See CRISPR in action in a new video

BY ELENA MOTIVANS

CRISPR is a powerful gene editing tool that can accurately add in or take out bits of DNA. There’s a lot of buzz about it because it is cheap, easy, and precise. There is also a lot of mystery surrounding CRISPR, perhaps because of its more controversial uses, such as plans of resurrecting the woolly mammoth or editing human embryos, and more sci-fi uses, like eliminating malaria and other diseases from mosquitoes and growing human organs in pigs. However, right now, it’s causing its biggest revolution in the lab, where scientists are now able to manipulate and control any gene easily.

CRISPR is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. These are actually just sequences which repeat at regular intervals with spaces in-between them. Bacteria use these spaces to keep a genetic memory of viruses that have invaded it in the past. If that virus dares to show its face again, the system will recognize it and destroy it. The sequences can’t detect and destroy viruses by themselves, but they have two helpers: the enzyme Cas9 and guide RNA.

Researchers from Kanazawa University and the University of Tokyo in Japan have published a new study in Nature Communications in which they visualized CRISPR-Cas9 in action, cleaving a strand of DNA in two. They visualized the process for a more detailed look at what CRISPR-Cas9 actually does. The technique that they used is called high-speed atomic-force microscopy and uses mechanical probes to get good resolution images and videos down to a nanometer. Now, you can watch the CRISPR-Cas9 complex work in real-time and real-space.

CRISPR-Cas9 in action (high-speed AFM)

hnisimasu @hnisimasu

CRISPR-Cas9 is like a hand with scissors. The guide RNA is the hand that directs the scissors to bits of DNA matching info in the genetic memory, leading it to the target. When found, Cas9 are like scissors that cut the DNA and destroy it. In this video, you can see the molecular scissors at work cleaving the DNA at the end of the clip. The original sequence can be destroyed or a new sequence can be patched into the gap.

It is pretty amazing that we can see exactly what happens when CRISPR-Cas9 is at work.

Journal reference:

Shibata, M., Nishimasu, H., Kodera, N., Hirano, S., Ando, T., Uchihashi, T. & Nureki, O. (2017) Real-space and real-time dynamics of CRISPR-Cas9 visualized by high-speed atomic force microscopy. Nature Communications 8, 1430.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Bizarre UFO Hovers Above A Navy Base in California

Extraterrestrial enthusiasts have been buzzing about the images that show an unidentified flying object near an American Navy base.

The photos in question show a flying saucer-shaped craft hovering above the ground with a helicopter flying nearby.

The five pictures, reportedly taken in the Californian desert, were released by the man known as Keith Bradshaw in a bid to find the truth on aliens.

The snaps were done in 2007, near the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, but he has been too nervous to show anyone.

After an old friend who worked on the Navy base shared with him about the mysterious craft, he sneaked out to the desert. According to Mr Bradshaw, he heard the sound coming from the helicopter as he approached the base. Then he saw the silver UFO with several military vehicles parked close by.

He took off his shirt, blended with his surroundings and spent about 10 minutes watching the flying saucer.

He saw the UFO wobbling along close to the ground and appearing to be very unstable. Then it would freeze in position, go up and sit at a particular height for a few minutes, added Bradshaw. He said that the mysterious flying object did not make any noise that he could hear.

Some of the world’s top UFO experts examined the images. British UFO investigator Philip Mantle said that the snaps could turn out to be one of the most controversial on record when it comes to UFO sighting pictures.

Former RAF and BAE Airbus division employee Jason Gleaves said that they could be genuine but warned that technology and software today may make fake looks authentic.

Former US Navy Physicist Dr Bruce Maccabee said that the photographs could not prove either way.

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

Zwicky Transient Facility team members install the instrument's new camera. 

Caltech Optical Observatories

New California telescope aims to catch quickly moving celestial events

By Daniel Clery

Astronomers in California have taken a telescope built before most of them were born and converted it into a new instrument dedicated to one of the newest and fastest-moving branches of astronomy: spotting objects in the sky that change from one day to the next.

The new Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), which today opened its eye to the sky, was created by retooling the 1.2-meter Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California, which, starting in 1948, took pictures of the night sky onto specially curved glass photographic plates. The ZTF, named in honor of Fritz Zwicky, the Bulgaria-born astronomer who worked for most of his career at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, has been fitted with a new camera made up of 16 charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors. That will enable it to snap single images covering an area more than 200 times the size of the full moon.

With such a wide field of view—the biggest of any telescope more than 0.5 meters wide—the ZTF can survey the whole northern sky visible from Palomar every night. By doing so, astronomers can spot anything that changes from the previous night’s images, enabling them to identify quickly changing celestial phenomena, including supernovae, variable and binary stars, the active cores of distant galaxies, potentially Earth-threatening asteroids, and the flash of merging neutron stars that could also emit gravitational waves. 

Although the scientific haul is expected to be high, the ZTF is also a testbed for a larger upcoming instrument, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will begin observing from Chile in 2022. The LSST is expected to be so prolific that researchers will have to automate the process of sifting through observed events to find ones worth following up, and then getting a more detailed spectrum. To build such automated systems, ZTF researchers are involved in efforts to create the necessary data processing systems and robotic follow-up telescopes. “The headline goal is to get [an automated system] working and implemented in a way that astronomers can interact with it and use it,” says Adam Bolton of the National Science Foundation’s National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona.

Scaling up

In the past, the discovery of sudden events like supernovae was largely a matter of chance; a fortunate accident while astronomers were looking at something steadier. But in recent years interest in quickly changing phenomena has grown and a range of instruments has sprung up that use small telescopes to scan the sky on a nightly basis. The ZTF continues this trend but with a larger telescope to see fainter and more distant objects.

A key target will be a particular kind of supernova, known as type Ia, that is an important celestial yardstick because it is thought to always explode with the same luminosity. It was by studying type Ia supernovae that astronomers discovered in the 1990s that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, an effect ascribed to the mysterious dark energy. But what causes these explosions is not known for sure, so lingering doubts hang over their reliability as a measure. With the ZTF expecting to find thousands of type Ias per year, astronomers hope to put those doubts to rest and improve the accuracy of this yardstick.

The team behind the ZTF—which includes Caltech and partners at other U.S. universities and institutions in Israel, Sweden, Germany, and Taiwan—also expects to see each year more than a hundred superluminous supernovae, extra-bright explosions thought to be linked to gamma ray bursts, and a dozen or so tidal disruption events, flashes that occur when a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole and is torn apart by its extreme gravity. Only a handful of such events have so far been confirmed, but astronomers hope if they can see more they will illuminate the notoriously camera-shy gravitational giants lurking at the centers of galaxies.

To achieve this, the team had to create a compact camera with a very wide field of view—47 square degrees. The camera’s 16 CCDs and electronics are enclosed in a cryostat to keep the detectors cold, and all of the gear must be small enough to fit in the center of the telescope at its focal point. The telescope’s drive motors were also changed so that the instrument can slew quickly from one patch of sky to another during observations. “It was amazing to take an old telescope and turn it into a supertelescope,” says Shrinivas Kulkarni, director of Caltech Optical Observatories, which has led the project.

New era of automation

Next decade, the LSST is expected to conduct regular surveys that are similar to the ZTF’s, but its 8.4-meter mirror will be able to see much more distant and fainter objects. The LSST is expected to detect as many as 10 million “events”—objects that change or appear—every night. “The ZTF will be an excellent forerunner for the fire hose of data expected from the LSST,” says Jonathan Grindlay of Harvard University, founding chair of the American Astronomical Society’s working group on time-domain astronomy.

That’s why automating data analyses will be critical. Researchers say stargazing will inevitably join forces with big data approaches, machine learning, and so-called event brokers, programs that can pick out the interesting events and then instruct robotic telescopes to take a closer look and obtain a spectrum so that an astronomer can peruse it later. Researchers at NOAO are working on such a broker system, as are others at the University of Washington in Seattle—who are partnered with the ZTF team—and elsewhere. “This is the best way to get ready” for the LSST, Kulkarni says. “We’ll go live, take data, and start doing things. ZTF will be the laboratory.”

The third part of the process—automated follow-up telescopes that can obtain spectra so astronomers can characterize events—is perhaps the least well prepared. The ZTF has teamed up with the Las Cumbres Observatory, which runs a worldwide network of 18 robotic telescopes, and the Liverpool Telescope, a robotic scope in the Canary Islands run by Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom. “The challenge is to put all the pieces together so that scientific intelligence can be applied at the right time,” Bolton says.

If the whole system works, it may herald a new era when astronomers no longer have to spend long nights tending to observations but can simply turn up to work in the morning and have a whole menu of celestial delights waiting for them. Less romantic perhaps but, Kulkarni says: “The most efficient way to do astronomy is to get astronomers out of the dome.”

*Correction 14 November, 4:15 p.m.: An earlier version of this article misstated where Fritz Zwicky was born. 

{ http://science.sciencemag.org/ }

UNEXPLAINED DISK-LIKE SKY PHENOMENON BLOCKS THE SUN OVER CHILE

Residents of Chile have witnessed a strange disk-shaped anomaly blocking the sun.

Arnoldo Liendo Arce from Antofagasta in Chile managed to capture a strange phenomenon that was witnessed by many residents on November 13, 2017.

MAN FILMING HALO OR SUNDOG ALSO CAPTURES STRANGE DISK SHAPED CLOUD

The man was out on the streets with other residents and filming what he thought was a Halo or Sundog, and he not only managed to capture the strange iridescent rainbow cloud but also an even stranger cloud formation that had formed inside the Sundog or Halo, and it was a dark disk that blocked out the sun.  

Sundogs and Halos are an atmospheric optical phenomenon that is caused when the sunlight reflects ice crystals in the atmosphere. However, there is not usually a strange cloud formation covering up the Halo or Sundog. In this instance, the strange disk cloud shape made for an even more spectacular sighting while people went about their day to day business.

WAS THE RAINBOW CLOUD ASSOCIATED WITH AN EARTHQUAKE?

The first video showed off the weird cloud formation with the Halo or Sundog, and another video revealed the colorful rainbow cloud that resident’s saw, which was suggested to be an earthquake light or sign that there was going to be an earthquake coming.

The iridescent clouds were a beautiful sight to witness by the residents of Chile, spiraling out in a circular pattern with the rainbow effect being seen mostly on the outer rim of the circle. The remainder of the sky was strangely clear, which added to the eerie effect. The strange disk-shaped cloud can also be seen blocking out the sun in the middle.

The second video is the more stable of the two as it does not circle around and this time it shows the stunning rainbow effect in a line or arch, one above and one below with the sun in the middle. Whether it was a Sundog or Halo, there is no doubt that it was a spectacular show for those living in Chile.

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{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

CLOSEST EARTH-LIKE PLANET EVER DISCOVERED: JUST A COUPLE OF LIGHT YEARS AWAY!

A team of researchers just used the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) to discover a low-mass alien planet — also known as an “exoplanet” — orbiting the red dwarf star Ross 128. Notably, this planet has a mass that is similar to Earth’s.  

In fact, it’s thought that the planet, formally known as Ross 128 b, could be similar to Earth in terms of both its size and surface temperature. And it is just 11 light-years from our solar system, making it the second-closest temperate planet to ever be detected. Ultimately, the little world comes in just after Proxima b.

“This discovery is based on more than a decade of HARPS intensive monitoring together with state-of-the-art data reduction and analysis techniques,” said Nicola Astudillo-Defru of the University of Geneva, who co-authored the paper outlining the exoplanet’s discovery, in a press release. “Only HARPS has demonstrated such a precision, and it remains the best planet hunter of its kind, 15 years after it began operations.”

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THIS IS HOW NASA USES STARLIGHT TO DISCOVER EXOPLANETS IN DEEP SPACE  

STRANGE SIGNALS FROM THE NEARBY RED DWARF STAR ROSS 128

The team behind the work notes that, while most red dwarf stars experience extreme solar flares — flares that bathe their planets in deadly radiation — Ross 128 is a “quiet star.” As a result, its planets are thought to be the closest comfortable locations for any possible alien life. Thus, the discovery of an Earth-mass world orbiting the star is significant. “Proxima Centauri is particularly active, with frequent, powerful flares that may sterilize (if not stripped out) its atmosphere,” lead author Xavier Bonfils of Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble explained. “Ross 128 is one of the quietest stars of our sample, and although it is a little further away from us, it makes for an excellent alternative target.” READ MORE: http://www.disclose.tv/news/closest_earthlike_planet_ever_discovered_just_a_couple_of_light_years_away/140837

The team behind the work notes that, while most red dwarf stars experience extreme solar flares — flares that bathe their planets in deadly radiation — Ross 128 is a “quiet star.” As a result, its planets are thought to be the closest comfortable locations for any possible alien life. Thus, the discovery of an Earth-mass world orbiting the star is significant.

“Proxima Centauri is particularly active, with frequent, powerful flares that may sterilize (if not stripped out) its atmosphere,” lead author Xavier Bonfils of Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble explained. “Ross 128 is one of the quietest stars of our sample, and although it is a little further away from us, it makes for an excellent alternative target.”  

The orbit of Ross 128 b is 20 times more proximal (20 times closer) than the distance between the Earth and the Sun – but the planet receives only 1.38 times more irradiation, which keeps its equilibrium temperature between -60°C and 20°C (-76°F and 68°F). But while scientists do believe that it is, in fact, a temperate planet, there’s still no confirmation that it lies within the habitable zone, which is the zone surrounding a star in which liquid water is able to exist.

“Ten years from now, we will be capable, thanks to giant telescopes, to directly ‘see’ the planet and characterize its atmosphere,” Astudillo-Defru told explaiend. “In the meantime, we need to better constrain theoretical models to elucidate if liquid water can be found on Ross 128 b’s surface.”

As was previously noted, Ross 128 is currently 11 light-years from Earth, but it’s moving toward us and, as a result, it will one day be our nearest stellar neighbor…not for 79,000 years, but in cosmic terms, that is just the blink of an eye ( via futurism.com ).

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{  http://www.disclose.tv/ }

USS NIMITZ UFO VIDEO INTRIGUES RESEARCHERS AROUND THE WORLD

Researchers around the globe have been intrigued by a video that was said to have been taken in 2004 from a USS Nimitz based Super Hornet fighter jet.

FIGHTER JET SCREEN VIDEO SEEMS TO SHOW UFO FROM 2004 

The video apparently shows an object in the distance that is not acting in any way like a typical aircraft, and as the fighter jet gets closer to it, the strange UFO then veers away out of sight.  

The video and story about the sighting of the UFO from the jet aircraft came to light in 2015 and it was rekindled recently when Tom DeLonge, the lead singer with Blink-182, brought it up when talking about the creation of the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science.

USS NIMITZ TIC TAC UFO FLIR FOOTAGE  

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John B. Alexander from Las Vegas, the author, said that the incident did occur but he has not been able to confirm the authenticity of the video. Alexander has written numerous books on conspiracies and UFOs and he told a news station that he thought the video had come from the US Navy. In an email, he said that he had asked one of the people who was said to have seen it in a classified version. He said that the source was very highly placed. He went on to say that the video was thought to be real but then said do not confirm the authenticity. He also said that other videos would more than likely soon reveal similar incidents that had taken place.

UFO WAS SAID TO BE 100 MILES FROM SAN DIEGO  

DeLonge did not show the video, which was said to have occurred during 2004 with the fighter jet coming from the aircraft carrier the Nimitz and recording various UFOs which were said to be about 100 miles from San Diego. However, he did tease that one of the goals of the group was to release video and documents that had previously been classified.

Since that time what has been said to be a video taken from the display that the pilot was seeing has been seen on many internet sites and YouTube. However, the origin of the video is not certain. Two UFO researchers said that it had first been seen in 2007 on a website in Germany that was run film students.

VIDEO WAS TRACKED TO ORIGINATE FROM GERMAN FILM MAKER WEBSITE

Isaac Kol from London is s researcher and he often posts on the Above Top Secret website. Recently he made a post that said in 2007 he had tracked an online copy of the video and it took him back to the German film students. It was said that they specialized in the creation of science fiction movies that had lots of special effects. He said that in 2007 he had been inclined to believe that the video was, in fact, a hoax. He went on to say that he found it interesting that the current talks about the video ignore the provenance of the video.

In an email to a news station, Kol said that he does not claim to have debunked the footage but that he has shown the place that it originally came from and it raised red flags which needed more investigation and evidence.

Ufologist Robert Powell from Texas said that the video had been found on a German film site and he was suspicious about it due to that fact. He went on to say that there had not been any proof that the film students had doctored the video. He also said that as far as he knows no one has looked at the video and determined that it has been edited in any way. Powell said that he had filed a request for freedom of information to get the documents related to incidents with the Nimitz which related to November 2004.

DOES THE PILOTS COMMUNICATION WITH FLIGHT CONTROL EXIST?

Alexander said that he thinks that the pilot’s communication audio tapes with flight control exist somewhere. The main reason that researchers have found the video intriguing is the fact that the UFOs seemed to baffle the best fighter jets of the navy and their radar systems in 2004.

A description of the anomalous aerial vehicles dropping down from more than 80,000 feet was put onto a website and this was based on returns from the radar, they were then said to have hovered about 50 feet from the water in only seconds. The objects then moved away at extremely fast speed with turn rates and acceleration that was faster than any known aircraft.

