Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
20-03-2019
Mercury, Instead Of Venus, May Actually Be Earth’s Closest Neighbor
Since Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, followed by Venus, Earth, Mars, etc…, we’ve always believed that Venus was our closest planetary neighbor, but new research suggests that we may be wrong.
According to a commentary published in the magazine Physics Today, while Venus does come closest to Earth when it passes by, Mercury is the planet the stays the closest to us for the longest amount of time.
Tom Stockman (Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama), Gabriel Monroe (mechanical engineer at the U.S. Army’s Engineer Research and Development Center), and Samuel Cordner (mechanical engineer at NASA), wrote in the commentary, “By some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularizers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets.”
When calculating the distance between two planets, it is normally determined by measuring each of their distances from the sun; however, that only determines the distance from the two planets when they are closest to one another. Since the two planets move at very different speeds, Venus is sometimes on the opposite side of the Sun and quite far away from Earth.
Researchers figured out the distance between planets by using a new mathematical technique called the point-circle method in which they calculated quite a few different points on each planet’s orbit. In addition, they were able to map out where the planets were situated every 24 hours during a 10,000 year period. By using that new technique, they determined that Mercury stayed the closest to Earth for the longest amount of time. What’s even more interesting is that Mercury is also the closest to all the other planets in our solar system.
Unfortunately for the researchers involved with this new theory, not everyone is on board with their idea. Steven Beckwith, who is the director of the Space Science Laboratory and professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, disagreed by saying, “Suppose you live in a house where the people who live next door to you spend half the year someplace, maybe you live in Wisconsin and your nearest neighbors spend seven months of the long winters in Florida. During the winter, the people in the next house over would be closer to you.” He went on with his example by stating, “But most people would still say that their closest neighbors are the ones who live immediately next door for the rest of the year. It is an interesting way of redefining ‘closest’, but it is hardly profound.”
With Venus being our nearest planetary neighbor when it orbits by us, but Mercury staying the closest to us for the longest amount of time, whatever your definition of “closest” is, it is nevertheless a very interesting theory to ponder.
Are we alone? Probably not. After all, astronomers have already found 4,001 confirmed exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy, and expect there to beover 50 billion exoplanetsout there. For scientists gathering in Paris today, the question is different: why haven’t we made contact with alien civilizations?
What is the Fermi Paradox and the "Great Silence?"
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked 'where is everybody?' back in 1950 in what's now called the Fermi Paradox. It addresses a contradiction in astronomy, and can be summarized thus: if extraterrestrial life and even intelligent alien civilizations are not just likely, but highly probable, then why have none of them been in contact with us? Are there biological or sociological explanations for this "Great Silence?"
“We are very interested in the scientific approach used in the analysis of the Fermi Paradox and the search for intelligent life in the universe,” said Cyril Birnbaum and Brigitte David at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie (Cité), the science museum in Paris that's hosting today's meeting. “The question 'Are we alone?’ affects us all, because it is directly related to humanity and our place in the cosmos.”
Illustration of the view from the innermost of the two exoplanets orbiting Gliese 667 C (largest star, a red dwarf) in the Gliese 667 system, which lies around 24 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius.
GETTY
What are scientists doing in Paris?
Today, leading researchers from the fields of astrophysics, biology, sociology, psychology, and history are meeting at the Cité. “Every two years, METI International (METI stands for messaging extraterrestrial intelligence) organizes a one-day workshop in Paris as part of a series of workshops entitled What is Life? An Extraterrestrial Perspective,” said Florence Raulin Cerceau, co-chair of the workshop and a member of METI’s Board of Directors. The scientists are discussing some pretty insane-sounding questions:
Are extraterrestrials staying silent out of concern for how contact would impact humanity?
Do we live in a "galactic zoo?"
Should we send intentional radio messages to nearby stars to signal humanity’s interest in joining the "galactic club?"
Will extraterrestrial intelligence be similar to human intelligence?
Did life get to earth from elsewhere in the galaxy (interstellar migration)?
"This puzzle of why we haven’t detected extraterrestrial life has been discussed often, but in this workshop’s unique focus, many of the talks tackled a controversial explanation first suggested in the 1970s called the 'zoo hypothesis,’” said Raulin Cerceau. Ah yes, the idea that we're being watched by aliens and ... perhaps even being protected by them.
If a zebra started pounding out a series of prime numbers in a zoo, would we re-evaluate their intelligence? That's how some scientists are characterizing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
GETTY
What is the "zoo hypothesis"?
This is a mind-warping idea that there are alien civilizations out there (no, not on Oumuamua) that know all about us, but purposefully hide from us. It certainly explains the "Great Silence." "Perhaps extraterrestrials are watching humans on Earth, much like we watch animals in a zoo," explains Douglas Vakoch, president of METI. "How can we get the galactic zookeepers to reveal themselves?" At a workshop, Vakoch proposed that humans should be more active in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “If we went to a zoo and suddenly a zebra turned toward us, looked us in the eye, and started pounding out a series of prime numbers with its hoof, that would establish a radically different relationship between us and the zebra, and we would feel compelled to respond," he said.
It's hard to disagree with that. "We can do the same with extraterrestrials by transmitting powerful, intentional, information-rich radio signals to nearby stars,” he said.
No, there are no aliens watching us from Oumuamua, the first interstellar asteroid that passed through the solar system in late 2018.
GETTY
What is the "galactic quarantine" theory?
Think the "zoo hypothesis" theory is insane? That's nothing compared to another theory about alien benevolence. “It seems likely that extraterrestrials are imposing a ‘galactic quarantine’ because they realize it would be culturally disruptive for us to learn about them,” said Jean-Pierre Rospars, the honorary research director at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique and co-chair of the workshop. “Cognitive evolution on Earth shows random features while also following predictable paths ... we can expect the repeated, independent emergence of intelligent species in the universe, and we should expect to see more or less similar forms of intelligence everywhere, under favorable conditions,” he added. “There’s no reason to think that humans have reached the highest cognitive level possible. Higher levels might evolve on Earth in the future and already be reached elsewhere.”
The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) at the Green Bank Observatory, West Virginia, is the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope.
GETTY
What does the Drake Equation try to do?
A formula to estimate the number of technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy, the Drake Equation is an attempt to put the Fermi Paradox into numbers. The Drake Equation was posited in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake, a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.
What is the Drake Equation?
OK, don't expect any answers here. The formula below, which comes from the SETI Institute might seem impressive, but it's mostly guesswork. Practically speaking, its purpose is not to find a definitive answer, but to keep the discussion going about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L
N = The number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable.
R = The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.
fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.
fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
METI puts a special emphasis on those last three terms, which explore not just the frequency of intelligence-bearing worlds, but how long they last (before they get wiped out).
Radio astronomy Vs interstellar colonization
While for now, radio astronomy is the only practical way of humans sending messages out into the cosmos, says one scientist, only full-blown colonization of other stars is the only way to prove the existence of intelligent life. “It appears that although radio communications provide a natural means for searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence for civilizations younger than a few millennia, older civilizations should rather develop extensive programs of interstellar colonization," said Nicolas Prantzos, director of research of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), in advance of Monday's meeting. "This is the only way to achieve undisputable evidence, either for or against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, within their lifetime.”
In 1960, Dr. Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia used the 25-meter dish for his Project Ozma, in which he searched two nearby stars called Epsilon Eridani (an artist's impression pictured here) and Tau Ceti for signs of alien life.
GETTY
Why aliens could be very different from humans
Why should they be even remotely similar? “The environment on an exoplanet will impose its own rules,” said Roland Lehoucq, an astrophysicist who works at the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA). “There is no trend in biological evolution: the huge range of various morphologies observed on Earth renders any exobiological speculation improbable, at least for macroscopic ‘complex’ life.” Skeptical that humans would have much in common with extraterrestrial life forms, Lehocq discussed "our persistent anthropocentrism in our understanding and description of alien life" and how difficult it is for humans to imagine extraterrestrial intelligence radically different from ourselves.
In short? We're too self-obsessed to even imagine extraterrestrial life, let alone find and communicate with it, and if there's not going to be proof within our lifetimes, we're not much interested in looking. Is there intelligent life out there? Probably, but we'll probably never find it.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Mystery glowing ball streaks through skies above Russia: Footage of unidentified object was captured close to site of the most powerful meteor explosion in recent history that landed with the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs
Mystery glowing ball streaks through skies above Russia: Footage of unidentified object was captured close to site of the most powerful meteor explosion in recent history that landed with the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs
A mysterious 'UFO' was observed firing across the sky in remote central Russia
The bright light looked like it was headed for a collision with the Earth's surface
It was observed a few hundred miles from a famous explosion site 111 years ago
No crash has been reported and no debris has been retrieved from any landing
A mystery glowing ball was spotted streaking across the Russian night sky close to the site of the largest meteor explosion in modern history.
A dashcam captured a dazzling flash changing colour from green to yellow to orange in a remote area of Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia.
It was spotted near the impact site of the Tunguska meteor that struck the region with the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs in 1908.
A dashcam captured a dazzling flash changing colour from green to yellow to orange in a remote area of Krasnoyarsk region in Russia. One theory is that the spectacular luminous UFO streaking over the Siberian hills was caused by a meteor yet so far there is no evidence for it
Pyotr Bondarev, from Tura village where the flash was seen, said: 'The night got bright and warm, as if a giant light bulb was switched on in the sky'.
Experts believe the object seen streaking over the Siberian hills was also a meteor but no conclusive evidence has been found so far.
The shining body was also seen as far as 250miles (402km) away, but appeared less, bright.
Witnesses say it appeared to be heading for a crash landing.
