On a clear June afternoon in 1947, Kenneth Arnold was flying past Mount Rainier when a flash of light caught his eye. 

Arnold, a Boise businessman and private pilot, had been on his way from Chehalis to Yakima, Washington, when he made a brief detour near Mount Rainier National Park. A $5,000 reward had been offered for anyone who could locate a Marine Corps transport plane that had crashed in the area, and Arnold had decided to take a look while passing through. 

The detour didn’t lead Arnold to the missing plane. Instead, it led him to a sighting that would help ignite America’s fascination with UFOs.

Looking toward Mount Rainier, Arnold said he spotted nine brilliant objects moving rapidly through the sky. They appeared to travel together, weaving through the landscape as they headed south from Rainier toward Mount Adams.

And once Arnold’s story was out, other people began coming forward with stories of their own.

What those people are actually seeing is another question. An unidentified object is, by definition, something the observer simply can’t identify, and nearly 80 years after Arnold’s flight, there is still no agreed-upon explanation for what passed by Mount Rainier that afternoon. 

{ https://www.sfgate.com/ }

EXCLUSIVE - DR PHIL: There are crystal clear secret UFO videos the government's hidden in plain sight. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. What I've heard... and the terrifying reason for the cover-up may be more damaging than a PANDEMIC

By MATT LONDON, US EXECUTIVE EDITOR, OPINION

Dr Phil McGraw is beginning to lose patience with the Trump administration's efforts to disclose decades of government-held secrets about unidentified flying objects, though he doesn't believe the President is to blame.

'I think the President is fully committed to wanting transparency, but I think his intention and what's getting bureaucratically executed are two very different things,' Dr Phil told the Daily Mail after the Pentagon released a new batch of documents and images related to UFOs, also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP.

Included in the latest dump were six videos of UAP encounters by Special Operations forces on an AC-130J gunship over the Gulf of Oman in September 2021. The footage, which appears to have been taken by a cellphone of screens, shows objects picked up by infrared cameras and other sensors.

An accompanying report indicated the Special Ops forces on the ship 'observed approximately 25 instances of UAPs while conducting a live fire exercise in the Gulf of Oman.' 

Beyond that, little additional information was provided.

For Dr Phil that's a problem. 

'This is the fifth tranche of information they've put out,' he said of the new material. 'There's not any context to this. There's very seldom any follow-up information.'

The renowned talk show host and former practicing clinical psychologist is a member of President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission and is in close contact with members of Congress about this disclosure process.

'This is the fifth tranche of information they've put out,' he said of the new material. 'There's not any context to this. There's very seldom any follow-up information'

'My point is: Are we really getting disclosure here?' he continued. 'Or are we getting information without context, so you don't really know the meaning of what they're reporting? Is that an accident? The pattern suggests that it's not really an accident.'

Dr Phil stresses that he is not one to engage in reckless speculation. In fact, House and Senate members have apparently sought him out to share their concerns over the potential of a mental health crisis, if non-human life and technology is revealed to the public.

'[Members of Congress] speak as candidly with me about it as anybody and maybe more so,' he told the Daily Mail. And these top government officials, he said, are as worried as he is that they're not getting the full story.

'The information about this, I've come to find, is very fractionalized,' Dr Phil explained. 'There's not one place or one person or group of people that has all the information. So, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand knows.'

That observation, he said, has given rise to suspicion, shared among members of Congress, that additional information may be held outside of federal government control.

'I think there is a fairly strong belief that a lot of this information has been housed, moved, managed, however you want to say it, to the private aerospace industry. Maybe to escape Freedom of Information Act requests,' Dr Phil shared.

The Freedom of Information Act or FOIA is a federal law that gives citizens the right to ask for and view records held by federal agencies. 

But if the information is not in government hands, the system can be thwarted.

'There are a lot of people who believe that [addition information is] in the possession of private aerospace companies, not the government, in terms of physically holding it and housing it. And I think there are senators and representatives that want to know… There are people on the Hill who believe that that's been done,' he said.

'Let's say something has been recovered,' Dr Phil continued in reference to potential non-human technology. 'The propulsion systems that have been described in some of these aircraft are pretty amazing. Some of them have no heat signature, some of them are astoundingly fast.

'They move in ways that we don't have the technology to navigate and move. If you were able to reverse engineer that and there was some kind of new energy source that would be a quantum leap forward, right? What would that be worth?'

