Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
Movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Arrival, and even Avengers are depicting UFOs with aliens who have come to Earth, which have had viewers from different parts of the world discussing more on the existence of extraterrestrials. However, today, there’s an increased focus on UFO researchers in Hollywood.
According to media critic and author Robbie Graham, the resurgence in popularity in aliens and UFOs is a direct result of the Pentagon revelations in 2017, which captured the attention of the press like there’s no UFO story in decades. Graham explained that the Pentagon UFO revelations helped legitimize UFOs as a topic of mainstream debate and opened up fresh political and scientific lines of inquiry for TV producers who are always searching for new approaches to this increasingly popular subject.
Irish actor Aiden Gillen, best known as Littlefinger in HBO’s Game of Thrones, said that people are more open to considering UFO sightings as a real event as opposed to just psychology. Gillen, who currently plays Dr. J. Allen Hynek in History Channel’s Project Blue Book, said that humans are naturally curious about UFOs and what’s up there. He added that talking about UFOs is no longer taboo and UFO topics are selling like never before as they are hot property on TV and everybody wants to stake a claim.
New laboratory studies – simulating conditions on the planet Mars and using salt-loving microbes – suggest that similar organisms could be producing Mars’ mysterious methane.
Ancient lake sediments in Gale Crater on Mars. The Curiosity rover has detected methane in this region, and this is the kind of environment where methanogenic archaea-type microorganisms might still survive today, with soils containing salts and clays.
Since it was first detected earlier in this century, methane in Mars’ thin air has been one of the most intriguing mysteries of the red planet.Record high levels of methane – reported in Mars’ atmosphere last June – was one of 2019’s biggest science stories. Is Mars’ methane created by geological processes? Or could it be a sign of life? That debate has raged more intensely in the past few years. Now a new study by researchers at Technical University Berlin (TU Berlin) outlines a possible mechanism where microbial life could indeed explain the findings.
The research was discussed in an article by Dirk Schulze-Makuch in Air & Space on January 9, 2020, and the peer-reviewed paper was published on January 8 in Scientific Reports. The findings were also presented on September 4, 2019, at the 19th EANA Astrobiology Conference in Orleans, France.
The study, led by Debbie Maus from TU Berlin, focused on how microbes can survive on water obtained only through deliquescence, where salts absorb tiny amounts of water directly from the air and then dissolve in the absorbed moisture. This would be essential on Mars, where there is no liquid water known on the dry, cold surface. Extremophile microorganisms on Earth can survive this way, however, making use of whatever tiny amounts of moisture are present. Could the same be true for Mars?
Some earthly microbes that employ deliquescence also release methane. And it’s known that Martian soil contains salts. So could deliquescence on Mars explain the methane in the air? While the current study doesn’t prove it does, the study does suggest that this explanation is plausible.
This Dec. 2, 2016 image taken by NASA's Curiosity rover shows rocky ground on the lower flank of Mount Sharp, a mountain on Mars. Curiosity landed on the red planet in 2012 and uncovered geologic evidence of an ancient environment.
How did Maus and her team reach these conclusions?
They used three different versions of simulated Martian soil, including the salts. These were contained in a special chamber that recreated conditions on the Martian surface. The researchers wanted to see if certain types of microbes would use the salts to obtain moisture through deliquescence in these simulated hostile conditions with very thin atmosphere, bitter cold and no liquid water.
The researchers tested three types of methanogenic archaea (methanogens), single-celled microorganisms similar to bacteria that, on Earth, live in environments with very low oxygen levels, much like Mars. All three types produce methane as a by-product of their metabolism.
Two out of the three types of microbes did produce methane in the simulated Martian conditions. Noteworthy is that this was particularly true when the tests used salts and soils similar to those found in ancient lakebeds on Mars, which have high clay content. This is just the kind of terrain that the Curiosity rover is in right now in Gale Crater – which used to be a lake or series of lakes a few billion years ago – and Curiosity has confirmed methane on more than one occasion now. Curiosity is currently examining clay-rich soil on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp in the middle of the crater.
The new study provides a plausible mechanism for the release of methane into the Martian atmosphere, although it still isn’t known for sure whether the methane is the result of biology or geology. On Earth, the vast majority of methane is produced by organisms, and the same could be true for Mars as well, but that is by no means certain at this point.
Illustration depicting what processes could create and destroy methane on Mars. The methane may originate from below the surface and be released into the atmosphere through subsurface cracks.
The researchers found that even if the microbes were desiccated – dried out – and dormant, they could be revived by deliquescence and release methane. From the paper:
Our results show, for the first time, that rehydration of MRAs [Martian regolith analogs] through deliquescence can reactivate the metabolism of desiccated methanogenic archaea. The design of the CDS provided deliquescence-driven water transport into the incubation chamber, but only when a hygroscopic salt was present. Our data also showed that methane production depends greatly on the methanogenic species, the incubation temperature, and the type of MRA and salt used in the experiments.
With the custom-designed Closed Deliquescence System (CDS), we have simulated the in vitro process of deliquescence and demonstrated that Methanosarcina soligelidi and Methanosarcina barkeri can survive desiccation in the presence of 30 wt% sodium chloride in a phyllosilicate-containing Martian Regolith Analog, and furthermore become metabolically active after water is provided by deliquescence.
Thus, we conclude that methanogenic archaea can live in environments with transient water availability and cope with varying salt concentrations. Consequently, salt-rich near subsurface environments on Mars subject to periodic wetting, such as proposed for RSLs [recurring slope lineae], can be considered potential habitats for certain halotolerant methanogenic archaea and could potentially be a biological source of methane in the Martian atmosphere.
The RSLs or recurring slope lineae are another feature on Mars that contain hydrated salts. These dark streaks on steep slopes may be the result of brief flows of briny water, but there is still much debate as to their actual cause. If there is moisture involved, they may be ideal locations for such salt-loving microbes to exist. There are even some RSLs on Mount Sharp in the middle of Gale Crater. The Curiosity rover could drive closer, but its controllers at NASA decided against it; there was a risk of contamination by the rover, which could still have some stray earthly microbes of its own on board.
A history of key methane measurements on Mars from 1999 to 2018.
Curiosity found evidence that the methane, at least near its location, is seasonal in its variation. That could be the result perhaps of clathrate ices or soils periodically releasing some trapped methane during warmer periods, other geological processes, or even a function of biology.
In a previous study, scientists found that the methane detected by Curiosity exhibits daily variations as well as seasonal ones. As John Moores at York University in Canada explained:
This most recent work suggests that the methane concentration changes over the course of each day. We were able – for the first time – to calculate a single number for the rate of seepage of methane at Gale Crater on Mars that is equivalent to an average of 2.8 kg [.7 gallons] per Martian day.
Another previous study also showed that wind erosion of rocks was unlikely to account for the variations in methane seen by Curiosity.
Methane was first found in the Martian atmosphere in 1999 by ground-based telescopes. The origin, however, is still a mystery despite the gas also being detected many times since then with various orbiters and the Curiosity rover. Curiosity also recently detected unusual seasonal variations in the amount of oxygen in Gale Crater, but further testing is needed to determine if there is any connection to the methane variations.
An example of Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL) on the walls of Newton Crater, as seen by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on May 30, 2011. They contain salts and possibly water.
So far, the search for life on Mars – past or present – has focused on the follow the water scenario.
Curiosity Rover✔@MarsCuriosity
The game is afoot.
I'm continuing to investigate the Martian methane mystery. A follow-on investigation shows that this past week's methane levels have sharply decreased. http://go.nasa.gov/2ZC0xvc
But if this new research is any indication, and as noted at the EANA Astrobiology Conference, maybe it’s time to modify that approach:
While our results emphasize the importance of the substrate, archaeal species, salt, and temperature used, we show – more importantly – for the first time that water provided through deliquescence alone is sufficient to rehydrate methanogenic archaea and to reactivate their metabolism under conditions roughly analogous to the near-subsurface Martian environment.
