The mysterious giant drones that have been flying in formation over parts of Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming just got a possible explanation … and it may create more mysteries than it solves … if it solves any. A member of a group of amateur UFO trackers claims they’ve been flying drones in formation over Colorado in an organized search for the “unidentified aerial phenomenon” that has become known as the Tic Tac UFOs. Yes, the ones seen by USS Nimitz pilots in 2004 on the east coast. What are they doing in Colorado, you ask? Let’s find out.

“If there was any interference with any other aircraft, that absolutely was not ours.”

In what appears to be an exclusive report by the Sterling Journal-Advocate (Sterling is in far northeastern Colorado where many of the drone sightings have occurred), Michael Spicer of Durango (a long way from Sterling in far southwest Colorado) takes an obviously defensive position as he talks the drone formations he and his group have been flying in and around Sterling. Spicer says the group is known as ArchAngleRECON and they’re headquartered in Wichita, Kansas – almost 500 miles from Sterling. He admits the group has been flying groups of 6 to 12 drones along longitude and latitude lines in northeast Colorado – the “grid pattern” many witnesses have described. Of course, he didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. Until …

“Spicer said the group was unaware of the stir caused by drones until he was contacted recently by the Federal Aviation Administration. He said he was interviewed by special Agent Michael Bumberger of the FAA’s Investigations and Law Enforcement Assistance Program. He said none of ArchAngelRECON’s drones were ever flown anywhere near any airport, and they did not encounter any other civilian aircraft.”

That was probably as part of the multi-government-agency investigation that ended recently with the “no harm, no foul” conclusion that they still don’t know whose drones they are, but they’re not illegal, so go back to what you were doing and forget about them. Despite that, Spicer seemed shaken by the contact and was probably questioned about reports that a drone may have interfered with a hospital helicopter and others were seen over Sterling Municipal Airport – an obvious FAA violation.

Before you ask, there’s not much info about ArchAngelRECON. There’s a 75th ArchAngel Recon “Multi game clan” with some videos on YouTube, but they’re related to gaming, not drones or UFOs. As usual these days, Spicer claims the group is tracking the new technology aircraft which is what the infamous Tic Tac UFOs from the 2004 incident are suspected by many of being. However, he’s quick to point out that not all of the drones seen recently belong to his group. He doesn’t say how many are and the report is pretty empty of any additional investigative evidence. Spicer also gives no information on whether they saw any of the drones/Tic Tacs.

It’s almost as if “looking for Tic Tac UFOs” is the new cover for any nefarious activities, and heading to Colorado to hunt the drones is becoming this year’s “Storm Area 51.” Will ‘Storm Sterling’ solve the mystery or end up in a failed rock concert too?

“That absolutely was not ours.”

OK, Michael Spicer, we’re not blaming you for that. In fact, you’re not the first to connect the drones to the Tic Tac. That honor belongs unofficially to Mike Turber, the investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert who made the link earlier this week.

So, despite the government’s plea to “move along, nothing to see here,” the Colorado/Nebraska/Wyoming/??? Drone mystery isn’t going away.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

23-01-2020 om 19:01 geschreven door peter  

Have You Ever Seen Someone Showing Unidentified Flying Objects In Their Videos?

With the recent explosion of UFO footage in recent years, many people wonder if it is possible to identify a UFO in someone’s video. You may be able to tell the difference between your own UFO and the strange lights in someone’s video, but what do you think a “Truther” might do if they could find your video? Would they tell everyone on the internet that you are a professional con man?

We have all heard the stories of deception in the past and will continue to do so, especially when we hear information about things that are not real, and people getting fooled by these people. I guess you could say that a UFO is like the golden goose in the movie The Wizard of Oz, if you think about it; a hoax is just like a hoax, however, if you could disprove something that people claim is real you could convince the masses of its fakery.

Of course, the only way you can do this is to make a person think that you have proof that someone else has proven something to them. Now, if the skeptics like yourself had something, like videos of UFOs, then you could definitely convince some of the skeptics. But, you do not, so how do you proceed?

If you are the guy that says, “Look at my photos!” then I would recommend that you hold off on making any videos until you get someone to believe you. You see, I have to put the picture of this subject out there, in order for people to believe what I have to say, if they can prove something to me, then I will have no need for them.

If you can prove that people have been seen in the photos, then you will have convinced more people than you know that the UFO phenomenon is real, but, it is probably not, that’s why they all go to the movies to see alien aliens. Some have pointed out to me that since UFOs are just that; they could justbe pictures of old mountain ranges or clouds.

Then again, maybe these are not real, and a more reliable source of UFOs is a web site with videos. If you are sure that these UFO videos are real, then the last thing that I would want to do is to convince anyone of the reality of aliens.

So you see, you do not have to be so sure. If you cannot find any evidence, then simply say that they are in the same category as the pictures you see in your mind’s eye, no one needs to know!

Source: 

• http://footageofufos.com/2020/01/have-you-ever-seen-someone-showing-unidentified-flying-objects-in-their-videos/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

23-01-2020 om 18:51 geschreven door peter  

AMAZING UFO video filmed from a plane over Utah

This really interesting UFO video was just uploaded to MUFON. It was recorded over Zion National Park in Utah on 19th August 2019!

Witness report: 

Video recording is taken from cockpit at 40000 ft of an object flying at a lower altitude over the terrain. Not sure what it is.

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

23-01-2020 om 18:36 geschreven door peter  

Even though he passed away in 1566, Nostradamus correctly predicted many events that happened after his death, such as the rise of Hitler and Napoleon, in addition to the 9/11 attacks on America. And based on recent events, it seems as though another one of the French prophet’s predictions has come true.

In one of his passages, he wrote, “The great plague of the maritime city will not cease until there be avenged the death of the just blood, condemned for a price without crime, of the great lady outraged by pretense.” It seems as though he was predicting the SARS-like outbreak that’s happening right now in the world. An outbreak of a new coronavirus started in China and has spread to different countries around the world: Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States.

Nostradamus

As for the “maritime city” that was mentioned in the passage, a conspiracy theorist has an idea of what location Nostradamus was referring to. “The start of SARS and preponderance of cases are in China, many of which are in Hong Kong. Therefore it is reasonable to view Hong Kong as ‘the maritime city’.”

And the “great lady” could possibly be Wu Yi who was previously the Chinese Health Minister and who helped to control the SARS virus.

So far, the deadly Chinese coronavirus – which has flu-like symptoms that include coughing, fever, shortness of breath, and difficulty breathing – has affected approximately 500 people with 17 deaths. What’s even more frightening is that scientists have warned the public that as many as 10,000 people could have caught the SARS-like virus while visiting Wuhan, China.

There has so far been one diagnosed case in the United States (Washington State) as a man in his 30s caught the virus while visiting Wuhan.