It would be naive, he argued, to dismiss the possibility that groups would not be motivated to keep advanced technology hidden in defiance of administration demands.

A screenshot of a video released showing an unresolved UFO report from last year. The footage shows a small orb-like object traveling across the screen

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{ https://www.dailymail.com/news/index.html }

Trump Promised Transparency. His Administration Keeps Finding New Ways to Hide Records.

"The most transparent president in history" keeps chipping away at laws like FOIA meant to keep the government honest.

Matthew Petti

(Joe Sohm/Dreamstime/Midjourney)

President Donald Trump claimed in 2019 that he was "the most transparent president in history." Throughout his second term, Trump's spokespeople have used that phrase over and over again. The administration has made a big show of opening the archives on old mysteries: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the existence of UFOs, and the case of well-connected sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. While the JFK files included some genuinely shocking revelations, the UFO files were thin on substance.

And the Epstein files turned into an infamous boondoggle. The administration handed a group of influencers binders labeled "Phase 1," which turned out to hold heavily redacted copies of already-public documents, then never followed up. After it was leaked to the press that the actual FBI file on Epstein included a sexually suggestive letter from Trump himself, Congress dragged the files out of an embarrassed and defensive administration.

But the Trump administration has also fouled up the everyday mechanisms for Americans to see what their leaders are up to and how their tax dollars are being spent. Officials have tried to hide documents from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or outright exempt government activities from FOIA. In fiscal year 2025, the federal government granted a little under 50 percent of FOIA requests, a record low since 2010, according to data compiled by The New York Times. The Department of Justice fought in court to overturn the Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve its files for posterity. In between his two terms, Trump infamously hid papers in his bathroom.

Trump had ironically ridden to power on the back of an earlier outrage about transparency. Much of the 2016 election focused on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's emails. Back when she was secretary of state, Clinton  had secretly moved her emails to a private, nongovernment server, both exposing them to hackers and concealing them from public FOIA requests. Trump said on the campaign trail that Clinton was trying to "cover up her crimes." In the decade since then, the Trump administration has done a lot more to cover up its own activities.

Beyond the political irony, the Trump administration's attack on transparency highlights how the struggle to keep politicians honest works. American journalists, lawyers, and crusading gadflies have won the right to inspect a wide variety of government records. The FOIA regime is a model for the rest of the free world—and the unsung source of a lot of politically relevant scoops, including at Reason. The political operators undermining transparency know what they're doing.

A Quick History of Modern Presidents Trying To Shield, or Release, Records

"One of the contradictory things about the United States is that an incredible amount of the government is dedicated to doing things in secret," geographer Trevor Paglen writes in Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World. "At the same time, it's one of the world's most open governments."

That openness was a hard-won right. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 had left federal officials with wide discretion in what information to release to the public, and they became increasingly tightfisted with Cold War paranoia. The original FOIA was passed in 1966 as a "product of years of slow campaigning by a network of journalists, scientists, and politicians seeking to make the government more transparent," according to State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime by historian Sam Lebovic. The Watergate scandal a few years later turbocharged those demands for transparency.

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon grew paranoid about internal leaks after the theft and publication of the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's secret internal history of the (then-ongoing) Vietnam War. He fretted to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger that his sabotage of Vietnamese peace talks or his undeclared war in Cambodia might be revealed. Nixon assembled the "Plumbers," a team of intelligence operatives, to "destroy" Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and hunt down other alleged traitors by "any means."

When the Plumbers were caught burglarizing Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in 1972, the resulting scandal not only forced Nixon to resign, but also set off a congressional campaign to rein in the executive branch, especially the national security complex. Congress amended FOIA in 1974 and 1976. Most importantly, the new rules allowed courts to review classified documents and punish noncompliant officials in response to FOIA requesters' lawsuits.

Congress also passed the Presidential Records Act of 1978 in response to Watergate. Nixon, ever the paranoiac, had secretly bugged the White House with tape recorders. When he attempted to destroy the tapes to avoid their being used as evidence against him, Congress clarified that White House records are the property of the nation, not the private property of the president himself. The act both preserved presidential papers and subjected them to FOIA from five years after the end of an administration.

The interpretation of the laws seesawed back and forth for some time. The Carter administration ordered officials not to withhold documents from FOIA requesters unless they could prove harm from releasing them. The Reagan administration flipped that rule around, stating that it would defend any official's decision to withhold documents if there was a defensible legal basis. The Clinton administration flipped back to the Carter position, and the George W. Bush administration flipped back to the Reagan stance.