No debris from a meteorite has been found so far and experts are keeping an open mind as to what caused the stunning spectacle.
The latest sighting lies several hundred miles from the site of the monumental Tunguska Event 111 years ago which caused devastation in the region
Mr Bondarev added: 'It was about 7.30pm, it was dark. I was outside having a walk with my wife and children, when the sky flashed green and yellow.
'Many people saw it and got very excited.'
Another local source said: 'It's impossible to tell what the shining object was. It might have been a meteor or something else.'
Krasnoyarsk Kirensky Physics University researcher Sergey Karpov said it was likely a small meteorite.
'Most likely it was something up to 10 centimetres [4inches] in diameter',' he said.
But this has not been confirmed by the Russian emergencies ministry.
There has been no suggestion that a stray missile or debris from a space launch was behind the 'UFO' sighting.
One theory is that the spectacular luminous UFO streaking over the Siberian hills was caused by a meteor yet so far there is no conclusive evidence that anything has landed nearby
The Tunguska explosion is thought to have been produced by a comet or asteroid hurtling through Earth's atmosphere at over 33,500 miles per hour (50, 000km/h), resulting in an explosion equal to 185 Hiroshima bombs as pressure and heat rapidly increased
Some have claimed it was a 'second Tunguska', as the site of the explosion 111 years ago which caused devastation across the region is within a few hundred miles.
More than 770 square miles (2,000 sq km) of forest was wiped out after a fireball - believed to be some 330ft (100m) wide - tore through the atmosphere and exploded in 1908, according to scientists.
An estimated 80million trees were destroyed and thousands of charred reindeer carcasses were left behind.
It is believed to have exploded three to seven miles (5 to 12km) above the earth's surface yet despite the carnage there was no impact crater.
There were no reports of casualties in the sparsely populated area, despite the power of the impact.
However, some experts have disputed the cause of 1908 Tunguska explosion.
The remote Tura village where the bright light was observed streaking over the Siberian hills in Russia. Tura is a mere few hundred miles from an infamous explosion caused by a meteorite landing over a century ago in the remote forests of Russia that caused devastation
No debris from a meteorite - a meteor that strikes the ground - has been found so far and experts are keeping an open mind as to what caused the stunning spectacle
WHAT WAS THE CHELYABINSK METEOR STRIKE?
A meteor that blazed across southern Ural Mountain range in February 2013 was the largest recorded meteor strike in more than a century, after the Tunguska event of 1908.
More than 1,600 people were injured by the shock wave from the explosion, estimated to be as strong as 20 Hiroshima atomic bombs, as it landed near the city of Chelyabinsk.
The fireball measuring 18 meters across, screamed into Earth's atmosphere at 41,600 mph.
Much of the meteor landed in a local lake called Chebarkul.
Other than the latest find, scientists have already uncovered more than 12 pieces from Lake Chebarkul since the February 15 incident. However, only five of them turned out being real.
What did they find in the meteorites?
Analysis of recovered Chelyabinsk meteorites revealed an unusual form of jadeite entombed inside glassy materials known as shock veins, which form after rock crashes, melts and re-solidifies.
By calculating the rate at which the jadeite must have solidified, the team were able to determine that the asteroid formed after a collision.
Jadeite, which is one of the minerals in the gemstone jade, forms only under extreme pressure and high temperature.
The form of jadeite found in the Chelyabinsk meteorites indicates that the asteroid's parent body hit another asteroid that was at least 150 metres (490ft) in diameter.
A mysteryUFOthat looked like a "glowing ball" in the sky turned the evening "bright and warm" despite it being a chilly -20C.
A dashcam captured a dazzling flash changing colour from green to yellow to orange in a remote area of Russia's Krasnoyarsk region.
It was spotted close to the Russian site of the world’s largest ‘meteor explosion’ which had the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs.
One witness claimed the edge was taken off the -20C cold by the eerie phenomenon shortly before 7.30pm on Friday.
“The night got bright and warm, as if a giant light bulb was switched on in the sky’, said witness Pyotr Bondarev from Tura village.
One theory is that the spectacular luminous UFO streaking over the Siberian hills was caused by a meteor, yet so far there is no conclusive evidence.
The strange light was recorded on a dashcam on Friday night(Image: The Siberian Times)
The shining body was also seen as far away as 250 miles and appeared to be heading for a crash landing.
No debris from a meteorite has been found so far and experts are keeping an open mind as to what caused the stunning spectacle.
Mr Bondarev said: “It was about 7.30 pm, it was dark.
“I was outside having a walk with my wife and children, when the sky flashed green and yellow.
"Many people saw it and got very excited.”
Eyewitnesses said it warmed the area which was at -20C(Image: The Siberian Times)
A local source said: “It’s impossible to tell what the shining object was. It might have been a meteor or something else.”
Some claimed it was a “second Tunguska”.
Tura lies several hundred miles from the site of the Tunguska meteor strike 111 years ago.
More than 770sq miles of forest was wiped out after a fireball - believed to be some 330 ft wide - tore through the atmosphere and exploded, according to scientists.
An estimated 80million trees were destroyed, and there were thousands of charred reindeer carcasses.
It is believed to have exploded three to seven miles above the earth’s surface yet despite the carnage there was no impact crater.
There were no reports of casualties in the sparsely populated area, despite an explosion with the force of 185 Hiroshima bombs.
Experts are unclear as to what the strange object was
(Image: The Siberian Times)
The forest that was flattened by the blast from the Tunguska meteorite in 1908
(Image: UIG via Getty Images)
However, some experts have disputed the cause of 1908 Tunguska explosion.
One the recent "glowing ball", Krasnoyarsk Kirensky Physics University researcher Sergey Karpov said it was likely a small meteorite.
“Most likely it was something up to 10 centimetres in diameter,” he said.
But this has not been confirmed by the Russian emergencies ministry.
There has been no suggestion that a stray missile or debris from a space launch was behind the colourful UFO.
A dashcam captured a dazzling flash changing colour from green to yellow to orange in a remote area of Krasnoyarsk region in Russia. One theory is that the spectacular luminous UFO streaking over the Siberian hills was caused by a meteor yet so far there is no evidence for it
The latest sighting lies several hundred miles from the site of the monumental Tunguska Event 111 years ago which caused devastation in the region
The Missile Defense Agency has offered new details about plans to develop a science fiction-sounding space-based neutral particle beam weapon to disable ordestroy incoming ballistic missiles. The goal is to have a prototype system ready for a test in orbit by 2023, an ambitious schedule to demonstrate that the technology has progressed to a more useful state from when the U.S. military last explored and then abandoned the concept nearly three decades ago.
The U.S. military’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2020 asks for $34 million in funding for the neutral particle beam program, or NPB, according to documents released on Mar. 18, 2019. The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) wants a total of $380 million through 2023 fiscal cycle for development of the directed energy weapon. Defense One, citing unnamed U.S. officials, had been first to report the existence of the plan on Mar. 14, 2019. It’s also worth noting that Congress set out a goal of testing of at least one space-based missile defense system prototype by 2022 and the deployment of “an operational capability at the earliest practicable date” in the annual defense policy bill for the 2018 Fiscal Year.
MDA included the new-start NPB program in a larger line item called “Technology Maturation Initiatives,” which also includes requested funding for the development of laser weapons and advanced airborne sensors. It does not expect to ask for any more funds for the particle beam system through this account in Fiscal Year 2024, which would indicate plans to move it into its own dedicated funding stream at that time.
“The NPB provides a game changing space-based directed energy weapon capability for strategic missile defense,” MDA’s latest budget request says. “The NPB is a space-based, directed energy capability for homeland defense, providing a defense for boost phase and mid-course phase” of a ballistic missile’s flight.
A staple in science fiction, particle beam weapons are grounded in real science. At its most basic, an NPB requires a charged particle source and a means of accelerating them to near-light speed to create the beam itself.
An extremely rudimentary graphic showing the components of a neutral particle beam system.
When this beam of charged particles hits something it produces effects similar to that of laser, namely extreme heat on the surface of the target capable of burning a hole through certain materials depending on the strength of the weapon. If the particles are not sufficently powerful to destroy something such as a missile or reentry vehicle, they may still be able to pass through the outer shells of those targets and disrupt, damage, or destroy internal components, similar broadly to how a microwave weapon functions.
In addition, since particle beams respond different to different materials, there is the potential that the system might also have the capability to discriminatebetween real incoming warheads a ballistic missile has released and decoys. Seperate sensors would be necessary to observe the impacts and categorize the results. But if it worked, this would help other ballistic missile defense systems, which generally have short engagement windows to begin with, focus only on actual threats.
The characteristics of these particles would make it hard, if not impossible for an opponent to shield their weapons from the effects or otherwise employ countermeasures, short of destroying the NPB itself, as well. All of this has long made the potential of a particle beam weapon attractive, especially for missile defense.
As part of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the U.S. military experimented with NPBs and hired Martin-Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, TRW, and a team from General Electric and Lockheed to craft potential designs for a space-based system. Between 1984 and 1993, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) spent approximately $794 million on the concept, according to a 1993 report from the General Accounting Office, now known as the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
MCDONNELL-DOUGLAS VIA AEROSPACE PROJECTS REVIEW A mockup of McDonnell-Douglas' space-based NPB.
Most notably, in July 1989, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in cooperation with the SDIO, conducted the Beam Experiments Aboard a Rocket test, or BEAR. This involved placing an actual particle beam system on board a sounding rocket and shooting it out of the Earth’s atmosphere.
As of 2018, this remained the “most energetic particle beam ever flown,” according to LANL presentation. “The experiment successfully demonstrated that a particle beam would operate and propagate as predicted outside the atmosphere and that there are no unexpected side-effects when firing the beam in space.”