So where did this virus come from? According to a new study (which can be read in full here), it is believed that the virus originated in snakes and spread to humans. There are two types of snakes that are commonly found around the area in which the outbreak originated: Bungarus multicinctus (or the many-banded krait) and Naja atra (or the Chinese cobra).

Nostradamus predicted many disturbing things in history, and this new SARS-like virus is one of the scariest predictions he has made, as more and more people are being affected by this deadly strain.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

23-01-2020 om 11:42 geschreven door peter  

Something big recently happened in space, but astronomers have no idea what it was. Whatever happened, it was powerful enough to stretch the fabric of reality itself, sending a brief instance of gravitational waves rippling through space-time, and picked up here on Earth. The burst of gravitational waves was unusually brief and lacked other qualities astronomers usually see in gravitational waves.

On January 14, astronomers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo interferometer detected a burst of gravitational waves lasting 14 milliseconds. Scientists have attempted to locate the source of the waves, but so far they have no idea what caused them.

Gravitational waves tend to stick around a little longer than the recently observed burst. Most detected gravitational waves are the result of two massive objects colliding with each other. As the two bodies of mass get closer and closer on their collision course, the gravitational waves change in frequency. On January 6, researchers published their observations of a collision between two neutron stars that occurred in 2017.

Like this, but through all of space-time.

It’s possible this burst of gravitational waves resulted from a quicker, more immediate event like a collapsing star. However, researchers have never observed the gravitational waves from a collapsing star.  Andy Howell, a staff scientist at Los Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network told Live Science:

“[The burst] seems a little too short for what we expect from the collapse of a massive star. On the other hand, we’ve never seen a star blowing up in gravitational waves before, so we don’t really know what it would look like.”

What’s more, a supernova would produce neutrinos—subatomic particles with no charge—and researchers detected no neutrinos alongside the gravitational waves. Some speculated that the waves may have been a signal from the star Betelgeuse which has recently been acting strange and is nearing the end of its life. However, as Live Science points out, Betelgeuse is still there.

A supernova would likely release neutrinos alongside its gravitational wave burst.

esultedIt’s possible the burst of waves may have been the result of an immediate black hole collision, an event that LIGO was specifically looking for. However, it is believed that while an immediate black hole collision would be shorter than that of a neutron star collision, it would still be possible to see the changing frequencies of the gravitational waves as the collision happened.

Yet another possibility is that it was a supernova that immediately turned into a black hole without producing any neutrinos, but that is highly speculative and with the possibility-realm of “what-if-it’s-a-thing-we-know-that-doesn’t-do-what-we-know-it-should.”

Astronomers are now pointing telescopes at that region of the sky to try and ascertain what caused the burst of gravitational waves. They say it could be an entirely new type of astronomical event.

It seems the more telescopes and gadgets we have up in the sky, the more anomalous events seem to occur. It’s a good reminder that we don’t know all that much about what happens outside our pale blue dot.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

23-01-2020 om 11:34 geschreven door peter  

Anyone who has been on a European river cruise or an organized bus tour through cities with ruins dating back thousands of years has no doubt felt that they were traveling back in time and probably wished it were possible to go back in time and see these cities when they were alive with our ancestors. If we feel that way, it’s not hard to imagine that our future descendants will have the same yearnings. What they may also have is the technology to pull off such a time-traveling tour package. A professor of biological anthropology believes UFOs are actually identified tour ‘buses’ from the future and lays out a case on how to prove it.

“Undoubtedly in the future, there are those that will pay a lot of money to have the opportunity to go back and observe their favorite period in history. Some of the most popular tourist sites are the pyramids of Giza and Machu Picchu in Peru … old and prehistoric sites.”

Michael Masters is a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University in Butte and the author of “Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon.” In a presentation at the 2019 International UFO Congress and a more recent interview with Space.com, Masters lays out his reasons to believe that aliens are future human tourists. The ‘human’ part is certainly plausible – he points out that most “extratempestrials” are described as bipedal beings with human features who can communicate in our languages and travel in ships that seem to be based on current technology … like a Ferrari resembles a Model T.

“We know we’re here. We know humans exist. We know that we’ve had a long evolutionary history on this planet. And we know our technology is going to be more advanced in the future. I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us. I’m just trying to offer what is likely the most parsimonious explanation.”

Masters sees the stories of alien abductees as indicators that many of the UFO time machines contain anthropologists doing what he wishes he could do if he had the technology – meeting ancient civilizations and perhaps picking up a few samples. Space.com adds credence to the connection to abductee stories by bringing in Larry Lemke, a retired NASA aerospace engineer and ufologist who points out that some abductee experiences coincide with what might happen if they were taken onboard a ship that was able to defy the usual laws of aerodynamics and Newtonian mechanics.

“There’s a group of thinkers in the field of UFOs that point out that phenomena reported around some UFOs do, in fact, look exactly like general relativity effects. Missing time is a very common one.”

Just like today, once the explorers and scientists are done analyzing (and looting) ancient sites, people with a lot of money start visiting them. Eventually, the costs go down and these tours become available to the masses. Have our future selves reached that point yet? Were those recent Tic Tac UFOs merely time-traveling tour buses filled with extratempestrials – noses pressed to the windows, future cell phones taking selfies as they try to see ten cities in ten … minutes?

“Our job as scientists is to be asking big questions and try to find answers to unknown questions. There’s something going on here, and we should be having a conversation about this. We should be at the forefront of trying to find out what it is.”

Not to mention selling souvenirs to these time-traveling tourists.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

23-01-2020 om 09:43 geschreven door peter  

UFO encounters run the range between those of a benevolent type, and others that are more sinister in nature. Throughout accounts of such encounters one kind find a wide range of experiences lying along this scale, to the point that it is often difficult to know what to make of it all. One very odd and frightening case supposedly played out over an expanse of the Australian Outback, and which has not been solved to this day. It is the tale of a mundane trip across the desert that would turn into a nightmare from possibly another world.

On January 20, 1988, Faye Knowles, her adult sons Patrick (24), Sean (21) and Wayne (18), and their two dogs were making their way towards Melbourne, Australia across a vast expanse of limestone bedrock called the Nullarbor Plain. The area is a remote desert moonscape of a place, with no one around for miles and other cars a rarity, so it was considered odd when in the very early morning hours a light was spotted some distance ahead, just outside of the tiny town of Mundrabilla. The light seemed to get steadily brighter as they watched it, and as they got closer they could see that it was semi-spherical or egg shaped and was most certainly not another vehicle as it was just a single bright light and seemed to be hovering in the air over that desolate expanse.

Nullarbor Plain

As the family struggled to comprehend what they were seeing, the strange object allegedly emitted a beam of light that swept towards their vehicle and caused the driver, Sean, to take evasive maneuvers. The beam missed the car, but this is when Sean would claim the object had begun to follow them down that lonely roadway, easily keeping pace with them no matter how fast they went. They apparently passed another car going the other direction, after which the mysterious object stopped pursuing them and followed the other vehicle. Sean the reportedly turned the car around to follow the other car and its UFO pursuer to figure out what was going on, but thought better of it and turned around yet again. The object then must have decided to go after them again, because it was soon ominously closing in on them once again.