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{  http://www.disclose.tv/ }

LIGHTNING STRIKE HITS PASSENGER PLANE - BUT WHAT DO YOU SEE ON SECOND 48?

A lightning strike at KL743, heading for Lima on November 13. It looks awesome.

But I'm posting that video because I am confused about what I see on second 48. Is it a bird, or a very fast drone or probe? Or is it something else?

{  http://www.disclose.tv/ }

Shocking UFO sighting above US Navy base in the California desert raises the possibility of alien visitors

The pictures were taken in 2007 but have only now been revealed to the public

By Jeff Parsons Tech/Science Reporter

These stunning pictures appear to show an alien spacecraft hovering in the air over the desert and have been seized upon by the UFO community.

They were taken by a man using the pseudonym "Keith Bradshaw", who says he went out to the desert near the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California after being told about the craft by a friend.

He snapped the pictures in 2007 - but says he has been too nervous to show them until now.

READ MORE

• Tourist spots mysterious 'doughnut' UFO hovering over lake in picture that has experts stumped

“This thing would wobble along close to the ground, very unstable," he told the Daily Star .

“Then it would freeze in position, go up to a certain height and sit there for a few minutes perfectly still. It made no noise that I could hear."

Keith said that he watched the craft for about ten minutes. He also claimed he saw the silver UFO while a number of military vehicles were parked nearby.

There was even a military helicopter flying around at the time.

READ MORE

• UFO hunter spots 'alien mothership' on the surface of Mars

“I don’t believe anyone could have been riding on the inside, but I got the idea the helicopter was somehow remotely controlling it," he said.

“It looked like whoever was controlling it was having fun with it, sometimes because they would do little tricks with it.”

By opening the pictures up to the world now, Keith hopes to open the conversation about whether we've been visited by extraterrestrials - or whether it was simply some new kind of military hardware that he witnessed.

READ MORE

• 40-year-old alien mystery may have finally been solved as astronomer reveals source of the 'Wow!' signal

He provided the pictures to 54-year-old UFO sleuth Philip Mantle, who says he hasn't seen anything like this in over 40 years of research.

Mr Mantle has described them as "the most controversial UFO photos on record" and adds experts are unable to agree if the photographs are real.

{ http://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

Nieuwe planeet dicht bij aarde ontdekt met “mogelijk beste kans op leven ooit” - HLN.be

Tommy Thijs en Karolien Koolhof 

Bron: ESO, Gizmodo, Newsweek, Belga, AD.nl

 ESO Een artistieke impressie van hoe Ross 128 b er zou kunnen uitzien.

Het gaat volgens de studie die vandaag verschijnt om een mogelijk nog belangrijkere ontdekking dan die van Proxima Centauri b, de aarde-achtige planeet die het dichtste bij de aarde ligt en die enkele jaren geleden werd ontdekt. Ross 128 b ligt met 11 lichtjaren afstand verder weg, maar zou wel betere omstandigheden hebben om er leven te herbergen. 

Lees ook

Vreemde exoplaneet ontdekt

De temperaturen zouden er gunstig genoeg zijn, met uitersten van weliswaar -60 graden Celcius, maar ook rond de 15 graden. Daardoor behoort meteen ook de aanwezigheid van vloeibaar water, een noodzakelijke voorwaarde voor de levensvormen die we tot nu toe kennen, tot de mogelijkheden.

“Gematigde wereld”

De brede temperatuurmarge weerhoudt de wetenschappers van het European Southern Observatory, die de ontdekking deden, er momenteel nog van de planeet “leefbaar” te noemen, maar de vooruitzichten zijn gunstig. Ze spreken over de “dichtstbijzijnde gematigde wereld rond een rustige ster ooit”.

De nieuwe planeet werd ontdekt met de HARPS-spectograaf (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) in de Chileense Atacama-woestijn. Ze moesten er tien jaar aan gegevens voor doorspitten. Pas na 157 observaties werd de planeet ontdekt.

“Bijzonder veelbelovend”

“Dit is spannender dan de ontdekking van Proxima Centauri b en bijzonder veelbelovend”, zegt Emily Rice van het American Museum of Natural History aan Gizmodo. “De ster rond de planeet is stiller en minder actief.” Het probleem met Proxima Centauri b is dat de ster errond massa’s ultraviolette en X-stralen uitstuurt die leven op de planeet onmogelijk maken. Dat is bij Ross 128 b niet het geval, de ster is een inactieve rode dwergster.

Proxima Centauri is de ster die zich het dichtst bij ons zonnestelsel bevindt, de planeet Proxima Centauri b bevindt zich op iets meer dan 4,2 lichtjaren afstand van de aarde.

“Mogelijk explodeert ster vroeg of laat”

Ook planeetonderzoeker Daphne Stam van de TU Delft is verheugd door de vondst: “Het is een mooie ontdekking, maar het betekent niet dat we meteen allemaal plannen kunnen gaan maken”, zegt ze. Ze verwacht dat de kans op leven niet zo groot is: “Het is een rode dwergster die nu rustig is, maar dat soort sterren staat er om bekend vroeg of laat te exploderen. De deeltjes die dan vrijkomen zijn vaak gevaarlijk voor levende organismen. Daarnaast is het nog maar de vraag of Ross 128 b überhaupt een atmosfeer en dus zuurstof heeft.”

Volgens Stam levert de vondst vooral veel interessante informatie op. Ze vervolgt: “We deden al onderzoek naar Proxima Centauri b, om te proberen te achterhalen wat voor soort wolken daar voorkomt. Die wolken vertellen namelijk iets over de temperatuur op een planeet. Bij deze nieuwe planeet zouden we dat ook graag doen.” Het feit dat Ross 128 b erg dicht bij de ster staat, maakt het lastig om hem te bestuderen. Door die positie is het volgens Stam namelijk moeilijk om het onderscheid te maken tussen het licht van de ster zelf en dat van de planeet. Stam: “En juist dat licht, en in het bijzonder de richting van de trillingen ervan, kunnen ons iets vertellen over de atmosfeer op een planeet.”

Komt dichterbij

Ross 128 b staat twintig keer zo dicht bij zijn ster als de aarde bij de zon, maar de ster heeft ook maar 17 procent van de oppervlakte van de zon. Door de geringe afstand tot de ster draait Ross 128 b er elke 9,9 dagen rond. Bovendien komt Ross 128 b steeds dichter naar ons toe en zal de planeet over slechts 79.000 jaar Proxima Centauri b inhalen en de dichtstbijzijnde exoplaneet worden.

Bedoeling is nu Ross 128 b te blijven observeren, en te ontdekken waar de atmosfeer uit bestaat. De planeet staat zo dicht bij de aarde dat het relatief eenvoudig moet zijn om met de Extremely Large Telescope van ESO op zoek te gaan naar zuurstof in de atmosfeer.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Saudi Arabia's 400 ancient 'gate' structures found on the edge of volcanoes are shown in stunning new detail, but archaeologists STILL have no idea why they were built

• The strange cluster, found in the Harrat Khaybar region, are 'the oldest man-made structures in the landscape'
• They could only be studied using satellite imagery taken from Google Earth due to restrictions in the country
• David Kennedy, of the University of Western Australia, was given special permission to fly over the structures 
• Some are up to 1,700 feet (518 metres) long and built across lava domes that may be thousands of years old
• Some stone structures have been dubbed 'gates' because they appear to look like field gates from above

By Tim Collins For Mailonline

Incredible images shot from the sky have provided a glimpse of some of the 400 mysterious stone structures located in a remote desert area in Saudia Arabia.

Since the early 1950s, restrictions in the country have stymied further research of the baffling geometric shapes, which experts believe may be up to 7,000 years old.

With the rise of satellite imagery and Google Earth, tantalising new shots of the elusive earth works were revealed, affording new avenues for investigation.

Now, a leading archaeologist has been granted special permission to fly over the desolate lava fields of the Harrat Khaybar region, providing the clearest pictures yet of the enigmatic formations

Incredible images shot from the sky have provided a glimpse of some of the 400 mysterious stone structures located in a remote desert area in Saudia Arabia. A leading archaeologist was granted special permission to fly over the desolate lava fields of the region, providing the clearest pictures yet of the enigmatic formations. This image shows a 'keyhole pendant'

Dr David Kennedy, of the University of Western Australia, has spent almost 20 years studying the 'Works of the Old Men', as they were named by the area's Bedouin population when questioned in the 1920s.

After his research hit the headlines in October, Dr Kennedy was given special dispensation by the Saudi government to take to the skies and conduct the first aerial survey in more than half a century.

There is no obvious explanation of why many of the shapes, which include gate-like structures, kites, pendants and keyholes, were built. 

In many cases, they are so large that their shape is only revealed when viewed from above.

But experts believe that new aerial photography, combined with closer inspection on the ground, could one day lead to a breakthrough.

Dr Kennedy and colleagues used Google Maps to 'pin' some of the sites they were most interested in visiting.

They then spent three days flying in a Saudi Royal Commission helicopter, from October 27 to October 29, for a total of 15 hours, taking almost 6,000 photographs of around 200 sites.

Writing for LiveScience, Dr Kennedy said: 'The number of high-resolution "windows" on Google Earth has increased rapidly, especially since the launch of the Landsat 8 satellite in February 2013. 

Dr David Kennedy, of the University of Western Australia, has spent almost 20 years studying the structures. Since the early 1950s, restrictions in the country have stymied further research of the baffling geometric shapes, like this triangle-shape seen pointing towards a bullseye, which experts believe may be up to 7,000 years old

After his research hit the headlines in October, Dr Kennedy was given special dispensation by the Saudi government to take to the skies to conduct the first aerial survey in more than half a century. The gate-like shape shown in this image is the fifth largest found so far, at 1,224 by 262 feet (373 by 80 metres)

'Google Earth will remain a useful tool for prospection. It is simple to "pin" and catalogue sites, measure them, sketch them and generate distribution maps for interpretation. 

'The limitations are equally obvious, however. The imagery is two-dimensional, and even the best resolution can be very fuzzy when enlarged. 

'Detail is missing, and some sites are effectively invisible for various reasons. And imagery may be months, or even years, old and thus less valuable for routine monitoring.' 

Built across ancient lava domes, some of these strange features are more than four times the length of a football pitch.

Some of the stone walls have been dubbed 'gates' because they appear to look like gates in a field from above. 

Dr Kennedy and colleagues used Google Maps to 'pin' some of the sites they were most interested in visiting. They then spent three days flying in a Saudi Royal Commission helicopter, from October 27 to October 29, for a total of 15 hours, taking almost 6,000 photographs of about 200 sites

Some of the stone structures have been dubbed 'gates' because they appear to look like field gates from above. The rectangular shapes in this image are the gates

The smallest gates are 43 feet (13 metres) in length while the longest are 1,699 feet (518 metres) long. Remains of lava flows can be seen on top of some of the gates, suggesting that they are older than some of the lava flows

The strange cluster of gates (pictured) 'appear to be the oldest man-made structures in the landscape' and some are up to 1,700 feet long and built across old lava domes. Dr Kennedy has said 'no obvious explanation of their purpose can be discerned'

The strange cluster 'appears to be the oldest man-made structures in the landscape' and some are up to 1,700 feet long and built across old lava domes.

The smallest gates are 43 feet (13 metres) in length while the longest are 1,699 feet (518 metres) long. 

Experts say that thousands of years ago this area would have been much more hospitable than it is now.  

Remains of lava flows can be seen on top of some of the gates, suggesting that they are older than some of the lava flows.

Many of the structures have multiple stone walls that form a rectangular design whereas others - called 'I' type gates - have one stone wall with piles of stones at the ends.

Most of them were discovered through satellite surveys and archaeological fieldwork has yet been carried out. Previous research has found thousands of stone structures that form geometric patterns in the Middle East

Experts believe that new aerial photography, combined with closer inspection on the ground, could one day lead to a breakthrough. In this image, there are gates pictured going up the side of this lava dome in the foreground

Many have multiple stone walls that form a rectangular design (pictured) whereas others - called 'I' type gates - have one stone wall with piles of stones at the ends

The structures were uncovered in the Harrat Khaybar region in Saudi Arabia in the 1920s and were referred to as the 'Works of the Old Men' by the region's Bedouin population

Most of them were discovered through satellite surveys and no archaeological fieldwork has yet been carried out.

Previous research has found thousands of stone structures that form geometric patterns in the Middle East.

These include two wheel-shaped patterns date back some 8,500 years.

A number of the designs, found in Jordan's Azraq Oasis, appear to have an astronomical significance, built to align with the sunrise on the winter solstice, according to LiveScience. 

Some types of stone structures such as 'kites', were believed to have been used to hunt animals. 

Others, like the pendants, often lead from burial sites and may have had ritualistic significance in death rites.

They were found on top of the gates - suggesting the gates pre-date them.

Read more:

• Aerial Images May Unlock Enigma of Ancient Stone Structures in Saudi Arabia

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Explore the ancient caves and labyrinths under Chichén Itzá, Mexico

Chichén Itzá is a complex of Mayan ruins on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. A massive step pyramid, known as El Castillo or Temple of Kukulcan, dominates the ancient city, which thrived from around 600 A.D. to the 1200s.

The mysteries of the Mayan “Snake God” could be revealed after scientists discovered a secret passage that would lead to an underground cave in the Kukulcan Temple, the name by which the Mayan deity is known as a feathered serpent, reports El Universal.

Unlike the European cosmogony that places deities in paradise; Mayan spirituality believed that the divine was in the underworld: that is why formations like caves and cenotes were so scared, because they were a means of access to the interior of the earth, according to the California State University scholar, James Brady.

  

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

{ https://futurism.com/ }

Declassified Drawings from the British Government’s UFO Desk

Allison Meier

The National Archives AIR 2-18961

(courtesy the National Archives and Four Corners Books)

Between 1962 and 2009, the British Government’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) had a UFO desk and telephone hotline that collected around 11,000 cryptic sightings from across the United Kingdom. The files are now accessible to the public, and among the reports on flying saucers and inexplicable lights in the night sky are drawings that attempt to describe their fleeting forms. As part of its new Four Corners Irregular series on modern British visual culture, Four Corners Books has published selections of this alien art in UFO Drawings From The National Archives by David Clarke.

A US release of the book is planned for February 2018. As Clarke, a reader and principal lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, explains in a book essay, the first release of UFO documents in 2007 came after years of effort:

The opening of these formerly secret files was a personal victory for me. For a decade before the MoD’s announcement I had waged a long campaign, using new powers under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act (FOI), for the full disclosure of Britain’s UFO files. From 2005, when the act came into force, I used a series of targeted FOI requests under the new act to persuade the Ministry of Defence to make their UFO material available for academic researchers. I argued there was a genuine public interest in how the government had investigated sightings of mysterious objects in the sky and that, by embracing greater openness, they could dispel many misconceptions about a subject long mired in unnecessary secrecy.

Then there was a strange twist where Clarke, long on the other side of access, was invited to work with the British National Archives during the release of the MoD UFO files. The project culminated in 2017, with a dedicated online UFO portal from the National Archives with thousands of digitized files. In UFO Drawings, Clarke delves into the history of MoD and the rise of UFO sightings following World War II. The overriding question, as put forth by Winston Churchill in 1952, was: “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?”

Clarke was particularly interested in how UFOs were depicted in art, whether crude crayon on construction paper drawings by elementary school children who collectively witnessed a flying saucer in 1977, or a beautifully painting bright white object observed over a roof in Harborne in 1975.

“Viewed from a purely aesthetic viewpoint, sketches of UFOs made by schoolchildren or policemen might appear naïve or worthless,” he writes. “But as visual evidence of unusual sightings that are deeply meaningful and significant to those individuals who see UFOs, they are uniquely valuable historical documents in their own right, and shed light on how the events and popular culture of the age imprinted on people’s imaginations.”

Indeed, UFO sightings spiked around cultural moments such as the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A rocket-shaped craft viewed through a telescope in Hampstead in 1972 looks strikingly like one from the 1960s science fiction television show, Thunderbirds. Yet there’s an incredible diversity of shapes, colors, and movement of the UFOs, ranging from huge hovering eggs, to dark triangular ships and soaring discs.

Each of the sketches, paintings, and even a few photographs in UFO Drawings is joined by a personal account. For a 1998 illustration of a salmon-hued, crop circle-creating orb adorned with Egyptian ankhs — a vision that seems fueled by Sun Ra’s cosmic Afrofuturism — the Oxfordshire correspondent wrote: “I have developed contact with this craft and their energy forces but unfortunately the designs I am perceiving are too complex for me to draw … these include anti-gravitational fields that allow the craft to access time.” A police officer in 1966 soberly diagrammed an object “the length of a bus” that “emanated a greenish grey glow.” An RAF intelligence officer later interviewed the man, and reported “there is no reason to doubt the fact that this constable saw something completely foreign to his previous experience.”

Every drawing is an artifact of the modern enigma of UFO sightings, and how our hopes and anxieties for a connection with other worlds rose in the late 20th century. The MoD desk may now be closed, but these personal experiences, and their visual record, are evidence of a widespread, mysterious phenomenon.

UFO Drawings From The National Archives by David Clarke is out now from Four Corners Books.

{ https://hyperallergic.com/ }

The good guys call themselves the Future of Life Institute. The bad guys are smart drones called Slaughterbots that can swarm a crowd yet kill precisely, delivering an explosive to the forehead of selected individuals while letting the others run in terror … or cheer the killing. While it sounds like a great plot for a dystopian movie or a sci-fi series, the Future of Life Institute is a real organization. And the Slaughterbots?