{ https://reason.com/tag/government-secrecy/ }

Autopsy reveals chilling new details in mysterious death of missing scientist found skeletonized in the woods

• MORE:  New twist in mystery of dead and missing scientists: Experts uncover chilling link that ties four unsolved cases together
  

By CHRIS MELORE, US DEPUTY SCIENCE EDITOR

Shocking new details have emerged concerning the mysterious disappearance and death of a New Mexico woman who worked at a secretive US nuclear lab.

Authorities have revealed that Melissa Casias, whose body was discovered on May 28, was shot in the head at or around the time of her death, but it remains unclear if this was murder or a suicide. Her body was found well after her death.

Casias, an administrative assistant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, vanished without a trace on June 26, 2025 after strangely walking out of her home without any identification, keys or way of contacting her.

Her skeletal remains were discovered 11 months later in Carson National Forest, propped up against a tree with a handgun near the body.

The official autopsy noted that Casias had been shot through the base of the skull, with the bullet exiting through the left side of her head. However, the Office of the Medical Investigator could not say if this wound was what killed the 53-year-old.

Due to the amount of decomposition of Casias's remains when she was found, the medical examiner could only say that the gunshot occurred 'perimortem,' meaning it took place around the time she died but may not have been the actual cause.

The medical examiner's report added that the woman's left hand and left leg were both found about 20 feet away from the body and showed signs of being attacked by wildlife who likely scavenged through the remains after death.

While the medical examiner could not tell if Casias's death was a suicide or involved foul play, an anonymous law enforcement source told the Daily Mail the new details in the case point to murder.

Melissa Casias worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a long-running nuclear research facility, before disappearing on June 26 last year. Her remains were found on May 28

The autopsy of Melissa Casias has been released and authorities have determined that the nuclear lab worker had been shot in the head

The newly released autopsy noted that the bullet was fired into the right side of Casias's cranial base, hitting the bottom of the skull near the large hole where the spinal cord connects to the brain.

It also damaged the topmost neck bone, known as the C1 vertebra, before exiting through the left side of the head, through the flat, thin part of the temple.

'There's no way this was suicide, not from that angle,' the law enforcement source claimed, noting the reported position of the bullet when it entered Casias's skull. 

The source believed that, if Casias was really holding the handgun at that angle, the gun would have recoiled, causing the bullet to change direction instead of passing straight through her skull.

'The kickback would have made the gun go straight up. That's ridiculous. She was murdered,' the source alleged.

Officially, the medical examiner has labeled Casias's cause of death as 'undetermined,' adding that the autopsy could not even determine how close the gun was to the nuclear lab worker's head when it was fired.

New Mexico State Police told the Daily Mail that their investigation is still active, but did not reveal if investigators have interviewed any new suspects in the case.

Casias' husband, Mark, was one of the last people to see his wife alive in 2025, when he was dropped off at LANL for work on the morning of her disappearance.

Melissa Casias (Left) pictured with her husband Mark Casias

Casias's body was found alongside a handgun in the McGaffey Ridge area of Carson National Forest

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•  New twist in mystery of dead and missing scientists as questions swirl about unknown 'mentor' 

Casias reportedly said she had forgotten her work badge needed to access the base at the couple's Taos, New Mexico home.

Shortly after, she was seen bringing a sandwich to her daughter's place of work, telling the teen that she would be working from home after forgetting the badge.

However, Casias never reported for work at LANL that day, with her family returning home to find a drop of blood inside the house and both of the wife and mother's cellphones wiped and rebooted to their factory settings.

She was last seen on surveillance cameras walking alone eastward on State Road 518, roughly three miles from her home, around 2.20pm local time.

David Adams, a lawyer hired by Casias's parents and siblings, previously told the Daily Mail the family has continued to suspect foul play after multiple red flags were raised by legal observers looking at the investigation into her disappearance and death.

Adams revealed in July that the woman's relatives and other volunteers had unearthed a trove of evidence at the scene in Carson National Forest nearly a month after New Mexico State Police officially declared the crime scene clear and removed Casias's remains.

The search team found bones, torn and bloody clothing, a tobacco pouch, orange peels and strands of someone or something else's hair that were not collected by police when the 53-year-old's body was recovered. 

The discovery has turned the case on its head, with Adams claiming investigators in New Mexico have seriously damaged their credibility if it is found that Casias was the victim of foul play and a suspect is brought to trial.