It purportedly got brighter and closer, passing them a few times to circle around to approach again before positioning itself right above their car as the terrified family within screamed out in fright. There was then a thump on the roof, and the car slowed down as if something very heavy were sitting atop it, leading them to the horrible realization that it had actually lowered itself to make contact with the vehicle. According to the witnesses, it then issued a shrill, ear piercing sound, and Faye would say that they were overcome with the sense of something invading their minds, later saying, “It felt like something was going into our heads,” and Patrick would say “I felt like my brain was being sucked out.” They also claimed that their voices became distorted and that they moved sluggishly, as if underwater or experiencing a slowing of time itself. Things would intensify when they then felt the car physically lift off of the road, after which they were shaken violently from side to side as a grey mist filled the car and dropped back down with such force that it blew one of their tires and disabled the vehicle to leave to leave it lying in that unforgiving place like a wounded beast. Fay Knowles would say of the otherworldly encounter:

I wound down the window and I felt this thing on the roof… all of this smoke stuff started coming into the car, the car was covered in black stuff. It was a small light and all of a sudden it became big like this, like a big ball. We thought we were dying, then we got out the car and we hid behind a little tree and the bushes and it couldn’t find us.

When the cowering family were sure the object was gone, they warily went back to their car, changed the tire, and got out of there as fast as they could, eventually making their way to Mundrabilla, where they excitedly told of what had happened to them. Interestingly, a trucker at the gas station there would tell them that he had also seen the strange, eerie light out over the desert as well. When their car was examined, it was found to be banged up, and both the exterior and interior covered with a fine film of black material like soot or ash that had an unusual odor like “a blown fuse.” The Knowles were able to get some truckers to go with them out to where the incident had supposedly occurred, where they allegedly found odd skid marks on the road that seemed to show that the vehicle has been dragged sideways by some powerful force, making it all even stranger.

South Australian Police in Ceduna were notified, and analyses of the soot on the car would be carried out that later prove to be divisive, with some saying it was merely sand and dust particles from the desert, while others claimed that there were also traces of an explosive compound called Potassium Chlorate, as well as a radioactive chemical called Astatine. Yet another analysis found that the dust on the outside of the car and that of the interior were different. The surprising differences of these results seem like they would deserve more follow-up, but oddly the South Australia police were apparently very eager to distance themselves from it all, finish the investigation, and sweep it under the carpet, and the whole case was just sort of filed away even as it was hitting the news in a big way. This would cause Faye Knowles to lament:

We are all angry. Everybody knows that this happened to us but the people who should be concerned have just ignored it. There has been a cover-up. The government owes us and the public an explanation.

Theories on what might have happened to the Knowles family out on that lonely and forbidding stretch of road have swirled ever since, ranging from the mundane to the far-out. One idea is that they had been tired from a 13-hour car ride all night along an isolated road in the middle of nowhere, and had then perhaps misidentified some natural phenomenon in their fatigued state. This has been speculated as perhaps being a truck’s headlights in the distance or the planet Venus, that were distorted by a temperature inversion, which is basically a layer of warm air over cooler air that can cause mirages and tricks of light. However, this in no way explains their car being picked up off of the ground and dropped.

It has also been suggested that they might have experienced a meteor that just happened to disintegrate and cause a shockwave near their car, or even a rocket fired from a military base at nearby Woomera. Other theories include that they were caught in a dust storm or some sort of electromagnetic storm, but none of these really fits all of the details of the encounter. Of course there is the idea that this was an actual UFO abduction, and a possibly even weirder idea is that it was an attack by a secret government organization using a helicopter and a powerful, technologically advanced electromagnet to lift the vehicle up. Researcher William Buckley has said of this strange idea:

The attack on the Knowles family was orchestrated and carried out by a well-resourced paramilitary organization operating in Australia, using a sophisticated helicopter with specialized lifting equipment. The Knowles’ involvement was purely accidental. They were not the intended target and were attacked only because they resembled the real target group who were also travelling on the same road that night. The nature of this covert action by this paramilitary group and the importance of the assassination attempt on the real target group are now shrouded in secrecy and cover-up and nobody wants the truth to be revealed.

This is obviously a case of attempted murder of four people who were all extremely traumatised by this hour-long attack. There was plenty of forensic evidence and witnesses to prove that the family was attacked and a major police investigation should have been triggered to uncover the truth.

Not quite as interesting as any of these is the idea that the family was trying to pull an insurance scam or even that it was just a flat-out hoax. For their part, the Knowles family has always insisted that what they experienced was very real, and very frightening, and they have never sought to gain fame or large amounts of money from any of it, mostly lying low about the whole thing. What happened to this family out on that bleak stretch of road? What forces came calling for them to follow them around and terrorize them? Was this aliens, a weather phenomenon, or something else? No one really knows, and the case remains controversial and debated to this day.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

23-01-2020 om 09:37 geschreven door peter  

THE ASTEROID THAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS ALSO CREATED A MASSIVE VOLCANIC ERUPTION

New study reconsiders that one time the universe got a little too excited about catastrophes. 

About 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs went extinct. We know this. And scientists suspect the reason was an asteroid coming to an abrupt halt just off the Yucatan Peninsula. But new research suggests there was another layer to the cataclysm: The asteroid hit the earth so hard that it spurred a massive volcanic eruption on the Indian subcontinent that helped eradicate other dinosaurs who might have survived as well as killing 70 percent of the Earth’s entire species.

At least those are conclusions from a new study published Thursday in Science, authored by American and Indian researchers spread across the globe.

The consensus among scientists is that a huge asteroid crashed into the planet and spurred the mass extinction of life at the end of the Cretaceous period, and resulted in the Chicxulub crater at the edge of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

At the same time, India was rife with volcanic activity in a place known as the Deccan Traps, a 200,000 square mile region that used to be basically covered in lava flow. More than 65 million years ago, the Deccan Traps began forming after a series of volcanic eruptions that are thought have lasted about 30,000 years.

The Deccan Traps, east of Mumbai

Nichalp, via Wikimedia Commons

The asteroid isn’t thought to have outright caused the initial volcanic eruptions, but rather augmented the intensity. The impact from the Chicxulub crash most likely caused earthquakes of about a magnitude 11, which would have shaken the planet’s crust up enough so molten rock could begin flowing out. The more magma was flowing up to the surface, the more unstable the things got. Cue explosions, fire, and dinopocalypse.