“Slaughterbots” the video (link here) was released this week by the Future of Life Institute at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons held in Geneva. The purpose of the Convention “is to ban or restrict the use of specific types of weapons that are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately.” The mission of the Future of Life Institute is “To catalyze and support research and initiatives for safeguarding life and developing optimistic visions of the future, including positive ways for humanity to steer its own course considering new technologies and challenges.” The purpose of the video is “safeguarding life” from tiny autonomous armed drones that can kill without human initiation based on things like data collected from social media.

Uh-oh.

The Future of Life Institute created the fictional (for now) video in conjunction with the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an international coalition working to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons. It sound like the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons is the perfect place to fight for such a ban … if it’s not too late.

Stuart Russell — Professor of Computer Science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading AI researcher – closes the video with a warning about Slaughterbots:

“Its potential to benefit humanity is enormous, even in defense. But allowing machines to choose to kill humans will be devastating to our security and freedom. Thousands of my fellow researchers agree. We have an opportunity to prevent the future you just saw, but the window to act is closing fast.”

The goal of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is not to restrict innovation in AI and drones but to stop the use if AI for selecting and killing without having a human in the decision-making process or pulling the trigger. The AI technology shown in the video is admittedly fictional but the components are recognizable in current devices, drones and social media.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the video is not the killing but the cheering. It’s just as easy to imagine this happening as well. Maybe that’s what the powers-that-be should focus on when deciding whether to ban slaughterbots.

Thoughts?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

We live in an ever developing, technological world full of amazing new discoveries, slick gadgetry, and constant incredible breakthroughs in science. It sometimes seems that in this rapidly advancing society of technological wizardry that there is no place anymore for such arcane things as charms, totems, or cursed items or haunted items, and that these are surely the relics of a fading, dying past mired in the murky word of the supernatural and occult. Yet these things still lurk out in the periphery, and in at least one case the worlds of high technology and the supernatural have managed to collide in the oddest of ways.

One of the more fascinating inventions of recent times is the process of 3D printing, in which a 3-dimensional object is recreated layer by layer based on computer controlled data and scans of a model. Such objects can be fashioned of almost any material and can be a wide range of sizes or shapes, making the potential applications of the process virtually limitless. Indeed, 3D printing has been used in the automotive industry, the medical field, the military, the clothing industry, you name it. Tools, toys, parts, firearms, automotive and electrical components, scientific instruments, medical implants, prosthetic limbs, even food, it seems almost anything can be conjured up seemingly from thin air by 3D printing in this day and age. Bizarrely, and perhaps inevitably, 3D printing has even been used to reproduce actual haunted, cursed objects. Wait, what?

3D printing

The whole weird experiment started with the alleged discovery of a strange hand-carved statue supposedly found by some hikers stashed away and abandoned, quite possibly hidden, in a dim cave somewhere in the Catskill Mountains of New York. The doll is creepy to say the least, with a length of filthy cord wrapped around its neck and rusty nails driven into its eyes, and it seems like the sort of thing most people would cringe at and leave lying where it was, but in this case the hikers took it home with them. It is a decision they would apparently later regret.

Almost immediately strange phenomena purportedly began to occur around the house, starting with inexplicable bumps, knocks, thuds, thumps, and other anomalous noises in the night when no one else was around, mixed with the persistent, intangible sense of being watched, but it quickly graduated to more frightening fare. Shadowy apparitions began to be seen lurking about, odd smells such as that of stagnant water or decay would appear and disappear, and it was reported that the strange doll would move on its own, changing locations when no one was looking and almost always later found in a different room from where it was left, and even tiny muddy footprints were allegedly discovered around the house. The pet dog of the house was apparently terrified of it and peed in the house on several occasions even though it never had done that before, and would often refuse to enter the premises at all. On one occasion the homeowner claims that they saw an entity crouching in a darkened room that looked like a haggard old crone completely naked and dripping with water, with reflective eyes like those of a cat, leading to the doll’s sinister nickname “The Crone of the Catskills.”

The seemingly possessed object drew great interest from paranormal investigators Dana Matthews & Greg Newkirk, who were able to acquire it for their spooky Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and Occult, a vast repository of some of the world’s most haunted or cursed objects. It is definitely one of the creepier museums out there, and it seems that the Crone would be perfectly at home here. And it was, in the sense that it went right on with its scary bag of tricks. On various occasions the figure was said to knock over furniture and a plastic figure of Jesus Christ on a wooden crucifix from the wall, pulling out the nails out in the process that were never found, as well as leave its muddy footprints all over the museum and the smell of fetid pond water in its wake, and there is one instance in which the Warrens claim to have captured video footage of the statue actually moving.

There were times when heavy furniture toppled over for no apparent reason to almost smash the museum owners or their guests, and the doll was known to roll off of tables on its own. More sinister still were reports of those who touched or even looked at the Crone the wrong way becoming violently ill or ending up in freak accidents. A burning, itching sensation was not uncommon for people who gazed at it too long, and there was a general natural aversion people felt in its presence, as if they were being repelled and pushed away. People who physically touched the figurine had it the worse, allegedly being overcome with sudden and inexplicable violent seizures and prompting the enactment of a strict no-touching rule for the cursed object. Indeed, the Crone was soon wrapped up in a pillowcase, stashed in a padlocked box, and taken out of the exhibition. The statue did not respond to any attempts to placate it, and things supposedly got so bad that the directors, who remember were housing the scariest, most haunted items on the planet, didn’t even want it anymore, and they mulled over putting the doll back into the cave where it had been found. For now it remains with the museum on a no-touch basis, and is rarely shown to visitors.

The Crone of the Catskills

It seems like a good plan to put it back, as it is apparent that disturbing its resting place caused whatever ominous and malignant force is attached to it to lash out, but before doing that it was decided to make it the subject of an off-the-wall experiment thought up by paranormal researchers Karl Pfieffer and Connor Randal. They proposed trying what is perhaps the world’s first attempt to 3D print a haunted object, while at the same time attempting to communicate with the malevolent, restless entity attached to it via psychic and livestreaming the whole thing on a museums member’s only Facebook page, on Halloween night no less. Other 3D scanning projects soon followed, including that of a haunted mask and various cursed idols, in a project meant to create a 3D catalogue of haunted and cursed items. 3D printing a cursed object inhabited by a very pissed off, very aggressive evil force or spirit, what could possibly go wrong? Apparently, making 3D prints of these haunted objects had some strange consequences, including freak equipment malfunctions, almost as if the objects did not want to be scanned, and museum founder Greg Newkirk explained some of these unexplainable issues thus:

We’ve had equipment malfunction in bizarre ways, artifacts mysteriously go missing before we can scan them, and just two weeks ago, we went to print a 3D duplicate of a haunted mask we’ve named The Fetid Face and it completely melted the printer. It destroyed the equipment.

Some artifacts are so plagued with problems that no successfully scan can be made. On top of this, some of the 3D scan prints have been claimed to have exhibited strange phenomena in their own right after the printing, as if some of the ghostly energy from their progenitor has attached itself to these copies as well. Concerning the strange defiance of being printed shown by some objects and the odd tendency for the prints to mimic certain aspects of the paranormal from their parent, Newkirk has said:

In hindsight, I guess we should have anticipated this, but when it comes to working with haunted artifacts in new, unexplored ways, you never know what’s going to happen. We’re attempting something that’s never been done before, laying the groundwork for future study of paranormally-active objects. There are going to be quirks we can’t see coming. Members will email us and let us know that something strange is happening with their copy. Maybe it’s possible that we’ve captured more than just the image of these artifacts in the scan – maybe we’re actually capturing a bit of their essence.

It seems like with 3D printing people will try and make or replicate just about anything, and it seems that we have officially stepped into the world of recreating cursed objects. Good idea or not (probably not), there are some interesting issues this raises, not the least of which is just what quality does an object possess that makes it haunted in the first place, and what anchors a spirit or ghost to it? Is it the object itself or some mysterious unseen quality permeating it? Are these prints upsetting or confusing the spirits? If the object were to be replicated perfectly down to the last molecule would the entity then be anchored to that thing as well or would a curse cling to the replica? It is all a curious little mental exercise to contemplate, and a new dimension on the nature of ghosts and cursed items. Or maybe it is all a bunch of rubbish and there are not ghosts or curses to begin with? Whether one believes in the supernatural or not, the project of 3D printing haunted items is certainly an odd little curiosity that melds the dark world of the paranormal with the shiny toys of modern technology.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Saucers, triangles and orbs appear to be so yesterday when it comes to UFO shapes these days. Just this week, stories came in from China and California about UFOs shaped like donuts, bowls and rings. Is this the start of the new model year for alien spacecrafts? If so, the photographs and video are unusually clear and suitable for ad campaigns.

The first comes from Lake Dianchi in China’s Yunnan Province where John Chen, on vacation from Taiwan, took some nice clear pictures of birds in the sky above the lake using a camera that was much more in focus than he was because he didn’t see the donut-shaped UFO floating over the horizon until looking at the pictures at home.

“It’s very curious. I don’t know what it is so my suggestion is that it’s a UFO. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The UFO actually looks more like a French cruller than a donut, but the image (seen here) was sharp enough to convince Chen to send it to British UFO researcher Philip Mantle, who reportedly shared it with fellow experts and could not determine what exactly the UFO was. Since Chen doesn’t remember seeing it, there’s no data on its movements. It’s definitely an odd shape for an aircraft, so lighter-than-air trash seems to be leading in the polls.

“This thing would wobble along close to the ground, very unstable. Then it would freeze in position, go up to a certain height and sit there for a few minutes, perfectly still. It made no noise that I could hear.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t get a video of the bowl-on-a-bowl-shaped UFO, nor of the helicopter flying above and around it. He says he suspects the helicopter may have been controlling it and the craft was too small for a human to ride in. Nonetheless, his photo also ended up in the hands of Philip Mantle, who reportedly said he’s never seen anything like this in 40 years and:

“This could turn out to be one of the most controversial UFO photo cases on record.”

Or it could be a fake. Other experts pointed out that it could be a sophisticated (for 2007) drone, and noted the military would have had more security if it was something truly top secret. ‘Hoax’ is getting the most votes here.

The third sighting – a ring-shaped cloud tinged orange from the sun – was allegedly taken in Shangrao in the Jiangxi Province. It looks like there were plenty of witnesses. (video and photos here). This type of UFO is generally identified as a vortex ring, which can be the result of a cannon firing (these are popular at festivals), an explosion or a spherical mass of fast-moving air meeting another mass of stationary air. One thing is for sure – they’re not alien spacecrafts or deemed worthy of evaluation by UFO experts.

That’s this week’s edition of New Shapes in UFOs.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

{ http://nationalufocenter.com/ }

Filer’s Files #46-2017 President Carter Saw UFO - PART II

UFO Sightings in the United States

Arizona Light

 Sierra Vista — I was photographing the sunset from a moving car on November 6, 2017, through an open window and took 12 photos. I reviewed them and noticed the object. Lens flare has been ruled out, as it strobed, and moved independently. Upon review, I zoomed in on the object, and observed an unusual appearance that doesn’t look like the space station. There were no obvious planets or moon in the area. Thanks To MUFON CMS

California Objects

Huntington Beach — Walking my dogs last night I looked up to observe movement of a satellite on October 26, 2017. It was a light grey flying wing with little sweep to it and little variation in width of the wing. There were no lights with constant speed. I estimate roughly 15,000 feet high, similar speed or slightly faster than an airliner with a similar wingspan flying west. It looked like an airliner minus the fuselage and lights with a very flat bottom. Having been around aviation my whole life and lived with a father who wrote for Aviation Week for 22 years, my impression is it was an aircraft, not alien.

Cabazon — My girl friend and her mother, were stopped at a rest stop, in Cabazon, California and had someone walking by, take this photo. This photo was taken in February 2015.

While looking through some of my pictures, from three years ago, I noticed the flying saucer shaped object on the upper left hand side of mountain, behind us. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Florida Lights

Miami — The time was nine-thirty P.M. and I was now sitting in the Sterns’ patio with my wife and Richard Boswell. We were facing the west looking over Indian Creek and I said jokingly, “No saucer yet.” She gave me a warm smile, which was broken by a shriek from across the creek. A startled woman said, “There it is again.” She was Mrs. Hunt who lives at Miami Beach, I learned later.

Immediately I jumped to my feet, checked the camera and shouted, “Where is it?”
Could this be the same Saucer from the night before? Actually the reply was instant. Mrs. Hunt said, “to your left above the apartments.”
My wife excitedly said, “There it is!” I was as well prepared to meet the situation and there is nothing in this world that this saucer could be compared with. I held my breath and pressed the camera tightly against my cheek and followed the disk the best I could. My pictures were weird with all 50 feet of film. The disk could be seen clearly with the naked eye. I followed the image with my naked eye instead of through the viewer. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Massachusetts Lights

Westford — A friend of mine who is of sound mind was driving and saw what he described as fireball like objects flying like birds.

He took a few photos and I thought they were amazing, so I decided it was worth reporting.

He was on Highway 495. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Michigan Light

Hessel — Woke up and was looking out the window at 3 AM on November 7, 2017. I saw something flashing in the sky by the stars it seemed. There was a trail of about 7 lines in a triangle shape of white, green and red. I took about 50 pictures as it moved very slow and seemed to change shape. I watched it for about 30 minutes and took pictures of it and went back to bed. I live in the woods with no city lights around. This thing just flashed and changed shapes as the pictures show. Thanks to MUFON CMS

New Jersey Unknown Objects

Burlington Township — I was flying my drone at a local lake about a mile from my house videotaping the fall foliage. I did not see the objects until I got home and reviewed my video tape. There are a total of three high speed unknown objects flying under and to the left of my drone. All three incidents were at different time frames. The first was noticed at the 52 second mark and the other two at the 11:35 and 11:40 mark. All three objects are moving in straight lines. Thanks to MUFON CMS

New York Lights

Brooklyn — I was walking along the water at Caesar’s Bay shopping center around 11:45 PM on August 4, 2017. The Verrazano bridge was just to the right. I was looking west over New York Harbor, when I noticed 4-5 bright steady lights in unusual pattern hovering in the distance. They maintained their formation consistently, but were not aircraft. I watched for 20 minutes, but the lights did not come closer and were consistent. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Pennsylvania Lights

 Mckeesport — I went out on my back porch on November’7, 2017, and saw the orange lights in the sky.

I was amazed and had chills up my spine.

There were many lights and then they flew off into the sky.

Thanks to MUFON CMS

Washington Disc

Kettle Falls — My father delivered newspapers every night in this area. about 2 PM he saw large disk hovering over Columbia River on June 17, 1967. It had a tube from disc to water…he watched about two minutes. Then the tube retracted and disc flew away..He told me two weeks later, we talked every day. He said he couldn’t talk about it. A deputy sheriff also saw it, but didn’t tell anyone for ten days.

Note: A delay in telling about seeing a UFO is common and people later report they had received telepathic instructions not to reveal abductions and sightings.

Worldwide UFO Sightings

Canada Object

 Scarborough, Ontario — I was at work and went outside within one minute I see a ‘dark ‘ brightly flashing white light object on November 6, 2017.

It  must of went over our roof heading southward Once I noticed the object south couple hundred feet away, my camera was out of my pocket within seconds to film it! I started to film at 4:49 PM, as it was moving fast under about 1000 feet. It stopped for a moment before the hydro lines south for 25 seconds giving me a great opportunity to film it! It then moved on southward towards Lake Ontario flashing brightly. A couple minutes later I lost sight of it. Thanks once again for your interest into the matter Thanks to Paul Shishis

Germany Alien

 Donauwörth — I know computer diction on November 4, 2017.

I know her communications flashing light will be caused by one alien! The light is itself the arm! The light is only visible with night vision. I think they coordinate their devices and her devices could change the state of aggregation in a lightning beam!

You can see 4 small dots on the body only with night vision that are her devices! They are still by me and invisible! Communication is a sound wave like transformer and there are three in the film!

Thanks to MUFON CMS

Japan Lights

On November’7, 2017 I saw some strange lights in the sky and decided to look closer with my smart phone. When I zoomed 8x, I saw a strange square shaped flying object, but the weird thing is that it does not move. It just stayed there, shinning with some abnormal light surrounding itself. I cannot see its exact shape, because it gets rounding all the time.  It does
not look like an airplane, helicopter, satellite, drone or balloon.. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Spain Object

Palma — I was sitting having a coffee on the first morning of my holiday and decided to take a selfie to wind a couple of friends up.
Once I took the photo I went back into my camera role to have a look when I noticed a strange object. I zoomed in on the object to have a closer look and my stomach turned. To this day it makes me feel sick when I look at it I’d just like other people who have a good knowledge of these kind of things to have a look at my pics and tell me what they think I found.  I was watching a MUFON UFO files episode a half hour ago. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Sweden Cigar

Cigar-shaped object with changing lights, radiated a bright dazzling light in brightness like the Moon.
When the large lights went small, a cigar-shaped silhouette appeared and flew very slowly below the clouds.