'There becomes a question of a chain of custody... Could law enforcement have spat a tobacco pouch in the crime scene? I mean, certainly possible. I mean, that would be an example of just poor training,' Adams explained.

The medical investigator's report determined that Melissa Casias was shot in the lower right-hand side of her skull, with the bullet exiting through the left temple

Casias was last seen walking alone in New Mexico after dropping off her husband at work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in June 2025, but not reporting for work herself

Casias's work at LANL has raised fears that the administrative assistant may have been the target of a larger plot to steal classified government data on nuclear research or rocket technology.

Her disappearance has been linked to several other missing person cases in the Southwest, including a retired employee from LANL and former US Air Force General William Neil McCasland, who oversaw the military's ties to research at the nuclear lab.

Overall, more than ten nuclear lab workers, NASA scientists and military personnel have been connected to the so-called 'missing scientist' case over the last year, with the White House ordering the FBI to investigate for any ties between the deaths and disappearances.

According to Adams, however, there have been no signs that the FBI has been looking into the death of Casias.

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{ https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/index.html }

Ancient 250-mile blob moving toward NYC leads scientists to shocking discovery

• READ MORE: I attended a secret UFO meeting preparing Christians for 'the truth' and saw shape-shifting beings. Trump's files hide a clue to where these 'aliens' come from
  

By STACY LIBERATORE, US SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EDITOR

Scientists probing an ancient hot ‘blob’ moving toward New York City discovered a mysterious column lurking nearby.

Called the Northern Appalachian Anomaly (NAA), the roughly 250-mile-wide mass is composed of unusually hot rock buried deep beneath New England.

A 2025 study found that the NAA is drifting southwest at approximately 12 miles per million years and could pass beneath New York City within 10 to 15 million years.

Researchers have now used seismic waves from distant earthquakes to create the most detailed three-dimensional images yet of the anomaly and surrounding mantle.

The scans revealed that the blob extends from approximately 37 to 124 miles beneath New England and is confined to the upper mantle.

But they also exposed a separate, narrow column beneath Connecticut that plunges hundreds of miles deeper.

Unlike the hot blob, which slows seismic waves, the column allows them to travel unusually quickly, suggesting it is made from colder, denser material.

Scientists believe it could be a fragment torn from the rocky underside of North America or the sinking side of a vast current circulating through the mantle.

Scientists believe a nearly 250-mile blob called the Northern Appalachian Anomaly is still moving and shaping mountains in the US

The latest study was led by researchers from Yale University and the University of Minnesota and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

The team created the underground images using seismic tomography, which works in a similar way to a medical CT scan.

Instead of X-rays passing through a human body, the technique measures the time taken for seismic waves from distant earthquakes to travel through different parts of the planet.

Those waves slow down or accelerate depending on the temperature, density and composition of the rock they encounter.

The researchers combined readings from USArray, the Canadian National Seismograph Network and other permanent monitoring stations with data from three temporary networks deployed across New England.

The temporary stations were positioned approximately three to 16 miles apart, allowing the scientists to see smaller features that might have been blurred or missed by earlier surveys.

At its most extreme point, P-waves, the fastest seismic waves created by earthquakes, traveled approximately four percent slower through the NAA than expected.

The slower speeds support the conclusion that the blob is made from hotter or otherwise altered mantle material, although it is not a hollow chamber or a giant underground lake of liquid magma.

The team has recently idnetified a column made from colder, denser material near the blob

The scans also showed that the NAA appears to end within the upper mantle and is not physically connected to other slow-wave anomalies detected in the deeper mantle transition zone.

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•  I saw unreleased UFO files at a secret meeting in the Tennessee mountains. We prayed after seeing what these 'humanoid beings' did... the world is not prepared 

However, the mysterious Connecticut column is different.

Researchers described it as a small, nearly vertical structure positioned adjacent to the NAA, rather than enclosed inside the blob.

The column appears to extend through the upper mantle to the bottom of the mantle transition zone, potentially reaching approximately 410 miles below the surface.

It is also not a tunnel or opening inside the Earth, but a three-dimensional volume of rock identified because seismic waves travel through it faster than they do through the surrounding material.

The researchers’ leading theory is that the column represents a piece of continental lithosphere, the rigid layer formed by the crust and the uppermost mantle, that detached and began sinking under its own weight.

If that occurred, hotter and more buoyant material may have risen from below to replace the missing fragment, potentially creating or contributing to the neighboring hot blob.