Thus, we suggest that a more important mantra for the search of life on Mars is ‘follow the salt’ rather than ‘follow the water.’ Future space missions, including life detection missions, should explore salt-rich regions on Mars as prime targets for astrobiology.
Mars Rover
Bottom line:New laboratory studies from researchers at Technical University Berlin suggest that microbes similar to methanogenic archaea on Earth could be producing Mars’ mysterious methane.
Phosphorus, a key ingredient of life, has been found in a newborn star system
Phosphorus, a key ingredient of life, has been found in a newborn star system
Astronomers trace molecular phosphorus from still-forming star to comet in our solar system
In a distant region of space, a young star shoots out jets of energy (inset), generating simple phosphorus-bearing molecules in the gas and dust of its surroundings.
ALMA/ESO, NAOJ, NRAO; V.M. RIVILLA ET AL; MARIO WEIGAND/WWW.SKYTRIP.DE
For the first time, phosphorus, a key ingredient of life, has been pinpointed in a cloud of gas and dust surrounding a newborn star.
Astronomers spotted a bright infant star shooting powerful jets of energy that created cavities in the gas and dust cocoon from which it formed. Different types of molecules in the cloud, including two simple phosphorus-bearing ones — phosphorus monoxide and phosphorus mononitride — were detected along the cavities’ walls, researchers report in the February Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Ultraviolet radiation from the newborn star helped form these molecules, the team suspects.
“Essentially, the young star is digging away at its natal cloud,” says Maria Drozdovskaya, an astrochemist at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Though phosphorus has been spotted around young stars before, its exact location had never been pinpointed, Drozdovskaya says. Her team showed that phosphorus monoxide dominated the dust regions closest to the infant star.
Molecules of phosphorus monoxide were also detected in a comet in our solar system, the team reports, helping link faraway star-forming regions where the molecules are created all the way to our part of the galaxy.
The findings add to evidence that comets may have helped deliver phosphorus, which is essential to DNA and many key organic chemicals, to the early Earth.
Observations of the young star were made using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, an enormous collection of radio dishes in Chile’s Atacama Desert. With its high-resolution instruments, ALMA was able to look in detail at the star, found in a star-forming region known as AFGL 5142 located about 7,000 light-years away from Earth.
Finding phosphorus in the earliest phases of a star’s life doesn’t necessarily mean it sticks around for long enough to become incorporated into planets. So the researchers turned to evidence closer to home, taking a second look at data from the European Space Agency’s now-defunct Rosetta spacecraft, which studied the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from 2014 to 2016 (SN: 8/6/14).
Comets are thought to be pristine relics from the solar system’s past. Rosetta had already detected phosphorus as well as the simplest amino acid glycine in the atmosphere of comet 67P (SN: 5/27/16). But clued in by the presence of phosphorus monoxide in the protostellar cloud, the spacecraft’s scientists looked at their data again and found that phosphorus monoxide was the main form of phosphorus in the icy body.
“It’s clearly telling us that comets contain the ingredients of life in their most basic form,” Drozdovskaya says.
Though essential for life, most of the phosphorus on Earth is locked up in minerals in its crust. Organisms tend to get the amount they need through their diet. Phosphorus monoxide, however, has the advantage of being soluble in water, making it far more biologically available than phosphorus locked in minerals, says study coauthor Víctor Rivilla of the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory in Florence. If comets delivered phosphorus to the young Earth in the form of phosphorus monoxide, perhaps that helps explain how early life was able to access the element.
It’s still unclear exactly how the phosphorus molecules were created or if comets actually delivered them to Earth. “As much as we’re making enormous progress — and this paper is an example of that — there are still these giant gaps,” says George Cody, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the work.
A sample return mission that collects ice from a comet and brings it to terrestrial laboratories would allow scientists to do much more detailed analyses of such simple molecules and perhaps start to fill in a few details, he says. While missions are under way to retrieve samples from asteroids (SN: 1/15/19), NASA’s most recent comet sample–retrieval proposal, the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return (CAESAR), was not selected in the agency’s last round of funding.
Alien Sex won’t be like you suppose’: Evolutionary biologist explains how extraterrestrials might reproduce
Alien Sex won’t be like you suppose’: Evolutionary biologist explains how extraterrestrials might reproduce
No-one knows, because people haven’t yet caught beings from outer space within the act of physical affection.
However now a top evolutionary biologist has decided to shed some light on how aliens may make love.
Dr. Sarah Otto, director of the biodiversity analysis centre at the University of British Columbia’s Zoology division, told Mirror On-line that people would have to ditch their earthbound preconceptions if they wish to understand what sex may look like on one other planet.
If aliens exist, would they have sex?
“I have never thought about aliens before,” she mentioned.
“However it’s an interesting thought experiment.
“What do we know about 4 billion years of evolution on Earth and what would we predict if it occurred all over again on another planet?”
Males are from Mars…
Earlier this month, an American lady referred to as Niara Terela Isley claimed reptilian aliens regularly raped her at their base on the dark side of the moon.
However aliens would in all probability find it very difficult to get jiggy with people, as a result of our bits and bobs are likely to be completely different shapes.
In addition to this, it is unclear whether or not the familiar gender binary of female and male would be replicated in an alien species.
Alien eroticism would probably be completely different, having developed alongside its own evolutionary lines.
Dr Otto mentioned the 2 gender approach was unlikely to be discovered on one other planet, because it does not always exist on Earth.
“The separate female and male sexes is not even universal rule on this earth, let alone others,” she continued.
Sexed up: All slugs are hermaphrodites, which means they’re able to breed quickly
Aliens could be hermaphrodites, Dr Otto advised, which means they can basically have sex with themselves, however this would rely upon what kind of beastie ET turned out to be.
This could be useful, as a result of it means ET would not have to find a partner and then speak them into bed.
“Organisms that can move and find different mates usually tend to have separate genders,” she mentioned.
“Those that are stationery tend to have female and male organs on the same individual.”
Intruigingly, Dr Otto advised being that can’t move would not essentially be any less clever than one that can run about, raising the prospect that alien lifeforms could look more like trees than people.
Just watch out for these wandering branches.
In Star Wars, the well-known Storm Troopers were mentioned to be exact copies – or clones – of the bounty hunter Jango Fett.
However in a real galaxy far, far away, aliens are unlikely to clone themselves, as a result of reproducing your exact genetic make up could leave a species at risk of being wiped out by one single disease.
If a creature cloned itself, the species wouldn’t be able to benefit from the combinations and mutations which occur when women and men merge their genetic code throughout reproduction.
“Clonal species do not tend to do well in the long run,” Dr Otto added.
Not every species on our own planet relies on sex which takes place exclusively between 2 genders.
“Rather than female and male, some species have categories like A, B, C, D and E,” Dr Otto added.
“But regardless of truth they may have a number of mating varieties, it is solely two that are likely to take part in mating.”
This means aliens would unlikely to get involved in orgies, as a result of when it comes to producing the subsequent generation, more than two parents is certainly a crowd.
Pleasure seekers
It’s usually stated that people are unique because we enjoy having sex.
Of course, each species is hardwired to reproduce – otherwise they would not last very long.
“It isn’t shock that evolution has linked sex to pleasure centres of our brain,” Dr Otto mentioned.
This would mean aliens would probably feel a an urge to get down and dirty, whether they loved it or not.
Sound familiar?
Brave New World
In his famous novel, Aldous Huxley imagined a future the place intercourse was purely for enjoyable and infants have been produced in factories.
We asked Otto if this was unlikely to be the best way aliens produced their offspring.
“I sure hope not,” she replied.
“In factories and manufacturing industries, you are attempting to do things the same way again and again.