The research is an early stepping point to bridging the gap between the asteroid and the volcanic activity. Scientists will need to do a lot more work before we have a better picture about how all of this went down long ago. What’s for certain is that both of these events, individually, were capable of profoundly changing the world as it was. The odds of them happening together are extraordinarily rare — and the consequences were that much more transformative for the future of the Earth.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

23-01-2020 om 00:19 geschreven door peter  

That's because worms like the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans can actually tell us a lot about the workings of the human body. Compared to mammals, these simple little fellas live for only two or three weeks, which makes them perfect for studying various genes and metabolic pathways also shared by humans.

In the past, for instance, scientists have shown that altering the insulin signalling pathway (IIS) in worms yields a 100 percent increase in their lifespan; meanwhile, changes in the so-called TOR pathway (target of rapamycin) result in a 30 percent increase.

This latest study has managed to genetically alter both pathways in just the right way to cause a result four or five times greater than the sum of their separate effects.

"The synergistic extension is really wild," says molecular biologist Jarod Rollins from the the MDI Biological Laboratory in Maine.

"The effect isn't one plus one equals two, it's one plus one equals five."

These findings show that ageing is not simply the result of one individual gene or pathway acting on its own, but rather a confluence of networks all working together in the long-term.

This could certainly explain why no one gene or cellular pathway has been found that can provide longer life for either worms, humans or any other animal for that matter.

When tweaks were made to both the IIS and the TOR pathways, the authors found their downstream activity worked synergistically, inducing a mitochondrial stress response that promoted longevity.

Whether or not something like this mechanism proves directly useful in humans remains to be seen, but knowledge of this relationship has certainly opened up new avenues for research.

Unfortunately, because of the long lives of humans, scientists find it quite hard to study our own ageing (it's also not ideal to play around with our genes just to see what happens), so we have to rely on animal proxies like mice, flies and worms instead. In fact, last year researchers were able to extend the lifespan of a mouse and decrease its chances of cancer by extending its telomeres.

But even with all the scientific limitations on human ageing research, we've had some progress. This year a human clinical trial is going to test the drug metformin, a widely-used treatment for type 2 diabetes that has the potential to delay the onset of age-related diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and Alzheimer's disease.

Perhaps this new research on C. elegans will open similar doors for clinical trials in the future.

"Despite the discovery in C. elegans of cellular pathways that govern ageing, it hasn't been clear how these pathways interact," says nephrologist Hermann Haller, president of the MDI Biological Laboratory.

"By helping to characterise these interactions, our scientists are paving the way for much-needed therapies to increase healthy lifespan for a rapidly ageing population."

• The study was published in Cell Reports.

{ https://www.sciencealert.com/ }

23-01-2020 om 00:09 geschreven door peter  

Betelguese's bizarre dimming has astronomers scratching their heads

This artist's impression shows a vast amount of material being flung into space from Betelgeuse.

ESO/L. Calcada

Over the last few weeks, Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has dimmed to the faintest it's been in a century. Astronomers have been buzzing with excitement about the event, discussing the star over social media and speculating what might be going on. 

The big question on everyone’s mind is whether the star is about to go supernova and explode. That’s probably not what’s about to happen, astronomers say, but they’re still excited to be witnessing behavior they’ve never seen from Betelgeuse before. There’s a lot astronomers still don’t know about the variable behavior of supergiant stars like Betelgeuse, so any strange activity is a chance to learn more about the lives of stars. 

A Fading Supergiant

For over a century, astronomers have watched Betelgeuse brighten and dim again and again. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, a star late in its life that has expanded to an enormous size. Bubbles of material rise from inside the star to its surface and sink back down, changing the mix of hotter and cooler stuff on the star’s surface. These changes make Betelgeuse appear brighter and fainter over time.

For about 25 years, Richard Wasatonic, an astronomer at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, has measured the brightness of Betelgeuse with a 10-inch diameter telescope in his backyard. He's worked with another Villanova astronomer named Edward Guinan, as well as an amateur astronomer named Thomas Calderwood. In October, they noticed that Betelgeuse was getting fainter again. By early December, they realized that Betelgeuse had gotten fainter than it had in the past 25 years and put out a post on a site known as The Astronomer’s Telegram to alert other astronomers.

“It kept getting fainter,” Guinan said. “Every night, it was fainter than the previous night, and I said, ‘Well, it has to stop soon.’ And it hasn’t.” 

On Dec. 23, they posted an update. Betelgeuse had gotten fainter still, and it was now the faintest it has been in the last century or so — for as long as astronomers have been able to measure its brightness with detectors rather than judging by eye. At its brightest, Betelgeuse is usually one of the six or seven brightest stars visible to humans in the night sky. By mid-December, it had dropped several places on that list, to 21st brightest. 

About to Blow?

The unusual dimming episode has made some astronomers wonder whether Betelgeuse is about to go supernova. Life on Earth would be fine if Betelgeuse did explode.

Based on its mass, astronomers estimate that the supergiant will go supernova when it’s roughly 9 million years old. According to Guinan, Betelgeuse is probably between 8 and 9 million years old now. Astronomers have recently estimated that Betelgeuse might be due for a supernova in about 100,000 years or so. When it blows, it'll be spectacular. The explosion will be about half as bright as the full Moon, Guinan said. Anyone lucky enough to be around would be able to see it shine during the day for months until it fades away.

Astronomers have carefully observed the behaviors of many stars after they exploded as supernovae. But no one has had a detailed look at how a star behaves leading up to a supernova. So astronomers don’t really know whether the current dimming event is leading up to a supernova. What they do know is that it’d be pretty unlikely for the explosion to go off now when there’s so much uncertainty in their understanding of Betelgeuse’s behavior and even its age. 

Guinan and his team will keep monitoring Betelgeuse, as they have been for decades. Based on Betelgeuse's past dimming and brightening patterns — the star seems to cycle in brightness both every 6 years or so and every 425 days — they expect that it'll get its faintest in January and then get brighter again. But they'll have to see if that's the case.

"It defies prediction," Guinan said. "It's hard to predict what it’s going to do in the future."

22-01-2020 om 23:50 geschreven door peter  

Strange night flashes, vibrations and ‘humming noise’ in Ohio town spark talk of UFO

A strange series of color flashes that turned the night sky reddish in Bethel, Ohio, has gotten international attention, as people scramble for a good explanation.

So far, nobody seems to have one, even after a week of debate.

A doorbell video, posted on Facebook by Tim Walker, shows a series of rapid flashes that changed in color and size over 20 seconds, from white to a red that filled the horizon.

It was recorded Jan. 12, just before 7 p.m., as Walker was rolling a trash bin outside his home about 30 miles southeast of Cincinnati.

“Anybody else see this tonight?” he wrote on Facebook. “The sky was flashing pink and purple - super bright. Thought it might be lightning, but it’s fairly cold (40 degrees), and there was no thunder. ...It was crazy — super bright.”

It’s been a week and Walker told McClatchy News Monday that “we have not gotten any explanation yet on what this was.”

He and his daughter, Carolyn, were both frightened by the flashes, which he says “got brighter and brighter.” The family lives next to a 4,800-acre state park, where quiet is the norm after sunset.