Thanks to MUFON CMS

UK/Wales Orb

Cardiff — I was travelling east on the M4 motorway between Cardiff and Newport on November 5, 2017, at 4.05 PM. In the sky to my left was a white object which did not appear to be moving. I took two photos on my iPhone 7 but they are not very clear. Once home, I enlarged the images and saw that the object was definitely nothing I recognized, appearing as 4 vertical rectangles side by side. Had I been alone I would have pulled off the toad to view the object further. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Chester —  On the 8th November 2017 at 06:44 AM. I was letting my dogs into the garden as I had just got up for work. It was a very clear but cold and frosty morning, visibility of the sky was very good.
I noticed a circular light travelling along the sky and thought it was a plane at first but it was going to quickly to be a plane so I got my phone and started recording. Later
I noticed some strange movements as it changed direction slightly but sharply. It did not seem to be the movement of a standard aircraft.
At the very end of the video it suddenly darts in the opposite direction. Thanks to MUFON CMS

Tewkesbury — I was going for a walk and I seen something out of the corner of my eye on November 10, 2017. Amazed when I turned to look this thing was massive I took a pic too it’s in the clouds more to the right on the picture. Thanks to MUFON CMS

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{ http://nationalufocenter.com/ }

The robot dog of the future is getting smarter. SpotMini, created by Boston Dynamics, has improved dramatically since its June debut. It’s designed to complete household chores while using its four legs to maintain balance, and a new video released Monday shows the incredible progress the company has made.

In the 24-second video, SpotMini runs up to the camera, peers down to look at the viewer, then lifts itself up and hops along on its way. Unlike its predecessors, which looked like a mesh of wires and metal bars, the new version has a fetching yellow exterior that makes it look more like a cute toy than some sort of military bot. If this dog-like machine is going to live alongside the rest of a family, you want it to look as friendly as possible.

The bot also appears to have a smoother motion. In previous demonstrations, the 55-pound SpotMini has been seen using a retractable arm located in its back to help out around the house, carefully moving objects to avoid dropping them. It can pick up cans, load up a dishwasher, and even do a little dance. During the 16 months since its debut, SpotMini has come on leaps and bounds to develop into a bot that wouldn’t look amiss alongside the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner or the Amazon Echo A.I. voice assistant.

At this stage, it’s unclear where SpotMini’s future lies. Japanese telecommunications firm SoftBank announced its purchase of Boston Dynamics back in June, taking over from Google parent company Alphabet. SoftBank is known in robotics for its Pepper customer assistant, a humanoid bot with a touchscreen on its front for taking orders in hi-tech stores.

“Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the information revolution, and Marc (Raibert) and his team at Boston Dynamics are the clear technology leaders in advanced dynamic robots,” SoftBank Group Chairman Masayoshi Son said at the time of the purchase.

Hopefully SpotMini leaps its way into homes soon.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

UFO IN NASA MOON IMAGE? HERE ARE THE MOST RIDICULOUS 'SIGHTINGS' OF THE LAST MONTH

BY JOSEPH FRANKEL

From Roswell to War of the Worlds, the prospect of making first contact is thrilling, terrifying, and a surefire way to grab public attention. That’s part of why stories of UFO sightings, like this week’s tabloid reporting of a reemergence of the “Black Knight Satellite ” can be so compelling. While so far all these stories have been of course proven false, Newsweek has chosen to highlight a few stories that may have got your hopes up.  

Just last month, there were since deleted reports of a “giant glowing ball” of light near the Arctic in Siberia possibly believed to be a UFO. The source, perhaps less romantically, turned out to be ICB missile tests. At the time, some sources interviewed for The Siberian Times expressed concern that the impressive display was rooted in alien activity or “a gap in the space-time continuum” rather than a military exercise. But, alas, the Northern lights were predicted to be especially bright that night so photographers by coincidence had their lenses trained on the sight.

Yesterday, a U.K.-based site reported directly on an online video observing that a perfectly triangular dent had been found on the surface of the moon. The video goes on to make the claim that the photographs of a small dent in the surface of the moon could be “providing cover for existing bases” for extraterrestrial creatures.

And on the same day, another outlet published a story raising the possibility that the ‘Black Knight Satellite’ had been spotted in images taken by NASA Apollo 16. Something of a Loch Ness Monster of outer space, the Black Knight Satellite has been purportedly ‘spotted’ many times over the years with little if anything to back it up. According to Vice, the myth dates back over 100 years to Nikola Tesla's early experimentation with radios in 1899. To that publication’s credit though, they raised the much more likely possibility that the dark spot on the screen was “a thermal blanket accidentally dropped from a space shuttle.”

But why all the hype? While there's a deeply human impulse to imagine and seek out life outside of what we know, as the almost spiritual nature of the true efforts to search for extraterrestrial life attest to, more likely than not, these articles are more likely tapping into market demands than any deeper psychological need. 

{ http://www.newsweek.com/ }

peter2011 : this is written by a sceptic journalist and not all is confabulation or a hoax.  I publish his story on my log, so you can read the "logical" thinking of a sceptic. Sorry, but it's to easy to write that is all false without proof!!!

Floating terror: Deadly jelly-like sea creature features in next 'horrifying' Blue Planet 2 episode

Portuguese man-of-war or the floating terror is most likely to be mistaken for a jellyfish.

By Sutrishna Ghosh

The jelly-like Portuguese man-of-war can harness sail power to fish with its deadly tentacles 

Twitter@BBCEarth

Sir David Attenborough's popular BBC One series continues with its great exploration in the big blue next weekend. After the hair-raising segment on the 'alien-like' Bobbit worm, Blue Planet 2 viewers are all set to explore the life of a deadly sea-creature that hunts using its venomous tentacles in next Sunday's (19 November) episode.

Known as Portuguese man-of-war or the floating terror, the creature is most likely to be mistaken for a jellyfish. But, according to a description available on the National Geographic's site, the man o' war is an animal made up of a colony of organisms working together.

{ http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ }

{ https://www.aninews.in/ }

‘Most Controversial UFO Photo on Record:’ UFO Sighting in California Desert

The pictures were reportedly taken by Keith Bradshaw in 2007, but he was too nervous to reveal them to the world until this week. Bradshaw claims that he went out to the desert after an old friend working on the base told him about the mysterious sighting. 

"This thing would wobble along close to the ground, very unstable," he told the Daily Star.

"Then it would freeze in position, go up to a certain height and sit there for a few minutes, perfectly still. It made no noise that I could hear."

View image on Twitter

Mogambo khush hua @mogambokhushhu

Aliens visiting? Crashed UFO on Mars and one hovering over navy base in California spotted http://dlvr.it/Q0tWKY 

2:42 PM - Nov 14, 2017

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Bradshaw also claims to have heard a helicopter as he walked toward the base, before seeing the silver craft. He watched the UFO for approximately 10 minutes and noticed the military helicopter flying around near the craft at the same time.

"I don't believe anyone could have been riding on the inside, but I got the idea the helicopter was somehow remotely controlling it," he said.

"It looked like whoever was controlling it was having fun with it, sometimes because they would do little tricks with it."

Bradshaw sent his pictures to the world's top UFO experts, who are unsure whether the photos are real or not.

YOUTUBE/らくのうマザーズ

Giant UFO With Cow Nipple Sprays Milk at Kids in Japanese Ad… Wait, What?!

British UFO hunter Philip Mantle said, "This could turn out to be one of the most controversial UFO photo cases on record," adding that he has never seen anything like the images in his more than 40 years of research.

"The photo analysts contacts cannot come to an agreement about these photos. Are they fake or genuine? Who knows."

Jason Gleaves, a former Royal Air Force and current British defence contractor with BAE Systems, believes the sighting could be real, according to the Daily Star.

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

Britain’s UFO files EXPOSED: Rare images reveal ‘alien ships’ spotted across UK

TOP secret pictures revealing UFOs spotted across the UK have been revealed after being declassified by the Ministry of Defence.

By Henry Holloway 

Sketches drawn by people who claimed to have seen alien spacecraft for over 60 years were submitted to the Ministry of Defence’s so-called UFO Desk.

“The striking images in the new book were sourced from these and an older collection of UFO files”

Dr Clarke

Odd accounts include a drawing for a white orb-shaped UFO spotted at a school in Macclesfield in 1977.

Children described the object with an opening and ladder landing near Upton Priory Junior School.

Dr Clarke said: “Their teacher, Mrs Hindmarsh, ushered the children inside and asked to draw what they had seen, separating them to ensure that no copying took place.

“The youngsters used pencils and coloured crayons to produce the images that ended up in an MoD file.”

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

SKETCH: A detailed drawing of an 'alien craft' spotted over Smethwick

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

ALIEN WORLD: This picture was sent to the Ministry of Defence claiming to be of another plant

Meanwhile, another sketch shows a lamp-shaped object with a flashing blue which flew over Smethwick in 1954.

With the name redacted, the UFO experiencer wrote a detailed account saying the craft hovered around 12feet above the ground for five minutes.

They wrote the craft was “totally silent, releasing a trail of smoke from the rear”.

Another strange picture sent to the Ministry of Defence in 2003 alleges shows to the “home world of the Procyons/Andromedons”.

Other stories detailed in the book include an alien spotted on the A1, and flying saucers cruising over Hampstead.

Dr Clarke is a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University and specialising in researching modern folklore.

He said: “The striking images in the new book were sourced from these and an older collection of UFO files, some dating back to the Second World War, that have been opened to public inspection under the 30 year rule.”

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

FLYING SAUCER: Alien ships spotted by school children at their school in Macclesfield

Earlier this year, a massive trove of UFO files were released by the MoD as alien hunters hoped for a smoking gun.

Since 2008, Dr Clarke has worked with The National Archives in releasing a trove of previously classified UFO files held by the MoD.

The book has been published by Four Corners Books.

Scientists have not yet discovered proof of the existence of aliens. 

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{https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

Shocking UFO sighting above US Navy base in the California desert raises the possibility of alien visitors

The pictures were taken in 2007 but have only now been revealed to the public

By Jeff ParsonsTech/Science Reporter

These stunning pictures appear to show an alien spacecraft hovering in the air over the desert and have been seized upon by the UFO community.

They were taken by a man using the pseudonym "Keith Bradshaw", who says he went out to the desert near the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California after being told about the craft by a friend.

He snapped the pictures in 2007 - but says he has been too nervous to show them until now.

READ MORE

• Tourist spots mysterious 'doughnut' UFO hovering over lake in picture that has experts stumped

“This thing would wobble along close to the ground, very unstable," he told the Daily Star .

“Then it would freeze in position, go up to a certain height and sit there for a few minutes perfectly still. It made no noise that I could hear."

Keith said that he watched the craft for about ten minutes. He also claimed he saw the silver UFO while a number of military vehicles were parked nearby.

There was even a military helicopter flying around at the time.

READ MORE

• UFO hunter spots 'alien mothership' on the surface of Mars

“I don’t believe anyone could have been riding on the inside, but I got the idea the helicopter was somehow remotely controlling it," he said.

“It looked like whoever was controlling it was having fun with it, sometimes because they would do little tricks with it.”

By opening the pictures up to the world now, Keith hopes to open the conversation about whether we've been visited by extraterrestrials - or whether it was simply some new kind of military hardware that he witnessed.

READ MORE

• 40-year-old alien mystery may have finally been solved as astronomer reveals source of the 'Wow!' signal

He provided the pictures to 54-year-old UFO sleuth Philip Mantle, who says he hasn't seen anything like this in over 40 years of research.

Mr Mantle has described them as "the most controversial UFO photos on record" and adds experts are unable to agree if the photographs are real.

{ http://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

Astronomers are on the lookout for low-frequency gravitational waves generated by merging supermassive black holes

In just a year, scientists have confirmed not one but five gravitational waves. But don’t worry, if you thought gravitational waves — essentially ripples in the fabric of space-time — are now dull and mundane, scientists found new ways to keep them interesting. New research showed that it’s theoretically possible to pick up the low-frequency gravitational waves generated by events such as the merger of two supermassive black holes. The discovery could be ten years away.

Intergalactic waves

Gravitational waves have made a lot of headlines lately so what’s with all the hype?

The existence of gravitational waves, which were first predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity about a hundred years ago, was only confirmed only last year. The event was recorded by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), whose founders were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. 

Gravity waves are essentially ripples in the fabric of spacetime which are generated by interactions between very massive accelerating cosmic objects, such as neutron stars or black holes. Physicists liken gravity waves to the waves generated when a stone is thrown into a pond.

Gravity waves are basically ripples/distortions in the medium that we live in, space-time itself.

Credit: ESO/NASA.

LIGO was founded in 1992, so it took them 25 years to prove their existence. That’s because detecting a gravity wave is no easy feat. To spot gravitational waves directly for the first time, scientists had to measure a distance change 1,000 times smaller than the width of a proton using interferometers, basically mirrors placed 4 kilometers apart.

In the case of the September 14, 2015, observation which was announced on February 11, 2016, scientists observed gravitational waves produced by the collision of black holes with a mass about a dozen times that of the Sun. Since then, gravitational waves have been spotted another four times. The most recent observation of a gravitational wave was generated by the merger of two neutron stars, which are the collapsed cores of large stars — they’re the smallest and, at the same time, densest stars we know of. The event was detected both by LIGO and by traditional telescopes which picked up light from the gamma-ray bursting out of the neutron star merger.

‘Hearing bass singers, not just sopranos’

Astronomers, however, would like to also detect far stronger gravitational waves, such as those produced by the merger of supermassive black holes — behemoth black holes whose mass can be millions if not billions of times greater than that of the Sun. The problem is that neither LIGO nor VIRGO can register low-frequency signals such as those generated by extremely massive events.

Thankfully, scientists have already thought of a solution. According to a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, it’s quite possible to detect gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes by studying the subtle anomalies in pulsars.

A pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star which emits electromagnetic signals. These objects are also very dense, holding the mass of the sun in about the size of a large city. Pulsars radiate two steady, narrow beams of light in opposite directions. Although the light from the beam is steady, pulsars appear to flicker because they also spin. For this reason, pulsars have earned the nickname of ‘cosmic lighthouses’.

With enough data, by studying the periodicity and strength of the pulsar signals, scientists can infer the presence and strength of a gravitational wave if the pulsar signal is delayed even by a tiny amount.

“A difference between when the pulsar signals should arrive, and when they do arrive, can signal a gravitational wave,” says Chiara Mingarelli, lead author of the new study and a research fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. “And since the pulsars we study are about 3,000 light-years away, they act as a galactic-scale gravitational-wave detector.”

In order to predict where and when supermassive black hole mergers might occur, researchers employed data from the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), which they combined with galaxy merger rates recorded by the Illustris simulation project. 

Out of the 5,000 galaxies that they studied, the scientists narrowed the list down to 90 pairs of supermassive black holes, the most massive of which are expected to merge within the next four million years. Mingarelli and colleagues are confident that by expanding the “pulsar timing array over the next 10 years or so, there is a high likelihood of detecting gravitational waves from at least one supermassive black hole binary.”

Ultimately, detecting a gravitational wave generated by merging supermassive black holes could teach us more about how galaxies form and merge, helping us unravel the secrets of the universe.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Experts find ‘secret passageway to an underground cave’ beneath Mexican Pyramid

Archaeologists have made an incredible discovery after revealing a ‘secret’ passageway located beneath the ancient pyramid of Kukulkan in the ancient city of Chichen Itza in Mexico.

The Mayan pyramid located in Chichen Itza is one of the most visited sites in modern-day Mexico.

Erected more than a thousand years ago, the stunning structure built by the long-lost civilization has been the subject of debate among experts, who have revealed a number of secrets hiding in the Pyramids interior.

Now, experts have found what appears to be a secret passageway leading to an underground chamber, or cave, filled with water beneath the ‘El Castillo’ Pyramid at Chichen Itza.

The cave, according to experts, is a cenote (a kind of flooded hole) that leads to the temple and could reveal the “sacred geography” of the place.

The theory is that there is a system of underground sumps interconnected around the pyramid at its cardinal points.

The Pyramid of El Castillo holds many secrets.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

The discovery was made by a team led by underwater archaeologist Guillermo de Anda, who used advanced imaging techniques, like ground penetrating lidar—a form of radar, to send electromagnetic signals through the walls and other architectural elements of the pyramid and its surroundings—and make a 3D model of the structures that make up the subsoil around the pyramid.

However, although there is certainty of the existence of the passage, the first explorations have not been made.

De Anda said in a statement to Milenio, that if the cenote was verified, it would “totally change” the vision we have of “the patterns of the Mayan settlement.”

This image shows the tunnel that leads to the interior of the Kukulcán pyramid at Chichen Itza.

Image Credit: INAH

The discovery was made through a smaller burial chamber referred to as the Ossuary.

In an interview with El universal, Dr. De Anda said: “Through the Ossuary, we can enter the cave beneath the structure and there we found a blocked passageway, probably closed off by the ancient Mayans themselves. We will enter again and this time we will try to open it to see if the passageway leads us to the entrance of the cenote beneath the pyramid.”

Unlike the European cosmogony that places the deities in heaven, Mayan spirituality believed that the Gods came from the underworld. The most sacred and alive was the earth, that is why formations such as caves and cenotes were so sacred because they were an access road to the inside of the earth, that is, leading to the presence of the gods,” said Dr. James Brady from the California State University, Los Angeles.

ERT-3D scans have revealed a smaller substructure within the walls of the Temple of Kukulkan.

Image credit: UNAM

Dr. Brady is a worldwide pioneer in the study of the relations established by the Mayans between architecture and caves.

Experts believe the ancient Maya built one of their most sacred pyramids around 1,000 years ago on top of a cavern, due to their religious beliefs.