“Evolution does not work that way.”
Just like earthly creatures, aliens are likely to have benefited from the flukes caused by combining their genes over the courses of many tens of millions of generations.
“Evolution stops if replication is done perfectly,” Dr Otto concluded.
“Up, left, down, forward… any way it wanted to go, at any speed it wanted to go. Which was hard for your brain to kinda wrap around at first.”
This was how Gary Voorhis, former Petty Officer 3rd Class Fire Controlman aboard the USS Princeton, described the behavior of an unidentified flying object that was tracked and observed across multiple systems during a 2004 Naval incident off the coast of California. The events described here, commonly known today as the USS Nimitz UFO incident, have become one of the most widely-discussed instances involving unexplained aerial phenomena of the modern era.
A number of key factors have contributed to the attention this incident has gained, which include the involvement of multiple witnesses, and more fundamentally, that it had been a military encounter with obvious national defense implications. Also contributing to the interest it has received had been footage obtained with the help of the Raytheon ATFLIR targeting pod systems employed by the Navy, as well as observations by radar operators and other technicians in the Navy’s Strike Carrier Group-11. All of these sources provided information about the operational capabilities of the craft, which has since been popularly likened to a bus-sized, flying “tic-tac”.
Gary Voorhis and Ryan Weigelt, both of whom served with the Carrier Group-11 at the time of the incident, related a number of unique details to me during a recent interview I conducted with them about the incident. Voorhis, as described earlier, had been a Petty Officer 3rd Class Fire Controlman aboard the USS Princeton, and was one of the system technicians for the Cooperative Engagement Capability and AEGIS Combat systems, which included the AN/SPY-1 Bravo radar. Weigelt, a former Leading Petty Officer, had been the power plant specialist of the SH-60B Seahawk helicopter at the same time.
One of the key elements that both men shared with me in our interview had been their recollection of seeing the now-famous intercept attempt led by Commander David Fravor, a former commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (and, notably, the officer to first compare the object or aircraft’s shape to a “tic-tac”). Fravor was accompanied at the time of the intercept by his weapon systems officer and two other pilots.
“When I started watching this film to begin with,” Voorhis recalled, “they had already started the intercept. The object was moving around, and it was moving in conjunction with the pilot. It would move out of the frame, but then the pilot would adjust, and it would come back into the frame.
“And then it would move sharp to the right, sharp to the left, up, down, any particular direction it wanted to go. It had no rudders, no props, no jet plume. You couldn’t tell which side was the front and which side was the back, except that you’d just assume that which way is going forward is front. But you can’t even assume that, because it would just move sideways.
“You’re waiting for it to move,” Voorhis said. “Then it just moves.”
Voorhis also said that the objects were tracked more than once on radar over the course of several weeks and that, on a few occasions when such radar detections occurred, he attempted to observe the objects with binoculars from the top deck of the U.S.S. Princeton. Voorhis described seeing what appeared to be movement of phosphorescent, albeit ambiguous objects along the horizon in the direction indicated by radar.
And yet, perhaps the Nimitz object’s otherworldly maneuverability isn’t the only impressive thing about its capabilities. Shortly after the initial phase of the intercept, Fravor and the others were alerted via radio that the object reappeared, this time at a designated “cap point”, as indicated in interviews about the incident.
Video footage obtained by pilot Chad Underwood shortly after the initial intercept during the 2004 incident.
“We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Fravor told the New York Times in 2017. Although the unidentified object at no time displayed any offensive capabilities or other indications of hostile intent, the fact that it (or rather, its operators) had obvious knowledge of the Combat Air Patrol coordinates seems to indicate one of two possibilities:
1) That in addition to highly advanced maneuverability, the “tic-tac” also had the ability to decode the highly encrypted communications systems employed by the Strike Group at that time, or
2) The operators of the UAP technology may have somehow had foreknowledge or other means of access to this information.
The implications of either scenario are significant, and may even be fundamental to understanding the nature of the technology in question.
The various accounts of this object and its capabilities, observed at close-range by Fravor and his company during the intercept, as well as on radar by Voorhis, Day, and others, indicates something that is well beyond the capabilities of any known technologies possessed today by the United States; the same can be said of any other world superpower. This should not necessarily be alarming, as there was no indication of overt offensive capabilities displayed by the object. However, any object or aircraft with such highly advanced performance should not be ruled out as a concern.
It could be decades (at least) before any further information is released that will give the public a clear idea as to what the 2004 Nimitz incident really entailed. That, however, relies heavily on whether the U.S. government–or that of any nation–actually possesses any significant further information in the first place.
You’ve got to love mushrooms. They’re good to eat (well, most of them), they have psychedelic and healing powers, they come in a wide array of beautiful shapes and colors, they play a part in many folklore tales … we could go on and on about ‘shrooms. And now, there’s another great reason to love them – a new study finds that mushrooms are 300 million years older than first thought, dating back 810 million years to a time when they joined the first plants as the only living things on the dry surface of Earth. Yes, this is indeed a “This changes everything!” moment, brought to you by your favorite fungi – mushrooms.
“This is a major discovery, and one that prompts us to reconsider our timeline of the evolution of organisms on Earth.”
Where is everybody?
In a study led by Steeve Bonneville, professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles (a French-speaking private research university in Brussels, Belgium), researchers found fossilized remains of mycelium – microscopic strands of fungi — in ancient rocks from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These 715 and 810 million-year-old rocks were at the Africa Museum in Tervuren, Belgium and had been determined to have been from a lagoon or coastal lake. The age and location makes these fungi-filled rocks historically special to Bonneville.
“The presence of fungi in this transitional area between water and land leads us to believe that these microscopic mushrooms were important partners of the first plants that colonized the Earth’s surface around 500 million years ago.”
Using non-destructive microscopic molecular analysis techniques such as synchrotron radiation spectroscopy, μ-Raman confocal microscopy, fluorescence microscopy and electron microscopy, Bonneville and his colleagues were able to study the organic remains in the rocks without damaging them. This allowed them to find traces of chitin, a very tough compound found in the cell walls of fungi, and determine that the cells had a nucleus, making them eukaryotic organisms … and the world’s oldest mushrooms.
We know what you’re thinking … are these the first magic mushrooms? Did the researchers eat them and experience 800-million-year-old visions? There’s nothing in the press release or the study, published in Science Advances, that would suggest they tried this, let alone even considered it. For that, you’ll have to visit the Democratic Republic of the Congo and find your own 800 million-year-old fungi-filled rocks to lick.
The outskirts of Socorro, New Mexico blend right into desert badlands that stretch off into the horizon, a seemingly unforgiving, hostile place of parched earth and spiny plants. On April 24, 1964, at about 5:50 p.m., a plume of dust kicked up over this moonscape, originating from the patrol car of police officer Lonnie Zamora. He had been in a high speed chase moments before, when a strange roaring sound had filled his ears and he had witnessed a bluish, orange flame soaring through the sky some distance away. It was all odd enough that he had broken off from the chase and was now barreling down a rural road towards where he estimated the flame had originated from to investigate. At this point he was not thinking of UFOs or the world of the weird. His best guess was that a car had overturned or a dynamite shack in the vicinity had blown up, but as he navigated the winding, rough and remote road he saw something sitting out in that desert that he at first assumed to be a white car overturned on the road with what looked like two people standing nearby. At this point he thought that his instincts were correct, and that there had been an accident, but as he rushed forward to offer assistance he would soon realize that this was no car. And thus would begin one of the most well-documented and discussed UFO encounters there is.