“The first thing that came to mind was what just happened with Iran, and I thought it might be a nuclear explosion. It was that bright and that powerful,” Walker told McClatchy. “I was in the Army and it reminded me of phosphorescent flares we used that light up the whole sky.”

His daughter was the first to see it, he said.

“I was scared,” she told Fox 19 News. “I thought it was an explosion when I first saw it, so it made me really nervous.”

Commenters on Walker’s video have also shared concerns, with Kendra Fox pointing out: “This is how every alien world domination movie starts!!”

Walker wasn’t the only one to see it, April Pierce said on Facebook.

“So many people are posting about it in Bethel and Amelia,” she wrote. “Some people said their power even flickered on and off.”

Walker didn’t report hearing an explosion of any kind accompanying the flashes, but Kat Carmosino said she heard a noise that added to the unnerving experience.

“We were in between Amelia and New Richmond, when the power went out there was the light show. The floor was vibrating and there was a humming noise. It was really odd,” she wrote.

The phenomenon has been covered by news outlets in Europe such as The Daily Mail, which said “there has been no logical explanation.”

While a UFO and aliens have come up as ideas, more down-to-earth speculation has included fireworks, a meteor and a transformer explosion. And the UK Express had a headline that asked: “Mystery US Military test exposed?”

Duke Energy told Fox19 that “584 customers lost power for two minutes just before 7 p.m. Sunday,” but a crew sent to inspect the line “found no issues.”

RELATED STORIES FROM LEXINGTON HERALD LEADER

Tim Walker of Bethel, Ohio, posted this video on Jan. 12, asking if others saw it. The lights have yet to be explained. 

FACEBOOK VIDEO SCREENSHOT/TIM WALKER

{ https://www.kentucky.com/ }

22-01-2020 om 23:40 geschreven door peter  

Hollywood's UFO Stories Are Becoming Way More Realistic

The Pentagon admits UFOs are real. So Hollywood is making a flurry of movies and TV shows about how we should look for them.

By MJ Banias

UFOs are everywhere, and Hollywood has noticed. Talking about UFOs is no longer fringe, with former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge getting the U.S. military to admit that it has videos of UFOs.

Small and big screens alike have always carried alien and UFOs. From films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Contact to Arrival and even The Avengers franchise, bizarre aliens and their vehicles have come to Earth and have had audiences the world over question the existence of extraterrestrials. But there is an increased focus on UFO hunters in Hollywood.

“I think it’s fair to say that it is, and that this resurgence in popularity is a direct result of the Pentagon UFO revelations of 2017, which captured the attention of the establishment press like no UFO story has in decades,” Robbie Graham, media critic and author of Silver Screen Saucers: Sorting Fact from Fantasy in Hollywood's UFO Movies, said. “This helped to legitimize UFOs as a topic of mainstream debate and has opened up new scientific and political lines of inquiry for TV producers who are always looking for fresh approaches to this enduringly popular subject.”

Recent polls indicate a little over half of Americans believe UFOs exist and one third buy into the belief that they are alien spacecraft, Graham isn’t totally convinced that UFOs will be the next big thing. He does point out that young people are being drawn into the subject matter like never before.

“It does seem that UFOlogy is not quite as dorky as it once was, thanks to an influx over the past several years of relatively young and trendy researchers who have been drawn to the subject through its newfound legitimacy. UFOlogy was once an old person’s game; now it’s a young person’s game,” stated Graham.

In 2017, former lead singer for Blink 182, Tom DeLonge, publicly announced his UFO/technology/media company, To the Stars Academy, alongside the New York Times article announcing a secret Pentagon program designed to study anomalous phenomena. Young gun UFO enthusiasts turned to social media, #UFOTwitter became an actual hashtag and the once invisible UFO discourse became incredibly public.

“I think people are more open to considering it as a real phenomenon as opposed to just psychology,” Aiden Gillen told Motherboard in an interview. Gillen, known best for playing the role of Littlefinger in HBO’s Game of Thrones, plays Dr. J. Allen Hynek in History Channel’s Project Blue Book, which returns next week. “I suppose you could have said that in the 50s and 60s as well, in the age of science, that people would be more open to the idea that we're not alone in the universe. I'm also fully aware of how unlikely it is that we will find each other.”

Project Blue Book is a fictional TV series about the infamous 1950’s and 60’s Air Force UFO investigation program of the same name.

Gillen said that humans are naturally curious about UFOs.

“It's inevitable that you are going to wonder. This is something that people have done since we began standing on our own two feet as a species. ‘What's up there?’ It's always been, ‘What's up there?’” he said. While Gillen doesn’t think the government should be spending vast sums of money chasing UFOs, as we have more direct problems to deal with, he does think that talking about UFOs is no longer taboo.

“I think there is something that is becoming cool about UFOs. It’s easier to talk about or reference,” Gillen explained. “I feel like Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of the coolest films of the 70s, and when this role came my way, I actually thought, ‘This is fucking cool.’”

While TV dramas like Project Blue Book are fictional, reality UFO themed programs still have a long way to go.

They “depict presenters chasing lights in the sky in Jeeps while wearing night-vision goggles and brandishing walkie-talkies. It’s nonsensical and devoid of educational value. It doesn’t have to be this way though, and this coming wave of factual UFO TV shows will likely reflect the more serious tone that the mainstream news media have begun to adopt with this topic,” Graham said. “Certainly, UFOs are ‘selling’ like never before. They’re hot property in TV land right now, and everybody wants to stake a claim.”

{ https://www.vice.com/en_in }

22-01-2020 om 23:20 geschreven door peter  

EARTH’S OLDEST ASTEROID IMPACT ‘MAY HAVE ENDED ICE AGE’

Scientists have identified the world's oldest asteroid crater in Australia, adding it may explain how the planet was lifted from an ice age.

The asteroid hit Yarrabubba in Western Australia about 2.2 billion years ago - making the crater about half the age of Earth, researchers say.

Their conclusion was reached by testing minerals found in rocks at the site.

The scientists say the find is exciting because it could account for a warming event during that era.

• The Curtin University research was published in the journal Nature Communications on Wednesday.

How did they date it?

The crater was discovered in the dry outback in 1979, but geologists had not previously tested how old it was.

• Dinosaur extinction: 'Asteroid strike was culprit'
• Splosh! How to make a giant impact crater

Due to billions of years of erosion, the crater is not visible to the eye. Scientists mapped scars in the area's magnetic field to determine its 70km (43 miles) diameter.

"The landscape is actually very flat because it's so old, but the rocks there are distinctive," researcher Prof Chris Kirkland told the BBC.

To determine when the asteroid hit Earth, the team examined tiny zircon and monazite crystals in the rocks. They were "shocked" in the strike and now can be read like "tree rings", Prof Kirkland said.

These crystals hold tiny amounts of uranium. Because uranium decays into lead at a consistent pace, the researchers were able to calculate how much time had passed.