The scans revealed that the blob extends from approximately 37 to 124 miles beneath New England and is confined to the upper mantle

Scientists refer to that process as lithospheric delamination, or lithospheric loss.

Another possibility is that the blob and the column are opposite sides of an edge-driven convection cell, a gigantic loop of slowly circulating mantle rock.

Under that scenario, hot material would rise beneath the blob while colder, denser rock descended through the column, much like a conveyor belt operating over millions of years.

However, the study does not prove that the structures are connected or that one created the other.

Researchers conducted tests intended to determine whether the column might be an artificial feature caused by gaps or limitations in the seismic data, but its precise composition and origin remain uncertain.

The NAA has puzzled geologists because regions of anomalously hot mantle are normally associated with volcanoes or active tectonic plate boundaries.

New England has neither and has remained far from an active plate boundary for approximately 180 million years.

‘This thermal upwelling has long been a puzzling feature of North American geology,’ Professor Tom Gernon, an Earth scientist at the University of Southampton, said following the 2025 study.

The blob is moving about 12 miles every million years, putting it beneath New York City in about 15 million years

Gernon and researchers from the Helmholtz Center for Geosciences in Germany proposed that the anomaly is part of a slow-moving ‘mantle wave’ triggered by an ancient continental breakup.

Their computer simulations suggested that the process began approximately 80 million years ago as Canada and Greenland separated and the Labrador Sea opened between them.

The disturbance destabilized the rocky underside of the tectonic plate, causing dense material to form drips that sank into the deeper mantle.

As those drips descended, lighter and hotter rock moved upward to replace them, creating slow-wave anomalies similar to blobs rising and falling inside a lava lamp.

Scientists call this process a Rayleigh-Taylor instability.

The 2025 model suggested that the NAA formed approximately 1,100 miles from its current location before slowly migrating southwest beneath North America.

The instability may also explain why the Appalachian Mountains remain unusually elevated despite hundreds of millions of years of erosion.

Heat at the base of the continent can weaken and remove portions of its dense root, making the land above lighter and more buoyant.

That process could have lifted parts of the ancient mountain range during the past several million years, counteracting some of the effects of erosion.

Neither the blob nor the newly imaged column poses an immediate threat to Connecticut, New York or surrounding states.

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{https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/index.html }

New AI technique helps robots complete tasks twice as fast by letting them 'think ahead'

A new AI system lets robots plan their next move while they're in motion — removing reaction delays and doubling task speeds without any extra computing overhead.

 By Niba @NotesByNiba - Edited by Laura Mondragón, Keumars Afifi-Sabet

A new AI process can help robots think even faster.

(Image credit: MASTER via Getty Images)

Scientists have engineered a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that cuts reaction delays in robots by over 10 times without using additional computing power.

Many robots controlled by vision language action (VLA) models move in fits and starts: reach, pause, adjust, pause again. The problem largely stems from how these models are typically run: After completing one set of instructions, the robot waits for the model to calculate the next set, creating a stop-and-go rhythm. This reaction lag is a major barrier to using VLA-controlled robots for tasks that demand continuous, real-time interaction.

A new system called "VLASH" tries to eliminate that wait by planning the next actions while the robot completes its current ones. In tests, robots using VLASH completed some tasks 1.5 to 2 times faster while retaining most or all of their accuracy. Maximum reaction latency fell by up to 11.8 times, depending on the computer hardware used.

Researchers from MIT; Nvidia; Caltech; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, San Diego; and Tsinghua University in China described the system in a paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server and will present at the Intelligent Robots and Systems Conference this fall.

An earlier version of the paper reported a speedup of more than 30 times, but the researchers told Live Science that those tests used longer action sequences and slower hardware. The newer experiments used shorter, more common action sequences and more powerful GPUs. "The 11.8x figure may better represent recent practical settings," the study authors told Live Science in an email.

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VLASH Demo

Robots are getting a brain upgrade

VLA models act as the brains of many advanced robots. They combine images from a camera with human instructions and information about the robot's current state, and then translate that information into physical movements. As the robot completes one group of actions, VLASH uses its current position and scheduled movements to estimate where it will finish. From that projected state, the AI plans the next group of actions.

VLASH predicts the robot, not the world around it. Predicting the entire environment with a world model can take more computing time, making it less useful when a robot needs very fast reactions. The two approaches could eventually work together, the researchers said.

It is like planning your next step before your foot touches the ground, rather than waiting for it to land before deciding where to go.