Furthermore, archaeologists note that the cenotes that are located around the Pyramid may represent the four cardinal points.

Researchers also note that the river located at the center may represent the center of the Maya universe, which they envisioned as a tree with roots reaching below ground.

Source: INAH

Featured image: Shutterstock

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

Hey all you citizen inventors! On November 7, 2017, NASA opened team registration for Phase 3 of its 3D Printed Habitat Challenge – the On-Site Habitat Competition. Get a team together and grab this awesome opportunity to share your ideas – plus there’s a $2 million total prize purse.

If humans plan to live on Mars – and beyond – future missions won’t be able to carry all of the necessary building materials from Earth, so we’re going to need some innovative options for shelter. NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge is looking for ways to develop technologies to create such habitats on-site, and challenges citizen inventors to lead the way.

In other words, NASA wants America’s best and brightest to help them figure out how to build a house on Mars, using advanced 3D printing technology in the most efficient and sustainable way possible.

Competition details, schedule and rules.

According to a NASA statement:

The goal of the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge is to foster the development of new technologies necessary to additively manufacture a habitat using local indigenous materials with, or without, recyclable materials. The vision is that autonomous machines will someday be deployed to the Moon, Mars or beyond to construct shelters for human habitation.

First place winner in Phase 2: Ice house by SEArch/Clouds Architecture Office. Read more about this design here.

Image via NASA.

The 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge is divided into phases. The Phase 1: Design Competition called on participants to develop state-of-the-art architectural concepts and was completed in 2015.

The Phase 2: Structural Member Competition focused on manufacturing structural components and was completed in August 2017.

The now-open Phase 3: On-Site Habitat Competition challenges competitors to fabricate sub-scale habitats using indigenous materials with or without mission-generated recyclables, and offers a $2 million total prize purse.

Mars Artificial Atmospheric Envelope (M.A.A.E.) – a finalist from Phase 2. More info about this design here.

Image via NASA.

Phase 3 has five levels of competition. Interested teams may register through February 15, 2018. Find full details, schedule and rules here.

Monsi Roman is program manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges. Roman said in a statement:

The ideas and technologies this competition has already produced are encouraging, and we are excited to see what this next phase will bring. The solutions we seek from our competitions are revolutionary, which by nature makes them extremely difficult. But this only fuels our teams to work harder to innovate and solve.

Bottom line: On November 7, 2017, NASA opened team registration for Phase 3 of its 3D Printed Habitat Challenge – the On-Site Habitat Competition

Read more from NASA

{ http://earthsky.org/ }

Inflatable Habitat Will Orbit the Moon

By: Nidhi Goyal

{ http://www.industrytap.com/ }

You Can Visit Real Alien Planets in VR Thanks to This Awesome New Simulation

PHYSICISTS OUTLINE 10 DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS OF OUR UNIVERSE

Mention the word 'dimension' different dimensions and straight away parallel universes come to mind. These are alternate realities that are parallel to our own but in which things happen or work differently. This is just a popular characterization and the reality of dimensions and the role played in the ordering of the Universe is very different.  

Dimensions are different facets of what people think to be a reality. People are aware of the three dimensions that surround them on a daily basis, defining the width, length, and depth of every single object that is in the universe on the x, y, and z-axes.

Outside of these visible dimensions, scientists believe that there are much more. The Superstring Theory is a theoretical framework that suggests the universe is in existence in ten different dimensions. The different aspects govern the universe, the fundamental forces of nature and the elementary particles that are contained in it.

10 DIMENSIONS EXPLAINED IN 2 MINUTES  

THE FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD DIMENSIONS

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The first of the dimensions is the length, the x-axis. This can easily be described as a one-dimensional object that is in a line that is straight and which exists just in terms of length and is without any more qualities that are discernible.

This can be added to the second dimension, which is the height on the y-axis and the object turns into a shape that is 2-dimensional. The third dimension involves the depth and this, of course, is the z-axis and it provides all objects with a sense of area along with cross-section.

A good example of this would be a cube as it is able to exist in three dimensions, length, width and depth, and volume. Outside of these dimensions is seven more and these are dimensions that not apparent but they have a direct effect on both reality and the universe as people know it.  

THE FOURTH DIMENSION – PROPERTIES OF MATTER AT ANY GIVEN POINT

The fourth dimension is what governs properties of any matter at any given point. With the other three dimensions being able to find the position in time of an object is essential for being able to plot the position of that object in the universe. The other dimensions reveal the deeper possibilities that come into play and explain their interaction with others and this is when things start to get very tricky for physicists.

FIFTH AND SIXTH DIMENSIONS – NOTION OF POSSIBLE WORLDS

Based on the Superstring theory, the fifth, along with sixth dimensions are where the idea of possible worlds comes into play. If people were able to see the fifth dimension they would see a world that was slightly different from that of their own and so it would give a meaning of similarity and the differences between the world in which we live in and others.

The sixth dimension would be a plane of possible worlds that would allow comparison and position to all the possible universes that begin with the same initial conditions as ours, for instance, the Big Bang. Theory suggests that if people could master both the fifth and sixth dimensions then they would be capable of time travel both backward and forwards into different futures.  

SEVENTH AND EIGHTH DIMENSION – ACCESS TO WORLDS BEGINNING WITH DIFFERENT INITIAL CONDITIONS

In a seventh dimension, people would have access to worlds that had different initial conditions. The initial conditions would be where the same along with subsequent actions would be different and so everything would differ from the start of time.

The eighth dimension would offer a plane of possible universe histories with each of them beginning with initial conditions that would be different and which branched out infinitely, which is why they have the name infinities.

NINTH DIMENSION – COMPARISON OF ALL UNIVERSE HISTORIES POSSIBLE

The ninth dimension allows for the comparison of all the histories of all possible universes and this would begin with all of the different initial conditions and the possible law of physics.

THE TENTH DIMENSION – EVERYTHING POSSIBLE IS COVERED

The final tenth dimension is the dimension that covers everything possible along with the imaginable. Anything that is beyond this is above this cannot be imagined by mortals and so it is the natural limitation of what people can conceive in terms of dimensions.

All of the additional six dimensions are needed for string theory so that there is a consistency in nature. The fact that only four dimensions of space can be perceived and explained by one or two mechanisms, either extra dimensions have to be compacted on a small scale or the world could live on the three-dimensional submanifold that corresponds to a brane, which is that all know particles other than gravity is restricted. If the extra dimensions were compacted the six dimensions would be in a form known as Calabi-Yau.  

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

The Theory of Everything relies on the belief that the universe is actually made up to ten dimensions, perhaps more, this depends on the model of string theory that was used, and this is an attempt to bring together the standard model of particle physics with the existence of gravity. In other words, it is an attempt to try to explain how all of the known forces in the universe can interact and how other universes might work.

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{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

MARTIAN JACKPOT: GIANT ALIEN DOME AND TRIANGLE UFO SPOTTED ON MARS

Many people may be tired of hearing about Martian structures and alike discovered on the Red planet and to their disappointment it's nothing but a bunch of rocks or rock formations resembling something familiar.

But recently UFO hunter have stumbled upon what they consider a Jackpot of Martian relics. They spotted on 2 craters not to far from each other what appears to be a massive Triangular object and a giant Dome.

Conspiracy theorists claim that the triangular object could be a crashed UFO similar to the triangular ones that have been spotted in recent times hovering above our cities.  

They also claim that the dome could be housing a breathable artificial environment created by either extraterrestrial beings, or created by our own space agencies which may have been kept in secret from the public for a long time.

What manner of objects are these?

Watch the following video to know more!  

Originally published by:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/879111/ufo-alien-life-on-mars-red-planet-youtube-secureteam10

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{ http://www.disclose.tv/ }

UFO SCHEERT VLAK BOVEN KLM TOESTELLEN OP SCHIPHOL

Een video die deze week werd gemaakt door een vliegtuigspotter laat een KLM Boeing 777 zien die direct na de start wordt getroffen door de bliksem. 

Net voordat dit toestel vertrok vloog er een onbekend object over een aantal voor vertrek klaar staande vliegtuigen op Schiphol. 

Veel mensen hebben de afgelopen dagen gekeken naar een spectaculaire video-opname die enkele dagen geleden werd gemaakt door vliegtuigspotter Ralph Valkenier.

De video laat het vertrekt zien van vlucht KL743, een Boeing 777-300, van Amsterdam naar Lima.

Net na de start wordt het vliegtuig getroffen door de bliksem, hetgeen uiteraard zorgt voor een bijzondere opname. Die blikseminslag is te zien rond 2:44 in de onderstaande video.

Maar, wat klaarblijkelijk niemand is opgevallen, behalve een oplettende lezer van deze website (dank!), is dat er net voor vertrek van vlucht KL743 een onbekend "iets" over de baan vloog.

Wij ontvingen het volgende bericht:

En dat klopt helemaal.

In de volgende vier opnames die zijn gemaakt vanuit de video zie je linksboven een object verschijnen dat over de gereedstaande vliegtuigen vliegt en rechts weer uit beeld verdwijnt.

Wanneer je het object wat vergroot, dan lijkt het veel op een klassieke vliegende schotel.

Hieronder zijn de beelden te bekijken en de UFO verschijnt rond de 45 seconden links in beeld.

Mocht iemand meer weten over wat dit is, laat het ons weten. En dan liefst een beetje fatsoenlijk en niet zoals we vaak krijgen in de trant van: "Hé stelletje door de AIVD gecontroleerde koekenbakkers, hadden jullie dat zelf niet kunnen zien?".

{ http://niburu.co/ }

There have been conspiracies for as long as we have contemplated such things. In many cases these can be paranoid delusions openly mocked by the masses and yet forever debated in the shadows of the fringe. After all, how could any of these crazy, far-out notions be real? Yet, sometimes the tinfoil-hat wearing crackpots are not as crazy as one might expect. From secret societies looking to rule the world from the shadows to strange human experiments, coverups, and insane government plots, sometimes truth can be just as weird as fiction, and here is a selection of conspiracies that turned out to be every bit as insane as advertised, and which show that perhaps paranoia is not always such a bad thing after all.

Secret Societies

Shadowy secret societies have long been a staple of the sprawling domain of conspiracy theories. The Freemasons, the Illuminati, secretive powerful cabals pulling the strings from behind the scenes and seeking to start a new world order are the bread and butter of many good conspiracies, and their plots must mostly seem like they must surely be set within the world of pure fiction, except for those times when they aren’t. Indeed there are many conspiracies involving such groups that have been proven to be very real indeed.

One such very real secret society is known as the Bohemian Club, which was founded in San Francisco, California in 1872, mostly as a social group for artists, musicians, writers, poets, and journalists, including amongst their number the author Mark Twain and the poets Charles Warren Stoddard and George Sterling. It was meant to be a casual venue for these artistic, creative individuals to get together to throw around ideas and talk shop together. As time went on, some of the more influential, wealthy, and powerful members sought to fashion the burgeoning club into something more, and they began to become highly associated with a massive campground in Monte Rio, California known as the Bohemian Grove, where members would make an annual pilgrimage in order to meet and carry out ever stranger rituals.

A Bohemian Club meeting

By the 1930s, the Bohemian Club had gone from informal get-togethers for starving artists to almost exclusively a gathering place for the rich and powerful, and would gather prominent members such as former presidents Richard Nixon and Herbert Clark Hoover, business and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and numerous influential politicians, CEOs of major companies, industry leaders, corporate major players, military officials, senior media executives, and various other people of power, and its waiting list for membership would get to be over 33 years long. What went on behind closed doors during their secretive get-togethers has always been top secret, and although they claim that there is no business discussed during their meetings and that ulterior motives are all left at the door, one does wonder what they get up to in there. It is known that there have been many important, even historical deals, government and business decisions, and projects laid out here, including the concept of the Manhattan Project, which was first laid out here and led to the development of the atomic bomb, so something is definitely going on to some extent or other.

The Bohemian Grove where these important figures would meet for 2 weeks a year, and still do, is itself dominated by towering redwood trees and a large stage and 30-foot-tall idol shaped like an enormous owl. The stage is used for various performances and ceremonies, such as the “The Cremation of Care,” which is a lavish, extravagant production complete with pyrotechnics that is meant to signify a “banishing of worldly cares,” and which culminates in the burning of an effigy. There are also supposedly various Druidic rituals carried out at the grove, all set to the backdrop of heavy drinking, opulent feasts, and all manner of debauchery. It is a place that has been described in The Washington Post as “a place where the rich and powerful go to misbehave,” and of which former president Richard Nixon said in 1971:

The Bohemian Grove (an elite, secrecy-filled gathering outside San Francisco), which I attend from time to time. It is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine…

The Bohemian Grove

Another secretive meeting of the world’s elite is called the Bilderberg Group, which meets every year in a private conference of around 150 of some of the planet’s most powerful figures, including monarchs, high-ranking politicians, senior military officials, economic leaders, powerful journalists, and experts from industry, finance, and academia. The covert meetings began in 1954 at the request of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and were originally intended as a way to promote the strengthening U.S.–European relations in a concept known as Atlanticism, but it has grown to cover wide ranging topics and agendas, most of which pertain to, well, no one really knows for sure. Although it is well-known that these meetings really do take place and it is even known who attends them to some extent, the contents of the meetings are highly guarded and the members sworn to absolute secrecy. This has of course led to the idea that this is an honest-to-God Illuminati type group seeking to impose one world government. The Bilderberg Group itself has been rather vague in dealing with such accusations, with one founder and member of over 30 years named Denis Healey somewhat ominously saying:

To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.

It is unclear just what these powerful individuals get up to behind closed doors, but it is certainly not just to idly chit chat. In the meantime the conspiracy theories on this very real secret society go deep, with claims ranging from they are controlling the world with an iron fist to that they are actually alien lizard people invading Earth. All we know is that the group does exist and they still have their incredibly secretive powwows every year.

While it is unclear if these secret organizations and shadowy meetings are really controlling world affairs to any degree, there has been at least one case where this actually did happen. In the 1980s, an offshoot of the Freemasons in Italy called the Propaganda Due (P2), which was led by the notorious fascist Licio Gelli, crawled into society like a parasitic worm. The group had the expressed goal of infiltrating and secretively controlling Italy from the inside via a shadow government, and to this end it had thousands of members including influential businessmen, military, police, and government officials, intelligence operatives, and other prominent figures among their ranks. Through these members the group was able to influence the press, burying certain news stories, exert pressure in the government on key issues of policy, including bringing Juan Peron back to power in Argentina, and cover up crimes such as the 1980 bombing of a Bologna train station, which killed 85 people and was orchestrated by Italian terrorists sympathetic to P2.

This may have gone on indefinitely if the hugely influential banker and P2 member Michele Sindona had not been busted for money laundering. Authorities would find within his records a list of around a thousand members of the secret society embedded like vermin all throughout the government and media, eventually leading to the resignation of Italian Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani, whose cabinet was found to be absolutely crawling with P2 members. Some political figures linked to the group committed suicide rather than face charges, and the leader of the sect, Gelli, promptly hi-tailed it out of the country to Switzerland, where he would stay until he was eventually extradited for fraud.

Secret Government Experiments

Another fixture of any good conspiracy theory is the idea that the government is covertly carrying out secret experiments on human beings, sometimes on whole populations against their will for nefarious purposes, and I hate to say it but there is a depressingly long list of occasions where this has really happened. One of the more well-known and dramatic secret government projects that was very real was the shadowy mind-control project known as MKUltra. Originating in the 1950s, the project was launched by the CIA and the US Army Chemical Corps, and sought to investigate the potential use and effects of mind control techniques as well as to “develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials.” Although it started small, the program escalated rapidly, blowing up until it was being pursued in various institutions including an estimated 86 universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.

Many of the often sadistic experiments involved heavy use of mind altering drugs such as LSD, the effects of which were poorly understood at the time and which were often given to unwitting test subjects in highly dangerous doses, which would lead to many of the patients developing brain damage and permanent mental and behavioral issues. There were also various chemicals tested, as well as gas propelled sprays and aerosols. In a lot of instances these tests were performed on terminal cancer patients to limit any lifelong problems they would have from the treatments and cover the tracks of the program. Other techniques pursued were electroshock treatment, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and verbal and physical abuse, often with no medical personnel on hand and the effects of which left at least two dead and many others mentally or emotionally scarred, with one report stating:

The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing programs may still suffer from the residual effects. . . . The fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting individuals was known, demonstrate fundamental disregard for the value of human life.

It is unknown just what exactly went on within the program because the CIA director at the time, Richard Helms, had the vast majority of the files utterly destroyed in 1973. In 1976 and 1977 the U.S. Senate made serious investigations into the goings on of MKUltra, but this got nowhere. There has never been any accountability for the horrors the program carried out on American citizens, and all of the researchers who contributed to it have had their names withheld from the records, their names exempt from the Freedom of Information Act due to the CIA wanting to protect them as “intelligence sources.” The true horrific extent of MKUltra and their murky activities remain unknown.

The list of experiments such as these goes on and on, and some of them are rather reprehensible to say the least. In 1932, the U.S. government launched the “Tuskegee Experiment,” in which they planned to study the effects of syphilis and analyze those who had the disease. The study was carried out in Tuskegee, Alabama, and involved gathering around 400 poor, illiterate black males who had contracted the disease in order to put them under the microscope so to speak. Throughout the whole thing none of the patients were given any form of treatment for the disease, even though this existed, and many of them didn’t even know they had it, and they were put through various physical tests such as painful spinal tap procedures without their consent until they died, after which the corpses would by dissected, analyzed, and swept under the carpet. It would not be until 1972, 40 years after it began, that the whole experiment would be blown wide open by the whistleblower Peter Buxtun, who went to the Center for Disease Control with the whole sordid story.