It is at least 200 million years older than the next most ancient impact structure - the Vredefort Dome in South Africa.

"We were interested in the area because the Western Australian landscape is very old but we didn't expected [the crater] to be as old as this," Prof Kirkland said.

"It's absolutely possible that there's an older crater out there just waiting to be discovered, but the difficulty is in finding the crust before it erodes and you lose that early Earth history".

Could it have ended an ice age?

The timing of the impact could also explain why the world warmed around this time, according to the researchers.

Scientists believe the planet was previously in one of its "Snowball Earth" periods, when it was largely covered in ice. At some point, the ice sheets melted and the planet began to rapidly warm.

• The ancient memories trapped in the world's glaciers

"The age of the [crater] corresponds pretty precisely with the end of a potential global glacial period," Prof Kirkland said.

"So the impact may have had significant changes to our planetary climate."

Using computer modelling, the team calculated that the asteroid struck a kilometres-thick ice sheet covering the Earth. The event would have released huge volumes of water vapour, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

This could have helped the planet's warming during the Proterozoic era - a stage when oxygen had just appeared in the atmosphere and complex life had not yet formed.

"Obviously we were very excited just with the age itself," Prof Kirkland said. "But placing that right with the context of Earth's other events makes it become really very interesting."

There is not enough modelling from the time to comprehensively test the theory, but "the rocks tell a story about the massive impact into the planet".

Another theory for the warming event is that volcanic eruptions may have pushed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

{ https://newsfortomorrow.com/ }

22-01-2020 om 23:04 geschreven door peter  

Astrophysicists find massive black holes wandering around dwarf galaxies

New research has uncovered the presence of at least thirteen ‘wandering’ black holes in dwarf galaxies. Something, that until recently was not believed possible.

A new search led by Montana State University has revealed more than a dozen massive black holes in dwarf galaxies that were previously considered too small to host them, and surprised scientists with their location within the galaxies.

The study, headed by MSU astrophysicist Amy Reines, searched 111 dwarf galaxies within a billion light years of Earth using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, two hours outside Albuquerque in the plains of New Mexico. Reines identified 13 galaxies that “almost certainly” host massive black holes and found something unexpected: The majority of the black holes were not in the location she anticipated.

“All of the black holes I had found before were in the centers of galaxies,” said Reines, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics in the College of Letters and Science and a researcher in MSU’s eXtreme Gravity Institute. “These were roaming around the outskirts. I was blown away when I saw this.”

The eXtreme Gravity Institute brings together physicists and astronomers to study phenomena where the forces of gravity are so strong they blur the separation between space and time, such as the big bang, neutron stars and black holes.

There are two main types of black holes, incredibly dense areas of space with gravitational pulls strong enough to capture light. Smaller, stellar black holes form as large stars die and are roughly 10 times the mass of our sun, according to Reines. The other type, known as supermassive or massive black holes, tend to be found at the center of galaxies and can have masses millions or even billions that of our sun. Scientists don’t know how they are created.

The Milky Way, a spiral galaxy consisting of somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars, has a massive black hole at its center, Sagittarius A*. Dwarf galaxies can be of any shape, but are much smaller than the Milky Way, with up to a few billion stars.

Reines’ results confirm predictions from recent computer simulations by Jillian Bellovary, an assistant professor at Queensborough Community College in New York and Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, which postulated that black holes may often be off-center in dwarf galaxies due to the way galaxies interact as they move through space. The findings may change how scientists look for black holes in dwarf galaxies in the future.

“We need to expand searches to target the whole galaxy, not just the nuclei where we previously expected black holes to be,” Reines said.

Reines’ paper, “A New Sample of (Wandering) Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies from High Resolution Radio Observations,” was published Jan. 3 in The Astrophysical Journal, and Reines reported the findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Jan. 5.

Reines has been searching the skies for black holes for a decade. As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, she focused on star formation in dwarf galaxies, but in her research she found something else that captured her interest: a massive black hole “in a little dwarf galaxy where it wasn’t supposed to be.”

Thirty million light years from Earth, the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 was previously believed to be too small to host a massive black hole. Conventional wisdom told us that all massive galaxies with a spheroidal component have a massive black hole, Reines explained, and little dwarf galaxies didn’t. Yet Reines found one in the center of the dwarf galaxy. It was a “eureka” moment, she said. Her findings were published in the journal Nature in 2011 and Reines turned her research to searching for other black holes in dwarf galaxies.

“Once I started looking for these things on purpose, I started finding a whole bunch,” Reines said.

Her next search of the universe shifted to visual data rather than radio signals. It uncovered over 100 possible black holes in the first systematic search of a parent sample of more than 40,000 dwarf galaxies. For her latest search, described in the paper released this month, Reines wanted to go back and look for radio signatures in that sample, which she said would allow her to find massive black holes in star-forming dwarf galaxies. Only one galaxy was identified using both methods.

“There are lots of opportunities to make new discoveries because studying black holes in dwarf galaxies is a new field,” she said. “People are definitely captivated by black holes. They’re mysterious and fascinating objects.”

Reines’ discoveries have poured new energy into the search for black holes in dwarf galaxies, opening up new areas of astrophysics as she and other scientists attempt to discover how these massive black holes form.

“When new discoveries break our current understanding of the way things work, we find even more questions than we had before,” said Yves Idzerda, head of the Department of Physics at MSU.

• Provided by: Montana State University

{ https://sciencebulletin.org/ }

22-01-2020 om 22:50 geschreven door peter  

Mythical Benben Stone: The Landing Site of Egyptian God Atum

The Benben stone is an object that is found in the mythology of ancient Egypt. This mythical stone is said to have once been housed in a shrine within the compounds of the temple dedicated to the deity Atum in Heliopolis. The Benben stone is also an architectural term, and is the name given to the tip of an obelisk or the capstone placed on top of a pyramid. This architectural feature is known also as a pyramidion (or pyramidia in its plural form).

In the mythology of ancient Egypt, there are several accounts of the creation of the world. One of these is centred on the god Atum, and had its origins in the city of Heliopolis. According to this version of the creation story, the universe was brought into being by Atum. In the beginning, there was nothing but darkness and chaos. It was out of the dark waters that the primordial hill, known as the Benben stone arose, on top of which stood Atum. As the Benben stone rose from the primeval waters, it has been suggested that this word is associated with the verb ‘weben’, which is the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘to rise’.

The god Atum, First book of respirations of Usirur

( public domain )

According to another interpretation, the Benben stone was the primeval hill on which Atum first landed. The god looked around, and realised that there was nothing around him but darkness and chaos, and that he was all alone. Desiring companionship, Atum began the work of creation. In some versions of the myth, Atum masturbated, and through this act, created Shu (the god of air) and Tefnut (the goddess of moisture). In other versions of the story, these deities were created by Atum’s copulation with his own shadow. Shu and Tefnut left Atum on the Benben stone, and went away to create the rest of the world. After some time, Atum is said to have grown worried about his children. Removing his eye, he sent it in search of them. Shu and Tefnut returned with their father’s eye, and the deity, seeing his children return, shed tears of joy. These teardrops, which fell on the Benben stone that Atum was standing on, transformed into human beings.