As Zamora approached, he could see that rather than an overturned vehicle, the object seemed to be a whitish, “O” or egg shaped vehicle with no discernible windows or doors and a shiny sheen like aluminum, as well as what looked like a set of four thin legs underneath it propping it up, and the figures standing nearby were about the size of small adults, with somewhat large heads and wearing what looked like coveralls and possibly some sort of headgear. Even at this point he wasn’t struck by anything particularly outlandish, although it was starting to give him the odd feeling that something was “off.” The object had some sort of red insignia on it, although he could not tell what exactly it depicted or what it meant, and he says that one of the figures seemed to jump in surprise when it realized he was approaching, after which both of them seemed to disappear within the object. In the meantime Zamora had radioed in the incident and it was then that he would be truly shocked when the object in question began to lift up straight into the air. He explains of what happened next:
Hardly turned around from car, when heard roar (was not exactly a blast), very loud roar — at that close was real loud. Not like a jet — know what jets sound like. Started low frequency quickly, then roar rose in frequency (higher tone) and in loudness — from loud to very loud. At same time as roar saw flame. Flame was under the object. Object was starting to go straight up — slowly up. Object slowly rose straight up. Flame was light blue and at bottom was sort of orange color. From this angle, saw the side of object (not end, as first noted). Difficult to describe flame. Thought, from roar, it might blow up. Flame might have come from underside of object, at middle, possibly a four feet area — very rough guess. Cannot describe flame further except blue and orange. No smoke, except dust in immediate area.
After fell by car and glasses fell off, kept running to north, with car between me and object. Glanced back couple of times. Noted object to rise to about level of car, about 20 to 25 feet guess — took I guess about six seconds when object started to rise and I glanced back. I ran I guess about halfway to where I ducked down — about fifty feet from the car is where I ducked down, just over edge of hill. I guess I had run about 25 feet when I glanced back and saw the object level with the car and it appeared about directly over the place where it rose from.
I was still running and I jumped just over the hill — I stopped because I did not hear the roar. I was scared of the roar, and I had planned to continue running down the hill. I turned around toward the object and at same time put my head toward ground, covering my face with my arms. Being that there was no roar, I looked up, and I saw the object going away from me. It did not come any closer to me. It appeared to go in straight line and at same height — possibly 10 to 15 feet from ground, and it cleared the dynamite shack by about three feet. Shack about eight feet high. Object was travelling very fast. It seemed to rise up, and take off immediately across country.
He would claim that after this spectacular takeoff the craft ceased to make any noise or flame, and proceeded to silently shoot off into the distance over a mountain. As he stood there in shock and we at what he had just witnessed backup arrived, in the form of a Sergeant Chavez. Zamora excitedly told Chavez about what had happened, and the two searched the area to allegedly find strange indentations and scorch marks upon the earth. Other officers who would arrive claimed that some of the vegetation and the ground were still hot to the touch, with some of it even described as still smoldering, as if just hit by a massive heat. Not long after this, word got out about this outlandish incident and reporters were coming in droves, with headlines splashed all over the news talking of aliens and UFOs in the desert.
This quickly got the attention of the government, including the FBI and the U.S. Air Force, in particular the study it had initiated into UFO sightings, called Project Blue Book. Investigators would intensively question Zamora about the incident and deem him to be a reliable witness, a respected police officer who seemed to be telling the truth and had no reason to lie. The FBI would say Zamora was “well regarded as a sober, industrious, and conscientious officer and not given to fantasy.” When Zamora then brought them out to the alleged landing sight, they found wrecked, charred brush and the indentations he spoke of, as well as what looked like some sort of metal scrapings on a rock, and it was all rather baffling indeed.
Investigators were also able to track down other people who had possibly witnessed the same exact event. It turned out that several independent witnesses had also reported seeing an egg-shaped unidentified object trailing a blueish flame at approximately the same time as Zamora’s encounter. One witness in particular gave a dramatic report of some sort of silvery craft emerging from a bank of black smoke, of which he said, “a round, saucer or egg-shaped object ascended vertically from the black smoke… After climbing vertically out of the smoke, the object leveled off and moved in a southwest direction.” There were other witnesses as well, including those who had seen the object visually and those who had heard a strange roar echo out across the desolate landscape, as ell as those who had seen merely a bright flash from the region, but it is all intriguing as many of these reports came in before Zamora’s tale even hit the news. In the end, the case had experts and investigators stumped, and Major Hector Quintanilla, the Air Force Chief of Project Blue Book at the time, would call it a genuinely puzzling case, and he would write in his report on the matter:
There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is also no question about Zamora’s reliability. He is a serious police officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area. He is puzzled by what he saw, and frankly, so are we. This is the best-documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic.
This is particularly odd, as it was in an era in which Project Blue Book was on a crusade to debunk sightings as much as possible, the days of weather balloons, misidentified aircraft, and of course Venus, and rarely admitted to or covered up those that were genuinely unexplained. Adding to the weirdness of it all was a discovery allegedly made in 1968, when a a University of New Mexico doctoral student in radiation biology by the name of Mary G. Mayes claimed to have gone out to the site of the landing to do a study on the “plant material” of the area, and had found that not only were the plants around the site unusually dried out, but that there seemed to be an area of fused sand in the middle of all of this, which looked as if “a hot jet had hit it.” She would claim that after these discoveries the Air Force had moved in to acquire all of her research, data, and samples and that was the last she heard of it.
In later years, the Zamora incident would gain a lot of traction in the UFO community, as it was extremely well-documented and considered a truly unclassifiable event made by a reliable witness, and Zamora would continue to stand by his story. Of course, the main problem is that there is only one person who ever saw the landed craft and around which all of this revolves, and that is Zamora himself. As such, there has been much debate as to how much any of it holds up, and so there have been a lot of theories proposed on what might have gone on out there along that remote road. It has often been suggested that this was all a hoax, not necessarily implemented by Zamora, but perhaps a prank played on him by some enterprising individuals, but if that is the case then they did a good job of fooling everyone involved, including the FBI and Air Force. There is also of course the notion that Zamora set this all himself, as part of a scheme in order to raise tourism to the area.
Other ideas have really run the range, including ball lightning, dust devils, mirages, and top secret military aircraft, even an experimental lunar surveyor being tested out of the nearby White Sands Missile Range. Then of course there is the idea that this was an actual encounter with otherworldly forces, and that this was a genuine alien encounter. It is hard to say, as Zamora is no longer with us, having taken what he saw to the grave with him, and the case has mostly been dropped officially, merely an unexplained little hiccup listed simply as “unknown” and not worthy of follow-up. Whatever it is Zamora encountered out there, it has remained one of the most well-documented and oft discussed UFO encounters out there, and without any definitive answers we will probaby never know exactly what transpired.
Alien Craft Recorded By Pilot Over Utah, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Alien Craft Recorded By Pilot Over Utah,Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Sept 2019
Location of sighting:Utah, USA
Source: MUFON #105762
A professional pilot recorded this at 40,000 feet. This is just absolutly amazing. This is great raw footage of an actual UFO. Most UFOs appear white and orb shaped...but this disk is unique. This is an important video because not only does it tell us the size, shape and color of the object, but it tells us how smoothly and easily this craft moves through the sky.
UFO Armada Over Ocean Seen From Space Station, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Armada Over Ocean Seen From Space Station, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Jan 26, 2020
Location of sighting: Earths orbit a ISS
Source: ISS live NASA cam
This is some cool footage of three UFOs rising up out of the ocean. Each UFO is about 1.5 km long...and one of them is still half under water. UFOs have been reported by pilots that size, so its not unusual at all. The UFO on the far left is the the leader of the fleet. You can see the UFO on the far left is about 75% out of the water, the center UFO is 45% and the UFO on the far right is only about 20% out of the water. Once the UFOs have left the water, they must wait in position for a few minutes until most water has fallen off the ship, because the water can cause hull damage when heating up fast and freezing fast exiting our atmosphere...but when they go light speed...a little water can really send them off track by a long ways.
Giant metallic disc with portholes seen in the sky over Tulsa, Oklahoma
Giant metallic disc with portholes seen in the sky over Tulsa, Oklahoma
Shannon was walking with her son to school when she saw a huge metallic disc with portholes in the sky over Tulsa, Oklahoma on January 20, 2020. The sun was reflecting off of it and although it scared her what she saw, she took a photo of the UFO with her phone.
Shannon states: I can tell you, first of all there was a humming noise that I heard that was not heard by anyone else all the night before.
It was huge, I'd say, maybe 3 football fields wide. It was surrounded by clouds that we're all different colors. It was very low and the top part of it was completely enveloped.
After I dropped my son off at school I came back out and stood amazed, I couldn't believe no one else reported it.
Remarkable; a similar UFO with portholes has been photographed by Daniela in Germany. (See image above).
In the following video Mrmbb333 talks about these two UFOs.
Time-Traveling Humans From the Future Might Be Piloting UFOs
Time-Traveling Humans From the Future Might Be Piloting UFOs
Over the decades, many people have fascinated with unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and aliens. However, visiting extraterrestrials may be products of time rather than the universe.
UFO pilots could be our future progeny that have understood well the landscape of time and space. Montana Tech University professor Michael Masters recently claimed that the ET spacecraft or commonly called as UFOs that people previously observed, could have contained humans from the future rather than aliens.
Dr. Masters said that humans would utilize contraptions to travel back in time for them to understand their evolutionary past.
He is focusing on human evolution study and says his theory is consistent with reams of UFO sightings. He believes that time travelers from the future are anthropologists much like himself with so many claims of alien abductions and medical examinations.
Those who claimed to have been abducted described humanoid aliens with incredible technology. Scientists experimented with the arrow of time reversal for a split second to simulate the possibility of time travel using quantum particles named qubits. If this experiment gives even a slight chance, it will support the theory of Dr. Masters.
The professor believes that UFOs are time machines from the future.
He described the extra-tempestrial as being bi-lateral symmetry, having five fingers on each foot and hand, upright-walking, bipedal, having two eyes, a mouth, a nose and having the ability to communicate with us in our languages.
The proof that led the professor to this bizarre theory is when most people who reported close encounters with aliens always seem to describe them in the same way. He stated that he took a multidisciplinary approach to understand the oddities of this phenomenon. However, he remains vigilant in his skepticism and does not have a staunch unwavering devotion to this notion. He believes that going back in time to study ancient humans would be the holy grail of paleontology.
Anthropologists do not discount the possibility that humans of the future will crack the secrets of time travel, considering the fast pace of scientific and technological advancement over the past century
ESA’s Mars Express has captured beautiful images of the icy cap sitting at Mars’ north pole, complete with bright swathes of ice, dark troughs and depressions, and signs of strong winds and stormy activity.
The poles of Mars are covered in stacked layers of ice that subtly shift in extent and composition throughout the year.
During summer, the pole is permanently covered by thick layers of mostly water ice; during winter, temperatures plummet below -125 degrees Celsius and carbon dioxide begins to precipitate and build up as ice, creating a thinner additional layer a couple of metres thick. Winter also brings carbon dioxide clouds, which can obscure the polar features below and make it difficult to see clearly from orbit.
Mars’ north pole in context
This view from Mars Express’ High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) suffers from very little such cloud cover, and shows the northern polar cap during the summer of 2006.
The landscape is a rippled mix of colour, from the bright whites of water ice to the dark reds and browns of martian dust, and displays a number of interesting phenomena.
Dark red and ochre-hued troughs appear to cut through the ice cap. These form part of a wider system of depressions that spiral outwards from the very centre of the pole. When viewed on a larger scale, as in the context map, this pattern becomes evident: the rippling troughs curve and bend and slice outwards in an anti-clockwise orientation, wrapping around the pole and creating a pattern akin to zebra stripes.
These spiralling features are thought to have formed via a mix of processes, the most significant one being wind erosion. It is thought that winds circle radially away from the centre of the north pole, moving outwards cyclically to create the spiral pattern we see.
Mars’ north polar ice cap in 3D
These winds, known as katabatic winds, move cold, dry air downslope under the force of gravity, often originating in areas of higher elevation (such as glaciers or snow-covered plateaus) and flowing down into lower, warmer areas such as valleys and depressions. They are acted upon by the Coriolis force as they move, which causes them to deviate from a straight path and form the aforementioned spiral pattern we see.
Visible to the left of the frame are a few extended streams of clouds, aligned perpendicularly to a couple of the troughs. These are thought to be caused by small local storms that kick up dust into the martian atmosphere, eroding scarps and slopes as they do so and slowly changing the appearance of the troughs over time.
The poles, and any active processes taking place in these regions, are particularly interesting areas of Mars. These layers of ice hold information about Mars’ past, particularly concerning how its climate has evolved and changed in the last few millions of years: ice mixes with layers of surface dust and settles at the north and south poles, capturing a snapshot of the planet’s characteristics during that period of history.
A key goal of HRSC is to explore the various phenomena occurring in the martian atmosphere, such as winds and storms, and the many intriguing geological processes that take place across – and below – the Red Planet’s surface.
The camera has been returning impressively detailed views of Mars for many years. Mars Express arrived at the Red Planet in late 2003, and has revealed much about the planet and its history – including mapping its surface at resolutions of 10 m/pixel or greater, exploring how wet and humid early Mars may have been, characterising its amazing volcanoes and bizarre surface features and geography, and probing deeper to determine the structure and components of its sub-surface.
This aim of characterising the entirety of the planet and its history will be continued and furthered by the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which arrived at Mars in 2016, and the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover and its accompanying surface science platform, which will arrive next year.
This image is published to coincide with the Seventh International Conference on Mars Polar Science and Exploration, which is taking place in Argentina from 13 to 17 January 2020. This is the latest in a series of international and interdisciplinary conferences to share knowledge about the intriguing polar regions of the Red Planet.
Physicists have certainly achieved a lot, but many mysteries about the universe remain.
The galaxy cluster Abell 1689 is famous for the way it bends light in a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Study of the cluster has revealed secrets about how dark energy shapes the universe.
Modern physics has many achievements to be proud of. A quantum understanding of three of the forces of nature. A beautiful, elegant description of gravity though the bending of space-time. An understanding of the history of our universe stretching back billions of years.
Physicists should rightly pat themselves on the back for such a bang-up job. This is isn't easy stuff.
And yet, mysteries abound, and sometimes we feel more in the dark than we did 100 years ago. Let's explore some of the major issues that modern physics is still trying to understand.
The early 1900s was such a simple time. We had our theory of electromagnetism, which elegantly and simply unified our understanding of electricity, magnetism and radiation. It was awesome. And we also had Newton's laws, which provided a solid framework for understanding motion. These two pillars propped up our physical world. It was great.
Then folks like Albert Einstein had to come and smash it all. With special relativity, we had to completely rewrite our notions of time, space, distance and speed. And with quantum mechanics, we had to sit down and have a serious rethink about … well, basically all of fundamental reality.
And so physicists undertook a massive program of unification, trying to put all physics laws under a single roof. And they were largely successful: special relativity married to gravity gave us general relativity. Special relativity combined with quantum mechanics led to the quantum field theories, which went on to enhance our understanding of the electromagnetic force, and once they were discovered, the strong and weak nuclear forces.
We didn't stop the train there. Experiments and theory in the 1950s revealed that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces were actually two sides of the same "electroweak" coin — these forces merged into one entity at high energies. Not to be outdone, so-called Grand Unified Theories put forward attempts to fold in the strong nuclear force as well.
The last force standing independently is gravity. And still today, decades later, we have no quantum description of gravity. And we've worked really hard on the problem, but every time we try to apply quantum techniques to Einstein's force, the math goes haywire and we can't make predictions.
Certain physics constants rule our everyday experience. The speed of light. The charge on the electron. The strength of the weak nuclear force. All in all, about 18 individual numbers need to be plugged into the Standard Model — our quantum framework for three of the four forces of nature and all the particles that make up the building blocks of our world — to make it work.
The Standard Model simply can't explain why we have the forces of nature that we do, why we have the families of particles that we do, why those forces and particles act the way they do and basically any other question that starts with the word "why."
In fact, the way the creaky mathematical machinery behind the Standard Model works, those constants must be measured experimentally and plugged into a few key places in the equations; otherwise all the calculations blow up. It's a slightly uncomfortable sensation to know that our math wouldn't be able to make predictions without these constants plugged in.
The strengths of the forces are particularly troublesome, especially gravity. Gravity is so embarrassingly weak: it's billions upon billions of times weaker than the weak nuclear force. Let that sink in: gravity is even weaker than the force with "weak" literally in its name.
Why? This is called the hierarchy problem. We don't have a solution, just a name for the problem.
Seeing in the dark
Our troubles aren't limited to theoretical pursuits to unify the forces, questionable mathematics and puzzling particle collider results. Starting a few decades, astronomers decided that we didn't have enough problems and tossed in a brand-new ingredient to the universe: dark matter.
We know that dark matter exists: we see evidence for it everywhere from the motion of stars inside galaxies to the background light left over from the earliest days of the universe. And while we understand a lot about what dark matter must act like, we haven't nailed down the culprit. We can only detect it through its gravitational effects, and astronomers suspect that it's a new kind of particle, hitherto unknown to the Standard Model, that floods the universe but does not interact through the electromagnetic force, making it completely invisible.
In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered — and we've backed this up since then with a host of independent observations — that the expansion of our universe is accelerating.
We have absolutely no idea what's causing this.
Our best guess is that it has something to do with the energy locked in the vacuum of space-time itself, but our simplest, most naïve calculations estimate a strength of dark energy that's about 10,120 orders of magnitude too high.
Whoops.
So that's a big mystery. As far as we can tell, we're not misunderstanding something about the way gravity works at the largest scales, so whatever is causing dark energy must be a new ingredient character operating in the cosmos.
As to more details in the pursuit of pinning down this strange acceleration, we're at a loss.
Learn more by listening to the episode"Is String Theory Worth It? (Part 1: Unify This!)"on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available oniTunesand on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to John C., Zachary H., @edit_room, Matthew Y., Christopher L., Krizna W., Sayan P., Neha S., Zachary H., Joyce S., Mauricio M., @shrenicshah, Panos T., Dhruv R., Maria A., Ter B., oiSnowy, Evan T., Dan M., Jon T., @twblanchard, Aurie, Christopher M., @unplugged_wire, Giacomo S., Gully F.for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutterandfacebook.com/PaulMattSutter.
A new NASA video combines visible, infrared and X-ray views of the famous Crab Nebula, a star that exploded into view in our sky 1,000 years ago.
NASA released the video above on January 5, 2020, saying it was created by astronomers and visualization specialists from its Universe of Learning program. These experts combined visible, infrared and X-ray vision of the famous Crab Nebula, the remains of a star that exploded into view in Earth’s sky in the year 1054. The video shows images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. It shows the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula – the rapidly spinning, super-dense crushed core of the exploded star – which sends high-energy jets in either direction into the nebula, and which serve as what NASA calls the powerhouse “engine” of the entire system.
The tiny dynamo [the pulsar] is blasting out blistering pulses of radiation 30 times a second with unbelievable clockwork precision.
The visualization was produced by a team at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland; the Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It debuted earlier this month at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii.
STScI’s visualization scientist Frank Summers led the team that developed the video. He said:
Seeing two-dimensional images of an object, especially of a complex structure like the Crab Nebula, doesn’t give you a good idea of its three-dimensional nature. With this scientific interpretation, we want to help people understand the Crab Nebula’s nested and interconnected geometry. The interplay of the multiwavelength observations illuminate all of these structures. Without combining X-ray, infrared, and visible light, you don’t get the full picture.
NASA described the video this way:
The movie begins by showing the Crab Nebula in context, pinpointing its location in the constellation Taurus. This view zooms in to present the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra images of the Crab Nebula, each highlighting one of the nested structures in the system. The video then begins a slow buildup of the three-dimensional X-ray structure, showing the pulsar and a ringed disk of energized material, and adding jets of particles firing off from opposite sides of the energetic dynamo.
Appearing next is a rotating infrared view of a cloud enveloping the pulsar system, and glowing from synchrotron radiation. This distinctive form of radiation occurs when streams of charged particles spiral around magnetic field lines. There is also infrared emission from dust and gas.
The visible-light outer shell of the Crab Nebula appears next. Looking like a cage around the entire system, this shell of glowing gas consists of tentacle-shaped filaments of ionized oxygen (oxygen missing one or more electrons). The tsunami of particles unleashed by the pulsar is pushing on this expanding debris cloud like an animal rattling its cage.
The X-ray, infrared, and visible-light models are combined at the end of the movie to reveal both a rotating three-dimensional multiwavelength view and the corresponding two-dimensional multiwavelength image of the Crab Nebula.
Summers commented:
The three-dimensional views of each nested structure give you an idea of its true dimensions. To enable viewers to develop a complete mental model, we wanted to show each structure separately, from the ringed disk and jets in stark relief, to the synchrotron radiation as a cloud around that, and then the visible light as a cage structure surrounding the entire system.
These nested structures are peculiar to the Crab Nebula. They reveal that the nebula is not a classic supernova remnant as once commonly thought. Instead, the system is better classified as a pulsar wind nebula. NASA explained:
A traditional supernova remnant consists of a blast wave and debris from the supernova that has been heated to millions of degrees. In a pulsar wind nebula, the system’s inner region consists of lower-temperature gas that is heated up to thousands of degrees by the high-energy synchrotron radiation.
Isn’t this a cool image? It’s the famous Crab Nebula – the remnant of a star that exploded 1,000 years ago – as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Superimposed on the visible light image from Hubble is an X-ray image from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (in lavender), revealing the nebula’s high-energy heart.
Image via NASA/ ESA/ J. DePasquale (STScI)/ R. Hurt (Caltech/IPAC).
Bottom line: A new NASA video combines visible, infrared and X-ray views of the famous Crab Nebula, a star that exploded into view in our sky 1,000 years ago.
Milestone: This is De Void’s first UFO story to make the Herald-Tribune’s print edition. Please note the direct style, as well as the paucity of adverbs and meaningless tangents.
SARASOTA – America’s former Chief of Naval Operations stated on Thursday that the unidentified flying objects that appeared to have outperformed Navy fighter pilots on videos recorded in 2004 and 2015 remain a mystery.
“I’ve seen the videos and, at least in my time, most of the assessments were inconclusive as to what it was,” said retired Admiral Gary Roughead, following a speaking engagement in Sarasota. “But the whole issue of defense against autonomous vehicles is one that the Department is taking pretty darned seriously.”
Three sets of gun-camera videos – one taken from an F-18 assigned to the USS Nimitz operating off southern California in November 2004, and two more from Super Hornets attached to the USS Roosevelt during maneuvers off Jacksonville in January 2015 – were authenticated as official government footage by the Defense Department last year.
Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead takes questions from a Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning audience
CREDIT: Billy Cox
The target of the 2004 footage, dubbed the “Tic Tac” for its oblong shape, reportedly plunged from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet in less than a second, a speed that would have easily destroyed a conventional aircraft. The New York Times broke the story in 2017 and, last summer, in an unprecedented move, the Navy publicly announced it had issued new guidelines for its pilots to report “unidentified aircraft.”
Roughead commanded both the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets before serving as CNO from 2007 through 2011. Booked for a Sarasota Institute of Lifetime Learning lecture on China’s 21st century military strategy, the Admiral said “there weren’t that many” such events on his watch, but that developing “unmanned autonomous aircraft” remains a priority.
“I think we’re going to continue to see new technology in the form of unmanned systems that will begin to interfere with military capability. And we’re not alone. There’s no question that China and Russia want to plan.
“Without knowing what they may be — are they phenomena or are they vehicles that someone was able to get into place? — I think one of the great challenges that more people looked at is, where would these have come from? And quite frankly, I haven’t spent a lot of time on that issue.”
Retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, who chased the Tic Tac UFO and recounted that experience for The Times, also reported a related mystery occurring simultaneously underwater, beneath the Tic Tac. Roughead said underwater weapons systems pose the next great evolutionary hurdle.
“I remember there was one (UFO), and it may have been after I retired, that seemed to go under water,” he said. “If in fact it was a real vehicle, how did it launch and recover? Because as you know, it’s not an easy thing to get something that can perform extraordinarily well in the air and dive into the water and become something else. What that phenomenon was, I can’t help you out there.”
In fact, Roughead recalled how, in public speeches to defense contractors, he announced the next “game-changing” breakthrough will be submersible military assets, whose power-sourcing could be “more transformative than the autonomous stuff in the air.” He compared the scale of such ambitions to the Apollo moon shots, which will demand “a triad of business, government, and academia coming together.
“The aerodynamics and the hydrodynamics and the strength that’s required to be able to fly and operate at depths, and the power you need to move at high speeds in the air, then how do you convert that power to something under the water – those are huge technological challenges,” he said. “There’s no question in my mind that in the future of warfare, probably long after I’m gone, we’ll see that type of thing beginning to occur.”
Imagine, Roughead said, being able to park military technology at the bottom of the ocean, virtually undetected, at a strategic location, “tell it to go to sleep” indefinitely, and then activate it when needed.
But with a little foresight, he added, investigations into such mind-bending scenarios could be used to build bridges with rivals like China.
“We have to look for opportunities, we have to look for venues where we can bring caring people together to say, OK, there’s a technological issue here, how do we bring the bright minds together,” Roughead said.
“How do we protect our legitimate national security technologies and intellectual property, but still get after some of the hard problems? I think that’s a way for closing some of the gaps down the road and bringing trust between the two.
“The first step for me is, how do you define what it is that we can work on together (to) remove some of the sensitivities and suspicions? Until you have that discussion, you’re not going to make any progress. The journey begins with the first step.”
Pressure peaks in the protoplanetary disk may be responsible.
An ALMA image of the young star HL Tau and the disk of gas and dust surrounding it. Rings in such protoplanetary disks indicate regions of pressure maxima, which could establish boundaries that help shape the developing planetary system
One of our solar system's fundamental boundaries may have existed since the very beginning, a new study reports.
That demarcation, which lies just beyond Jupiter's orbit, is a dramatic one. The planets, asteroids and other objects sunward from the invisible line are lacking in carbon-containing organic compounds, whereas the stuff farther out is rich in organics.
Jupiter's hefty gravitational presence has been widely invoked to explain this "Great Divide." But computer simulations indicate that the gas giant was never big enough early in its history to keep the carbon-rich rocks and pebbles from spiraling into the inner solar system with the observed effectiveness, the new study found.
"We banged our head against the wall," lead author Ramon Brasser, a researcher at the Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, said in a statement. "If Jupiter wasn't the agent responsible for creating and maintaining that compositional dichotomy, what else could be?"
Brasser and co-author Stephen Mojzsis, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, found inspiration, and a possible solution, in newly forming exoplanetary systems.
Images captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have revealed intricate ring structures in the disks of dust and gas that surround newborn stars. The material in these disks is what planets are made of — and those rings serve as a sort of blueprint for the future planetary system, Brasser and Mojzsis determined.
A ring indicates that there is a band of maximum pressure in the protoplanetary disk, according to the two researchers. And such pressure peaks could explain our solar system's Great Divide.
"One or multiple such — potentially mobile — long-lived pressure maxima almost completely prevented pebbles from the Jovian region [from] reaching the terrestrial zone, maintaining a compositional partition between the two regions," the researchers wrote in the new study, which was published online today (Jan. 13) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
"We thus suggest that our young solar system's protoplanetary disk developed at least one and probably multiple rings, which potentially triggered the formation of the giant planets," they added.
The "almost" in the above statement is an important qualifier, however. Dribs and drabs of material from the outer system did sneak through the pressure net long ago, and some of it rained down on the young Earth, luckily for us.
“Those materials that might go to the Earth would be those volatile, carbon-rich materials," Mojzsis said in the same statement. “And that gives you water. It gives you organics."
Scientists Say We Travel To Parallel Universes When We Dream
Scientists Say We Travel To Parallel Universes When We Dream
Every night, humans have an average of 6-10 dreams. A few minutes after being awoken, these dreams are usually forgotten. However, what if there's actual meaning to dreams that would make them more lucrative to remember?
Modern science, as well as Native American tribes and Mexican nations, believe that we, or at least our brains visit a "parallel universe" when we dream. This would explain why humans can dream in color, and can senses with all five feelings what's happening within the dream. If you've ever dreamed of eating your grandmother's signature apple pie per se, have you ever realized that it feels like you can taste and smell the delicious pie in front of you? Or maybe you've dreamed of riding a roller coaster and felt the thrill of riding it as it climbs up the steep hills and rushes down the ramps.
The True Science Of Parallel Universes
Mystics also believe that there are places where dreaming takes place, but have related it to supernatural beings such as ghosts and spirits. However, since 1920 scientists have been trying to avoid such questionable beings, and in their quest to find the ideal place of nuclear particles to host dreams, they realized that such a formation would be impossible on Earth. Thus they shifted the argument away from the supernatural, and into an arguably more confusing field of physics.
An example of the scientist's theory of parallel universes would be to think of two worlds: one in which you are born, and one in which you aren't. Logically, you can never be in such a "dual" state within one dimension, and thus the need for multiple parallel dimensions arises. Think about it: in another world, there could be a copy of yourself who does things slightly differently, and as a result may have a better life than you. In another world, there could be a person like you who didn't forget his lines at the corporate meeting. In another world, there could be another version of you who understands what is going on with our dreams--and maybe by then, we'll know if the scientists or the mystics win out on this debate.
The most recent UFO sightings are often not investigated by those who claim to have seen the UFO. Of course, the majority of UFO sightings can be accounted for by the lens of the human mind, so it is a fact that many people see UFOs. However, many of these people have no knowledge of how to spot a UFO and are open to misinformation when they do.
Many people are very skeptical when it comes to seeing what they believe to be UFOs because they are unfamiliar with the actual evidence. Sometimes, they simply have no clue what they are looking at. So, how can you spot a UFO? Here are some things to consider.
One thing to consider is the overall aura of the film; in other words, does the footage seem real or does it look like a fake? This is important because the UFO is often perceived in a similar way. Is the film realistic and does it appear to be real?
Does the movie have a real sense of creepiness? If so, then the footage you are seeing may not be as genuine as you thought. It may just be a group of teenagers messing around with a camera, or someone trying to shoot a UFO with their very own camera.
Another thing to consider is the artistic license Jimmy Semper used with his shots. Have you ever noticed that many of the UFO’s shot in these movies seem to mimic real UFO’s? It is easy to see how this is possible, but it can be annoying.
You will also want to be careful about those comments that Jimmy Semper left on his website. Are they true or false? I don’t care about this, but you should decide if you believe Jimmy Semper’s statements.
These are just a few things you will want to think about before you decide to watch a YouTube video. Of course, the world is filled with UFO videos, so you are bound to see many others. That is why it is a good idea to check out more recent UFO footage, so you can learn how to spot a UFO and enjoy the best of the newest UFO footage that is available to watch.
Scientists from Tufts University, the University of Vermont, and the Wyss Institute at Harvard have developed tiny, living organisms that can be programmed. Called "xenobots," these robotswere made with frog stem cells.
The research, published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is meant to aid development of soft robots that can repair themselves when damaged.
Ultimately, the hope is these xenobots will be useful in cleaning up microplastics, digesting toxic materials, or even delivering drugs inside our bodies.
What happens when you cross stem cells from a frog heart and frog skin? Not much—that is, until you program those cells to move. In that case, you've created a xenobot, a new type of organism that's part robot, part living thing.
And we've never seen anything like it before.
Researchers from Tufts University, the University of Vermont, and Harvard University have created the first xenobots from frog embryos after designing them with computer algorithms and physically shaping them with surgical precision. The skin-heart embryos are just one millimeter in size, but can accomplish some remarkable things for what they are, like physically squirming toward targets.
"These are novel living machines," Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research, said in a press statement. "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."
By studying these curious organisms, researchers hope to learn more about the mysterious world of cellular communication. Plus, these kinds of robo-organisms could possibly be the key to drug delivery in the body or greener environmental cleanup techniques.
"Most technologies are made from steel, concrete, chemicals, and plastics, which degrade over time and can produce harmful ecological and health side effects," the authors note in a research paper published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It would thus be useful to build technologies using self-renewing and biocompatible materials, of which the ideal candidates are living systems themselves."
Building Xenobots
Xenobots borrow their name from Xenopus laevis, the scientific name for the African clawed frog from which the researchers harvested the stem cells. To create the little organisms, which scoot around a petri dish a bit like water bears—those tiny microorganisms that are pretty much impossible to kill—the researchers scraped living stem cells from frog embryos. These were separated into single cells and left to incubate.
They differentiated the stem cells into two different kinds: heart and skin cells. The heart cells are capable of expanding and contracting, which ultimately aids the xenobot in locomotion, and the skin cells provide structure. Next, using tiny forceps and an even smaller electrode, the scientists cut the cells and joined them together under a microscope in designs that were specified by a computer algorithm.
Interestingly, the two different kinds of cells did merge together well and created xenobots that could explore their watery environment for days or weeks. When flipped like a turtle on its shell, though, they could no longer move.
Other tests showed whole groups of xenobots are capable of moving in circles and pushing small items to a central location all on their own, without intervention. Some were built with holes in the center to reduce drag and the researchers even tried using the hole as a pouch to let the xenobots carry objects. Bongard said it's a step in the right direction for computer-designed organisms that can intelligently deliver drugs in the body.
Evolutionary Algorithms
On the left, the anatomical blueprint for a computer-designed organism, discovered on a UVM supercomputer. On the right, the living organism, built entirely from frog skin (green) and heart muscle (red) cells. The background displays traces carved by a swarm of these new-to-nature organisms as they move through a field of particulate matter.
SAM KRIEGMAN, UVM
While these xenobots are capable of some spontaneous movement, they can't accomplish any coordinated efforts without the help of computers. Really, xenobots couldn't fundamentally exist without designs created through evolutionary algorithms.
Just as natural selection dictates which members of a species live and which die off—based on certain favorable or unfavorable attributes and ultimately influencing the species' characteristics—evolutionary algorithms can help find beneficial structures for the xenobots.
A team of computer scientists created a virtual world for the xenobots and then ran evolutionary algorithms to see which potential designs for the xenobots could help them move or accomplish some other goal. The algorithm looked for xenobots that performed well at those particular tasks while in a given configuration, and then bred those microorganisms with other xenobots that were considered "fit" enough to survive this simulated natural selection.
In the video above, for example, you can see a simulated version of the xenobot, which is capable of forward movement. The final organism takes on a similar shape to this design and is capable of (slowly) getting around. The red and green squares at the bottom of the structure are active cells, in this case the heart stem cells, while the blueish squares represent the passive skin stem cells.
DOUGLAS BLACKISTON
All of this design work was completed over the course of a few months on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at the University of Vermont. After a few hundred runs of the evolutionary algorithm, the researchers filtered out the most promising designs. Then, biologists at Tufts University assembled the real xenobots in vitro.
What's the Controversy?
Anything dealing with stem cells is bound to meet at least some flack because detractors take issue with the entire premise of using stem cells, which are harvested from developing embryos.
That's compounded with other practical ethics questions, especially relating to safety and testing. For instance, should the organisms have protections similar to animals or humans when we experiment on them? Could we, ourselves, eventually require protection from the artificially produced creatures?
"When you’re creating life, you don’t have a good sense of what direction it’s going to take," Nita Farahany, who studies the ethical ramifications of new technologies at Duke University and was not involved in the study, told Smithsonian Magazine. "Any time we try to harness life … [we should] recognize its potential to go really poorly."
Michael Levin, a biophysicist and co-author of the study from Tufts University, said that fear of the unknown in this case is not reasonable:
"When we start to mess around with complex systems that we don't understand, we're going to get unintended consequences," he said in a press statement. "If humanity is going to survive into the future, we need to better understand how complex properties, somehow, emerge from simple rules."
At its heart, the study is a "direct contribution to getting a handle on what people are afraid of, which is unintended consequences," Levin said.
The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment is better known as MOXIE. NASA is preparing for human exploration of Mars, and MOXIE will demonstrate a way that future explorers might produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere for propellant and for breathing.
Tech Specs
Main Job
To produce oxygen from the Martian carbon-dioxide atmosphere
Power
300 watts
Volume
9.4 x 9.4 x 12.2 inches (23.9 x 23.9 x 30.9 centimeters)
Oxygen Production Rate
About 10 grams per hour (About 0.022 pounds per hour)
Operation Time
Approximately two hours of oxygen (O2) production per experiment, which will be scheduled intermittently over the duration of the mission
"When we send humans to Mars, we will want them to return safely, and to do that they need a rocket to lift off the planet. Liquid oxygen propellant is something we could make there and not have to bring with us. One idea would be to bring an empty oxygen tank and fill it up on Mars."
5 Things to Know
1. MOXIE Makes Oxygen on Mars
Carbon dioxide makes up ~96% of the gas in Mars' atmosphere. Oxygen is only 0.13%, compared to 21% in Earth's atmosphere.
2. MOXIE Is a Test Model
MOXIE is the size of a car battery. Future oxygen generators that support human missions on Mars must be about 100 times larger.
3. MOXIE Helps Future Explorers
To launch off of Mars, human explorers need about 33 to 50 tons (30 to 45 metric tons) of fuel, about the weight of a Space Shuttle.
4. MOXIE Breathes like a Tree
MOXIE makes oxygen like a tree does. It inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen.
5.Homemade on Mars
Homemade liquid oxygen on Mars could supply more than ¾ of the propellant humans need for exploration on the Red Planet.
Where Is MOXIE Located?
Did You Know?
Oxygen produced on Mars could help support the breathing air supply for human explorers.
For Scientists
NASA is preparing for human exploration of Mars, and the MOXIE investigation on the Mars 2020 mission aims to address key knowledge gaps.µ
MOXIE is a short, snappy name for a tool that helps lead to human footprints on Mars. It helps humans explore Mars by making OXygen. It works "In situ" (in place) on the Red Planet, and is an Experiment."
"Moxie" can also be a personality trait. Someone with moxie is considered bold and adventurous, hardy and spirited! No one is sure, but the word may trace back to Native American place names for "dark water." In the late 1800s, people drank "Moxie," a tonic and later a soft drink. Because the drink claimed health benefits, people began using moxie to mean vitality and endurance. It surely endures in American vocabulary today! You can still drink Moxie in some old-time, nostalgic soda-pop shops today.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
The game is afoot.