LANL A picture of the particle beam-carrying sounding rocket ahead of the BEAR test.
However, the SDIO ultimately pursued a plan to build a massive constellation of space-based kinetic interceptors, known as Brilliant Pebbles, coupled with an equally extensive sensor network in orbit and on Earth. The entire project came to an end in 1993 ahead of the incoming administration of President Bill Clinton, who renamed SDIO the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization – the forerunner of MDA – and refocused its efforts on terrestrial missile defense.
SDIO’s particle beam program proved to be impractical given the technology available at the time. The prospective space-based systems were large and required massive power sources, with nuclear power being the most viable option. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding over nearly a decade between the 1980s and 1990s, the previous NPB effort did not demonstrate a beam powerful enough to produce the desired effects on a target or produce a sufficiently lightweight power source design, according to the 1993 GAO report. Despite the BEAR experiment, there had been no test of an actual complete weapon system by that point, either.
VIA THE NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM Artwork depicting the NPB system from the BEAR test.
“We’ve come a long way in terms of the technology we use today to where a full, all-up system wouldn’t be the size of three of these conference rooms, right? We now believe we can get it down to a package that we can put on as part of a payload to be placed on orbit,” an unnamed U.S. military official told Defense One in regards to the new particle beam initiative. “Power generation, beam formation, the accelerometer that’s required to get there and what it takes to neutralize that beam, that capability has been matured and there are technologies that we can use today to miniaturize.”
But even if a practical and functional design is possible, there’s no guarantee it would necessarily provide the promised capability, especially against ballistic missiles in their boost phase. Striking missiles in this first stage of their flight is attractive because they are moving relatively slow and are producing a massive heat signature that makes them easier to spot and track. It also means that the missile's contents rain down over or near the launch country in a more localized manner than if destroyed during mid-course or terminal phases of flight.
Unfortunately, they’re also moving through the atmosphere for a significant part of the boost phase. The beam that an NPB shoots out are notably vulnerable to distortion and deflection, since the particles can easily get sent off course by ricocheting off other particles hanging in the air.
There’s a reason why, if you want to build an NPB at all, putting it in the vacuum of space makes the most sense. The amount of power necessary to ensure the beam remains both focused and powerful at appreciable ranges and for enough time to actual damage or destroy a target in the atmosphere could be immense.
An NPB concept from the SDI program using a nuclear reactor at the rear to power the system.
For some context on the potential scale of power generation one might be looking at, in the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. military had also considered a ground-based particle beam that could defeat ballistic missiles in its latter stages of flight called Seesaw. The Advanced Research Projects Agency determined it would take a system propagating a particle beam across hundreds of miles of tunnels to work properly.
To create the necessary to power supply, Nicholas Christofilos, a Greek physicist working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the time, went so far as to propose using nuclear bombs to effectively create a ludicrously large drain hole that would allow the entire volume of the Great Lakes to flow into a massive hydroelectric generator complex underneath, according to Sharon Weinberger's 2017 book The Imagineers of War: The Untold History of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency that Changed The World. Needless to say, this idea was absurd and the entire program never left the drawing board.
Technological improvements since then in various fields, such as power generation efficiency and adaptive focusing systems, would reduce these requirements, but they could still be prohibitive depending on other design constraints. This would also be much less of an issue for exoatmospheric engagements.
Beyond these potential technical issues with the beam itself, boost-phase ballistic missile defense systems need to be in an optimal position to engage their target during a very short amount of time after a launch. On average this phase of a missile’s flight is around five minutes at most in total. Sensors would first have to spot and categorize the threat after which American officials would make a decision to engage or not.
VIA AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
A general timeline of the boost phase of ballistic missiles and the time available for defense systems to respond.
Ensuring that there are enough space-based NPBs “parked” in orbit near even a portion of known and possible launch sites could be a costly proposition that would also require significant investments in the U.S. military’s ballistic missile defense sensor architecture, a separate issue you can read about in more detail here and here. The speed of the particles and the range of the weapons in the vacuum of space could help mitigate these issues. It would also be far less of a concern during the mid-course portion of the missile's flight where the entire engagement would occur in space or the very upper reaches of the atmosphere and there would be more time to line up the best shot.
“It’s a very short timeline, first to even know where it [the missile] is coming from…It’s less than a couple minutes before it leaves the atmosphere,” the unnamed defense official that spoke to Defense One admitted. “So, you have to have a weapon that’s on station, that’s not going to be taken out by air batteries and so we have been looking at directed energy applications for that. But you have to scale up power to that megawatt class. You’ve got to reduce the weight. You’ve got to have a power source. It’s a challenge, technically.”
“I can’t say that it is going to be at a space and weight requirement that’s going to actually be feasible, but we’re pushing forward with the prototyping and demo,” this individual continued. “We need to understand as a Department [of Defense], the costs and what it would take to go do that. There’s a lot of folklore…that says it’s either crazy expensive or that it’s free. It needs to be a definitive study.”
Feasibility concerns notwithstanding, there would be political and legal ramifications on top of everything else, too. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in orbit. Though the NPB itself would not fit this definition, a nuclear power source would still have the potential to prompt outcry and formal protests.
HIPSASH A Russian MiG-31 Foxhound carries an air-launched anti-satellite weapon in a test.
Particle beams by their nature can also be difficult to detect and conclusively trace back to a particular source, making them non-attributable. This is something that Michael Griffin, presently Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and a major proponent of NPBs, has described in the past as an “advantage."
But it’s also something that America’s adversaries could look to exploit and weaponize, blaming the U.S. government for all manner of explained phenomena in space.
Russia has a long history of making unsubstantiated allegations against the U.S. government, claiming in recent years that Americans and their allies have staged chemical weapons attacks on civilians in Syria, are actively supporting ISIS terrorists in that country and in Afghanistan, and are running a covert biological weapons program in Georgia. A constellation of particle beam weapons in space capable, at least in principle, of conducting non-attributable attacks, would be an obvious goldmine for Russian propagandists seeking to spread conspiratorial claims, blaming any hole that appears in a spacecraft or malfunctioning satellite on an unprovoked particle beam attack.
It might be hard to challenge these claims. Beyond it's missile defense capabilities, a space-based particle beam does seem like an ideal anti-satellite weapon. It would offer an easy way to quickly knock out satellites, or at least disable them, in a crisis. It would be hard for an opponent to detect such as an attack was occurring in the first place and even more difficult to counter.
But proponents in the U.S. government, especially Undersecretary of Defense Griffin, who worked on the Reagan-era SDI program, are adamant about at least exploring the possibility of a space-based particle beam weapon system. “We should not lose our way as we come out of the slough of despondence in directed energy into an environment that is more welcoming of our contributions. We should not lose our way with some of the other technologies that were pioneered in the ’80s and early-’90s and now stand available for renewed effort,” he declared in 2018.
It remains to be seen whether MDA will determine that the technical and other considerations have changed sufficiently in the last 30 years to make the idea of particle beam weapons in orbit any more practical than it was during the Cold War. But we should get a better idea in the next five years as the Pentagon pushes toward its goal of lofting a prototype particle beam weapon into orbit for the first time.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)say they’ve founda way to levitate and propel objects using only light — though, for the time being, the work remains theoretical.
They hope the technique could be used for “trajectory control of ultra-light spacecraft and even laser-propelled light sails for space exploration,” according toa paperpublished in the journal Nature Photonics Monday. That means no fuel needed — just a powerful laser fired at a spacecraft from back on Earth.
Optical Tweezers
The Caltech scientists devised the so-called “photonic levitation and propulsion” system by designing a complex pattern that could be etched into an object’s surface. The way the concentrated light beam reflected from the etching causes the object to “self-stabilize,” they say, as it attempts to stay inside the focused laser beam.
The first breakthrough that laid the groundwork for the new research were the development of “optical tweezers” — scientific instruments that use a powerful laser beam to attract or push away microscopic objects. The big downside: they can only manipulate tiny objects at only microscopic distances.
Ognjen Ilic, post-doctoral scholar and first author of the new study, puts the tweezer concept and its limitations in much simpler terms: “One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer,” he said in a statement. “But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on.”
From Micrometers To Meters
In the paper, the Caltech researchers argue that their light manipulation theoretically could work with an object of any size, from micrometers to spaceship size.
Though the theory is still untested in the real world, the researchers say that if it pans out, it could send a spacecraft to the nearest star outside our solar system in just 20 years.
“There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft,” said Harry Atwater, professor at the Caltech Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”
On Dec. 18, 2018, a school bus-size meteor exploded over Earth with an impact energy of roughly 10 atomic bombs. According to NASA, the blast was the second-largest meteor impact since the organization began tracking them 30 years ago, bested only by the infamous fireball thatexploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in Feb. 2013.
As to why one of the largest meteor impacts in recent history may have totally passed you by, that's likely because the space rock in question shattered over the Bering Sea, a cold stretch of the Pacific Ocean between Russia and Alaska, miles from inhabited land.
NASA learned about the December impact thanks to the U.S. Air Force, whose missile-monitoring satellites were among the first to detect the blast. The rumble of the impact also registered on infrasound detectors — stations that measure low-frequency sound waves inaudible to human ears — around the world, giving scientists enough data to draw some basic conclusions about the sneaky meteor.
According to NASA, that meteor weighed about 1,500 tons (1,360 metric tons), had a diameter of about 32 feet (10 meters), and was traveling through the atmosphere at about 71,582 mph (115,200 kilometers per hour) when it exploded. The blast occurred about 15.5 miles (25 km) over the ocean and erupted with an energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT — roughly 10 times the energy of the atomic bomb that the United States detonated over Hiroshimaduring World War II.