Pyramidion of Hori, New Kingdom 18th Dynasty 1350 BC, Limestone

( Mary Harrsch / Flickr )

The Benben stone is also recorded to have been a sacred object that was once kept in the special shrine known as the ‘hwt benben’, which translates as ‘House of the Benben’. This sacred relic was the innermost sanctuary of the temple in Heliopolis, where Atum once served as its chief deity. The original cult object is said to have been lost at some point of time in history. Nevertheless, based on pictorial evidence, it has been suggested that this was an upright stone with a rounded top. It has also been pointed out that later on, other solar temples would also have their own Benben stones. For example, the temple of Aten in El-Amarna / Akhetaten, that was built by the 18 ^th Dynasty pharaoh, Akhenaten, during the 14 ^th century B.C., is recorded to have possessed a Benben stone of its own.

Pyramidion of king's writer Pauty, Saqqara

( Rob Koopman / Flickr )

Apart from being the name of a cult object, the Benben stone is also used to describe a type of ancient Egyptian architectural element. To the ancient Egyptians, this was known as a ‘benbenet’ (the feminine form of ‘benben’), whereas for people today, the stone is known also as a pyramidion. This term is used to describe the capstone that was placed either on the top of a pyramid or on the top of an obelisk. It has been said that in the case of the former, the pyramidion is often covered with electrum or gold. Examples of pyramidions have survived, and may be found in museums. One, for instance, is the pyramidion that once topped the 12 ^th Dynasty Pyramid of Amenemhat III, which is today displayed in the Egyptian museum in Cairo.

The golden capstone of an obelisk in Luxor

( public domain )

• Featured image: The Benben stone (pyramidion) from the Pyramid of Amenemhat III, Egyptian museum, Cairo. Photo source: Wikimedia.

By Wu Mingren

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

22-01-2020 om 21:32 geschreven door peter  

Gigantische massa onbekend materiaal op de maan ontdekt - HLN.be

Bron: CNN, Inverse

De onverwachte massa bevindt zich onder het Zuidpool-Aitken-bekken, een enorme inslagkrater op de maan van 13 km diep en ongeveer 2.000 km breed. De ovale krater - een van de grootste in het zonnestelsel - is niet zichtbaar vanop de aarde, omdat hij zich aan de achterkant van de maan bevindt.

De ontdekte massa is er een van minstens twee triljoen kilogram - 350 miljoen keer zwaarder dan de Piramide van Cheops - en zou tot meer dan 300 km diepte onder de oppervlakte van de maan begraven liggen. De massa werd ontdekt op basis van gegevens verzameld tijdens de Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory-missie van NASA in 2011. Die data werden gekoppeld aan de topografie van de maan zoals de Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter die in kaart bracht. Bleek dat de instrumenten onder het Zuidpool-Aitken-bekken iets erg abnormaals hadden opgepikt. Waarschijnlijk is de mysterieuze massa afkomstig van een inslag op de maan meer dan vier miljard jaar geleden, zo stelt het team van professor Peter B. James.

De maan zelf zou 4,5 miljard jaar geleden gevormd zijn na een botsing tussen de aarde en een planeet met de omvang van Mars. De meest plausibele verklaring is, volgens de wetenschappers, dat de maan zich kort na haar vorming stabiliseerde en dat daarna een grote asteroïde aan relatief lage snelheid is ingeslagen op de maan. Met vervolgens de kolossale metaalmassa als restant.

Maar professor James heeft nog een andere verklaring: de massa zou ook een concentratie van dichte oxiden kunnen zijn die kristalliseerden in de maankorst tijdens de latere stadia van het stollen van het magma van de maan. Verder onderzoek dringt zich dus nog op. De huidige studie werd gepubliceerd in Geophysical Research Letters.

Selectie video's door peter2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

22-01-2020 om 21:07 geschreven door peter  

’s Werelds oudste krater ligt in West-Australië en maakte volgens onderzoekers “een einde aan de superijstijd” - HLN.be

De naam Yarabubba doet misschien denken aan een of andere planeet uit Star Wars, in werkelijkheid gaat het om ’s werelds oudste krater. Kenners wisten al langer dat de grandioze inslagkrater bestond, maar dat Yarrabubba wel 2,229 miljard jaar oud is, hadden ze nooit durven denken. 

Nu, dankzij een nieuwe ouderdomsbepaling, is de krater plotsklaps ’s werelds oudste exemplaar. Daarmee stoot hij de Vredefort-krater in Zuid-Afrika – die ‘slechts’ 2 miljard jaar oud is – van de troon.

Lees ook

Gigantische massa onbekend materiaal op de maan ontdekt

Einde van de superijstijd

Bovendien kan de nieuwe, oudere leeftijd van Yarrabubba betekenen dat hij een rol speelde bij het einde van de superijstijd, opperen de onderzoekers. Op het moment van de inslag was het immers ontzettend koud maar de daaropvolgende 400 miljoen jaar niet meer. De onderzoekers suggereren dat er door de inslag immense hoeveelheden ijs verdampt zijn. De waterdamp, was een broeikasgas is, zou tot een stijging van de temperatuur hebben geleid. Wil men dat bevestigd zien, dient een vervolgonderzoek op poten gezet te worden.

De leeftijd van een asteroïde bepalen

Een asteroïde die inslaat, is een van de meest gewelddadige geologische gebeurtenissen. In een oogwenk staat de aardkorst onder zodanig veel druk dat die als het ware explodeert. Grote inslagen kunnen littekens achterlaten ter grootte van een kleine stad.

Miljarden jaren later merk je echter weinig van die littekens. Alleen specialisten kunnen de vlaktes met in het midden een verdikking, herkennen. Vervolgens worden de microscopische korrels zirkoon en monaziet – het gesteente dat ontstaat bij een inslag – bestudeerd. Die bestaan uit hoge concentraties radioactief uranium en thorium waarmee men de absolute ouderdom van de gesteentes kan bepalen.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

22-01-2020 om 20:49 geschreven door peter  

Tube-Shaped UFO Sighting Above Massachusetts

A video of a puzzling, glittering object seen above Massachusetts has sparked conspiracy claims, just like the weird snake-like UFO sightings that made the rounds online last year.

John Baglio uploaded the video on Facebook. He shot the footage while driving on the highway between Boston and Malden with his son. According to John, he had caught a glimpse of a spinning bright, white object over his head. The UFO is shown moving from one chemtrail to the other, slowly diminishing in size.

One commenter suggested that this type of object was frequently observed elsewhere across the US, Mexico, and England. They said the craft was cylinder-shaped and approximately 200 feet long.

