmers. In areas that have always had wolves, like Romania and Poland, a livestock attack is considered an unfortunate accident. However, in areas where wolves are newly returning to, farmers are unhappy with their presence. In France, wolves killed over 8,000 farm animals (mostly sheep) in 2017 alone. The government responded by ordering a wolf cull of up to 40 wolves by July 2018. It is a careful balance between supporting farmers and wolves. It is critical to include the social aspect in making wolf introduction plans to aid their success.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 21:57 geschreven door peter  

Fermi’s Paradox — how life and space intertwine

BY CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR

This is an opinion post by Justin Curmi and does not necessarily represent the position or opinion of ZME Science.

The Fermi’s Paradox explores the idea of how there are is a virtually limitless number of stars, but you don’t see much life floating around. What is the reason for this paradox?

Perhaps Enrico Fermi, the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, addressed this matter incorrectly. There could be two other explanations for this: firstly, the way we conceptualize space might be incorrect. We might be a part of a larger whole — just like some indigenous groups are still isolated from advanced technology around them, we might be unaware of the broader picture.

Alternatively, space might be at a specific phase of its development. In this case, the question should be “In what phase are we in space’s development?” Let’s elaborate.

Planetary systems emerge at different times but they can be viewed in a similar light as the inhabitants of Earth, in a sense. Evolution tends to leave clues of its work (for example neanderthal DNA in humans), which can be an indication of the rate that a sentient life takes time to form, as well as the other random variables that influence it. So, if a planetary system has the potentiality of supporting life, one should consider these inner and outside (meteorites, radiation, gravity, and so on) influences that affect life.

In addition, life has so far been the process of surpassing different spatial dimensions, therefore one needs to calculate why one life form transcends and another does not. Moreover, it seems that sentient life forms, like humans, tend to want to surpass these spatial dimensions. Would it be possible to go breach the current three spatial dimensions? That is still an open question.

A diagram of the geological timescale.

Image via Wikipedia.

In a way, geological formations also follow a similar path as evolution, though the rate for geological formations is much slower than life’s evolution; th

s one could speculate that space must have variables and a rate influencing its development. The only thing to figure is the rate at which space develops. This rate might be much slower than geological formations. Once we found this rate out, it could have large implications on human society in general. For instance, spaceships may be viewed as the wheel of our time because we are just learning how to probe the vast depths of space and traverse it. In addition, what does this mean for humans? Will we start developing around these new discoveries and technologies we are creating as earlier humans did for math?

It’s not just about practicality. If humans are able to conceptualize different worlds through math, this could also lead to revolutions in the arts. Artist could utilize simple maths to design their works. Future humans might employ a more advanced system of mathematics to create their art, and an advanced structure to construct it. All the arts they may create would be beyond current human comprehension due to the fact their senses will develop around this new form of thinking. Ultimately, art will increasingly become more advanced as our brains continue to develop new systems of conceptualizing our world.

Almost everything else will become increasingly more complex: interstellar infrastructure, universal agriculture, planetary currency, and so on. Mankind is continually in the process of dominating their surroundings, which will lead us to model our different collective belief and philosophical systems around the new information and thoughts we develop.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 21:45 geschreven door peter