Researchers tested two VLA models on two robot platforms, using a laptop with an Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU. They tested pick-and-place, stacking and sorting tasks, running 20 trials per method, plus fast-reaction challenges, including table tennis and Whac-a-Mole. They separately measured reaction latency on various processing units.

Because VLASH estimates the robot's future state from movements that have already been scheduled, it does not require a separate prediction model or additional inference step at runtime.

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Priming machines for the real world

The researchers also reorganized existing training data to speed up fine-tuning. In one benchmark, each training step was 3.26 times faster while reaching comparable accuracy. That does not mean total training becomes 3.26 times faster or cheaper, the researchers cautioned, because the overall cost also depends on the model, hardware, data and number of training steps.

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Table tennis and Whac-a-Mole put VLASH's reactions to the test. In both, the target could move while the robot was still calculating what to do.

VLASH does not try to predict those movements. Instead, it processes new observations 15 to 30 times per second, allowing it to quickly spot changes such as an object being moved, the researchers said.

This increased speed doesn't address the robot's safety around humans, however. Roshni Lulla, co-founder and chief research officer at the Institute for Humane Robotics who wasn't involved with the research, cautioned that faster reactions do not necessarily make a robot safer. "Reacting sooner is a real benefit, but the case for improved safety is unclear to me," she explained.

The researchers said manipulation tasks that require continuous motion and rapid responses would probably benefit first. That could eventually include manufacturing and other environments where objects move and plans change. But Lulla said the more revealing test would be putting these robots around people. "The real question is how this changes robotic performance in human-centered environments," she said. "I would want to see testing done with a human present in the room, when the state of the environment could be changed by another agent."

Search and rescue is a more distant possibility. VLASH has not been tested in poor lighting, smoke, unstable terrain, or with damaged cameras or unreliable communications. How it performs under those conditions would largely depend on the underlying VLA model, the researchers said.

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VLASH could eventually be paired with more advanced world models that predict changes in the wider environment. First, however, researchers need to test it across more robots, VLA models, tasks and environments, as well as in longer experiments and with unexpected disturbances.

Lulla said the results support a relatively narrow conclusion. "We can fairly claim that this new methodology removes a bottleneck in terms of processing time and preserves capabilities," she said. But, she added, "What I would not claim is a meaningful advance in safety or in intelligence."

"Rather than any single demonstration, we would look for consistent gains across many robots, tasks, environments, and long-running trials, together with appropriate reliability and safety validation," the study authors said. For now, VLASH shows that robots can spend less time waiting to decide what to do next. Whether those faster reactions hold up outside the lab remains to be seen.

Article Sources

• Tang, J., Sun, Y., Zhao, Y., Yang, S., Lin, Y., Zhang, Z., Hou, J., Lu, Y., Liu, Z., & Han, S. (2025, November 30). VLASH: Real-Time VLAs via Future-State-Aware asynchronous inference. arXiv.org. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01031v2

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

New X-Files Comic Series Lands Release Date As Franchise Veteran Returns For Next Major Release

 By Shaun Corley

A new X-Files series is coming soon, and a franchise veteran will be returning along with it. One of the most popular science fiction television shows in history, The X-Files brought fringe concepts such as alien abductions and conspiracy theories to the mainstream. The X-Files unnerved a generation of viewers, all while keeping them entertained.

The product of producer Chris Carter, The X-Files quickly rose from its Friday night origins to become one of Fox’s signature shows. It made stars out of its leads, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, who played FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, respectively. Mulder, a true-believer in the phenomenon he investigates, at first clashed with the skeptical Scully, and viewers found this tension compelling on many levels. The X-Files ran for 11 seasons, and spawned two motion pictures. A director’s cut for the second, I Want to Believe, will debut on Hulu on August 14.

{ https://screenrant.com/exclusives/ }

Man builds jet ski UFO of his (literal) dreams

{ https://www.popsci.com/category/technology/ }

Deze nieuwe beelden van de zon laten iets zien wat we nog nooit eerder zagen

  Yorick La Rivière - Wetenschapsredacteur astro e.a. + moderator Disqus

Een ontdekking van mini-draaikolken op de zon, vastgelegd door ’s werelds krachtigste zonnetelescoop, geeft eindelijk een verklaring voor de extreme hitte van de corona.