John said the object was around the same size as a bus and it was hovering low over the highway around 200 feet. He explained that the UFO was right above them, they drove directly under it and it had two big lights that were facing forwards while the object in question was moving.

John said that they could not hear anything from the object, unlike a plane that would have been incredibly loud even from the inside of a car.

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

22-01-2020 om 20:25 geschreven door peter  

For future homes on the moon, Mars, and other worlds, NASA is exploring technologies that would use mushrooms to grow self-repairing, self-replicating habitats.

Instead of building future moon structures of metal and glass, NASA is exploring technologies that could grow structures out of fungi for future habitats on the moon, Mars and other worlds.

A fungus is a group of organisms, including mushrooms and molds, that produces spores and eats up organic material. NASA researchers are investigating the potential of mycelia – the nutrient-absorbing, underground threads that make up a fungus’s main bulk – to help construct outposts on the moon and Mars. These tiny threads build complex structures with extreme precision, networking out into larger structures like mushrooms. With the right conditions, say the researchers, they can be coaxed into making new structures, ranging from a material similar to leather to the building blocks for a Mars habitat. The NASA researchers call it myco-architecture.

• EarthSky 2020 lunar calendars are available! Only a few left. Order now!

A researcher holding a petri dish containing mycelia – the underground threads that make up the main part of a fungus – growing in simulated Martian soil, also known as Martian regolith.

Image via NASA/ Ames Research Center/ Lynn Rothschild

NASA astrobiologist Lynn Rothschild is the principal investigator on the early-stage project. She said in a statement:

Right now, traditional habitat designs for Mars are like a turtle – carrying our homes with us on our backs – a reliable plan, but with huge energy costs. Instead, we can harness mycelia to grow these habitats ourselves when we get there.

According to NASA:

Ultimately, the project envisions a future where human explorers can bring a compact habitat built out of a lightweight material with dormant fungi that will last on long journeys to places like Mars. Upon arrival, by unfolding that basic structure and simply adding water, the fungi will be able to grow around that framework into a fully functional human habitat – all while being safely contained within the habitat to avoid contaminating the Martian environment.

A fungi structure would be more than just a shell, say the researchers. It would have its own ecosystem of sorts, with multiple kinds of organisms alongside the humans it’s designed to protect. NASA said:

Just like the astronauts, fungal mycelia is a lifeform that has to eat and breathe. That’s where something called cyanobacteria comes in – a kind of bacterium that can use energy from the sun to convert water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and fungus food.

This research is part of a field known as synthetic biology: the study of how we can use life itself as technology, in this case fungi.

A stool constructed out of mycelia after two weeks of growth. The next step is a baking process that leads to a clean and functional piece of furniture. The myco-architecture project seeks to design not only for habitats, but for the furniture that could be grown inside them as well.

Image via 2018 Stanford-Brown-RISD iGEM Team/ NASA.

The researchers say the technologies could also be used here on Earth. For example, mycelia could be used for water filtration and biomining systems that can extract minerals from wastewater, bioluminescent lighting, humidity regulation and even self-generating habitats capable of healing themselves. Rothschild said:

When we design for space, we’re free to experiment with new ideas and materials with much more freedom than we would on Earth. And after these prototypes are designed for other worlds, we can bring them back to ours.

Bricks produced using mycelium, yard waste and wood chips as a part of the myco-architecture project. Similar materials could be used to build habitats on the moon or Mars.

Image via 2018 Stanford-Brown-RISD iGEM Team/ NASA.

• Bottom line: NASA researchers are exploring technologies to build – and grow – structures on the moon and Mars made of mushrooms.
• Via NASA

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

22-01-2020 om 17:33 geschreven door peter  

Meet the Chinese robot worm that could crawl into your brain

Stephen Chen in Beijing

The device could be sent into the brain and transmit electric pulses to the neurons.

Photo: Shutterstock

According to an ancient southern Chinese form of black magic known as Gu a small poisonous creature similar to a worm could be grown in a pot and used to control a person’s mind.

Now a team of researchers in Shenzhen have created a robot worm that could enter the human body, move along blood vessels and hook up to the neurons.

“In a way it is similar to Gu,” said Xu Tiantian, a lead scientist for the project at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“But our purpose is not developing a biological weapon. It’s the opposite,” she added.

In recent years, science labs around the world have produced many micro-bots but mostly they were only capable of performing some simple tasks.

But a series of videos released by the team alongside a study in Advanced Functional Materials earlier this month show that the tiny intelligent robots – which they dubbed iRobots – can hop over a hurdle, swim through a tube or squeeze through a gap half its body width.

The 1mm by 3mm robotic worms are not powered by computer chips or batteries, but by an external magnetic field generator.

A video from the team showed the robots performing a range of manoeuvres.

Photo: Handout

Changing the magnetic fields allows the researchers to twist the robot’s body in many different ways and achieve a wide range of movements such as crawling, swinging and rolling, according to their paper.

They can also squeeze through gaps by using infrared radiation to contract their bodies by more than a third.

The worm’s body is also capable of changing colour in different environments because it is made from a transparent, temperature-responsive hydrogel and the video shows that when added to a cup of water at room temperature they become almost invisible.

It also has a “head” made from a neodymium iron-boron magnet and a “tail” constructed from a special composite material.

Xu believes they will prove particularly useful for doctors in the future, for example by being injected into the body and delivering a package of drugs to a targeted area, for example a tumour.

This would limit the effect of the drug to the areas where it is needed and reduce the risk of side effects and the robot worm could exit the body once its task is complete.

The patient would need to lie in an MRI style machine that generates the magnetic field needed to control the robots during the procedure.

The robot worms are controlled by electromagnetic signals.

Photo: Handout

It could also be implanted into the brain because its high mobility and ability to transform means it can survive in this harsh environment where there are rapid blood flows and tiny blood vessels.

Currently, brain implants can only be inserted via a surgical procedure and have a limited capability to integrate with the neurons, which means they can only perform a few simple tasks.

But Xu said the new robots could “work as an implant for brain-computer interface” that would make it possible to communicate directly with a computer without needing a keyboard or even a screen.

She believes this would work by carrying a transmitter that converts external signals into an electric pulse and connect with brain cells to stimulate activities that are not possible using current technology.

Xu admitted that it may be possible to misuse the technology by turning it into a weapon, but said there were still some major barriers to making this effective.

For instance, the controller would need to build a powerful electric field generator with a long effective range to operate the robot worms.

It would also be very difficult to send the microbots to their designated locations without the cooperation of the person they are implanted into because they have to sit or lie down and stay perfectly still while they are moving through the body.

But improving the hardware may overcome these obstacles so Xu could not rule out the possibility the technology could be weaponised one day, but added: “We just hope that day will never come.”

{ https://www.scmp.com/ }

22-01-2020 om 17:13 geschreven door peter