The world's asteroid-monitoring groups failed to see the rock headed our way likely due to its smallish size. Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told New Scientist that most modern telescopes are best able to detect objects measuring several hundred meters or more in diameter, making smaller objects like this one easy to miss. NASA asteroid hunters are most concerned about identifying near-Earth objects measuring 460 feet (140 m) across, which have the potential to obliterate entire US states if allowed to pass through the atmosphere, Live Science previously reported.
The December 2018 impact only came to attention this week thanks, in part, to a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas that was delivered by Kelly Fast, NASA's near-Earth objects observations program manager. Fast told BBC News that the December event exploded with "40 percent the energy release of Chelyabinsk," but didn't show up in the news because of the impact's relatively remote location.
The Chelyabinsk meteor, which measured 62 feet (19 m) wide, passed over mainland Russia and was recorded by many motorists. The resulting shockwaves injured more than 1,200 people.
Understanding the process could help reveal the moon's strange origins.
The Stickney Crater on Mars' moon Phobos. New research suggests that reddish and bluish areas on the moon's surface point the way to understanding its formation.
The eccentric orbit of the Martian moon Phobos could drive the flow of powder across the moon's surface, a new study finds, shedding light on Phobos' mysterious origins.
Dark gray, potato-shaped Phobosis only about 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) wide, but it is by far the larger ofMars' two moons, at more than seven times the mass of its companion, Deimos. Phobos orbits at only about 3,700 miles (6,000 km) from the Martian ground, closer to its planet than any known moon; as a result of this tight orbit, Phobos zips around Mars three times per Earth day.
Previous work revealed an odd dichotomy on the surface of Phobos. Some areas are reddish, while others are bluish, Ron Ballouz, lead author of the new study and an astrophysicist at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), told Space.com.
The origins of these red units and blue units, as these regions are called, was uncertain. Solving this puzzle could shed light on the origins of Phobos and the way it interacts with its environment, the researchers said.
To help solve this mystery Ballouz's group investigated the grains of dust and rock known as regolith, which drift around the surface of Phobos due to the moon's slightly oblong orbit.
Although Phobos' orbit is nearly circular, it is very slightly eccentric, or oval-shaped. This eccentricity "is large enough to change the relative strength between Phobos' and Mars' gravity over each orbit. The closer you are to the Red Planet, the stronger its gravitational pull and vice versa," study co-author Nicola Baresi, an astrodynamicist at JAXA, told Space.com.
As such, Phobos wiggles a bit as it orbits Mars, causing slopes on the moon to vary by up to 2 degrees over the course of the natural satellite's 7-hour and 39-minute orbit around the Red Planet. This slight tilting back and forth is enough to draw grains of regolith downhill on Phobos.
Computer simulations revealed that the quantity of grains that flows "depends on where you are on Phobos," Ballouz said. When the scientists compared their data with photos of the surface of Phobos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, they found that the sites where they expected the highest amount of surface motion appeared to match the blue regions of Phobos.
The motion on the surface of Phobos "is very gradual," Ballouz said. "There is not a landslide on Phobos every orbit. We call this a 'cold flow' process, as opposed to the fast motion of a landslide."
"This process is not really expected to create new 'sand' or regolith," study co-author Sarah Crites, a planetary scientist at JAXA, told Space.com. Instead, the cold flow just moves existing particles around, she explained.
The researchers suggested that the blue units consist of relatively fresh, unweathered material from Phobos excavated by the rocking the moon experiences during its orbit. In contrast, the scientists suggested that the red units consist of regolith that, for the most, part stayed put over time and got weathered by being exposed to solar radiation.
These findings could shed light on the uncertain origin of Phobos. "One of the biggest mysteries surrounding Phobos is its origin — was it created from a giant impact onto Mars that created a debris disk around the planet that eventually coalesced into Phobos, or was it once an asteroid that was captured by Mars' gravity?" Ballouz said.
If Phobos originated from a giant impact on Mars, the blue units should resemble Martian rock, since the blue units represent pristine material from the Red Planet. However, the latest data suggest that the near-infrared signature of the blue units differs from that seen up to now from Martian rock, the researchers said.
The group is taking part in a future international mission led by JAXA called the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) probe, which is set to launch in 2024 and return samples from Phobos to Earth in 2029. These samples may finally help resolve the debate over Phobos' origin, Ballouz said.
The scientists detailed their findings online March 18 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
New research says that the Earth’s past ice ages may have been caused by tectonic pile-ups in the tropics.
A crevasse in a glacier. Image via Pixabay.
Our planet has braved three major ice ages in the past 540 million years, seeing global temperatures plummet and ice sheets stretching far beyond the poles. Needless to say, these were quite dramatic events for the planet, so researchers are keen to understand what set them off. A new study reports that plate tectonics might be the culprit.
Cold hard plates
“We think that arc-continent collisions at low latitudes are the trigger for global cooling,” says Oliver Jagoutz, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and a co-author of the new study.
“This could occur over 1-5 million square kilometers, which sounds like a lot. But in reality, it’s a very thin strip of Earth, sitting in the right location, that can change the global climate.”
“Arc-continent collisions” is a term that describes the slow, grinding head-butting that takes place when a piece of oceanic crust hits a continent (i.e. continental crust). Generally speaking, oceanic crust (OC) will slip beneath the continental crust (CC) during such collisions, as the former is denser than the latter. Arc-continent collisions are a mainstay of orogen (mountain range) formation, as they cause the edges of CC plates ‘wrinkle up’. But in geology, as is often the case in life, things don’t always go according to plan.
The study reports that the last three major ice ages were preceded by arc-continent collisions in the tropics which exposed tens of thousands of kilometers of oceanic, rather than continental, crust to the atmosphere. The heat and humidity of the tropics then likely triggered a chemical reaction between calcium and magnesium minerals in these rocks and carbon dioxide in the air. This would have scrubbed huge quantities of atmospheric CO2 to form carbonate rocks (such as limestone).
Over time, this led to a global cooling of the climate, setting off the ice ages, they add.
The team tracked the movements of two suture zones (the areas where plates collide) in today’s Himalayan mountains. Both sutures were formed during the same tectonic migrations, they report: one collision 80 million years ago, when the supercontinent Gondwana moved north creating part of Eurasia, and another 50 million years ago. Both collisions occurred near the equator and proceeded global atmospheric cooling events by several million years.
In geological terms, ‘several million years’ is basically the blink of an eye. So, curious to see whether one event caused the other, the team analyzed the rate at which oceanic rocks known as ophiolites can react to CO2 in the tropics. They conclude that, given the location and magnitude of the events that created them, both of the sutures they investigated could have absorbed enough CO2 to cool the atmosphere enough to trigger the subsequent ice ages.
Another interesting find is that the same processes likely led to the end of these ice ages. The fresh oceanic crust progressively lost its ability to scrub CO2 from the air (as the calcium and magnesium minerals transformed into carbonate rocks), allowing the atmosphere to stabilize.
“We showed that this process can start and end glaciation,” Jagoutz says. “Then we wondered, how often does that work? If our hypothesis is correct, we should find that for every time there’s a cooling event, there are a lot of sutures in the tropics.”
The team then expanded their analysis to older ice ages to see whether they were also associated with tropical arc-continent collisions. After compiling the location of major suture zones on Earth from pre-existing literature, they reconstruct their movement and that of the plates which generated them over time using computer simulations.
Animation showing suture zones developing as tectonic plates evolved over the last 540 million years. MIT researchers found sutures in the tropical rain belt, shown in green, were associated with Earth's major ice ages.
Credit: Swanson-Hysell research group
All in all, the team found three periods over the last 540 million years in which major suture zones (those about 10,000 kilometers in length) were formed in the tropics. Their formation coincided with three major ice ages, they add: one the Late Ordovician (455 to 440 million years ago), one in the Permo-Carboniferous (335 to 280 million years ago), and one in the Cenozoic (35 million years ago to present day). This wasn’t a happy coincidence, either. The team explains that no ice ages or glaciation events occurred during periods when major suture zones formed outside of the tropics.
“We found that every time there was a peak in the suture zone in the tropics, there was a glaciation event,” Jagoutz says. “So every time you get, say, 10,000 kilometers of sutures in the tropics, you get an ice age.”
Jagoutz notes that there is a major suture zone active today in Indonesia. It includes some of the largest bodies of ophiolite rocks in the world today, and Jagoutz says it may prove to be an important resource for absorbing carbon dioxide. The team says that the findings lend some weight to current proposals to grind up these ophiolites in massive quantities and spread them along the equatorial belt in an effort to counteract our CO2 emissions. However, they also point to how such efforts may, in fact, produce additional carbon emissions — and also suggest that such measures may simply take too long to produce results within our lifetimes.
“It’s a challenge to make this process work on human timescales,” Jagoutz says. “The Earth does this in a slow, geological process that has nothing to do with what we do to the Earth today. And it will neither harm us, nor save us.”
The paper “Arc-continent collisions in the tropics set Earth’s climate state” has been published in the journal Science.
In a series of scientific presentations held today (March 18) at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, mission scientists shared new data about the space rock's topography and composition, which is helping them to refine scenarios about how the object formed.
"Every single observation that we planned worked as planned," Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said during the team's first presentation. "We had a 100 percent successful flyby."
The wealth of data the spacecraft was able to gather has offered mysteries and hypotheses alike about the distant Kuiper Belt object, which scientists hadn't even discovered when New Horizons launched. In particular, the team has been eager to piece together how the object, which is formally known as 2014 MU69, formed.