In this case at least the government did not actually go about deliberately infecting people, merely going through the motions of doing so, but this would not be the case in other “studies.” Surely the government would not test possibly dangerous substances on its own citizens? Oh, how wrong you would be. In 1950, the U.S. Navy put into effect Operation Sea Spray, in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria, the effects of which we had no idea of at the time, were liberally sprayed all over the San Francisco Bay Area of California. The idea was to monitor the effects of the pathogens, and nearly 800,000 people were exposed during this time. 11 people would check into hospitals complaining of urinary tract infections and at least one patient died from complications. There was also a spike in cases of pneumonia during the time, as well as other health complications, with rates of these cases far beyond the norm.

During the whole operation the Navy made no attempts to alert the populace or even health authorities that this was all going on, and the experiment wouldn’t even come to light until 1977, when it was brought before a Senate subcommittee. Unbelievably, it would be decided that all of these various infections had been incurred within the hospitals, and that they had no relation to the experiments. Cover up? What do you think?

This is not even the only such shadowy experiment carried out by the U.S. government on its own citizens by a long shot. In 1955 the U.S. military went about dumping around 330,000 mosquitos all over the state of Georgia in an effort to conduct the feasibility of entomological warfare, or basically spreading diseases such as Yellow Fever among the enemy through insect vectors. The study aimed to investigate the logistics of such a thing, the dispersal rate, and the survivability of the insects during the process, and although none of the mosquitos was actually infected, someone forgot to tell the hundreds of thousands of civilians in the area that this was all going on. Similarly we have Operation Drop Kick in 1956, in which hundreds of thousands of mosquitos were dispersed over Savannah, Georgia and then monitored for how aggressively they infiltrated homes and bit people. It was a success in that the mosquitoes survived the drops and went about biting people with relish.

In the 1960s there was also Project SHAD, which saw the Department of Defense authorizing the release of dangerous chemical and biological agents aboard Naval ships in order to test the crews’ abilities to detect and react to the invisible threat. The thing is, many of these subjects were not at all aware that any of this was going on. This sort of experimentation with human guinea pigs goes way back, with the government conducting tests of the effects of radiation on unwilling or ignorant participants as early as the end of World War II, when the government engaged in willingly giving people radiation infused food, releasing radioactive substances into populated areas, and injecting radioactive substances into people, including pregnant women and prison inmates.

The cases involving such unethical tests are numerous, and the government even went to such lengths as robbing graves in order to gain tissue on which to experiment, including the corpses of babies. In one case from 1957, a mother named Jean Prichard lost her baby during childbirth, but when she requested to receive its corpse she was told that it was not available, and it later came to light that it had been gathered by the government for use in experiments. This would not be the only such case, and the U.S. government allegedly secretly procured hundreds and hundreds of adult and stillborn baby corpses for use in testing the effects of radioactivity in what was called Project Sunshine. These are just the tip of the iceberg, and the list of such experimentation is long, but I would suggest not going through it too carefully if you want to keep some semblance of faith in humanity.

Dark Government Machinations and Sinister Coverups

Government conspiracies often claim that there are dark workings behind the scenes and sinister plots going on beneath what we think we know about the society we think we live in, and if history is anything to go by these fears are rather well founded. One shadowy plot was supposedly carried out by the CIA starting from the 1950s, and was called Project Mockingbird. The dark initiative was designed to use journalists stationed all over the world to gather intelligence, to print propaganda designed to mold and shape public opinions on certain issues, plant false or misleading information, or to even serve as contacts with spies. In many cases this was done with the consent of the news agencies these reporters worked for, but at other times not, and one CIA operative has said of the allure of using reporters to do CIA work thus:

It’s tough to run a secret agency in this country. We have a curious ambivalence about intelligence. In order to serve overseas we need cover. But we have been fighting a rear‑guard action to try and provide cover. The Peace Corps is off‑limits, so is USIA, the foundations and voluntary organizations have been off‑limits since ‘67, and there is a self‑imposed prohibition on Fulbrights [Fulbright Scholars]. If you take the American community and line up who could work for the CIA and who couldn’t there is a very narrow potential. Even the Foreign Service doesn’t want us. So where the hell do you go? Business is nice, but the press is a natural. One journalist is worth twenty agents. He has access, the ability to ask questions without arousing suspicion.

So valuable were reporters seen as operatives for the CIA that the agency even went as far as to train its own agents to be, or to at least pose as journalists. It is estimated that more than 400 American journalists participated in this covert activity over the course of nearly three decades, including those from such high profile news outlets as The New York Times, and it extended from news publications to TV and radio broadcasts. These journalists often signed secrecy agreements preventing them from discussing their dealings with the CIA, but many of them were not fettered by such things, being merely briefed and debriefed on each incoming assignment. In a very in-depth article in the October 20, 1977 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The Washington Post, Carl Bernstein wrote of this relationship:

Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services — from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.

Even though these activities have been blown wide apart, the CIA itself has continued to obfuscate and downplay its use of journalists to do its dirty work, always purposefully vague or misleading on the matter, and the true extent of this program is even now not entirely clear and muddled in murk. During a 1976 investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee and overseen by Senator Frank Church, the CIA even went so far as to urge the committee to limit the depth of its digging into the matter, and they even made attempts to purposefully hide and blur the full scope of the program. In the end, the investigating committee was not able to completely unearth the full extent of these sordid operations, but they were able to demonstrate that they did happen, and that the CIA continues to dabble in such practices even now, stating:

The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.

Going back further, to the 1960s, we have an insidious plan launched by the U.S. government to aid in the battle against Cuban Leader Fidel Castro, who at the time was considered to be one of the world’s greatest communist threats. In the wake of the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the government was left scrambling for ideas on how to somehow oust the tenacious, abrasive leader. Some of the ideas to assassinate Castro were insane, like something a movie villain would come up with, including the plan to use exploding cigars smuggled to him, but one of the more out there and indeed diabolical plans was called Operation Northwoods.

Fidel Castro

Drawn up in 1962, and under approval by the the Joint Chiefs of Staff but eventually rejected by defense secretary Robert McNamara, the plan was as insane as it was completely brazen. According to declassified documents from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the ideas was to orchestrate a terrorist campaign in the state of Florida that could be blamed on the Cubans and give further fuel to the American people to continue the fight against the rogue nation. Some of the ideas for this floated around were shooting down planes, for real or simulated, and planting evidence to make it look like Cuba did it, planting bombs in Florida and other locales such as Washington DC that could have very well killed innocent people, as well as sinking boats carrying innocent Cuban refugees, hijacking planes, or faking the shooting down of military aircraft in such a way as to make it look like Cuba was responsible. The declassified documents include a portion that says:

We could develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington . We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated) . Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

It was reasoned that all of this this would enrage the American people to the point that they would be more suggestible to taking aggressive action against Cuba. This would make the populous more willing to get behind a full blown war with Cuba and give the government the decisive excuse it needed to pursue whatever rash and harebrained idea it wanted against Castro and his regime without too much public fallout. The government luckily saw the insanity of going through with all of this, but the plans were laid out on the table and were being vigorously pushed forward at the time.

This would not have been the first time that the U.S. had used blatant lies to further a war cause, and the most well-known of these has to be the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of 1964, which would kick off the grim and bloody Vietnam War. On August 4 of that year, the warships the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joywere on patrol in South Vietnamese waters during a time when both sides of the brewing conflict were on high alert and on hair triggers. The two destroyers were then claimed to have come under an unprovoked brutal attack by enemy torpedo boats that were picked up on sonar and radar, and the two American vessels proceeded to unleash all hell on the perceived threat, unloading around 300 shells on the supposed targets. However when the smoke cleared, there was apparently no one there after all, but that is not the story that the American people would be fed.

Military officials insisted that there had indeed been enemy boats, and almost immediately the story of these two ships being senselessly attacked by the North Vietnamese was being splashed all over the news. President Lyndon B. Johnson jumped on the opportunity as an excuse to go to war in Vietnam and the rest is history. Conspiracy theorists long debated and discussed the idea that no such attack had ever taken place, that it had been a ruse to give the president the authority to go to war, and this was considered merely a crackpot idea at the time, but decades later they would be proven right.

In 2005, declassified documents showed that indeed there was no such attack, and the warships had fired on nothing more than specters and false alarms. Indeed, it was found that there had been no North Vietnamese vessels anywhere near where the two U.S. ships had been at the time. The American vessels did indeed fire, but there had been nothing there to hit. There were various eyewitnesses who attested to this fact after the news came out, including a Navy pilot and squadron commander named James Stockdale, who had been flying overhead during the incident and claimed:

I had the best seat in the house to watch that event and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets — there were no PT boats there…. There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

The USS Maddox

Others who continued the damning evidence were former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who agree that it had all been bogus, and even Johnson himself would later admit, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.” So here we have an event that never happened, which was played up by the government as if it had and used as justification to go into a war that would kill millions, which was then covered up and buried from prying eyes. It is a conspiracy wet dream and it is all true. There is some interesting information on the whole thing here.

Another shadowy plot that actually did go through were active attempts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to infiltrate, harass, and smear a variety of political groups, activists, critics of the Vietnam War, and civil rights leaders during the 1970s. To this end, under a program called COINTELPRO the FBI stalked, intimidated, and infested such groups with undercover spies sent to discredit them and sow dissent within their ranks, and otherwise try and fracture these organizations from within, all bolstered by bogus media reports, slander, and psychological warfare. The project’s expressed mission was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize activists across the country,” basically anyone the bureau considered subversive and often minority groups. Author Jesse Walker described what they did beautifully in his book The United States of Paranoia, writing:

Under COINTELPRO, FBI agents infiltrated political groups and spread rumors that loyal members were the real infiltrators. They tried to get targets fired from their jobs, and they tried to break up the targets’ marriages. They published deliberately inflammatory literature in the names of the organizations they wanted to discredit, and they drove wedges between groups that might otherwise be allied. In Baltimore, the FBI’s operatives in the Black Panther Party were instructed to denounce Students for a Democratic Society as “a cowardly, honky group” who wanted to exploit the Panthers by giving them all the violent, dangerous “dirty work.” The operation was apparently successful: In August 1969, just five months after the initial instructions went out, the Baltimore FBI reported that the local Panther branch had ordered its members not to associate with SDS members or attend any SDS events.

One of the most famous targets of the FBI campaign was the legendary civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who by all accounts was constantly harassed by the feds. He was followed, monitored, his hotel rooms and phone lines bugged, the works. Most brazenly of all, the FBI actually tried to get him to commit suicide by presenting evidence of an affair he was having and threatening to release the information unless he killed himself. The letter in question was claimed to have been written by another African American, and does not mince words at all, with one portion reading:

No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

Martin Luther King Jr.

For a long time there was little proof that the FBI had anything to do with any of this, and the members of such groups and their leaders were widely considered to be paranoid for thinking that they were being followed and harassed by the feds. It was truly considered to be a crackpot conspiracy theory at the time, but then evidence that it was really going on came along in the most unlikely of ways when in 1971 a group of activists calling themselves the Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, where they uncovered a treasure trove of highly secret documents outlining the whole thing. The activists proceeded to send out this evidence to various major newspapers and politicians, who mostly shied away from defying the FBI, perhaps bending to pressure of a coverup. However, The Washington Post stood strong and published the findings, consequently blowing the whole operation open like a piñata and bringing down intense public scrutiny upon the FBI.

It wasn’t only the U.S. government coming up with Machiavellian schemes to pull the strings and influence American society, as the Soviet Union had their own plans as well. During the Cold War, the Soviets had very real plans in place to sabotage the United States from within if things went south, and these were frighteningly well-realized. Throughout the U.S. were placed hidden arms caches including firearms, bombs, and mines, and there were numerous sleeper agents placed around the country, or in some cases lying ready to pounce over the borders in Canada or Mexico, ready to take up a variety of positions where they could sow chaos, including firemen, policemen, and soldiers. The main targets in such a scenario were oil pipelines, supply routes, infrastructure, the power grid, and military installations, but it was also seen as a priority to just create as much mayhem as possible. It sounds like a pure, tinfoil hat nut job theory, and it would have probably remained that way if an archivist at the KGB hadn’t taken it upon himself to collect the information and release it. Some documents on this plot can be seen here.

One of the most bizarre government plots of all was put into effect by British military intelligence agencies in the early 1970s. At the time there was great ethno-nationalist unrest brewing in Northern Ireland, which has been called The Troubles and the Northern Ireland Conflict. It was a tense time in which the country was precariously perched at the abyss of civil war, marked by random violence and terrorist acts all over Britain and Europe, carried out by paramilitary groups such as the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and the British military was looking at all options to put an end to it. They found what they were looking for in the fear and fascination provoked by horror films such as The Exorcist and The Devil Rides Out, which just so happened to have come out when fears were going about concerning demonic possession, black masses, witchcraft, and Satanic worship.

Amidst rumors of human sacrifice and demonic forces at work, the growing fears of such paranormal phenomena got so heated that it came to be known as the “Satanic Panic,” and although for much of the populace it was a horror, the British saw it as an opportunity. After all, why not twist the knife even further and exacerbate this terror that was sweeping the very regions they sought to bring under control? To this end, from 1972 to 1974 the government’s “black operations” set up a campaign of psychological warfare that saw them planting such Satanic imagery as pentagrams, black candles, and upside-down crucifixes in remote and rundown areas of the region, as well as releasing fake news stories of black masses, human sacrifices, and sinister rituals in order to cultivate more fear of the supernatural and stoke the burning fires of paranoia.

The ultimate goal was to convince the populace that the dissenting paramilitary forces were directly responsible for unleashing these evil forces across Northern Ireland, and for the most part it seemed to have worked rather well. British Army psychological warfare specialist at the time, Captain Colin Wallace, would explain of the program:

It was quite clear that the church, both the Roman Catholic church and the Protestant church, even for the paramilitaries, held a fair degree of influence. So we were looking for something that would be regarded with abhorrence really by the two communities, and at the same time would be something that paramilitaries couldn’t justify, and also would be in many ways seen as a reason why some of the outrages were taking place. That sort of degree of activity was lowering the value of human life. And so eventually it came to the point where we looked at witchcraft. Ireland was very superstitious and all we had to do was bring it up to date.

The hysteria that all of this was conjuring up created doubts among the citizens and kept children from going out at night, playing right to the plans of the British. It convinced a great many Northern Irelanders that these rebel groups had flung open some sort of gateway or portal to darkness and evil. There was definitely a noticeable spike in the number of people who truly believed that there was some dark force descending across the land, although to what extent this affected the end of the conflict remains unknown. It is a curious account of a bonkers secret government conspiracy being carried out in all of its off-the-wall glory.

We have seen here only a small fraction of the lunacy that has gone on to be spun off into conspiracy tales that proved to be quite real. There are many, many others, and they all go to show that sometimes the conspiracy theorists are not a bunch of paranoid maniacs full of hot air. There indeed do seem to be some sinister and ominous goings on reaching all the way up to the upper echelons of government. While there are some obvious misses, such as the moon landings (happened) or the infiltration of world governments by the lizard people (wait, what?), these odd cases show us that conspiracies are perhaps not to always be dismissed out of hand and regulated to the realm of paranoid delusion. Maybe there really is sometimes more going on than meets the eye.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Look out Elon and Jeff … there’s a new billionaire in space town and he’s planning to boldly go – or at least boldly fund a trip – where no billionaire has gone before. Russian rich man Yuri Milner, one of the biggest players in the Russian part of the Internet, announced plans to pay for the first privately funded interplanetary space mission to search for life on Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth-largest moon and the solar system object considered to have the best chance of harboring some form of life. Is Milner serious or just trying to distract attention from revelations in the “Paradise Papers” about his involvement in helping the Russian government covertly invest in Facebook and Twitter?

“We formed a sort of little workshop around this idea: Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon and that can look more thoroughly at those plumes and try to see what’s going there ahead of a more expensive mission that NASA is considering right now, which might take maybe 10 years to launch?”

GeekWire reports that Milner made this statement at The Economist’s New Space Age conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle last week. The ‘plumes’ are the columns of water vapor and simple hydrocarbons venting from the moon’s south polar region that were first seen and later passed through by the Cassini probe. The “more expensive mission” he’s referring to is NASA’s proposed $1 billion New Frontiers program which would not launch until at least the mid-2020s.

An artist’s depiction of Cassini passing through the plumes of Enceladus

If you’re wondering whether he will accomplish this lofty goal, Milner is a billionaire who has put money into space projectsbefore. He’s invested $100 million in the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Breakthrough Listen), another $100 million to send a fleet of nano-probes to the Alpha Centauri star system (Breakthrough Starshot) and more financial support to enhance the capability of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and to launch – both for improving observations of the Alpha Centauri system.

Milner is obviously more focused on space exploration than Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are investing their money in human flight, cargo transport to the space station and settlements on Mars. To put it another way, Musk and Bezos seem intent on making money with space travel while Milner wants to make a name for himself by finding what he calls a “smoking gun” for biochemical activity on Enceladus that should indicate the presence or at least the spark-ability for life.

If Milner can escape the political mess that the Paradise Papers have opened, he could be the force behind finding a new garden of paradise on Enceladus.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Strange Disk-Like Cloud Formation Blocks The Sun Over Antofagasta, Chile

On November 13, 2017 Arnoldo Liendo Arce captured a strange phenomenon in the sky over Antofagasta in Chile.

While filming a possible Halo or Sundog in the sky he not only captured a strange iridescent colorful rainbow cloud, but even more strange is a cloud formation that has formed itself exactly within the Halo or Sundog, like a dark disk blocking the Sun.

Halo’s and Sundogs are well known atmospheric optical phenomena caused by the reflection of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere but....you ever have seen such a cloud formation covering a Halo/Sundog?

The first video shows the strange Halo/Sundog/cloud formation, the second video shows the colorful rainbow cloud which could be a possible earthquake light, a sign for an impending powerful earthquake.

  

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Mars is not exactly a friendly place for life as we know it. While temperatures at the equator can reach as high as a balmy 35 °C (95 °F) in the summer at midday, the average temperature on the surface is -63 °C (-82 °F), and can reach as low as -143 °C (-226 °F) during winter in the polar regions. Its atmospheric pressure is about one-half of one percent of Earth’s, and the surface is exposed to a considerable amount of radiation.

Until now, no one was certain if microorganisms could survive in this extreme environment. But thanks to a new study by a team of researchers from the Lomonosov Moscow State University (LMSU), we may now be able to place constraints on what kinds of conditions microorganisms can withstand. This study could therefore have significant implications in the hunt for life elsewhere in the Solar System, and maybe even beyond!

The study, titled “100 kGy gamma-affected microbial communities within the ancient Arctic permafrost under simulated Martian conditions“, recently appeared in the scientific journal Extremophiles. The research team, which was led by Vladimir S. Cheptsov of LMSU, included members from the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University, the Kurchatov Institute and Ural Federal University.

Image taken by the Viking 1 orbiter in June 1976, showing Mars thin atmosphere and dusty, red surface. Credits: NASA/Viking 1

For the sake of their study, the research team hypothesized that temperature and pressure conditions would not be the mitigating factors, but rather radiation. As such, they conducted tests where microbial communities contained within simulated Martian regolith were then irradiated. The simulated regolith consisted of sedimentary rocks that contained permafrost, which were then subjected to low temperature and low pressure conditions.

As Vladimir S. Cheptsov, a post-graduate student at the Lomonosov MSU Department of Soil Biology and a co-author on the paper, explained in a LMSU press statement:

“We have studied the joint impact of a number of physical factors (gamma radiation, low pressure, low temperature) on the microbial communities within ancient Arctic permafrost. We also studied a unique nature-made object—the ancient permafrost that has not melted for about 2 million years. In a nutshell, we have conducted a simulation experiment that covered the conditions of cryo-conservation in Martian regolith. It is also important that in this paper, we studied the effect of high doses (100 kGy) of gamma radiation on prokaryotes’ vitality, while in previous studies no living prokaryotes were ever found after doses higher than 80 kGy.”

To simulate Martian conditions, the team used an original constant climate chamber, which maintained the low temperature and atmospheric pressure. They then exposed the microorganisms to varying levels of gamma radiation. What they found was that the microbial communities showed high resistance to the temperature and pressure conditions in the simulated Martian environment.

Image of Martian soils, where the Spirit mission embedded itself. Credit: NASA/JPL

However, after they began irradiating the microbes, they noticed several differences between the irradiated sample and the control sample. Whereas the total count of prokaryotic cells and the number of metabolically active bacterial cells remained consistent with control levels, the number of irradiated bacteria decreased by two orders of magnitude while the number of metabolically active cells of archaea also decreased threefold.

The team also noticed that within the exposed sample of permafrost, there was a high biodiversity of bacteria, and this bacteria underwent a significant structural change after it was irradiated. For instance, populations of actinobacteria like Arthrobacter – a common genus found in soil – were not present in the control samples, but became predominant in the bacterial communities that were exposed.

In short, these results indicated that microorganisms on Mars are more survivable than previously thought. In addition to being able to survive the cold temperatures and low atmospheric pressure, they are also capable of surviving the kinds of radiation conditions that are common on the surface. As Cheptsov explained:

“The results of the study indicate the possibility of prolonged cryo-conservation of viable microorganisms in the Martian regolith. The intensity of ionizing radiation on the surface of Mars is 0.05-0.076 Gy/year and decreases with depth. Taking into account the intensity of radiation in the Mars regolith, the data obtained makes it possible to assume that hypothetical Mars ecosystems could be conserved in an anabiotic state in the surface layer of regolith (protected from UV rays) for at least 1.3 million years, at a depth of two meters for no less than 3.3 million years, and at a depth of five meters for at least 20 million years. The data obtained can also be applied to assess the possibility of detecting viable microorganisms on other objects of the solar system and within small bodies in outer space.”

Future missions could determine the presence of past life on Mars by looking for signs of extreme bacteria. Credit: NASA.

This study was significant for multiple reasons. On the one hand, the authors were able to prove for the first time that prokaryote bacteria can survive radiation does in excess of 80 kGy – something which was previously thought to be impossible. They also demonstrated that despite its tough conditions, microorganisms could still be alive on Mars today, preserved in its permafrost and soil.

The study also demonstrates the importance of considering both extraterrestrial and cosmic factors when considering where and under what conditions living organisms can survive. Last, but not least, this study has done something no previous study has, which is define the limits of radiation resistance for microorganisms on Mars – specifically within regolith and at various depths.

This information will be invaluable for future missions to Mars and other locations in the Solar System, and perhaps even with the study of exoplanets. Knowing the kind of conditions in which life will thrive will help us to determine where to look for signs of it. And when preparing missions to other words, it will also let scientists know what locations to avoid so that contamination of indigenous ecosystems can be prevented.

References: Universe Today

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NEW NAZCA DISCOVERY DEPICTS AN ORCA WHALE

The giant figure was found and recovered by archaeologists but is in danger from land traffickers who have surrounded the area and prevent access to tourists.

The archaeological discoveries in the Pampas of Nasca and Palpa do not cease to amaze the world, this time it is the discovery and recovery of a huge geoglyph that represents an orca, a cetacean that is part of the beautiful iconography of the Nasca Culture.  

The Orca is one of the most enigmatic and ancient drawings of the Palpa-Nasca circuit and it took 50 years for the Peruvian state to recover it when it was already lost. It is a gigantic drawing that was engraved on the hillside of a hill located on the outskirts of Palpa, in the Ica region, a place famous for being the home and study centre of the archaeologist María Reiche.

The killer whale is a cetacean that inhabits all the seas of the world. It is known as the 'killer whale' because of its enormous size and ferocity. In ancient Peru, the Nasca considered it a deity linked to the sea and was represented in its fine sculptural ceramics.  

The geoglyph of the killer whale was photographed in the early 1960s and was considered to have disappeared when it was identified and rescued by the team of archaeologists led by Johny Isla Cuadrado, head of the Decentralized Office of Culture in the Ica region.

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DE WARE REDEN DAT EEN ROBOT STAATSBURGERSCHAP KREEG IN SAOUDI ARABIË

Dat een robot die eruit ziet als een moderne vrouw zonder hoofddoek het staatsburgerschap van Saoedi Arabië heeft gekregen, is iets dat velen heeft verbaasd. 

Saoedi Arabië staat nu niet bepaald bekend als een land met gevoel voor humor heeft, dus wat is de werkelijke reden dat ze dit hebben gedaan? 

We leven in een wereld die razendsnel verandert en die binnen enkele jaren volkomen onherkenbaar zal zijn veranderd. Wie had er ooit gedacht dat een robot staatsburgerschap van een land zou krijgen.

Waarom dit is gebeurd en waar we mogelijk naartoe gaan, wordt uitgelegd door Bert (dank!):

Eind oktober gebeurde er ogenschijnlijk iets grappigs, een AI robot Sophia genaamd, werd een staatsburger van Saudi Arabië(SA). Dat dit nu uitgerekend in SA moest gebeuren lijkt wel een grap, een land waar de vrouw amper rechten heeft en streng islamitisch is, juist daar krijgt een "vrouwelijke" robot het staatsburgerschap.

 { http://niburu.co/ }

Polish UFO writings are said to have been lost.Videos.

(Before It's News)

According to Polish Colonel Ryszard Grundman, Polish UFO writings either lost or stolen. In a conversation dated  former head of air traffic and air defense, Colonel Grundman, responsible for UFO reports, there were many new facts about the concentration of UFO records.

Antarctica once had a forest and researchers are trying to figure out why it disappeared

BY ELENA MOTIVANS

Antarctica wasn’t always the frozen barren land that it is today — millions of years ago, it was covered in lush forests. The trees had some bizarre traits to let them survive the extreme light conditions at the poles. They were extremely hardy so researchers are curious about what made them go extinct.

The British explorer Robert Falcon Scott was the first to find plant fossils in Antarctica in 1912. However, unfortunately, he did not survive the expedition. Now, UW-Milwaukee geologists have climbed the frozen Transantarctic mountains looking for more fossils to give insight into why the trees went extinct. They found the fossil fragments of 13 trees, which are over 260 million years old. This was before the first dinosaurs, at the end of the Permian period. The Permian ended 251 million years with a mass extinction that caused 90% of species to go extinct. These forests went extinct at the same time.

Hard to imagine it green.

Image credits: Dave Pape.

The hypothesis is that volcanic eruptions in Siberia released a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, over 200,000 years. This input of gases over a short time frame likely caused the mass extinction.

“This forest is a glimpse of life before the extinction, which can help us understand what caused the event,” said Gulbranson, a paleoecologist and visiting assistant professor in UWM’s Department of Geosciences.

Antarctica was warmer and more humid at this point in time. It was a part of the Gondwana supercontinent in the southern hemisphere. Plants included mosses, ferns, and trees. These forests were not so diverse but stretched across all of Gondwana (which included South America, Africa, India, Australia and the Arabian Peninsula)

“This plant group must have been capable of surviving and thriving in a variety of environments,” Gulbranson said. “It’s extremely rare, even today, for a group to appear across nearly an entire hemisphere of the globe.”

Researcher Erik Gulbranson studies some of the fossilized trees he found in Antarctica.

Credit: UWM Photo/Troye Fox.

At the south pole, night rules the winter, with months of pitch-darkness, while the summer months are constantly lit. From the preserved tree fossil rings, the researchers found that the trees switched from summer-mode to winter-mode very quickly, in just one month. In the summer, the trees were active and grew, while in the winter, they were dormant. Modern plants make this switch over several months and keep water by making food during the day and resting at night. Another study has shown that the forests were likely composed of a mix of deciduous and evergreen trees.

“There isn’t anything like that today,” Gulbranson said. “These trees could turn their growing cycles on and off like a light switch. We know the winter shutoff happened right away, but we don’t know how active they were during the summertime and if they could force themselves into dormancy while it was still light out.”

Although these trees seem to have been very hardy and able to withstand extreme conditions, they weren’t able to survive the high carbon dioxide levels that led to the mass extinction. The research team will go back this winter (Antarctic summer) for more clues on how these trees went extinct and how the greenhouse gases affected them.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

What is the Wilson Cycle, builder and slayer of supercontinents?

We all know what tectonics is — but does it happen by accident? Does it have to follow rules? Is there a method to the madness? Actually, there is: a beautiful, epic cycle of death and rebirth named after Canadian geophysicist John T. Wilson.

Image via Pixabay.

Geology is, in many ways, a matter of degrees. One of my freshman year professors used to say that nothing “just happens” in geology, that every flake of rock adheres to the same rules that shape whole planets — it’s just a matter of how closely you look. Zoom into a single strand of sand and you’re dealing with petrography — the science of the stuff rocks are made of. Look at the whole beach, and you’re dealing with sedimentology and depositional systems. If you want to know how the beaches got there, you’ll need tectonics.

And while each level of zoom paints a strikingly different picture, they’re all iterations of a single story. A story in which physics, chemistry, sometimes biology, take the leading roles. Their interplay dictates everything, from the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field to the price of gas.

Of these processes, tectonics plays out on the more massive scale of things. Look at a map — it’s tectonics who made it be that way. And it seems to be unique to the Earth. There’re some other planetsaround there that seem to do it, some very similarly to ours, but the way our blue corner of space goes about tectonics is to the best of our knowledge, unique.

But, being the science-savvy folks that you are, I’m sure you know this already. So what I’d want to talk about today is what you’ll find when you zoom out from tectonics one more time. The rules, if you will, which tectonics has to play by. A guidebook that geologists know as:

1. The Wilson Cycle

Well if you’re a stickler for rules it’s technically the Supercontinent Cycle, but that’s just a mouthful so I don’t really use the term.

So let’s get down to business. You know how the Earth’s crust is made out of plates that skim on the surface of a molten ocean of lava (the mantle), bumping into one another. Some of them get pushed back down into the mantle where they’re recycled, so have you ever asked yourself — why don’t we run out of plates?

I don’t even own this many regular plates.
Image credits USGS.

Well, the mantle also helpfully supplies new plate material in rift areas — places where existing tectonic plates drift away from one another, so the mantle can reach the surface and harden into rocks. And when they don’t really feel like bumping into or away from each other, they just slide past one another. We call these latter ones “transform boundaries,” while the bits where plates mash together are known as convergent boundaries and those where they move apart are divergent boundaries. Pretty clever, eh?

Now, what John T. Wilson did to warrant us naming the thing after him was to theorize that the motions of these plates aren’t a random hodge-podge, but rather follow a predictable pattern — a cycle. Give them enough time, and these plates will mush together into a single supercontinent. Wait a bit after that, and you’ll see these plates squabble and break up into a lot of tiny continents, more closely resembling what we know today. The really patient (and ridiculously long-lived) will get so see this happening again and again.

One full cycle is estimated to be around 300 to 500 million years old, and the first one likely started somewhere between 3 and 3.2 billion years ago, when the Earth cooled down enough for the rocks we know and love today to harden into crust.

2. Step one: The Stable Craton

What we consider as being the crust is made up of three large families of rock, two of which form the bulk of it. Geologists also draw a line between oceanic and continental crust. This division stems from a difference in chemical compositions, which translate to physical differences: oceanic crust is generally made up of mafic igneous rocks (which have a lot of heavier minerals such as magnesium and ferriccompounds, so they’re denser,) while continental crust largely made up of felsic igneous rocks (richer in lighter minerals such as feldspars and silica.) Both have generous sprinklings of sedimentary and metamorphic rocks.

Being denser, mafic rocks float deeper into the mantle, so they sink below the waterline. Felsic rocks, being less dense, rise above their mafic counterparts and break the waterline, forming land. That’s how they get their names — mafic/oceanic crust naturally bobs below the waterline and forms oceans, felsic/continental crust is light enough to potentially form dry land.

The first step in the Wilson Cycle starts with a single tectonically-stable core (a craton) containing all felsic material surrounded by oceanic crust and, well, the ocean. Since all felsic material is contained here, this core can’t get any lighter or heavier so it stays at a perfect isostatic equilibrium (at a constant level on top of the mantle). There’s no more tectonic movement to form mountains, so erosion has had time to level this continent dead-flat, almost down to the waterline, all over its surface — a state referred to as a peneplane. There’s no volcanic activity and no earthquakes. It’s actually quite uneventful, even for what’s basically a pile of rocks.

3. Step two: The Rifting

Powered by the heat trapped in our planet’s interior, an incredibly hot and extremely powerful jet of molten material known as a mantle plume shoots upwards from the core and begins to eat into the craton. What happens next resembles a blowtorch melting through a slab of metal, but the material this plume is made of also has a lot of weight and speed, meaning it will also push against the rocks at the surface.

An estimate of how the West Gondwana Craton looked like before it split off in Africa and South America. The WGC itself split off from a larger craton earlier throgh similar processes.
Image credits Woudloper / Wikimedia.

The rocks above the plume start to swell from heat dilation, pushing neighboring rocks aside and forming a dome on the surface. At the same time, the underside of the craton begins to melt — you can see a version of this happening in Yellowstone today. The combined effect is that the crust stretches and thins until it eventually fractures under mechanical stress. The fracturing usually follows three different directions, a triple junction, most often asymmetrical and diverging at odd angles from one another. Molten material from the underside rises up and forms surface vulcanism.

4. Step three and four: Divergence and Oceanification

These fractures are deep — they go all the way through the crust. Sometimes, as seems to be the casewith Yellowstone, plumes just die off or are otherwise blocked in the mantle, and that’s that. But if it keeps going, the fractures can become longer and widen until there’s actually no more crust left in the area, forming a rift valley. Nature can’t have that, so water rushes in to fill the gap and hardens the magma into a ‘transition’ crust, which mixes pre-existing felsic and newly minted mafic rocks. Convection cells created by the plume slowly inch the neighboring slabs of rock apart, meaning more empty space, more oceanic crust formed here, and eventually, you have a full blow ocean on your hands.

So there’s an important thing to keep in mind here: rifting breaks continents apart and creates oceans.

This is how oceans are born.
Image credits Hannes Grobe / Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.

As these two continents float away from the rift, the new transition and oceanic crust cool down (becoming denser) and sink lower in the mantle. This process also pulls the original continental material from the rifting area that they’re attached to from about 3-5 km above sea level to roughly 14 km below the waterline in 100-110 million years. Some consider this to be a separate step in the process but that’s more of a geological technicality. I’ve mentioned it so you can get an idea of how much heat dilation affects the buoyancy of rocks (and it’s effect in step 1.)

5. Step Five: Convergence

The more astute of you may be suspecting that the Earth is, in fact, a pretty round object. Now it’s time for our thinking caps to come on.

What happens on one pole of the Earth when there’s a rift actively pumping out new crust on the opposite one for a few million years? Well, it either starts looking like a pug’s face (please be this one) or, or, it can stay round by recycling old crust back into the mantle to make room for the new one. Let’s check.

Damnit, it’s round!
Image credits NASA.

Divergence (with the creation of new crust) will eventually stop as the plume dies off. But it can go on for tens, even hundreds of millions of years, creating a lot of material before that happens. So some old crust needs to crack and subduct into the mantle to make room for all the new stuff. This doesn’t have to happen on the opposite pole, but it has to happen somewhere.

This is the second, closing half of the cycle. As a rule, it’s always oceanic crust that breaks and starts to subduct, since continental crust is just too floaty (in magma that is, not water.) So this subduction zone forms somewhere underwater since that’s where oceanic crust tends to hang around. But wherever it happens you’ll be able to spot it — there’ll be either an island arc nearby, formed by the top plate or a pre-existing continental edge. Part of the subducting crust is dragged down into a trench (about 1-2 km below the normal ocean floor,) and will heat up while it slides into the mantle. At about 120 km deep it’ll begin melting back into magma.

6. Step six: Re-continentalization

Let this process roll for long enough and all the old oceanic crust will subduct and continents will bump back into each other. There are a few more things taking place between S5 and S6, such as new mountains forming as the cratons get smushed, the creation of new subduction zones, but again, geological technicality.

This new continent will mix pieces of the old craton, bits of transition and oceanic crust (which will tend to sink to the bottom during suture,) and metamorphic rocks it picked up along the way.

In many ways, the second half of the cycle acts like the first one in reverse. It’s often less clear-cut than what I’ve told you about here: new rifts can form opposite the ‘old’ one, fracturing the continents even more. And while the effects of these two halves can become apparent hundreds, thousands of years apart, they take place simultaneously — when there’s new crust being formed, the old crust has to be consumed somewhere else. And it happens all the time. There’s constant creation and destruction of land going on on Earth, each day, right below our feet. Well, right below our feet and a few thousand kilometers out at sea, but you get what I mean.

The Wilson Cycle is the ultimate matchmaker and the end-all homewrecker. Give it enough time, and this process will, through sheer trial and error, bring all the land together, then break it up all over again.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Scientists track Earth’s ancient, destroyed oceans

We think of oceans as eternal and stable; what could affect these endless fields of water? But everything changes, the plains, mountains, and the Earth itself. Throughout our planet’s geological history, oceans have been born and destroyed, and now we’re one step closer towards knowing how this happened.

The maps are showing different viewing options for the region under Southeast Asia.

Illustration: Grace E. Shephard.

Seeing the past

Millions of years ago, the Earth was a different place. It’s not just the biodiversity and the climate, the oceans and the land looked different, too. That happens because the surface of the Earth is in constant motion. It doesn’t move by much (on the scale of centimeters per year), but give it enough time, and the change becomes noticeable. This happens due to the relative motion of the planet’s tectonic plates, pushed around by upwelling magma from the mantle.

The movement isn’t only lateral — it’s vertical as well. New crust is formed at mid-oceanic ridges, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and older crust is destroyed. Some of the crust goes up, the other sinks into the mantle, in the “geological graveyard.” This cycle also affects oceans. Sometimes, it opens up or spreads new oceans, and other times it closes them down. The Pacific, for instance, is currently expanding, while the older Atlantic is slowly shrinking. Now, researchers have used seismic tomographyto have a “look” at this geological graveyard up to 2,800 km beneath the surface, identifying how the planet might have looked like 200 million years in the past.

This is not the first time something like this has been done. Several studies, using several different approaches, have retraced our planet’s evolution, sometimes ending up with different models. Now, Grace Shephard at the University of Oslo has found a simple, yet powerful way to combine images from alternative seismic tomography models.

“There are many different ways of creating such models, and lots of different data input can be used,” explains Grace Shephard, who has been a postdoctoral researcher at CEED since she took her Ph.D. at the University of Sydney four years ago.

“We wanted a quick and simple way to see which features are common across all of the models. By comparing up to 14 different models, for instance, we can visualize where they agree and thus identify what we call the most robust anomalies.”

The Arctic is a region where little is known about plate tectonics far back in time. That is one of the reasons why Australian Grace E. Shephard decided to join the CEED team of the University of Oslo.

Photo: Dag Inge Danielsen/UiO.

A continental traffic jam

This tomography data gives more accurate and more easily available information about the movements of the oceans and continents, as well as the interaction between the Earth’s crust and the mantle. By seeing at what depth the former seafloor lies (the paleo-seafloor), and supposing that it sinks at a rate of 1 cm/year, researchers can calculate when the paleo-seafloor sank. Using this method, scientists found that there was a period around 100–140 million years ago that experienced more ocean destruction; it’s unclear why this happened. They also learned of an area of the mantle which is more ‘sticky’ — viscous — and exerts more opposition to sinking plates, resulting in a “traffic jam.”

The analysis raises new possibilities of understanding our planet’s history, but there’s still plenty of work to do. The models have to be constantly fine-tuned and improving using real-life observations.

“Studying these processes in new ways opens up new questions. That is something we welcome, because we need to find out what questions to ask and what to focus on in order to understand the development of the Earth. We always have to keep in mind what is an observation and what is a model. The models need to be tested against observations, to make way for new and improved models. It is an iterative procedure.”

Using the same approach, we can also derive information about the future. While it’s impossible to gauge how life will evolve over such a long timescale, geologically speaking, not that much will change.

“If you look at Earth from space, the distribution of continents and oceans will then look much the same, even though life, the climate and sea level may have dramatically changed. If we move even further ahead, say 10 or 100 million years, it is very hard to say how oceans may be opening and closing, but we have some clues. Some people think that the Atlantic will close, and others think the Arctic or Indian oceans will close. We can follow the rules of the past when we look to the future, but this task keeps geoscientists very busy.”

Journal Reference: On the consistency of seismically imaged lower mantle slabs, G. E. Shephard, K. J. Matthews, K. Hosseini & M. Domeier, Scientific Reports 7,

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

The Idea of Creating a New Universe in the Lab Is No Joke

 by ZEEYA MERALI

Physicists aren’t often reprimanded for using risqué humour in their academic writings, but in 1991 that is exactly what happened to the cosmologist Andrei Linde at Stanford University. He had submitted a draft article entitled ‘Hard Art of the Universe Creation’ to the journal Nuclear Physics B. In it, he outlined the possibility of creating a universe in a laboratory: a whole new cosmos that might one day evolve its own stars, planets and intelligent life. Near the end, Linde made a seemingly flippant suggestion that our Universe itself might have been knocked together by an alien ‘physicist hacker’. The paper’s referees objected to this ‘dirty joke’; religious people might be offended that scientists were aiming to steal the feat of universe-making out of the hands of God, they worried. Linde changed the paper’s title and abstract but held firm over the line that our Universe could have been made by an alien scientist. ‘I am not so sure that this is just a joke,’ he told me. 

Fast-forward a quarter of a century, and the notion of universe-making – or ‘cosmogenesis’ as I dub it – seems less comical than ever. I’ve travelled the world talking to physicists who take the concept seriously, and who have even sketched out rough blueprints for how humanity might one day achieve it. Linde’s referees might have been right to be concerned, but they were asking the wrong questions. The issue is not who might be offended by cosmogenesis, but what would happen if it were truly possible. How would we handle the theological implications? What moral responsibilities would come with fallible humans taking on the role of cosmic creators?

Theoretical physicists have grappled for years with related questions as part of their considerations of how our own Universe began. In the 1980s, the cosmologist Alex Vilenkin at Tufts University in Massachusetts came up with a mechanism through which the laws of quantum mechanics could have generated an inflating universe from a state in which there was no time, no space and no matter. There’s an established principle in quantum theory that pairs of particles can spontaneously, momentarily pop out of empty space. Vilenkin took this notion a step further, arguing that quantum rules could also enable a minuscule bubble of space itself to burst into being from nothing, with the impetus to then inflate to astronomical scales. Our cosmos could thus have been burped into being by the laws of physics alone. To Vilenkin, this result put an end to the question of what came before the Big Bang: nothing. Many cosmologists have made peace with the notion of a universe without a prime mover, divine or otherwise.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum, I met with Don Page, a physicist and evangelical Christian at the University of Alberta in Canada, noted for his early collaboration with Stephen Hawking on the nature of black holes. To Page, the salient point is that God created the Universe ex nihilo – from absolutely nothing. The kind of cosmogenesis envisioned by Linde, in contrast, would require physicists to cook up their cosmos in a highly technical laboratory, using a far more powerful cousin of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. It would also require a seed particle called a ‘monopole’ (which is hypothesised to exist by some models of physics, but has yet to be found). 

The idea goes that if we could impart enough energy to a monopole, it will start to inflate. Rather than growing in size within our Universe, the expanding monopole would bend spacetime within the accelerator to create a tiny wormhole tunnel leading to a separate region of space. From within our lab we would see only the mouth of the wormhole; it would appear to us as a mini black hole, so small as to be utterly harmless. But if we could travel into that wormhole, we would pass through a gateway into a rapidly expanding baby universe that we had created. (A video illustrating this process provides some further details.)

We have no reason to believe that even the most advanced physics hackers could conjure a cosmos from nothing at all, Page argues. Linde’s concept of cosmogenesis, audacious as it might be, is still fundamentally technological. Page, therefore, sees little threat to his faith. On this first issue, then, cosmogenesis would not necessarily upset existing theological views.

But flipping the problem around, I started to wonder: what are the implications of humans even considering the possibility of one day making a universe that could become inhabited by intelligent life? As I discuss in my book A Big Bang in a Little Room (2017), current theory suggests that, once we have created a new universe, we would have little ability to control its evolution or the potential suffering of any of its residents. Wouldn’t that make us irresponsible and reckless deities? I posed the question to Eduardo Guendelman, a physicist at Ben Gurion University in Israel, who was one of the architects of the cosmogenesis model back in the 1980s. Today, Guendelman is engaged in research that could bring baby-universe-making within practical grasp. I was surprised to find that the moral issues did not cause him any discomfort. Guendelman likens scientists pondering their responsibility over making a baby universe to parents deciding whether or not to have children, knowing they will inevitably introduce them to a life filled with pain as well as joy.

Other physicists are more wary. Nobuyuki Sakai of Yamaguchi University in Japan, one of the theorists who proposed that a monopole could serve as the seed for a baby universe, admitted that cosmogenesis is a thorny issue that we should ‘worry’ about as a society in the future. But he absolved himself of any ethical concerns today. Although he is performing the calculations that could allow cosmogenesis, he notes that it will be decades before such an experiment might feasibly be realised. Ethical concerns can wait.

Many of the physicists I approached were reluctant to wade into such potential philosophical quandaries. So I turned to a philosopher, Anders Sandberg at the University of Oxford, who contemplates the moral implications of creating artificial sentient life in computer simulations. He argues that the proliferation of intelligent life, regardless of form, can be taken as something that has inherent value. In that case, cosmogenesis might actually be a moral obligation.

Looking back on my numerous conversations with scientists and philosophers on these issues, I’ve concluded that the editors at Nuclear Physics B did a disservice both to physics and to theology. Their little act of censorship served only to stifle an important discussion. The real danger lies in fostering an air of hostility between the two sides, leaving scientists afraid to speak honestly about the religious and ethical consequences of their work out of concerns of professional reprisal or ridicule.

We will not be creating baby universes anytime soon, but scientists in all areas of research must feel able to freely articulate the implications of their work without concern for causing offence. Cosmogenesis is an extreme example that tests the principle. Parallel ethical issues are at stake in the more near-term prospects of creating artificial intelligence or developing new kinds of weapons, for instance. As Sandberg put it, although it is understandable that scientists shy away from philosophy, afraid of being thought weird for veering beyond their comfort zone, the unwanted result is that many of them keep quiet on things that really matter.

Artwork illustrating the concept of an alternate 'bubble' universe in which our universe

As I was leaving Linde’s office at Stanford, after we’d spent a day riffing on the nature of God, the cosmos and baby universes, he pointed at my notes and commented ruefully: ‘If you want to have my reputation destroyed, I guess you have enough material.’ This sentiment was echoed by a number of the scientists I had met, whether they identified as atheists, agnostics, religious or none of the above. The irony was that if they felt able to share their thoughts with each other as openly as they had with me, they would know that they weren’t alone among their colleagues in pondering some of the biggest questions of our being.

Zeeya Merali

----

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

{  http://bigthink.com/ }

Mars SHOCK CLAIM: UFO and alien base found on Red Planet

CONSPIRACY theorists believe they have hit the jackpot after discovering what they claim is a UFO and alien base on Mars.

Mystery UFO video supposedly from USS Nimitz fighter jet intrigues researchers

Written by Barnett Parker

USS Nimitz Tic Tac UFO leaked FLIR footage

LAS VEGAS (FOX5) -UFO researchers around the world have been abuzz in recent weeks about a video supposedly shot in 2004 from a Super Hornet fighter jet based on the carrier USS Nimitz.

The video shows an object in the distance that doesn’t act like a typical aircraft – and it veers out of sight as a fighter jet closes

The story first came to light in a 2015 article in fightersweep.com – and the tale was rekindled exponentially when former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge referenced it Oct. 11 during his announcement about the creation of his To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science.

Author John B. Alexander of Las Vegas believes the incident happened, but he hasn’t confirmed the video. Alexander – whose books include “UFOs” Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities” -- told FOX5 he believes the video originated with the U.S. Navy.

Alexander said in an email that he “asked one of the guys who saw it in a classified version,” and that his source “was very highly placed, and I mean very highly placed.”

He added: “The update is they believe the video to be real, but do not-- do not -- confirm the authenticity. Others videos are likely soon to similar incidents.”

DeLonge didn’t show any video from the 2004 incident with the Nimitz and various UFOs about 100 miles from San Diego but he has teased that one of the group’s goals is to release such previously classified video and documents.

This screen grab shows unidentified object streaking to left.

Since the announcement, what could be described as video from the display the pilot sees has popped up in several places on Youtube and other internet sites.

The origin of the video is uncertain, although two UFO researchers say it first appeared in 2007 on what they describe as a website run by German film students.

Researcher Isaac Kol lives in London and sometimes posts on the Web forum Above Top Secret.

He recently posted:

Back in 2007, I tracked the first online copy of the video back to the website of a group of German film students that specialized in creating science fiction movies with lots of special effects (Vision Unlimited).

His post also included, “in 2007, I was inclined to reach the tentative conclusion that it was a hoax... I find it very interesting that the current rounds of discussion seem to ignore the provenance of the footage…”

Kol told FOX5 in an email, “I don’t claim to have debunked that footage – merely shown that the place that it was originally posted raises red flags pending further evidence.”

Robert Powell lives in Austin, Texas, and publishes on the Facebook page Scientific Coalition for Ufology.

He said: “The video was first found on a German film site back in 2007 I believe. That makes one suspicious, but there is no proof that the video was doctored by the German film students. I'm not aware that anyone has looked at the video and made a determination that it was edited in some fashion.”

Powell has filed a freedom of information requests to obtain all the documentation he can about the November 2004 incidents with the Nimitz.

Alexander noted he believes audio tapes of the pilots communicating with flight control also exist.

One reason researchers found this video so intriguing is the way the UFOs baffled the Navy’s best fighter jets and radar systems in the days around Nov. 14, 2004.

The story on fightersweep.com described the anomalous aerial vehicles as dropping from above 80,000 feet, according to radar returns and then hovering 50-feet off the water within a matter of seconds.

The objects then moved away at “speeds, turn rates and accelerations faster than any known friendly or threat aircraft.”

{ http://www.fox5vegas.com/ }

Virgin Galactic Wants to Send People on Superfast Trips Across Earth

The Week's Top Space Stories

A United Nations committee finds 2017 may be one of the hottest years on record, NASA launches a $100K contest for aerosol sensor design, the NASA administrator nominee advances in his confirmation process, and laser weapons might soon be mounted onto aircrafts in some of this week's top stories from Space.com.

1. U.S. Air Force signs new laser weapon contract

2. Top three hottest years on record may soon include 2017

3. Uber Collaborates with NASA on flying car project

4. Ultra-long-lasting supernova raises questions about star deaths

Photo Credit: NASA/YouTube

5. NASA will award $100K for best astronaut air-safety design

6. A 1972 engine may benefit manned missions to Mars

Photo Credit: NASA

7. Happy 50th anniversary, Saturn V!

Photo Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

8. Earth may have more than one planetary neighbor

The closest exoplanet to Earth, Proxima b, might have company. According to a new study, a dusty ring encircling the star suggests other planets may orbit the star Proxima Centauri. [Full Story: The Closest Exoplanet Proxima b May Have Neighbors]

Photo Credit: Joel Kowsky/NASA

9. Senate committee votes along party-lines for NASA administrator nomination

Photo Credit: Lockheed Martin

10. NASA awards contracts for moon-orbiting space station's power and propulsion module

{ https://www.space.com/ }