De zon is nog altijd een bron van grote raadsels. Eén van de meest hardnekkige vragen is waarom de buitenste atmosfeer, de corona, miljoenen graden heter is dan het zichtbare oppervlak. Die vraag is mogelijk beantwoord dankzij onthutsend gedetailleerde beelden die onlangs zijn vrijgegeven door de NSF Daniel K. Inouye-zonnetelescoop op Hawaï.

Een nieuwe opname van het zonsoppervlak, vastgelegd door de Inouye-zonnetelescoop, toont de kenmerkende spiraalvormige structuren van ‘Kelvin-Helmholtz-instabiliteiten’, zichtbaar als kleine wervelingen in het turbulente plasma. Foto: NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS

Mini-draaikolken onthuld

De nieuwe opnamen, gemaakt met de krachtigste zonnetelescoop ter wereld, tonen het zonsoppervlak in een nooit eerder gezien detail. Astronomen konden structuren onderscheiden van nog geen 20 kilometer groot in een actief, magnetisch gebied vlakbij een zonnevlek. Op die beelden zagen ze kleine, dynamische wervelingen die lijken op kleine draaikolken of brekende oceaangolven. Deze wervelingen blijken de handtekening te zijn van het zogenoemde Kelvin-Helmholtz-instabiliteit (KHI).

• We schreven vaker over de Zon, lees bijvoorbeeld ook De 10 mooiste foto’s van onze moederster: de zon, Zon van ongekend dichtbij: Parker Solar Probe fotografeert onze ster op slechts 6 miljoen kilometer of Nieuwste foto’s van ultramoderne zonnetelescoop: deze zonnevlekken zijn groter dan de aarde. 

Meer dan mooie plaatjes

Deze instabiliteit is al lang bekend in de vloeistofdynamica en treedt op wanneer twee lagen plasma met verschillende snelheden langs elkaar schuiven. Hierdoor ontstaat er een schuifspanning op de grenslaag, die kleine verstoringen laat uitgroeien tot spiraalvormige wervels . “Mijn eerste reactie was: ‘Wauw, hoe kunnen we zulke kleine, fijnschalige structuren op de zon zien?’,” zegt de aan het observatorium verbonden astronoom Dr. David Kuridze. “Dit is iets wat we nog nooit eerder hebben gezien in zonne-observaties”. De vondst is niet alleen esthetisch; hij heeft diepgaande wetenschappelijke implicaties.

Een simulatie van de ‘Kelvin-Helmholtz-instabiliteit’, waarbij twee lagen plasm ametverschillende snelheden langs elkaar schuiven en zo de karakteristieke draaikolken vormen die nu voor het eerst op de zon zijn waargenomen. Wat begint als een glad grenslaagje, raakt al snel in een chaotische warreling van wervelingen die energie van grotere naar kleinere schalen overbrengen. Animatie: Empetrisor/Wikimedia/CCA-SA-4.0

Het mysterie van de hete corona

Wetenschappers weten al langer dat de extreme hitte van de corona, die miljoenen kelvin kan bedragen, verband houdt met het magnetische veld van de zon. De heersende theorie is dat magnetische veldlijnen zich op een gegeven moment als vlechten in elkaar draaien, waarbij energie wordt opgeslagen die plotseling kan vrijkomen bij een zogenoemde magnetische recombinatie. Het grote vraagteken was echter: wat veroorzaakt dat vervlechten in de eerste plaats? De nieuw ontdekte draaikolken lijken nu de ontbrekende schakel. Ze zijn overal aanwezig waar het magnetisch veld sterk genoeg is, en fungeren als een constante motor die de magnetische veldlijnen in beweging houdt en in elkaar draait.

Een directe vergelijking tussen een echte opname van de Inouye-zonnetelescoop (linksboven) en een gesimuleerd beeld (rechtsboven) op basis van geavanceerde fysische modellen. De opmerkelijke overeenkomst bevestigt dat de waargenomen wervelingen daadwerkelijk Kelvin-Helmholtz-instabiliteiten zijn. De simulatie van het magnetische veld op het zonsoppervlak (rechtsonder) toont daarbij hoe deze processen de magnetische veldlijnen fysiek vervormen en verbuigen. Afbeelding: NSF/NSO/AURA/HAO

De vondst heeft grote gevolgen voor ons begrip van de zonneatmosfeer. “Kelvin-Helmholtz-instabiliteit is waarschijnlijk een mechanisme dat bijdraagt aan de verhitting van de buitenste atmosfeer en een deel van de oplossing vormt voor het aloude raadsel waarom sterren een corona hebben van een miljoen graden Kelvin,” zegt Dr. Thomas Rimmele, hoofd techniek bij het National Solar Observatory. De data tonen bovendien dat dit draai-effect zowel gemagnetiseerd als niet-gemagnetiseerd plasma op het zonsoppervlak efficiënt mengt, waardoor magnetische velden zich sneller over de zonneatmosfeer kunnen verspreiden.