Soon after the flyby, the team confirmed that MU69 is in fact two objects stuck together in what scientists call a contact binary. Continuing analysis of high-resolution black-and-white New Horizons photographs suggests that the two halves of the object formed separately, and that the larger lobe, nicknamed Ultima, appears to be the result of many much smaller objects clumping together, like Dippin' Dots.
"In some sense, Ultima has a fairly simplified geology, a bit like Frankenstein here," Jeff Moore, a New Horizons scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, said during a presentation. "Thule has a lot more stuff here going on." In particular, this smaller lobe sports the largest feature on the object, a depression the team has nicknamed Maryland. (New Horizons is operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in that state.)
A new map produced by the New Horizons team appears to show the many different lumps of rock that converged to form the object nicknamed Ultima Thule.
But when the team turns to color images, it's harder to see evidence of this aggregate structure. MU69's overwhelmingly red surface shows some variations in color that match surface features, but not the hypothesized small geologic subunits.
"You definitely see some correlation with the geological features, but one thing that you don't see is any logical correlations with these lumps which might be previous stages of accretion," Will Grundy, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, said during his presentation. "They don't look obviously different from each other."
The new findings also touch on how the two pieces of MU69 converged. As the team has gotten a closer look at the joint of the object, they haven't found any signs that a violent collision distorted the rock. Instead, the scientists believe that the two halves of the object formed separately, hung around together long enough to sync up their longest and shortest dimensions — like two neighboring pancakes — then very slowly touched, at a speed of about 9.8 feet (3 meters) per second.
"You can do this yourself, you can walk into a wall," William McKinnon, a New Horizons partner and a planetary scientist at the Washington University in St. Louis, said during his presentation. "It's a very gentle situation."
Although the spacecraft's stay at MU69 was incredibly brief, mission scientists will be receiving new data from New Horizons for more than a year. That's thanks to the amount of observations it was able to make and the slow data-relay rate possible for the probe at such a long distance from Earth. The combination means scientists will be grappling with puzzles about the object for quite a while to come.
"Ultima Thule is beyond remarkable," Stern said. "It has presented us with a wide variety of mysteries, and frankly, I think on a per-gram basis, it may even be outdoing Pluto itself.
Has the Enigmatic Voynich Manuscript Code Finally Been Cracked?
Has the Enigmatic Voynich Manuscript Code Finally Been Cracked?
The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious illustrated hand-written vellum codex in a currently unidentified written and visual code. However, according to a non-peer reviewed paper published in John's Hopkins University digital journal, a Canadian researcher has finally cracked the six century old Voynich Manuscript code. But has he really?
History of the Mysterious Manuscript
The manuscript’s documented history stretches back to 1639 (though it is said to be older than this), when a Prague citizen named Georgius Barschius wrote a letter to a Jesuit named Athanasius Kircher who was living in Rome. He told Kircher that he had a strange manuscriptfilled with illustrations of plants, stars, and “chemical secrets” accompanied by an “ unknown script .” Barschius wrote with hope that Kircher may help translate the work, but Kircher couldn’t apparently accomplish the task either.
The next time the manuscript appears is almost 300 years later, and that story explains how it became known as the Voynich Manuscript . The name comes from Wilfrid Voynich (1865 - 1930), a Polish revolutionary, antiquarian, and bibliophile who operated one of the largest rare book businesses in the world. Purchased by Voynich in 1912, the manuscript, which he simply called his “cipher MS,” has been Carbon-dated to between 1404 -1438 AD and it is thought to have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance.
There is much secrecy around Voynich’s acquiring the mysterious manuscript, but he did say some, possibly untrue, things about it. For example, Voynich claimed to have found the document in a collection of illuminated manuscripts in some “ancient castle in Southern Europe.” He wrote:
“While examining the manuscripts, with a view to the acquisition of at least a part of the collection, my attention was especially drawn by one volume. It was such an ugly duckling compared with the other manuscripts, with their rich decorations in gold and colors that my interest was aroused at once. I found that it was written entirely in cipher. Even a necessarily brief examination of the vellum upon which it was written, the calligraphy, the drawings and the pigments suggested to me as the date of its origin the latter part of the thirteenth century. The drawings indicated it to be an encyclopedic work on natural philosophy. [...] the fact that this was a thirteenth century manuscript in cipher convinced me that it must be a work of exceptional importance, and to my knowledge the existence of a manuscript of such an early date written entirely in cipher was unknown, so I included it among the manuscripts which I purchased from this collection.”
Famous Attempts to Decode the Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript traveled with its owner to London in 1912 and then to the United Sates in 1915. He sometimes provided people with photographic samples of the manuscript to see if they could decipher what it may mean. In 1920, a man named William Romaine Newbold famously suggested a possible solution to a part of the manuscript, but it was later disproved by John M. Manly in 1931.
In 1969, the Voynich Manuscript was donated by Hans P. Kraus to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where it is currently catalogued under call number MS 408. Measuring 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 cm (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 inches) the text is written from left to right in a sophisticated script. With around 240 pages collected into 18 quires, and because many pages fold out, the artifact brings to adults all the same intrigue and interactivity as pop-up books offer children. 14 of the pages are missing and there is no author or title provided on the cover.
Some pages of the Voynich Manuscript fold out to show larger diagrams.
Hundreds of professional cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and II, have attempted to decipher the text and interpret the images; but none of the hypotheses proposed thus far account for all, or even most, of its many parts. Literary specialists and historians have proposed a long list of possible authors including: Roger Bacon , John Dee , Edward Kelley , Giovanni Fontana, or even Voynich himself.
Mr. Voynich among his books in Soho Square circa 1899.
The text of the Voynich Manuscript is written in short paragraphs and is still a mystery. It may be tempting to assume there is some link between the writing and illustrations, which appear to be connected to Medieval science or medicine, but this can’t be verified. The manuscript’s visual content is generally described as being: herbal, botanical, astronomical, biological, cosmological, and pharmaceutical in nature, and specialists have observed characters from Latin/Greek/Old Cyrillic / Croatian Glagolitic cursive, and Hebrew. Detailed studies of the parchment, cover, binding, ink, paint, and retouching methods are available online and we will waste no time on these elements in this article. Our clear purpose here is to look at the solution recently presented by Canadian researcher, Mr. Amet Ardic, who believes the manuscript contains “shapes meaning prefixes and suffixes in distinctive letters, resembling the Turkish language used in his home country.”
Detail of an unidentified plant on page 78r of Voynich Manuscript, in a part of the text which has become known as the “biological” section.
Is Turkish the Key to Cracking the Voynich Manuscript Code?
Mr. Ardic claims he and his son have discovered more than 300 words in the Voynich Manuscript Code. His research paper was published on the John's Hopkins University digital journal. In his online video presentation , which has been watched almost a million times, Mr. Ardic concluded that the manuscript was written in a poetic, rhythmic method called "Phonemic Orthography" which describes speech visually.
Mr. Ardic first noticed the Turkish character “Turqu" seven times in the Voynich manuscript” and he made another convincing observation in the illustration featured in FOLIO 67-R, known as the “astronomy” section. A circle divided into 12 sections suggested to Mr. Ardic that it might be a calendar and each piece may represent one of the 12 lunar months .
Top: Folio 67r displays a circular design with 12 inner sections which are believed to represent the 12 annual lunar months.
To advance his theory, the researcher then replaced the characters detailed within each of the 12 suspected months with modern Turku characters, for example; October is pronounced “Ogzaf" and in the old Turkish dictionary it is spelled “Yuzai.” The word essentially means the season “fall.” The word "Ai" means “two moons”. From these, Mr. Ardic translated the letters of ‘October’ to mean "autumn moon.” Extending this system of interpretation across the ‘moon’ circle, further correspondences were noted, for example: November is written as “Sepel”, which when translated to modern Turkish “Seper Ayi” means "moon of rain.” Furthermore, July translates to "the month of harvest.”
What you have read and seen of the Voynich Manuscript thus far might have already convinced you that it has been successfully deciphered, but this would be a hastily drawn conclusion before taking a closer look at Mr. Ardic’s claims from alternative points of view; an activity which makes it clear that not everybody is buying his ancient Turkish theory.
Screen shot from promotional video showing Mr. Ardic researching a copy of the Voynich Manuscript.
Stand Back… Here Comes the Skeptical Opinion to Ruin Everything
Before we begin, I must make it clear that I am not a trained linguist, but I am an experienced investigator, and in this instance my case book is full of niggling inconsistencies which we will try to rationalize before drawing a conclusion.
Firstly, it is important to remember that Turkish is a very well documented language and the Voynich Manuscript has been studied by professional linguists from all over the world for over 500 years. Mr. Ardic, with all and absolute respect, is an electrical engineer. Any balanced juror would have to agree that the probability is much, much higher that, just like Egyptian hieroglyphics , cuneiform, Mayan, and Linear B , so too would the Voynich Manuscript most likely be decoded by a linguist.
Secondly, if you had just cracked the code of one of the world’s oldest cyphers, the video releasing your amazing findings to the world might begin with a simple table or chart translating the encoded characters into modern letters with a step by step decipherment; letter by letter, word by word, page by page. Contrary to this, one would need to watch the presentation on Ardic’s interpretation of the Voynich Manuscript code five times to really understand the theory. This suggests the researcher possibly found a seed, dug around it until he found a root, then a plant.
Detail of a page in Folio 33-V of the Voynich Manuscript.
I must now slow down a little on my unrelentingly skeptical attitude because Mr. Ardic and supporters of this hypothesis could firmly argue that Yale University made the manuscript public in the first place because not one of the world’s PhD linguists was able to decipher it for over five centuries. What is more, he might refer us to the quite brilliant book Wikinomics by author Don Tapscott, who provides many great examples of outsiders and amateur enthusiasts disrupting existing fields. And speaking personally, if we were to all underestimate the capacity of enthusiasts I wouldn’t even be writing this article! Not to mention, the world is full of highly advanced thinkers without PhDs applying themselves as software engineers, developers, and hackers – and they are running rings around the world’s national security and banking systems.
Mr. Ardic claims to have studied ancient Turkish languages with his son and they were able to pinpoint the Voynich writing style to an ancient phonetic variant. But his findings assume that there is only one language encoded into the manuscript. Why not 2, 5, or 12? That would go a long way to explaining why only a small part of the content can be related to Turkish.
What I find really interesting in all this is that the online amateur research community attributes a selection of different languages to the Voynich manuscript. When these proposed countries of origin are looked at on a map they form an approximate geographical area which might suggest the manuscript was not actually written in northern Italy, as many scholars have argued.
What is more, many researchers see Serbo-Croatian, Ottoman, and Old Turkic - it might be prudent for linguists to take these observations and look closer at Croatian Glagolitic cursive and Angular Glagolitic, which might have in part evolved from Turkic language systems. And then, it must be considered that the Voynich manuscript might be an amalgamation of Glagolitic and Turkic cultures condensing shared botanical, pharmaceutical, astronomical traditions, and craft knowledge.
Whether Mr. Ardic’s findings will stand up to peer review or not will remain to be seen, but there is no part of me that is not inspired by the dedication both he and his son have committed to furthering our understanding of the code within the Voynich Manuscript.
SLOW SMASH The two lobes of Ultima Thule probably came together at the speed of a person walking briskly into a wall, researchers announced.
NASA, JHU APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY, SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE, ESA
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Ultima Thule’s history may be written in the sum of its parts.
New analyses suggest that the tiny space rock formed from a rotating cloud of even smaller rocks that collapsed into two individual objects. Those objects then gently collided in the early days of the solar system, creating the distant double-lobed world studied by the passing New Horizons spacecraft, researchers reported March 18 at theLunar and Planetary Science Conference.
NASA’s New Horizons flew by Ultima Thule, officially known as MU69, on January 1 (SN Online: 12/30/18). The first images that the spacecraft sent back suggested a snowman-shaped world, with a larger lobe that the team dubbed “Ultima” and a slightly smaller bulb called “Thule” (SN: 2/2/19, p. 7). But subsequent images showed that the lobes look more like flat pancakes or hamburgers than jolly snowballs (SN: 3/16/19, p. 15).
The first map of the space rock’s geology may help explain that flatness. The map shows distinct mounds on both lobes whose borders are still visible today, planetary scientist Jeff Moore said at the meeting. Moore, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and his colleagues think that those mounds represent small or medium-sized rocks that organized themselves into a rotating disk before merging into two separate lobes that then collided. That rotation could have spread out material in a lobe, flattening it. “The disk was spinning … and that’s why we have the hamburger shape,” Moore said.
Planetary scientist William McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis agrees, although he adds that “this has not been proven.” McKinnon also presented computer simulations of the final collision between Ultima and Thule that showed that the two must have been moving at about 2 meters per second when they collided. That’s about as fast as a person walking into a wall at a brisk pace, McKinnon said.
FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER This preliminary map of Ultima Thule’s geology shows how the space rock could have come together from many distinct objects. Each color represents a different possible section of the final body (a few examples highlighted with arrows), each of which could have been a separate smaller rock billions of years ago.
NASA, JHU APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY, SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE, ESA
That gentle crash, plus the Frankenstein body, suggests that planetesimals like Ultima Thule form from clouds of dust and rock clumping together under the force of their own gravity. Before New Horizons, it wasn’t clear if these proto-planets formed from cloud collapse or from small rocks slowly sticking together to form larger rocks over time.
“I think it's plausible” that clouds of rotating pebbles could have coalesced into Ultima Thule's two lobes, says planetary scientist David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. He and colleagues suggested in a 2010 study that collapsing clouds of small rocks in the Kuiper Belt — the distant zone of cold, primitive space rocks beyond Neptune’s orbit where Ultima Thule lives — could form close pairs of objects.
But the idea may not yet explain Ultima Thule’s flatness. “In my simulations back in 2010, I produced a lot of spheres,” Nesvorny says. Other researchers will now have to do new simulations that show that these rotating disks can lead to flat pancakes, he says.
Jupiter’s moon Europa likely has a subsurface ocean, possibly salty, with volcanic vents on its ocean floor. A new study suggests it might also have an oceanic jet stream, comparable to the Gulf Stream back here on Earth.
Europa’s icy surface is covered by long thin cracks, making the moon look like a cracked egg. A new study suggests that an equatorial jet stream in Europa’s ocean creates stress in this Jovian moon’s outer ice crust, resulting in the cracks.
Like Earth, Jupiter’s moonEuropais believed to be a water world. Scientists have strong evidence that a global subsurface ocean lies beneath Europa’s outer icy surface crust. From what we know so far, this marine environment isn’t too different from what exists in Earth’s oceans. There’s a rocky bottom and possiblehydrothermal ventsmuch like those found on ocean floors on our planet.
Now researchers in Paris have found that there might be another common feature – ocean currents – and specifically what scientists are calling an oceanic jet stream for Europa. In a new peer-reviewed paper in Nature Astronomy – published March 11, 2019 – these scientists described evidence that Jupiter’s magnetic field might be creating a jet stream in Europa’s ocean, which may be comparable to the Gulf Stream on Earth.
Christophe Gissinger and Ludovic Petitdemange co-authored the new work. They are both based in Paris with École Normale Supérieure and the Laboratory for Studies of Radiation and Matter in Astrophysics. From their paper’s abstract:
During recent decades, data from space missions have provided strong evidence of deep liquid oceans underneath a thin outer icy crust on several moons of Jupiter, particularly Europa. But these observations have also raised many unanswered questions regarding the oceanic motions generated under the ice, or the mechanisms leading to the geological features observed on Europa.
By means of direct numerical simulations of Europa’s interior, we show here that Jupiter’s magnetic field generates a retrograde oceanic jet at the equator, which may influence the global dynamics of Europa’s ocean and contribute to the formation of some of its surface features by applying a unidirectional torqueon Europa’s ice shell.
Illustration of Europa’s outer ice crust. It’s thought that water from the ocean below can reach the surface through cracks or volcanic vents.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The researchers used data from the Galileo mission to Jupiter, which ended in 2003. They theorized that Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field might produce movement in Europa’s salty subsurface ocean, and their numerical simulations confirmed this idea. They said the jet stream in Europa’s ocean should be close to the moon’s equator, moving a few centimeters per second, and flowing in the opposite direction of the moon’s spin.
Such a jet stream could help explain why Europa’s surface is so cracked. The flow of the jet stream opposite the moon’s rotation would cause stress in the outer ice shell, forming the cracks. Gissinger told New Scientist:
It will not slow down the entire moon because the tidal forces from Jupiter are huge and will keep Europa’s rotation the same, but it will create these cracks that we have seen.
Another calculated effect would be thinner ice near the poles, since some of the energy from the magnetic field would dissipate off the moon’s surface, near the poles. And that is exactly what has been observed. Possible geysers have been seen on Europa’s surface, similar to ones found on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which also has a global subsurface ocean.
What makes a jet stream even more interesting is that on Earth, the Gulf Stream helps to move around compounds that are needed for life. This may increase the chances of life existing in Europa’s ocean. As noted by Gissinger:
We know on Earth that the Gulf Stream is very important for transporting compounds which are important for life.
Europa’s ocean is thought to be quite similar to the deep ocean environment on Earth. It’s pictured as dark and salty, with hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor that could also serve as warm niches for life, just as they do on Earth. Life thrives around those kinds of vents in Earth’s oceans, which provide both heat and nutrients. Could the same be happening on Europa? Only further study of Europa will help to answer that question. To that end, space scientists are planning a new mission to this moon of Jupiter’s – Europa Clipper mission – to be launched sometime in the early 2020s.
Diagram of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean. Europa’s jet stream is thought to be quite similar to its earthly counterpart.
Image via Nature.
Europa Clipper will conduct multiple close flybys of Europa, using advanced instruments to analyze the moon’s surface and the ocean itself in much more detail than ever before. A lander mission may also follow Europa Clipper later, which would actually touch down on the icy surface and examine the ice and regolith for possible evidence of life that may have been deposited on the surface by geysers or other upwelling from the ocean below.
Europa’s ocean and the subsurface oceans of other moons like Enceladus and Titan have shown that water worlds are actually common in our solar system – and perhaps in other solar systems as well. The new study shows that while Earth’s oceans may be on the surface of the planet, hidden oceans on other worlds can still share many of the same characteristics, making them exciting environments for exploration.
Composite image of Jupiter and Europa.
Image via the Galileo spacecraft and NASA.
Bottom line: If there is a jet stream in Europa’s ocean, it would not only make that ocean even more similar to ones on Earth, but could even increase the chances of life in that deep, dark, alien abyss.
Each spring, flocks of migratory birds travel northward from their sunny vacations in the south, following a flight plan that’s ingrained in their DNA. Birds — like bats, bees, wolves, bears, and countless other animals — have the ability to use theEarth’s magnetic fieldasa map tonavigate the planet. We humans seem directionless in comparison, but as new research in eNeurosuggests, it’s probably not because we lack the tools.
A team including Caltech geoscientist Joseph Kirschvink, Ph.D., and neuroscientist Shin Shimojo, Ph.D., show in the new paper that the human brain responds to changes in the electromagnetic field, even if humans don’t realize it.
“Our results indicate that human brains are indeed collecting and selectively processing directional input from magnetic field receptors,” they write in their preprint on biorXiv.µ
The Earth's magnetic field lines are directed toward magnetic north and south, depending on the hemisphere.
The Earth’s electromagnetic field is generated by electric currents created from the swirling molten iron in its core. In the northern hemisphere, all field lines are oriented toward magnetic north, and ditto for the south. Those lines are what birds and their field-reading kin use to navigate — and, as the new evidence suggests, humans may be able to sense them too. When participants in the study went through simulated shifts in the Earth’s magnetic field, their brain activity reacted in predictable patterns, suggesting the human body is equipped for magnetoreception, even if we’re not aware of it.
It’s impossible to shift the planet’s actual magnetic field, so the team built a highly insulated chamber in which they could create “ecologically relevant rotations of Earth-strength magnetic fields” for the person sitting inside it. As the team rotated the magnetic field, they also measured the electrical activity of the participants’ brains using electroencephalography (EEG).
The experimental setup, designed to allow shifts in the magnetic field in one direction, any direction, or a "sham" shift.
In some people, with each rotation of the field, the team noticed a pattern neuroscientists have documented before: a sudden drop in amplitude in the alpha oscillation, the main brain wave on an EEG of a person at rest. That drop, called an “alpha event-related dysynchronization” (or alpha-ERD for short), is usually observed when a person is suddenly confronted with an external stimulus, whether visual, auditory, or physical. The participants didn’t know their brains were reacting, but their EEGs gave it away.
In total, 34 people “from the Caltech population” participated in the various experiments, in which the magnetic field was shifted in a range of directions, rotated, or not manipulated at all. Four of those people, the team writes, had especially stable alpha-ERDs even over follow-up experiments, suggesting their brains were always attuned to changes in the “normal” magnetic field. The other responses were more variable, though the general pattern of alpha-ERDs occurring in response to magnetic field shifts was clear.
Interestingly, the tests confirmed these people were attuned to magnetic north, as they were conducted in the northern hemisphere. A successful southern hemisphere follow-up experiment would further support their hypothesis.
The changes in brain activity, as Kirschvink told The Guardian, represent the brain “freaking out” in response to sudden changes in the environment. However, it’s still not clear how the brain is picking up on the magnetic field. Some researchers have suggested that retinal proteins called “cryptochromes” might react to the magnetic field, but Kirschvink predicts the body might contain specialized magnetosensory cells housing iron clusters that move like the needle of a compass. Unfortunately, finding these magnetosensory receptors has been compared to finding a needle in a haystack. “The receptors could be in your left toe,” Kirschvink told Science in 2016.
There’s a lot left to learn about where this ability to sense the magnetic fields came from, how it might have been used, and why we can’t use it anymore. But this study is an important first step in exploring an innate part of ourselves that we didn’t know existed. The timing couldn’t be better, as some scientists warn that we are overdue for a major shift in the Earth’s magnetic field.
“For now,” the team writes, “alpha-ERD remains a blank signature for a wider, unexplored range of magnetoreceptive processing.”
Abstract
Magnetoreception, the perception of the geomagnetic field, is a sensory modality well established across all major groups of vertebrates and some invertebrates, but its presence in humans has been tested rarely, yielding inconclusive results. We report here a strong, specific human brain response to ecologically-relevant rotations of Earth-strength magnetic fields. Following geomagnetic stimulation, a drop in amplitude of EEG alpha oscillations (8-13 Hz) occurred in a repeatable manner. Termed alpha event-related desynchronization (alpha-ERD), such a response is associated with sensory and cognitive processing of external stimuli. Biophysical tests showed that the neural response was sensitive to the dynamic components and axial alignment of the field but also to the static components and polarity of the field. Thispattern of results implicates ferromagnetism as the biophysical basis for the sensory transduction and provides a basis to start the behavioral exploration of human magnetoreception.
Antarctica BOMBSHELL: How scientists made SHOCKING find after drilling 500ft below ice
Antarctica BOMBSHELL: How scientists made SHOCKING find after drilling 500ft below ice
SCIENTISTS drilled 466ft into an Antarctica ice sheet in a bid to learn more about the history of the South Pole – but what they uncovered left them shocked, a documentary revealed.
Antarcticais the Earth’s southernmost continent, located on the South Pole, where temperatures can be as low as -90C. Anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 scientists reside there at various research facilities, carrying out their own experiments. However, one investigation left a team of researchers astonished.
Amazon Prime’s “Antarctica – An Adventure Of A Different Nature” revealed the moment scientists dug almost 500ft into an ice sheet to learn about the icy continent’s history.
The 1991 documentary explained: “A core drill digs deep into the ice sheet.
“Ice layers can read like the rings of trees and the climate record goes back 100,000 years.
“Entrapped bubbles of ancient air – the ice cores tell a simple story.
Scientists dig below Antarctica
(Image: GETTY)
The team dug below the ice
(Image: AMAZON PRIME)
Methane, strontium 90, lead, increased carbon dioxide, we are changing the air and we can see the effects
Antarctica – An Adventure Of A Different Nature
“When the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere change, so does the climate.”
However, when the scientists analysed the ice layer, they were left stunned.
The series explained: “A day, a week, a month, a year, a decade – the core came from 466ft down and its ice fell as snow about 4,000 years ago.
“From the crystal of the ice, the news from Antarctica is bad.
They drilled into the ice sheet to take a saple
(Image: AMAZON PRIME)
They then removed the ice from the drill
(Image: AMAZON PRIME)
"Methane, strontium 90, lead, increased carbon dioxide, we are changing the air and we can see the effects.
“20 years ago, scientists predicted man-made chemicals would thin the planet’s protective layer of ozone.
Since 1991, the United Nations Environment Programme has sponsored a series of technical reports on the Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion to reverse the effects.
In 2007, a report was released that showed the hole in the ozone layer was recovering and was the smallest it had been for around a decade.
The 2010 paper read: "Over the past decade, global ozone and ozone in the Arctic and Antarctic regions is no longer decreasing but is not yet increasing.
“The ozone layer outside the Polar regions is projected to recover to its pre-1980 levels before the middle of this century.
They took a large sample of ice
(Image: AMAZON PRIME)
“In contrast, the springtime ozone hole over the Antarctic is expected to recover much later."
In 2012, NASA confirmed the hole had decreased once again.
They revealed: "Warmer air temperatures high above the Antarctic led to the second smallest season ozone hole in 20 years averaging 17.9 million square kilometres.
“The hole reached its maximum size for the season on September 22, stretching to 21.2 million square kilometres (13.8 million square miles)."
Antarctica is an untouched nation, used for scientific research`
(Image: GETTY)
The frozen desert is home to some of science's most amazing discoveries.
He told BBC Radio 4 listeners: “We know there were dinosaurs there and we know there were giant penguins too – 6ft tall in fact.
“We reconstructed a penguin from a single metatarsal that was found – it is amazing what you can do with one bone.
“So we know it was a much more interesting continent previously.”
The unearthed bones dated back 37 million years and new studies show the species could have measured almost twice the height of today's emperor penguins.
It is believed the penguin could have weighed up to 19 stone, making it possible to dive deeper and stay underwater for longer.
Are octopuses ALIENS? 'There's something going on behind their eyes'
Are octopuses ALIENS? 'There's something going on behind their eyes'
A MARINE biologist has had her say on an extraordinary claim that octopuses evolved from extraterrestrial “cryopreserved” eggs hundreds of millions of years ago, which if true might explain their extraordinary intelligence and complexity.
Dr Helen Scales is due to deliver a talk at the Cambridge Science Festival tomorrow at which she will consider the theory, as well looking at the reasons why they are so clever. The 2018 study, entitled Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? was co-authored by a group of 33 scientists and published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology journal. The paper suggests that the explanation for the sudden flourishing of life during the Cambrian era – often referred to as the Cambrian Explosion – lies in the stars, as a result of the Earth being bombarded by clouds of organic molecules.
Octopuses are thought to be the most intelligent invertebrates
The paper states: “The genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes more than is present in Homo sapiens.
“One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth - most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilised Octopus eggs.”
Dr Scales, whose new book, Octopuses: A Ladybird Expert Book, is published on Thursday, March 21, does not actually buy the idea herself, saying: “They claim they have evidence to support their theory that extra terrestrial viruses came to earth around 500 million years ago and kick starting the Cambrian explosion.
“But there really is no proof that this is where viruses came from, and this doesn’t explain how they formed in the first place.
“Genetic evidence tells us that octopuses evolved from squid ancestors around 135 million years ago.
“The authors of the study argue that other unconventional ideas in the history of science have later turned out to be true. But that really doesn’t prove anything.
“There are plenty of other outlandish theories that aren’t true.
“Really, this paper just poses an interesting idea, which is perhaps worth thinking about, but there's no proof backing it up.”
There have been suggestions that octopuses have extraterrestrial origins
(Image: GETTY)
“Every time I've met an octopus in the wild I've had a strong sense that they're watching me and contemplating what I'm up to
Dr Helen Scales
Nevertheless, she emphasised the uniqueness of the remarkable cephalopods, often regarded as the most intelligent of all invertebrates.
She said: “There's something instantly captivating about Octopuses. I think it's because they look and behave so differently from any other animals.
“All those arms and suckers that twist and hold onto things, their ability to change shape and colour with such sophistication and control, the way they can squeeze into tiny spaces then peep out with those big eyes watching you.
“Every time I've met an octopus in the wild I've had a strong sense that they're watching me and contemplating what I'm up to.
Despite their incredible evolution octopuses only live a brief period of time (Image: GETTY)
“There's definitely something powerful going on behind their eyes.”
During her talk, Dr Scales will consider why octopuses have blue blood, and three hearts, why they navigate the seas by jet propulsion, and how their massive brains extend into their arms, giving them special sensory abilities.
She added: “What really marks them out is that fact they they’ve evolved highly complex nervous systems and complex behaviours that are not at all normal for invertebrates, animals without backbones.
“In my talk I’ll be considering how and why octopuses evolved such big brains, and what they tell us about the evolution of intelligence.
Octopuses use jet propulion - one of their many fascinating traits
(Image: GETTY)
“Octopuses are highly intelligent, especially compared to all the other invertebrates. They have complex nervous systems with around 500 million nerves, half of them clustered in their heads and the rest in their arms, controlling their agile limbs and super-sensitive suckers.
“Captive and wild octopuses have shown remarkable abilities to solve problems and use tools, like carrying two halves of an empty coconut around and assembling them as a shelter when they want to hide.”
Yet despite all this, most octopuses live for just two years on average, a fact which consistently baffles biologists.
Dr Scales said: “Their short life span is one of the really surprising things about octopuses. It’s undeniably odd that these smart animals live such rich lives, but for such a short time.
“It’s not exactly clear why they’ve evolved to live fast and die young. It could come down to a build up of genetic mutations that limit their life span.
“Essentially the theory goes that because octopuses are soft-bodied and highly vulnerable to predation, it means genetic mutations that act late in life tend not to be removed from the population: a mutation that causes, say, a break down of eye pigments leading to blindness, won’t affect many octopuses because they are mostly already dead and eaten by the time the mutation kicks in.
“Accumulating such late-acting mutations could lead to the situation most octopuses now face, of apparently being pre-programmed to die young. Not all do, though.
“An octopus in the deep sea has been seen brooding her clutch of eggs continuously for 4.5 years.”
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UFO sightings: NASA expert urges to take alien claims SERIOUSLY - 'There must be life'
UFO sightings: NASA expert urges to take alien claims SERIOUSLY - 'There must be life'
UFO claims and stories of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth need to be considered without blanket scepticism, a physicist and former NASA researcher has shockingly claimed.
NASA’s hunt for proof ofalienlife is at the forefront of the space agency’s deep space exploration. But here on Earth, many conspiracy theorists and self-appointed UFO-hunters are already certain aliens visit Earth on a regular basis. Most of these alien claims, supposed UFO sightings and stories of mysterious crop circles appearing overnight are immediately dismissed by the scientific community. A former NASA researcher and physicist at the University of Albany, however, has argued immediate scepticism to all UFO-related theories is counterproductive.
Kevin Knuth, an associate professor at Albany, argued in an opinion piece for Cosmos Magazine, the odds of life existing outside of Earth are pretty high.
The “unsettling and refreshing” possibility is exactly why, he argued, more attention needs to be paid to what is happening in the skies.
Dr Knuth said: “I think UFO scepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy.
“A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out.
UFO sightings: A former NASA researchers hopes alien life exists
(Image: GETTY)
“In the end, the sceptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion
Kevin Knuth, University of Albany
“The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.”
The main reason why scientists are exhorted about the prospect of alien life, outside of questionable UFO footage, is the so-called Fermi Paradox.
Nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi explored the probability of life developing outside of Earth after he considered some 300 billion stars exist in the galaxy, many of which are billions of years older than our own Sun.
Even if intelligent life was to develop on a small fraction of these planets in the near 14 billion-year-long history of the universe, tens of thousands of alien species should technically exist outside of Earth.
Dr Knuth said this might in and of itself does not prove aliens do exist somewhere in the Milky Way but the prospect is nonetheless exciting.
The biggest problem faced by human explorers today is the lack of speedy and efficient interstellar travel technology.
The scientist said: “With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilisation like ours to colonise our Milky Way galaxy.
UFO sightings: There are enough solar systems in the universe for life to have developedµ
(Image: GETTY)
UFO sightings: There is no concrete evidence to prove UFOs exist
(Image: GETTY)
“Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilisations?
“This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilisations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.”
Unfortunately, Dr Knuth said, there has been no “smoking gun” evidence, which could once and for all prove the existence of UFOs.
But the topic remains an area worthy of interest, study and serious debate for as long as even the slightest possibility of alien life exists.
Dr Knuth said it would greatly benefit the scientific community to try and better understand alien visitors should they ever arrive.
He said: “Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.”
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET SpaceX is begonnen met de bouw van het eerste prototype voor zijn ‘Starship’. Topman Elon Muks heeft dit bevestigd met een korte videoclip waarin het te gebruiken hitteschild wordt getest.
Elon Musk zegt op Twitter dat de tweede rakettrap, het gedeelte van de Starship-raket dat in de ruimte komt, momenteel al wordt gebouwd. Dit is de nieuwe, grote, geheel herbruikbare raket waarmee onder meer naar Mars moet worden gevlogen en die voorheen bekend stond onder de naam Big Falcon Rocket.
Momenteel is SpaceX ook al bezig om de roestvaststalen hitteschilden van de Starship te testen. Deze hitteschilden, die worden gevormd door zeshoekige tegels, hebben een beperkte hittetest succesvol doorstaan. Daarbij zijn temperaturen van 1.375 graden Celsius gehaald, wat volgens Musk de temperatuur is waar het ruimteschip mee te maken krijgt bij de terugkeer in de dampkring.
Dit hitteschild is gemaakt met een technologie die transpirational cooling heet. Kleine gaatjes in het hitteschild waar water of methaan doorheen gaat, moeten de buitenkant koelen. Dit moet eventuele schade aan het hitteschild beperken en ervoor zorgen dat de raket weer snel herbruikbaar is. Transpirational cooling wordt toegevoegd zodra er erosie optreedt bij het hitteschild, legde Musk uit.
Musk liet ook weten dat SpaceX ‘hopelijk’ nog deze week begint met het testen van de kleine testversie van StarShip, genaamd Starhopper. Deze wordt uitgerust met een Raptor, de methaanraketmotor waarmee de grote Starship uiteindelijk wordt uitgerust. De Hopper zal tijdens tests hooguit ietwat van het platform komen en nog niet echt opstijgen. In januari viel deze kleine testversie nog om door een sterke wind.
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Clif High: UFOs, Alien Encounters, & Secret Space via Richard Dolan
Clif High: UFOs, Alien Encounters, & Secret Space via Richard Dolan
Clif High and Predictive Linguistics. PL is the process of using computer software to aggregate vast amounts of written text from the internet by categories delineated by the emotional content of the words and using the result to make forecasts based on the emotional ‘tone’ changes within the larger population. A form of ‘collective sub-conscious expression’ is a good way to think of it.
Predictive linguistics can be used to forecast trends at many different levels, from the detail of sales to individuals, all the way up to forecasts about emerging global population trends. Richard Dolan is one of the world’s leading researchers and writers on the subject of UFOs and believes that they constitute the greatest mystery of our time. He is the author of two volumes of history, UFOs and the National Security State, both ground-breaking works which together provide the most factually complete and accessible narrative of the UFO subject available anywhere.
He also co-authored a speculative book about the future, A.D. After Disclosure, the first-ever analysis not only of how UFO secrecy might end, but of the all-important question: what happens next?
The powerful meteorblast exploded near Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula, over the open waters of the Bering Sea. Military satellite over the region tracked the meteor blast to around 16 miles (25.6km) above the ground. The incident occurred on December 18 last year, when the fireball entered the atmosphere at breakneck speeds of about 71,582mph or 32km per second. The meteor never reached the ground but NASA estimates the blast was more powerful than the devastating nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
NASA meteor: A monstrous fireball exploded over the Bering Sea
(Image: NA)
Kelly Fast, an asteroid expert at NASA, said of the latest meteor impact: “That was 40 percent the energy release of Chelyabinsk, but it was over the Bering Sea so it didn't have the same type of effect or show up in the news.
That was 40 percent the energy release of Chelyabinsk
Kelly Fast, NASA
“That's another thing we have in our defence, there's plenty of water on the planet.”
According to NASA, the meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a steep angle of around seven degrees.
The meteor’s explosion was then detected by military satellites and the information was relayed to NASA.
Dr Johnson, said the fireball flew towards the ground through an area populated by commercial aeroplane rates between North America and Asia.
Asteroids and comets of various sizes pelt the Earth on a regular basis but rarely does an object big enough to cause widespread destruction approach the planet.
The real danger comes from so-called “Near-Earth Objects” (NEOs) measuring more than 460ft (140m) in diameter.
In 2005, the US Congress tasked NASA with detecting and cataloguing the up to 90 percent of these objects within the boundaries of our solar system.
NASA meteor: The giant explosion remained largely undetected
(Image: GETTY)
NASA meteor: The fireball blast was bigger than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb
(Image: GETTY)
Space rocks this big are dubbed “Potentially Hazardous Asteroids” (PHAs) because they have the potential to wipe out or severely damage entire regions.
A 2018 joint-report between NASA and the White House said: “NEO impacts of varying size could have major environmental, economic, and geopolitical consequences detrimental to the United States, even if the impact is outside US territory.
“The direct effects from a NEO impact depend on its size, composition, and impact speed.
“Small, rocky NEOs are likely to explode before hitting the ground, resulting in an airburst that could produce a wider area of moderate damage compared with a similarly sized metallic object that would strike the ground and cause heavier, more localised devastation.”
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
What's inside a Martian meteorite: X-ray study on rare...
Space ROCKS: Expedition bags haul of 'lost' meteorites...
Twin satellites dubbed Wall-E and Eve fall silent months...
Cloudy with a chance of dust storms: NASA's InSight lander...
Touchdown on Mars! Jubilation as NASA’s InSight lander...