Die versnelling is cruciaal. Het magnetische veld van de zon wordt opgewekt door dynamoprocessen die als gigantische kosmische motoren werken en de rotatie-energie van de ster omzetten in magnetische velden. Maar omdat de magnetische cyclus van de zon slechts (gemiddeld) elf jaar duurt, opvallend snel in kosmische termen, moet de gegenereerde magnetische flux efficiënt kunnen verdwijnen. “Bestaande modellen hebben moeite om deze snelle diffusie te verklaren,” aldus Dr. David Kuridze, astronoom bij het National Solar Observatory. “De Kelvin-Helmholtz-instabiliteit die we in de fotosfeer van de zon hebben ontdekt, kan fungeren als een belangrijke bron van deze ontbrekende magnetische diffusie.”

• We schreven vaker over dit onderwerp, lees bijvoorbeeld ook Er gebeurt meer op de zon dan je denkt: veertig jaar aan data geeft ons een kijkje onder het oppervlak of Ook onze zon kan super-zonnevlammen voortbrengen. Of kijk deze video van de hand van Diederik Jekel: Hoe weten we hoe heet de zon is? | Short.

De kracht van de Inouye-telescoop

Deze doorbraak is volledig te danken aan het ongelofelijke oplossend vermogen van de NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. De telescoop, die vlakbij de top van de vulkaan Haleakalā op Maui staat, is uitgerust met een enorme vier meter brede spiegel en geavanceerde instrumenten. De beelden die de telescoop leveren kan, zijn zó scherp dat het vergelijkbaar is met een onderscheidingsvermogen van een muntstuk op 180 kilometer afstand. “Deze waarnemingen zijn dé validatie met de hoogste resolutie van magnetohydrodynamische simulaties tot nu toe,” verklaart Dr. Matthias Rempel, betrokken bij de analysen van de nieuwste beelden.

De NSF (National Science Foundation) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope op de top van Haleakalā op Maui, Hawaï, Verenigde Staten. Foto: NSO/AURA/NSF

Leestip: 

• Grootste zonsverduistering in decennia: bijna 90 procent van de zon verdwijnt op 12 augustus

Een nieuwe blik op onze ster

De ontdekking van de Kelvin-Helmholtz-instabiliteit op het zonsoppervlak is een mijlpaal in de zonnefysica. Het is een essentiële aanwijzing dat de kleinste, tot nu toe onzichtbare structuren een sleutelrol spelen in de grootste processen op de zon, van de mysterieuze verhitting van de corona tot het ontstaan van ruimteweer dat onze technologie op aarde kan beïnvloeden. De Inouye-telescoop blijkt een venster te zijn naar een compleet nieuw niveau van detail, dat ons begrip van onze eigen ster en verre sterren voorgoed zal veranderen.

{ https://scientias.nl/nieuws/astronomie-ruimtevaart/ }

Green Dust Storm On Mars, Could Confirm Water Exists! NASA Photo, UFO UAP Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Aug 13, 2026

Location of sighting: Mars

Photo: 

• https://areo.info/mer/spirit/675/tn/2P186291916EFFAJQVP2263L5M1_L2L5L5L6L6.jpg.html

Source: 

• https://areo.info/mer/spirit/675/

 

Lets talk about this a bit, because NASA doesn't want too. This photo on the NASA site was clearly over looked by NASA editing staff or it would never have made it this far. There is a green...yes you heard me right, green dusk storm on the far right of this NASA rover photo and it could be an indication of water on Mars. 

 

You see, in the past many times I have found water leaking down the hills near the Mars rover. This green cloud could mean theres a geological dust storm happening. Serpentine is a greenish stone which can form when water interacts with olivine rich rocks...which after the water dries up...could be blown into a green dust storm which we see in the photo. Maybe its not a direct indicator of water right now, but defiantly shows that water once existed on Mars in the past...and where there is water...there is life. 

 

Update: Oh, and I got a few messages from readers saying it might be radioactive dust...I assume from a massive war that may have wiped out the entire planet. I like that theory, and yes its possible for sure. 

Scott C. Waring - UFO Sightings Daily

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }