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 Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
16-03-2019
‘De zomer is een dodelijk seizoen aan het worden voor leven op aarde’
‘De zomer is een dodelijk seizoen aan het worden voor leven op aarde’
Vivian Lammerse
Door klimaatverandering moeten we rekening gaan houden met extreme hittegolven.
Klimaatverandering wordt vaak besproken in termen van gemiddeldes. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan het Parijsakkoord, waarin landen hebben toegezegd er alles aan te doen om de opwarming van de aarde tot 2 graden Celsius te beperken. Maar klimaatverandering zal echter niet alleen de gemiddelde wereldwijde temperatuur verhogen; er komen ook extreme hittegolven op de loer te liggen. En dat terwijl hittegolven nu al schade toebrengen aan mens en dier.
HITTEGOLF VAN 2003
Herinner je je de hittegolf van 2003 nog? Destijds had Europa te kampen met uitzonderlijk heet en droog weer. De zomer van 2003 was een van de heetste Europese zomers ooit, die zelfs in sommige landen een gezondheidscrisis teweeg bracht. In totaal overleden er zo’n 70.000 mensen in Europa aan de gevolgen van de hittegolf. De hoogste officiële temperatuur tijdens de hittegolf in Nederland werd op 7 augustus in Arcen (Noord-Limburg) gemeten: 37,8 graden Celsius.
Extreem Om een uitgebreid beeld te krijgen van de effecten van toekomstige hittegolven, verzamelden de onderzoekers informatie uit meer dan 140 wetenschappelijke studies. En uit de bevindingen blijkt dat hittegolven extremer zullen worden en ook vaker voor zullen komen. Dit komt omdat kooldioxide en andere broeikasgassen in de atmosfeer warmte vasthouden, waardoor de gemiddelde temperatuur van de aarde stijgt. Het zou kunnen betekenen dat de hittegolf uit 2003 tegen het einde van deze eeuw vier keer zo lang zou kunnen duren. “Dit suggereert dat – in sommige jaren – de hele zomer warmer zal zijn dan wat we in 2003 ervoeren,” zegt onderzoeker Jonathon Stillman. “De zomer is een dodelijk seizoen aan het worden voor het leven op aarde.”
Effecten Hittegolven leiden op dit moment al tot massale sterfte bij dieren. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan verbleekt koraal in delen van het Great Barrier Reef, of de grote paardensterfte in Australische zomers. Volgens de onderzoekers hebben hittegolven ook subtiele effecten op het lichaam van dieren. Zo neemt de hoeveelheid gespecialiseerde eiwitten die andere moleculen beschermen tegen hitte toe. “Als dieren meer gevaarlijk hoge temperaturen gaan ervaren, kun je verschuivingen zien in hun fysiologie,” legt Stillman uit. “Ze zullen misschien niet gelijk het loodje leggen, maar in hun lichaam kun je zien dat ze wel dicht bij dit punt in de buurt komen.” Ook mensen lopen gevaar als het extreem heet wordt. Vooral ouderen vormen een risicogroep.
Infrastructuur Er zijn manieren om met de hittegolven om te gaan, maar dat is niet voor iedereen op aarde weggelegd. Dit komt omdat een gebrek aan infrastructuur het voor kwetsbare menselijke gemeenschappen bemoeilijkt om naar koelere klimaten te migreren, wat grootschalige conflicten kan veroorzaken. Ook versperren veel menselijke bebouwingen de weg voor dieren om naar koelere klimaten te trekken.
Wanneer de extreme hittegolven gaan gebeuren en hoe extreem deze precies zullen zijn, varieert in de modellen. “We kunnen niet zeggen dat het volgend jaar gaat gebeuren,” zegt Stillman. “Maar als we doorgaan met onze huidige emissies, zullen we tegen het einde van deze eeuw hittegolven ervaren die heftiger zullen zijn dan de hittegolven die we al hebben gezien.”
For the first time, scientists made a successful in situ collection of bacteria living in hot springs in Yellowstone National Park and using an unconventional source – electricity – for food and energy
Pools of hot water like this one – in Heart Lake Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming – are the home to bacteria that can eat and breathe electricity.
Bacteriaare some of the most diverse and adaptable organisms on Earth. They can be found in harsh environments where few other living creatures can survive. They’re known to use a wide range of sources for energy and sustenance. This month (March 5, 2019), scientists at Washington State Universitydescribedthe first-ever successful in situ collection of a little-known species of bacteria that eats and breathes electricity.
They successfully captured the enigmatic electricity-eating bacteria last August in the Heart Lake Geyser Basinarea of Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park. Their work took them on long hikes to four pristine hot springs in that area. WSU graduate student Abdelrhman Mohamed, who is first author on the study, commented:
This was the first time such bacteria were collected in situ in an extreme environment like an alkaline hot spring.
He added that temperatures in the springs ranged from about 110 to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit (43 to 93 degrees Celsius).
Image via uri Gorby/Rensselaer Polytechnic institute.
The research team was able to coax the bacteria out of hiding by inserting a few electrodes – electric conductors – into the edge of the water in the hot spring.
Thirty two days later, the researchers returned to retrieve the electrodes, which had attracted the bacteria from the water. Mohamed and postdoctoral researcher Phuc Ha analyzed the results. Their statement exclaimed:
Voila! They had succeeded in capturing their prey — heat-loving bacteria that ‘breathe’ electricity through the solid carbon surface of the electrodes.
It sounds a bit like something out of science fiction, but it’s another example of how microorganisms can adapt to a wide range of extreme environments, using whatever resources are available for energy and as nutrients.
Similar bacteria have been cultivated before, but not taken in-situ from this kind of extreme environment – in this case an alkaline hot spring pool of water. Their statement explained more about them:
Most living organisms — including humans — use electrons, which are tiny negatively-charged particles, in a complex chain of chemical reactions to power their bodies. Every organism needs a source of electrons and a place to dump the electrons to live. While we humans get our electrons from sugars in the food we eat and pass them into the oxygen we breathe through our lungs, several types of bacteria dump their electrons to outside metals or minerals, using protruding hair?like wires.
Observing these bacteria in a laboratory isn’t easy, these scientists said, which is one reason the team wanted to study then in their own habitat. According to Haluk Beyenal of WSU, who supervised the research:
The natural conditions found in geothermal features such as hot springs are difficult to replicate in laboratory settings. So, we developed a new strategy to enrich heat-loving bacteria in their natural environment.
In order to collect the bacteria in such a challenging location, Mohamed used a cheap portable potentiostat, an electronic device to control the electrodes submerged in the hot springs for long periods of time.
Geobacter, another kind of bacteria that uses electricity.
Image via Science Photo Library/Corbis.
These scientists said:
These tiny creatures are not merely of academic interest.
They might also provide clues to solutions to some of humanity’s biggest environmental problems, including pollution and sustainable energy. These bacteria could literally “eat” pollution, converting toxic pollutants into less harmful substances. And, in the process, they might even generate electricity. As noted by Beyenal:
As these bacteria pass their electrons into metals or other solid surfaces, they can produce a stream of electricity that can be used for low-power applications.
How cool is that?
Some bacteria can use a rather unconventional source for food and energy – electricity.
As also reported back in 2015, some bacteria can even live on electrons alone. According to Annette Rowe, a postdoc researcher at the University of Southern California:
It’s a crazy phenomenon. I’ve kept some of these bugs for over a month with no addition of carbon.
As Rowe noted, they must have been subsisting solely on electricity from the electrode, because there was nothing else available as an energy source.
Bacteria were among the first known life forms to appear on Earth, and can be found in soil, water, hot springs, radioactive waste and the deep portions of Earth’s crust. There is even evidence for them existing the deepest part of the ocean – the Marianas Trench – according to a study in 2013. They also live in symbiotic and parasitic relationships with plants and animals.
These new findings show just how resilient and adaptable some species of bacteria can be. They can survive and flourish in hot springs and also make use of an unconventional source for their food and energy: electricity. Perhaps they will aid scientists looking for new ways to combat environmental pollution and provide sustainable energy for humanity in the future.
Bottom line: For the first time, scientists made a successful in situ collection of bacteria living in hot springs in Yellowstone National Park and using an unconventional source – electricity – for food and energy.
Octopuses change colour while they SLEEP! Footage offers a rare glimpse of the creature's skin switching from light to dark and back as it slumbers - but is it dreaming of an enemy?
Octopuses change colour while they SLEEP! Footage offers a rare glimpse of the creature's skin switching from light to dark and back as it slumbers - but is it dreaming of an enemy?
The octopus' body is seen turning from pale white to a dark brown-green colour
All the while it is asleep on a coral reef it seemingly matches its skin colour to
Octopuses have very precise control over their skin colour in response to threat
It might be camouflaging itself during sleep because of a threat in its dreams
An octopus has been seen changing the colour of its skin on its entire body from light to dark while it sleeps - and experts say it may be dreaming of a predator.
Footage shows the pale white creature pulsing as vein-like patterns emerge on its skin, becoming increasingly darker and spreading over its entire body.
Octopuses are well known for their advanced abilities to camouflage their bodies in response to threat.
One researcher believes the clip shows evidence of an octopus equivalent of REM sleep, with the marine animal responding to some imagined creature.
In an interview with LiveScience, Sara Stevens, a specialist with Butterfly Pavilion zoo in Colorado discusses her thoughts on the footage.
'The exact processes of how they match colors is still not fully understood, though it's being very thoroughly studied, Ms Stevens said.
'Current research suggests that the actual cells themselves can match colors. But the jury's still out on whether they're achieving REM sleep.'
Octopuses can actively change their skin colour to either make themselves either invisible, or stand out, with a striking pattern depending on their surroundings.
They have thousands of colour-changing cells called chromatophores that lie just under the surface of the skin.
These specialised pigment cells expand and contract and push the pigment to the surface.
The creature's skin colour temporarily changes thanks to this mechanism.
This process is triggered in the wild by a changing environment or by an emerging threat.
On top of chromatophores, two other types of cells - iridophores and leucophores - are involved in the camouflaging process.
Iridophores have layers of reflecting plates that create iridescent greens, blues, silvers and golds, while leucophores are cells which can detect what colours best match the animal's surrounding.
This allows octopuses to appear inconspicuous whatever their environment and change their skin tone to match their surroundings.
Given that octopuses have very precise control over the system by which their skin colour changes, it is rare for them to trigger the response while sleeping.
In footage captured the octopus at a zoo in Colorado - looking pale white at the start of the video and changing its skin colour over a minute to match the coral reef it is lying on
Octopuses can actively change their skin colour to either make themselves invisible, or stand out with a striking pattern depending on what their environment is. They have thousands of colour-changing cells called chromatophores that lie just under the surface of the skin
These specialised pigment cells are effectively ink sacs can expand and contract and push the pigment to the surface. Through this mechanic, the creature's skin colour temporarily changes
Unlike humans, octopuses have multiple brains rather than just one central nervous system.
Instead of being in one place, their brain cells are spread all over the body, which gives the creature very precise control to each part of the body.
Changing the colouration over its skill is an active process that requires the octopus to activate specific bundles of neurons, and depends on a complex array of nerves and muscles controlling the expansion and contraction of the pigment sacs.
But these controls may be activated while the octopus sleeps, if its unconscious mind is sensing a threat.
One hypothesis is that it may sense threat in its sleep - it could have something to do with what the creature is dreaming about.
It may be inconclusive, but octopuses species may also experience a dreamlike state like that achieved during REM cycles in humans.
Butterfly Pavilion announced a naming contest for the new Octopus vulgaris (pictured), also known as the common octopus. The zoo is asking visitors to submit names to the new octopuses residing on its website.
Octopuses live for one to two years on average and adopt a unique biological defence system in the wild - ejecting a thick cloud of ink that dulls its predator's sense of smell.
They are also known for their intelligence and even collect shells to decorate their dens knowns as octopus gardens.
Talking about the octopuses at the zoo, of which there are a few new additions from the octopus from Florida, Butterfly Pavilion aquarist Sara Stevens, said: 'People are able to relate to octopuses in a way that is unrivalled by any other invertebrate'.
'Due to their intelligence and almost childlike way in which octopuses interact with the world, our guests seem to connect and fall in love with them very easily.
'It's an animal that instantly creates a sense of awe and wonder, making them fun and important ambassadors for ocean conservation.'
The Butterfly Pavilion announced a naming contest for the new Octopus vulgaris, also known as the common octopus.
The Colorado zoo is asking visitors to submit names to the new octopuses residing on its website.
HOW DO OCTOPUSES DEFEND THEMSELVES?
One of the most effective ways octopuses avoid predation is by camouflaging with their environment.
They have special pigment cells allow them to control the colour of their skin, much like chameleons.
As well as colour change they can manipulate the texture of their skin in order to blend in with the terrain.
As well as camouflage they can escape predators by using a 'jet propulsion' method of escape, where they rapidly shoot out water to propel them through the water rapidly.
The jet of water from the siphon is often accompanied by a release of ink to confuse and evade potential enemies.
The suckers on the tentacles of the eight-legged beasts are extremely powerful and are used to drag prey towards a sharp beak.
As well as protection from other animals, it has been recently found that octopuses can detect the ultrasonic waves that preempt a volcanic eruption or earthquake, giving them enough time to escape.
Streetcap1, AKA George Graham UFO researchers 1st and last ever interview on Russia TV Found, UFO Sighting News.
Streetcap1, AKA George Graham UFO researchers 1st and last ever interview on Russia TV Found, UFO Sighting News.
I was sent this video clip by a Russian UFO research this week. In it is the long lost interview of UFO researcher George Graham AKA Streetcap1. He died suddenly a few months after doing this interview with RT News. He was very proud of doing this TV interview and I'm sure he would like it to be shared with the world. Streetcap1 first came to be famous when I published his videos and discoveries on my UFO Sightings Daily site several years ago. Since then, he has become a legend in the area. I can't help but think that I did warn him not to invite the RT News agency into his home. He didn't listen, and a few months later...he died suddenly. Here is the link to our chat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85Oul-lL8k
So, here below is his interview video. This for you Streetcap1, RIP. Scott C. Waring
CIA REMOTE VIEWING PROGRAM DISCOVER ANCIENT CIVILIZATION ON MARS
CIA REMOTE VIEWING PROGRAM DISCOVERS ANCIENT CIVILIZATION ON MARS
DECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REMOTE VIEWING CIA DOCUMENTS REVEAL THE DISCOVERY OF AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION THAT ONCE INHABITED THE RED PLANET.
It’s hard to fathom the number of esoteric programs that the CIA has or is currently funding and researching. The clandestine organization has been known to explore myriad outlets for conducting its operations, ranging from sinister to strange. But often the strange ones, particularly those that become declassified because the general populace finds them too bizarre to actually be true, are the most intriguing. When certain programs come to light, it always begs to ask the question, what else are they doing that they aren’t telling us about and what else haven’t they disclosed?
During the Cold War, the CIA conducted several experimental programs involving the human psyche. MKUltra was one of the more malevolent programs aimed at mind control using drugs and other techniques for torture and interrogation purposes. One element of the program involved administering LSD surreptitiously to subjects with the goal of turning them into robot agents that they could then control. The horrific intent of the program eventually came to light and was exposed, despite an attempted cover-up and destruction of all evidence pertaining to it.
But one of the more intriguing (and humane) programs that produced some interesting results was one known as Stargate, which trained operatives in astral projection and remote viewing. These psychic abilities that allow for perception and, if you’re well-practiced, the ability for your astral body to travel anywhere, including distant planets, has cultivated striking imagery and details that often have been confirmed.
Secrets of Remote Viewing
A PSYCHIC JOURNEY TO MARS
During the Cold War, one of the members of Stargate, Joseph McMoneagle, was able to perceive details, which were later confirmed by satellite imaging, of a new type of Russian nuclear submarine being constructed, based simply on coordinates provided to him. The submarine was one of the largest ever built and when he described its magnitude to military engineers, he was scoffed at. It turned out that McMoneagle’s impression was right.
McMoneagle was one of a key group of remote viewing in CIA’s participants that focused on military targets, missing persons and occasionally attempts to see into different time periods. But those attempts were all mundane compared to an unexpected, otherworldly astral journey he would take in 1984. One day he was awoken from a nap and given a sealed envelope that couldn’t be opened until the end of a subsequent viewing session, during which his colleague dictated coordinates for him to view. Soon McMoneagle found himself astral projecting to an unfamiliar locale.
Somewhat recently, the CIA released the transcript of McMoneagle and an agent conducting the viewing. When McMoneagle went into his viewing state, he described a world inhabited by a civilization in dire shape. He described seeing an infrastructure consisting of intersecting roads, aqueducts, channels and pyramids. The transcript is interesting and describes a baffled McMoneagle who often struggles to report the ‘raw data’ his colleague consistently reminds him to stay focused on. Throughout the viewing his astonishment overtakes him leading to tangential periods, sometimes as long as 30 minutes, trying to maintain his focus.
When McMoneagle eventually reports contact with living entities his colleague tells him to initiate communication with them. He describes their situation as being in a critical state, seemingly on the brink of apocalypse. Having purportedly sent members of their civilization on a mission to find a new place to inhabit, these tall shadowed figures appear to be in a state of hibernation awaiting the return of their search party. When he asks if these entities can perceive him, they describe him as something of a hallucination. At the end of the viewing McMoneagle opened his envelope to see where he supposedly projected to – Mars, approximately 1 million years B.C.
Skeptics have written off Stargate and other programs of its ilk as diversionary tactics to steer the Soviets in the wrong direction during the Cold War. The logic being that if the U.S. could subversively convince the Soviets that they were having success in phony psychic programs, the Soviets might then waste time and resources funding similar programs. And of course, there’s no way to know if McMoneagle’s account has any validity without sending a manned mission to Mars to explore the coordinates he was viewing. This probably isn’t going to happen very soon, but McMoneagle said he’d be willing to go, though he is in his 70s.
Whatever the CIA’s original intent may be, many of the members of the Stargate program still practice remote viewing or are willing to talk about it an all seriousness. With the program now having been disclosed and that era of the Cold War being over, it seems there would be no need to continue to maintain secrecy or continue playing along. We would also be remiss to think that the Russians weren’t researching remote viewing long before the U.S. There’s even evidence that they were researching it before Stalin’s reign.
There are other declassified remote viewing CIA documents that were once deemed ‘top secret’ by the CIA, including some that resulted in accurate descriptions of secret Soviet bases on an esoteric island in the middle of the Indian Ocean and another in the middle of the Ural Mountain range. The viewer described details of the bases and their geographic locations in details that were later confirmed. Though the evidence surrounding these particular sessions is somewhat conflicting, the reports affirming the results show astonishment from agents analyzing the program at the amazing accuracy of some of these viewings. And while astral projection and remote viewing are similar in nature, but much different in their scope, the confirmation of results from the remote viewing CIA sessions increases the likelihood that astral projections could have significant accuracy.
Those who survived the panic caused by the less-trouble-than-expected Y2K orMillennium Bug that was supposed to shut down computers when they tried to move their clocks from 12/31/1999 to 1/1/2000 may scoff at the new April 6, 2019 bug that many predict will wreak havoc with the GPS systems drivers, pilots and many major industries depend on. Those who profited from the Y2K Bug (COBOL and assembler language programmers dragged out of retirement to fix old software) may be upset that no one told them about this one sooner. Those planning a flight or a road excursion on 4/6/2019 may suddenly be considering a postponement. The rest of us are wondering … what the heck is the April 6, 2019 bug?
“The GPS Internal Navigation Time Scale “GPS Time” is based on the weighted average of GPS satellites and ground station clocks. GPS Time is used for user navigation solutions. A nanosecond error in GPS Time can equate to one foot of position (ranging) error. The WN parameter is provided via a ten (10) bit parameter – or “counter.” The valid range of values for the WN parameter is 0 to 1023 (or 1024 total values). The WN parameter is incremented by one each week. At the end of the 1024th week, the counter experiences a rollover (resets) to 0. Each WN rollover event defines a new GPS Time Epoch. The WN value is referenced to the start of the current GPS Time Epoch. The last WN rollover was August 21, 1999. GPS Time is currently in the second Epoch. The next WN rollover is April 6, 2019.
GPS Time is adjusted by the U.S. Air Force GPS Directorate to maintain alignment with UTC as provided by the U.S. Naval Observatory. A GPS device that provides UTC time does so by converting GPS Time to UTC using multiple parameters – including WN – conveyed in page 18 of GPS sub-frame.
GPS devices with a poorly implemented GPS Time-to-UTC conversion algorithm may provide incorrect UTC following a WN rollover. Additionally, some GPS devices that calculate the WN value from a device-specific date rather than the start of the current GPS Time Epoch may provide incorrect UTC at some other device-specific date.”
That explanation came from a memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in April, 2018. A one-year warning doesn’t seem like much time to fix old programs dependent on an antiquated 10-bit counter that bumps up one per week until it reaches binary 1111111111 (1023) and resets to zero, does it? DHS points out that this happened once before on August 22, 1999 and nothing bad happened then. Of course, that could be because most people were still folding paper maps in 1999 when GPS was still a new and much less used innovation.
On the other hand, in 2019 it seems that every cell phone, vehicle, watch and just about anything with a chip in it has GPS. Will we all go spinning aimlessly on 4/6/2019? Here’s an answer from FalTech GPS, a company specialized in GPS repeater technology.
“Who will be affected? The list is long and varied; some industries come to mind immediately as they are known to use the accurate timing information provided by the GPS constellation. Financial markets, power generating companies, emergency services and industrial control systems may be affected, as well as fixed-line and cellular communications networks. GPS tracking devices installed in a fleet management system to schedule and monitor deliveries could cause system errors if they start to provide location data that is potentially up to 20 years out of date.”
All together now …. ahhhh! Why isn’t someone doing something about this? Well, the government and GPS makers have been for a while. Most modern GPS receivers shouldn’t be affected. Older devices that have been getting regular firmware updates should also be OK. A lot of GPS devices can run without UTC or can get it from other sources. And don’t forget – GPS systems survived August 22, 1999, just as we survived January 1, 2000.
And yet … Tom’s Guide reports that a security expert at the recent RSA Conference 2019 (RSA is a computer and network security company) said in a presentation:
“I’m not going to be flying on April 6.”
Does that sound like a warning? Is someone keeping things quiet? Who? This is no April Fool’s joke. If you survive April 1, make it to April 7 by being extra careful just in case on April 6.
While many in the U.S. are still dealing with the after-effects of ‘springing forward’ one hour for Daylight Saving Time, a group of Russian scientists is celebrating falling back – not just by spinning their clocks but by actually resersing the forward trek of time. Does this mean do-overs are actually possible? Is Doc Brown’s DeLorean revving its engine? Is HG Wells begging for a trip back to Earth to change the ending of his novel?
“This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time from the past to the future.”
Gordey Lesovik, a quantum physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and lead author of the new study published in the journal Science Reports, describes in simple terms how his team apparently broke the second law of thermodynamics by returning a quantum computer to a state in its past life. And not just once, but a reliably reproducible 85 percent of the time. Lesovik’s Russian team worked with quantum researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois using the public domain IBM Q System Hub, a universal quantum computing system with 20 superconducting qubits.
The second law of thermodynamics: an isolated system either remains static or evolves toward a state of chaos rather than order.
Phys.org gives a good, layman’s explanation of this discovery using billiard balls. When a triangle of 15 billiard balls is hit by a cue ball, they scatter into a chaotic state, never to return to that orderly triangle. What the Moscow team has done is returned two qubits (quantum bits) on the quantum computer back to their previous state after chaos and dispersion had begun. Sure, it’s just two qubits and not 15 colorful billiard balls, but it’s never been done before, and the fact that they could do it repeatedly puts the second law of thermodynamics on a walk of shame out of the physics books.
Or does it? We’re talking electrons here, not objects, cars or humans. The quantum computer couldn’t replicate the reverse time travel with three qubits, failing over half the time. And technically speaking, this was not really time travel but returning a machine to a previous state in time, akin to returning an adult to the body and mind they had as a teen or reverse aging. Except the machine could only return to the state or age it was in a fraction of a second ago.
Is this still a big deal?
“Time reversal can help—we do time-reversal of the final state of the computer and run the same quantum program again. If the computation was correct we will arrive to the initial state of the computer.”
That’s a physicist’s “yes” from Gordey Lesovik, who sees this as a tool for testing programs on quantum computers. It won’t return a billiard table to its previous pre-break state, it’s not a time machine or even an age-reversing picture of Dorian Gray. For now, we have to take Lesovik’s word that it’s indeed a big deal.
Scientists have debated whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before a massive asteroid impact finished them off 66 million years ago. New research shows they were thriving in their final days.
Dinosaurs once reigned on Earth, until a cataclysmic event– now thought to have been a massive asteroid impact, or possibly intense volcanic activity – wiped them out about 66 million years ago during theMaastrichtianage at the end theLate Cretaceousepoch. This mass extinction event was sudden and brutal, powerful enough to wipe out the largest creatures to ever walk on the Earth – and countless others as well.
There has, however, been some debate as to what was happening before the mass extinction. Some scientists thought the dinosaurs were flourishing right up until their demise, while others suggested that they had already been in decline before they were finished off.
So which scenario is correct? A new study by researchers from Imperial College London, University College London and University of Bristol shows that it was the former.
Illustration of a late Maastrichtianpalaeoenvironment in North America, where dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, Edmontosaurus and Triceratops roamed the floodplains 66 million years ago. The Maastrichtian was the latest age of the Late Cretaceous epoch.
Dinosaurs were likely not doomed to extinction until the end of the Cretaceous, when the asteroid hit, declaring the end of their reign and leaving the planet to animals like mammals, lizards and a minor group of surviving dinosaurs: birds.
The results of our study suggest that dinosaurs as a whole were adaptable animals, capable of coping with the environmental changes and climatic fluctuations that happened during the last few million years of the Late Cretaceous. Climate change over prolonged time scales did not cause a long-term decline of dinosaurs through the last stages of this period.
According to the researchers, previous studies had underestimated the number of living species at the end of the Cretaceous period – when the asteroid hit – due to changing fossilization conditions. This led to the erroneous conclusion that some species had already been in decline or gone extinct before the asteroid collision.
The study focused on North America, where some of the most well-known dinosaurs used to roam, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops.
A massive asteroid impact – or possible intense volcanic activity – caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, according to current research.
Image via James Thew/iStockphoto.
Way back then, North America was split into two halves by an inland sea. The Rocky Mountains in the western half were forming at this time, and sediment from the mountains created ideal conditions for preserving dinosaur bones. Conditions in the eastern half were far less conducive to preservation, however. Fossils in the western half, along with some mathematical predictions, had been used to suggest that dinosaur populations were in decline before the asteroid hit. Paper co-author Philip Mannion, from University College London, explained:
Most of what we know about Late Cretaceous North American dinosaurs comes from an area smaller than one-third of the present-day continent, and yet we know that dinosaurs roamed all across North America, from Alaska to New Jersey and down to Mexico.
The researchers used a method called ecological niche modelling – or species distribution modelling – that takes into account different environmental conditions, such as temperature and rainfall, which each species needs to survive. When they mapped these conditions, both across the continent and over time, they were able to determine where different dinosaur species could most easily survive changing conditions – before the asteroid impact occurred.
Global map showing distribution of surface temperature on the Earth in the Late Cretaceous period. Warmer colors show higher temperatures while colder colors indicate lower temperatures.
Instead of being in decline, they found that many species were actually more widespread than previously thought. Those species, however, were in locations where fossils were less likely to be preserved and those locations were smaller than initially estimated. The lesser numbers of fossils in these areas had previously led scientists to the conclusion that those species were already in decline, when they actually were not.According to the researchers:
The results of our study suggest that dinosaurs as a whole were adaptable animals, capable of coping with the environmental changes and climatic fluctuations that happened during the last few million years of the Late Cretaceous. Climate change over prolonged time scales did not cause a long-term decline of dinosaurs through the last stages of this period.
Bottom line: These findings make this tale all the more tragic – dinosaurs were thriving at their peak on this planet in the Late Cretaceous. They had taken over the world, and survived other potential calamities, only to have a random chunk of rock from space – or unprecedented volcanic eruptions – seal their ultimate fate.
New fuel cell could help fix the renewable energy storage problem
Novel fuel cells can help store electricity from renewables, such as wind farms, by converting it into a chemical fuel for long-term storage and then changing it back to electricity when needed.
ISTOCK.COM/RON_THOMAS
New fuel cell could help fix the renewable energy storage problem
If we want a shot at transitioning to renewable energy, we’ll need one crucial thing: technologies that can convert electricity from wind and sun into a chemical fuel for storage and vice versa. Commercial devices that do this exist, but most are costly and perform only half of the equation. Now, researchers have created lab-scale gadgets that do both jobs. If larger versions work as well, they would help make it possible—or at least more affordable—to run the world on renewables.
The market for such technologies has grown along with renewables: In 2007, solar and wind provided just 0.8% of all power in the United States; in 2017, that number was 8%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But the demand for electricity often doesn’t match the supply from solar and wind. In sunny California, for example, solar panels regularly produce more power than needed in the middle of the day, but none at night, after most workers and students return home.
Some utilities are beginning to install massive banks of batteries in hopes of storing excess energy and evening out the balance sheet. But batteries are costly and store only enough energy to back up the grid for a few hours at most. Another option is to store the energy by converting it into hydrogen fuel. Devices called electrolyzers do this by using electricity—ideally from solar and wind power—to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, a carbon-free fuel. A second set of devices called fuel cells can then convert that hydrogen back to electricity to power cars, trucks, and buses, or to feed it to the grid.
But commercial electrolyzers and fuel cells use different catalysts to speed up the two reactions, meaning a single device can’t do both jobs. To get around this, researchers have been experimenting with a newer type of fuel cell, called a proton conducting fuel cell (PCFC), which can make fuel or convert it back into electricity using just one set of catalysts.
PCFCs consist of two electrodes separated by a membrane that allows protons across. At the first electrode, known as the air electrode, steam and electricity are fed into a ceramic catalyst, which splits the steam’s water molecules into positively charged hydrogen ions (protons), electrons, and oxygen molecules. The electrons travel through an external wire to the second electrode—the fuel electrode—where they meet up with the protons that crossed through the membrane. There, a nickel-based catalyst stitches them together to make hydrogen gas (H2). In previous PCFCs, the nickel catalysts performed well, but the ceramic catalysts were inefficient, using less than 70% of the electricity to split the water molecules. Much of the energy was lost as heat.
Now, two research teams have made key strides in improving this efficiency. They both focused on making improvements to the air electrode, because the nickel-based fuel electrode did a good enough job. In January, researchers led by chemist Sossina Haile at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, reported in Energy & Environmental Science that they came up with a fuel electrode made from a ceramic alloy containing six elements that harnessed 76% of its electricity to split water molecules. And in today’s issue of Nature Energy, Ryan O’Hayre, a chemist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, reports that his team has done one better. Their ceramic alloy electrode, made up of five elements, harnesses as much as 98% of the energy it’s fed to split water.
When both teams run their setups in reverse, the fuel electrode splits H2 molecules into protons and electrons. The electrons travel through an external wire to the air electrode—providing electricity to power devices. When they reach the electrode, they combine with oxygen from the air and protons that crossed back over the membrane to produce water.
The O’Hayre group’s latest work is “impressive,” Haile says. “The electricity you are putting in is making H2 and not heating up your system. They did a really good job with that.” Still, she cautions, both her new device and the one from the O’Hayre lab are small laboratory demonstrations. For the technology to have a societal impact, researchers will need to scale up the button-size devices, a process that typically reduces performance. If engineers can make that happen, the cost of storing renewable energy could drop precipitously, helping utilities do away with their dependence on fossil fuels.
Your GPS Devices May Stop Working on April 6, 2019
Your GPS Devices May Stop Working on April 6, 2019
Your GPS devices may stop working on April 6, 2019 and if If that sounds familiar, it’s because the situation is basically the same as the “millennium bug” behind the infamous Y2K scare.
April 6 is the day millions of GPS receivers will literally run out of time, rolling over their time counters back to zero, thanks to limitations in timekeeping for older GPS devices. Many navigation systems may be affected, such as on ships or older aircraft, although your smartphone will be fine.
But because GPS satellites are also crucial to digital timekeeping used by websites, electrical grids, financial markets, data centers and computer networks, the effect of April 6 may be even more wide-ranging.
Although an information-security expert during a presentation at the RSA 2019 security conference in San Francisco said "I'm not going to be flying on April 6," thankfully, no one is hyping the GPS bug to an exaggerated degree - but it could still cause problems.
What does this idiom mean and who did we inherit it from?
Image via Pixabay.
Some idioms weather the years with grace. Their meaning keeps them relevant even after cultural context leaves them in the dust. We advise our friends against “beating a dead horse”, for example, or point out that you can take it to water but not make it drink — despite the fact that almost nobody today has even interacted with a horse.
Then there are those idioms that aren’t only removed from the modern way of life but are also factually incorrect. Yet they persist. “Sailing the seven seas” is one such idiom. Today, we’ll take a look at how it came to be and which seas, exactly, it harkens to.
Nowadays the term “seven seas” is a shorthand for “all the seas and oceans”; sailing the seven seas, then, means you’re quite the accomplished sailor. But, these “seven seas” carried various meanings throughout history and across cultures. Each civilization understood it differently, through the lens of their religion, culture, and the places they knew. Keep that in mind as we delve into the seven depths of this idiom.
Seven degrees of mystical seas
The earliest use (that we know of) is religious in nature. It comes from the ancient Sumerians, the first people to inhabit Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq. Enheduanna, a high priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna from the city-state of Ur, and the first poet to have their name recorded in history, refers to ‘seven seas’ in a hymn written around 2300 BC. Betty De Shong Meador provides a translation of these hymns in Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (University of Texas Press, 2000, page 73), which reads (note that I’ve added all the commas and breaks between verses based on how I interpret the text):
“[….] O, house / Your shining face is the great snake of the reed marsh / Your foundation, o, shrine / The fifty abzu’s, the seven seas, has plumbed the inner-workings of your prince / Decision maker / Crown of wide heaven / He, Ashimbabbar, king of heaven, o , Ur / Shrine has built this house on your radiant and placed his seat upon your dais.”
Ashimbabbar seems to be a normalized, alternative spelling of Nanna’s name; Nanna was a moon god and “the tutelary deity of the city of Ur”, according to Oracc. In this context, abzu’s — from ‘ab’ meaning waters and ‘zu’ meaning deep in Akkadian — are probably fresh underground waters, such as those from springs or dug wells. The Sumerians believed underground waters came from the primordial sea and held an important religious significance.
Ok, hardhats on, it’s time to go on a limb here. In the Babylonian creation epic, Abzu morphs into a key deity. It’s possible they/it has been so all along. But, the fact that Enheduanna cites ‘fifty’ abzu’s suggests to me that this wasn’t the case while she lived, or that the two concepts were similar but already separated. Abzu, as a deity, represents a primordial freshwater ocean which, after coupling with Tiamat, a primordial saltwater ocean, essentially leads to the creation of the Universe. The two birth younger gods, who eventually usurp & murder them and create the world as we know it from their corpses.
Fresh- and salt-water seem to play a central part in the Sumerian religion and culture. The fifty abzu’s (which are fresh, Abzu’s domain) and the seven seas (seas tend to be salty, Tiamat) may have symbolized the primordial, raw stuff of which reality was born from in Enheduanna’s eyes. These ‘seven seas’, then, may have symbolized knowledge, creation, or the essence of both the mundane and the godly — not a stretch of the map. Possibly; that’s my take on it.
Seven western seas
Western cultures likely inherit the idiom from the ancient Greeks and Romans (who basically exported Greek culture throughout Europe). NOAA states that “the Seven [Greek] Seas were the Aegean, Adriatic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Caspian seas, with the Persian Gulf thrown in as a ‘sea'”. This fits well with the world as known to the ancient Greeks, who were quite the accomplished sailors themselves. Although they never moved out of the Mediterranean and its connected seas in large numbers, that still places them within a reasonable distance of Mesopotamia, its culture, and our known source for the idiom.
Another reference to the seven seas comes from Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer and admiral. Writing in his book The History of the World (the quote below is taken from Chapter 16, or ‘XVI’ in Roman numerals) these ‘seas’ were, in fact, the navigable salt marshes that the river Po forms when it meets the Adriatic sea.
“And there is not a river againe, that in so little a way, groweth to a greater streame [than the Po]: for over-charged it is and troubled with the quantitie of water, and therefore worketh it selfe a deepe channell, heavie and hurtfull to the earth under it, although it be derived and drawne into the other rivers and goles, betweene Ravenna and Altinum, for 120 miles: yet because he belcheth and casteth them out from him in so great abundance, he is said to make seven seas.”
“[….] All those rivers and trenches afore-said, the Tuscanes began to make first out of Sagis, carrying the forcible streame of the river acrosse into the Atrian meeres, which are called the seven seas, and made the famous haven of Atria a towne of the Tuscanes; of which the Adriaticke sea tooke the name afore time, which now is called Adriaticum.”
Here too we see that the ‘seas’ themselves weren’t necessarily seas per se, but the idiom has at least moved firmly into the realm of geography by this time.
The ‘seas’ in seven seas change over time, keeping pace with the most up-to-date maps. NOAA goes on to explain that in medieval European literature, “the phrase referred to the North Sea, Baltic, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Arabian seas”. On the Arabian side of the cultural divide, these seven seas were the waters on the Eastern trading routes — the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Khambhat, the Bay of Bengal, the Strait of Malacca, the Singapore Strait, the Gulf of Thailand, and the South China Sea, according to LiveScience.
As Europe crawled out of the middle ages and reached for cultural dominance through exploration (and sadly, colonization), the seven seas changed to mean the Arctic, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico (when Europeans first reached the Americas), and then the Banda Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Timor Sea as trade in spices and tea between Europe and Asia intensified.
In other words, the ‘seven seas’ idiom evolved over time to mean ‘a faraway place’ rather than a particular area or group of seas — probably under the combined efforts of sailors and captains looking to impress land-locked ladies. Maybe it’s an old-timey equivalent to ‘in a galaxy far, far away.’
But this still leaves one part of the puzzle unanswered:
Why is it always ‘seven’?
This is a trickier question to handle.
It may be a vestige of Enheduanna’s hymns. Ancient Sumerians regarded the heavens as being formed of seven domes, each made of a different type of precious stone. It’s possible, then, that each of the seas she refers to could have spawned one of the domes, and the wording just stuck.
Another possible explanation, in my view, has to do with the number itself. One of the most cited papers in psychology today, published in 1956 by George A. Miller, a Harvard psychologist, reports that the average memory span of young human adults is approximately 7 items. Whether this is the cause or not, I cannot say for sure — but the number seven pops up time and time again in all manners of places and contexts.
Rome was built on seven hills, and the world, according to Christian mythos, was made in seven days — although technically the last one was a cheat-day. Christian traditions also tell us of seven deadly sins and seven virtues, of Noah being told to bring seven pairs of every animal aboard his ark, of Jericho’s walls falling on the seventh day after seven priests with seven trumpets march around it seven times. Hinduism tells of seven different chakras, Islam of seven hells and seven heavens, and Mahatma Gandhi lists Seven Blunders of the World — to name a few. A massive poll carried out by writer, mathematician, and broadcaster Alex Bellos a few years ago found that 7 was the most-voted ‘favorite number’ (10% out of some 44,000 voters).
Do I believe that the number 7 is magic? Of course not — the only magic I believe in is Santa Claus and that booze can make me dance. But, seeing the number pop up so often definitely suggests something is special about it.
“Seven is the only number among those we can count on our hands that cannot be divided our multiplied within the group [it’s a prime number]. [It] is the only number between two and ten that is neither a multiple nor a factor of the others. In this way, “lucky number seven” stands alone—and we grasp this implicitly,” Bellos told Brandon Specktor for Reader’s Digest.
“It’s unique, a loner, the outsider. And humans interpret this arithmetical property in cultural ways.”
“By associating seven with a group of things, you kind of make them special too. The point here is that we’re always sensitive to arithmetical patterns, and this influences our behavior—even if we’re not conscious of it.”
One voter from New Zealand even told Bellos in his comments that “People don’t usually tend to pick 7, and I like to be different,” humorously supporting his hypothesis.
Stay overnight on an Antarctic ice shelf, and you might feel the shaking from thousands of tiny quakes as the ice re-forms after melting during the day.
In a recent study on Antarctica’sMcMurdo Ice Shelf, scientists used seismometers to record hundreds of thousands of tiny “ice quakes” that appear to be caused by pools of partially-melted ice expanding and freezing at night.
University of Chicago glaciologist Douglas MacAyeal is co-author of the study, published in the Annals of Glaciology on December 17, 2018. MacAyeal said in a statement:
In these areas we would record tens, hundreds, up to thousands of these per night. It’s possible that seismometers may be a practical way for us to remotely monitor glacier melting.
The team set up seismometers for 60 days during the melt season in two locations near seasonal meltwater lakes on the McMurdo Ice Shelf. One location was drier; the other was slushier, with pools of melted water forming and refreezing. The wetter location, they found, was alive with seismic activity at night. MacAyealexplained:
In these ponds, there’s often a layer of ice on top of melted water below, like you see with a lake that’s only frozen on top. As the temperature cools at night, the ice on the top contracts, and the water below expands as it undergoes freezing. This warps the top lid, until it finally breaks with a snap.
The energy vibrates out into the surroundings, where it’s picked up by seismometers. Some of the cracks re-heal, but some do not, MacAyeal said. He suggested that the phenomenon might explain why icebergs actually break off more frequently during colder times of the year.
Researchers plant a seismometer on the McMurdo Ice Shelf. Image via Alison Banwell/University of Chicago.
Bottom line: Scientists recorded hundreds of thousands of tiny ice quakes on an Antarctic ice shelf that appear to be caused by pools of partially melted ice expanding and freezing at night.
Scientists from Japan, one of the most seismically active regions of the globe, claim that a new earthquake detection method based on gravity could provide an earlier warning than traditional methods.
Contour maps depict changes in gravity gradient immediately before the earthquake hits.
Credit: Kimura Masaya.
In 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake hit eastern Japan, along a subduction zone where two of Earth’s tectonic plates collide. The tremor came as a one-two punch, generating a huge tsunami in the process which led to the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The effects of the powerful quake were devastating, with more than 120,000 buildings left in rubble and $235 billion-worth of incurred damage.
Japan handled the onslaught bravely and admirably. Thanks to its sophisticated network of sensors, Tokyo residents were given a minute warning via texted alerts on their cell phones before the city was hit by strong shaking. These sensors also recorded a wealth of data that is still keeping researchers busy with work that might lead to improved earthquake detection.
Exactly 8 years after the Tohoku earthquake, a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) used some of this data to argue that a new detection method based on gravimeters could theoretically detect earthquakes earlier than seismometers.
Gravimeters are sensitive devices for measuring variations in the Earth’s gravitational field. They’re typically employed by industries to prospect subterranean deposits of valuable natural resources, including petroleum and minerals, but also by geodesists who study the shape of the earth and its gravitational field.
When an earthquake occurs at a point along the edge of a tectonic plate, it generatesseismic waves that radiate outward at up to 8 kilometers per second. These waves transmit energy through the earth, thereby altering the density of the subsurface material they pass through. Denser material has a slightly greater gravitational attraction than less dense material, and since gravity waves propagate at the speed of light, it’s possible to measure these changes in density before the arrival of a seismic wave.
The Japanese researchers combined gravimetry and seismic data, which they fed into a complex signal analysis model. The results scored 7-sigma accuracy, meaning that there’s only a one-in-a-trillion chance that they are incorrect.
“This is the first time anyone has shown definitive earthquake signals with such a method. Others have investigated the idea, yet not found reliable signals,” ERI postgraduate Masaya Kimura said in a statement. “Our approach is unique as we examined a broader range of sensors active during the 2011 earthquake. And we used special processing methods to isolate quiet gravitational signals from the noisy data.”
TOBA prototype.
Credit: Ando Masaki.
At the moment, the researchers are working on a new kind of gravimeter called the torsion bar antenna (TOBA), which aims to be the first instrument specifically designed to detect earthquakes by gravity. A network of such devices could theoretically warn people 10 seconds before the first seismic waves arrive from an epicenter 100 km away. These precious extra seconds could mean the difference between life and death in many situations.
“SGs and seismometers are not ideal as the sensors within them move together with the instrument, which almost cancels subtle signals from earthquakes,” explained ERI Associate Professor Nobuki Kame. “This is known as an Einstein’s elevator, or the equivalence principle. However, the TOBA will overcome this problem. It senses changes in gravity gradient despite motion. It was originally designed to detect gravitational waves from the big bang, like earthquakes in space, but our purpose is more down-to-earth.”
Nikola Tesla Discovered The Black Knight Satellite
Nikola Tesla Discovered The Black Knight Satellite
Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) made dozens of breakthroughs in the production, transmission and application of electric power.
He invented the first alternating current (AC) motor and developed AC generation and transmission technology.
Though he was famous and respected, he was never able to translate his copious inventions into long-term financial success—unlike his early employer and chief rival, Thomas Edison.
The Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory claims that there is a spacecraft in near-polar orbit of the Earth that is of extraterrestrial origin, and that NASA is engaged in a cover-up regarding its existence and origin. This conspiracy theory combines several unrelated stories into one narrative.
Over the last several months, a series of mysterious anomalies spotted on civilian radar systems have baffled observers and may suggest that the Air Force is testing something they don’t want the public to see. The anomalies began in December 2018 when a strangely dense cloud-like formationappeared on weather radarin Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. A few days later, similar radar anomalieswere observedin Maine and Florida, and last month the same phenomenonturned up in Australia.
While most observers are confident that these anomalies are some new type of chaff, a common anti-radar countermeasure deployed by military aircraft to fool radar, the frequency and distribution of these anomalies worldwide is somewhat puzzling. What is being hidden in plain sight?
The latest radar anomaly appeared on radar on March 5th, 2019 around 12:20 pm local time in partly cloudy skies with no precipitation anywhere on weather radar. The anomaly appeared as a large, mostly stationary plume in the skies just to the west of Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, about 100 miles north of Roswell, curiously enough. As Tyler Rogoway of The War Zonepoints out, Cannon Air Force Base is home to the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) which operates a number of cutting-edge unmanned aerial vehicles like the MQ-1 Predator, MQ-9 Reaper, RQ-11 Raven, Scan Eagle, and Wasp III. AFSOC conducts infiltration and exfiltration operations for US Special Forces as well as surveillance and reconnaissance missions and even psychological warfare.
While tests of new aircraft and aerospace technologies are nothing new to the desert, this plume and the others like it over the past few months display behavior not typically seen in known chaff systems. These plumes have persisted much longer than known chaff countermeasures and somehow remain mostly in place unlike traditional chaff which tend to be carried by the wind more easily.
A pair of B-1B Lancers deploy chaff and flares during a military exercise.
These radar anomalies could just be the Air Force testing new countermeasures, although I’m left to wonder why these tests would be conducted above civilian areas as in the Australia and Indiana cases. Is the Air Force hiding something stranger than a new type of chaff inside these plumes? If I were to guess, I would say these are most likely tests of the long-rumored drone swarms Air Forces around the world have been testing – maybe even the telepathically-controlled swarms DARPA has recently successfully developed. That’s all my conjecture, though. So far, Cannon Air Force Base has yet to respond to requests for comment on the incident.
While we’re rightly worrying about the diminishing numbers of honeybees and the crop apocalypse that could occur with their demise, other creatures with stingers seem to getting … bigger. Earlier this year, a Wallace’s giant bee (Megachile pluto), measuring a whopping 1.5 inches and thought to be extinct, wasfound alive and stinging in Indonesia.Meh, say researchers in China who this week announced the discovery of a new species of Godzilla (uh-oh) hornet that is nearly an inch longer than the giant bee, has a 3.9 inch wingspan and a quarter-inch stinger (ouch!). With those measurements, it’s either the world’s biggest hornet or the world’s smallest fighter jet. This being China … it could be both!
The Godzilla or killer hornet was discovered near the Myanmar border in the city of Pu’er in the Yunnan province of southwestern China. It was brought to Zhao Li, the curator of the Insect Museum of West China in Sichuan Province, who determined it was a new species in the Vespa mandariniafamily. Vespa mandariana is already the world’s largest hornet and one of the deadliest, deserving of its other nickname – ‘yak killer’. These are not the yellow-legged or Asian hornets (Vespa velutina) which are an invasive now found across Europe and the UK (too late for a hornet Brexit). The yak killers only live (so far) in tropical eastern China in low mountains and forest areas. Zhao Li measured this specimen at six cm (2.3 inches) in length, a wingspan close to 10 cm (3.9 inches) and that 6.35 mm (.254 inch) stinger. (See a picture here.) Being a good entomologist, Zhao Li warned that the specimen was a worker and the queen would be even larger. Ahhh!
A hornet with a wingspan of 9.35 cm discovered in Southwest China's Yunnan province.
[Photo/Xinhua]
At least the Godzilla hornet only attacks larger insects like mantises and the occasional yak, right? Wrong! Asian giant hornets feed on honey and will attack entire colonies of defenseless honeybees to get to it. They also attack other hornet species and have been known to attack hives of their own species in order to bring protein-rich larvae to feed their queen. Moving up the biological scale, Asian giant hornets use their quarter-inch stinger to deliver a venom containing a toxin that causes tissue damage. Multiple stings by a swarm of giant hornets have been lethal to humans, even if they’re not allergic to the venom. In 2013, stings by Asian giant hornets killed 41 people and injured more than 1,600 in Shaanxi Province alone. Don’t bother running and hiding – they’re the only species of social wasps that mark their food source with a scent and return with a hunting party.
An example of an Asian giant hornet (not the one recently found)
(Wikipedia)
It’s a good thing there are professional giant hornet exterminators, right? Wrong! Godzilla hornets are the most difficult to kill. Exterminators resort to beating them with clubs (slow), removing nests (they’re huge), traps (expensive), poison (bad for other insects) and screens that only let honeybees in (leaving the angry hornets to attack humans instead).
Is there any good news about this new discovery of the world’s largest and deadliest hornet? Well, that larva that the queens eat is potentially good for improving human endurance and is being marketed in China as a “hornet juice” nutritional supplement.
You’ll be able to spot the users at the next Olympics – they’ll be the ones wearing gold medals and thanking their mom, God and the giant killer hornets.µ
As a follow-up to my 2-part article on Shadow People and the Philadelphia Experiment – which is very much driven by the words and controversial claims of a whistleblower – I thought I would share with you over the next few days a number of additional whistleblower-based accounts that have come my way. We’ll begin with one which concerns the controversial Roswell affair of 1947. Back in 1998, I wrote a book titled The FBI Files. It told the story of the Bureau’s involvement in the UFO phenomenon, contactee cases, the alleged Aztec, New Mexico UFO crash of 1948, the cattle mutilation mystery, and even FBI records on the sinister Men in Black. Chapter Four of the book was titled “The Oak Ridge Invasion.” As so often happens when I write a book, people who personally know something of its contents or subject-matter will contact me and share the relevant information. And that is precisely what happened with regard to that specific chapter. It was a study of FBI files that had been declassified under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act and which described various UFO encounters at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.
One of the people who contacted me – by letter, via the London, England-based publisher of The FBI Files, Simon & Schuster – was an elderly woman who worked at Oak Ridge in 1947, and who had read my book. She added she had some information that I was sure to find of interest, but which she preferred to tell me about specifically in person. Well, as I was living in the U.K. at that time, there wasn’t much of a chance of me meeting up with her at any time soon – which is exactly what I told her. I couldn’t persuade her to put her revelations onto paper. Nor would she share them with me over the telephone. And, she wasn’t on email – not a massive number of old folks were online in 1998, I am guessing. So, for a couple of years it was a case of her story not just stalling, but coming to a complete halt. That is, until the summer of 2001.
I moved to the United States to live in early 2001, and, in the summer, I traveled around much of the west coast – chiefly to do a series of lectures for various UFO groups in California. I put out a feeler to that same old lady, explaining my new circumstances and asking if we could now, finally, talk. Well, that would be just fine, she said. On July 28, 2001 I hung out with the then-seventy-nine-year-old woman: we had lunch in a Los Angeles restaurant and chatted extensively. She was driven to the restaurant by a family member, a much younger man who seemed to be equally as worried as she was. Nevertheless, she agreed to share what she knew, providing her name was never published (although, she was required to provide Simon & Schuster’s legal people with a release-form, as were each and all of the other whistleblowers when I wrote my 2005 book on all this: Body Snatchers in the Desert). So, I sat back and listened.
I referred to her in the book as the Black Widow. There was a relevant reason for this; a reason which was not mentioned in Body Snatchers in the Desert: her husband, who she married in 1972, was African-American. She, however, was not. They were both just into their very early fifties when they married and had twenty-four happy years together, despite some unforgivable racist comments from her ignorant family. It was in 1996 that her husband passed away, hence the title I gave her. When we met, and knowing that she had read The FBI Files, my natural assumption was that she wanted to tell me something about UFO encounters at the Oak Ridge facility. Makes sense, right? No. I was wrong: what she actually wanted to share with me was certain information that, if provable, would radically alter the face of Ufology and blow the Roswell case right out of the water. As we ate, I wondered, with a fair degree of excitement: what the hell have I got myself into? It wasn’t long before I had the answer to that loaded question.
The Black Widow, born in 1922, had been in the employ of Oak Ridge – in a medical capacity – from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s. While there, and on three occasions between May and July 1947, she saw a number of unusual-looking bodies brought to the facility – and under stringent security. They looked like regular Japanese people, she said. Others, however, displayed the signs of certain medical conditions: dwarfism, oversized heads, and bulging eyes. A few of the bodies were extensively damaged – as if they had been in violent accidents. In all, fifteen such bodies were brought to Oak Ridge under great secrecy; all of them reportedly used in certain high-altitude, balloon-based experiments in New Mexico, one of which led to the Roswell legend. Or, became a part of the legend is probably more correct. The Black Widow said: “Those bodies – the Roswell bodies – they weren’t aliens. The government could care less about those stories about alien bodies found at Roswell – except to hide the truth.”
She added: “I don’t know anything at all about how these people were brought [to the United States], but I heard at Oak Ridge that some of them were in the States in late 1945 and brought over with Japanese doctors and Nazi doctors who had been doing similar experiments. That’s when some of this began.” The story continued that at least some of the people used in the tests were American prisoners given the opportunity to cut the lengths of their sentences – if, that is, they were willing to take a chance and take part in the dicey experiments. Reportedly, a number did take the bait, but failed to survive the flights. Some of the handicapped people did not come from Japan, but from “hospitals and “asylums” in the United States.
All of the material evidence was said to have been eventually destroyed – chiefly because the operations didn’t provide much in the way of results, and because of the outright illegality of the experiments. Everything, the Black Widow said, was hidden beneath a mass of fabricated tales of flying saucers and little men from the stars. She doubted that anything of any significance still existed – certainly not the bodies or the balloons, and probably not even the old records, which she believed were burned to oblivion. Unless, however, some of them were preserved for secret, historical purposes, which is not impossible. I hope they were. If not, it may be nigh on impossible to conclusively prove anything about Roswell – ever.
There was one final aspect of the Black Widow’s story that needs to be addressed: her overwhelming fear. It was ever-present throughout our 2001 meeting. She tried to disguise that fear with smiles and laughter, but she was certainly no Oscar-winning Hollywood actor. That’s for sure. Seeing through her facade was like seeing through freshly polished glass. In Body Snatchers in the Desert I said that she “…possessed the sad and somewhat sunken eyes of a person with the weight of the world on her shoulders. She was clearly looking for someone to speak with; but, equally, she was very concerned about the ramifications of doing so, ‘if the government finds out.’”
It’s common knowledge that humans know more about mars and the moon than they do about their own oceans. Humans have devoted lots of time and money into developing space travel, however do we know what really lies in the depths of our oceans? Today we will showcase some of the most bizarre discoveries made by deep-sea divers. These discoveries range from frightening sea creatures, to underwater cities and remnants of ancient civilizations that are outright scary! These odd findings may rouse lots of curiosity as to what else is left to be discovered in the very depths of our oceans.
A recent proposal made by the Interior Department could potentially make it more difficult to request and obtain public records, in a move some transparency advocates are calling a potential violation of the Freedom of Information Act.
In response to the proposed changes, a group of congressional leaders penned a letter to David Bernhardt, Acting Interior Secretary, arguing that the move could undermine efforts toward more transparency in government.
A portion of the letter reads, “The proposed rule appears to restrict public access to DOI’s records and delay the processing of FOIA requests in violation of the letter and spirit of FOIA. Rather than clarifying DOI’s FOIA process, the proposed rule would make the process more confusing and potentially expose it to politicization and unnecessary litigation.”
David Paulides, author of a number of books on people who have vanished in National Parks, Tweeted about the proposed changes.
“For 9 yrs I’ve explained how the DOI demanded $1.4 mil for a list of missing people from our parks,” Paulides wrote. “They have abused, ignored and now want to change the FOIA.”
“The National Park Service is not what the public perceives and is fed via advertising,” Paulides said. In his books, Paulides has discussed the exorbitant fees the National Park Service requested from him in the past, in response to a request for details on people who have vanished on U.S. federal land.
FOIA laws have traditionally provided civilians access to information pertaining to a wide variety of different areas of government. In January, one notable release via FOIA by the Defense Intelligence Agency revealed new details about the Pentagon’s UFO tracking program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program.
This is not the first such change in policy in recent years. Beginning on March 1, 2017, the FBI changed its FOIA policies, stating the agency would no longer accept Freedom of Information Act Requests via email. The decision was met with derision by transparency advocates, who argued that this placed limitations on the public’s ability to request and access information that can be lawfully obtained from government agencies.
Prior to 2017, the FBI cited requests numbering greater than 951 pages “complex,” and anything between 50 and 950 “medium” processing track. This was changed in 2017, with requests involving more than 50 pages now being labeled “complex.”
Elizabeth Hempowicz with the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) was quoted by The Daily Caller at the time of the decision, saying “It’s hard to see this move by the FBI as anything other than an attempt to make it more difficult for the public to access information about the agency, as is our legal right under the Freedom of Information Act.”
According to an AP report, the changes for 2019 proposed by the Interior would affect “wording authorizing staff to reject records requests they deem ‘unreasonably burdensome’ and impose monthly limits on the number of FOIA requests that can be filed by an individual. The proposal would also replace the phrase “time limit” in the agency’s FOIA regulations with the term ‘time frame,’ a subtle change critics worry might allow staff to treat FOIA’s legally required time limits as mere guidelines.”
The proposed changes are similar to the FBI’s policy shift in 2017, in that both appear to be aimed at limiting large numbers of requests that can be filed with ease through digital mediums like email. There are reasons why it can be assumed such changes may be deemed necessary by certain government agencies; particularly those like the FBI that receive a large volume of FOIA requests, which often may be pertaining to information for which the agency keeps no records.
However, transparency advocates (which includes the bipartisan group in Washington whose letter recently opposed the changes) argue that this moves government institutions further away from accountability and measures which allow openness and disclosure of information to the public.
Lauren Easton, a spokesperson for the Associated Press, said in January that the proposal “would greatly infringe upon the public’s right to know and understand the inner workings of its government,” and the news agency “condemns such restraint of public information and any move by a government agency to undermine transparency.” They are one of several media outlets currently opposing the measure.
Alex Hinson, a spokesman for the Interior, argues to the contrary, saying recently in a public statement that the agency believes “these changes will result in a more transparent, equitable, and accountable FOIA program.”
It remains unclear how placing restrictions on the amounts and methods by which individuals may request information would promote transparency.
A decades-long scientific mystery may have finally been solved. Some Antarctic icebergs are an odd emerald green color instead of the normal blue tinge and scientists have suggested a new theory as to why they look that way.
Ice absorbs more red light than blue light and that’s why they appear as a blue color. While most of them look blue or white while they are in the seawater, many people over the years have seen these oddly colored icebergs. Even sailors and explorers from the early 1900s have reported witnessing strange colored green icebergs around Antarctica.
A green iceberg floats in the Wendell Sea in 1985. Green icebergs’ unusual color has long perplexed researchers.
AGU/JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH: OCEANS/KIPFSTUHL ET AL 1992
While green icebergs have captured the curiosity of scientists for several decades, glaciologists conducted new studies which lead them to believe that iron oxides that’s in rock dust from Antarctica’s mainland is what’s turning the icebergs a green color. Australian researchers found huge amounts of iron in East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf and that’s how the theory got started.
Iceberg in Antarctica
Interestingly, iron is a very important nutrient for phytoplankton which is a microscopic plant that’s at the base of the marine food chain. While iron is very limited in quite a few areas of the ocean, if this new discovery of iron in some icebergs proves to be true, it would be an extremely important benefit for marine life.
According to Stephen Warren, who is a glaciologist at the University of Washington, “It’s like taking a package to the post office. The iceberg can deliver this iron out into the ocean far away, and then melt and deliver it to the phytoplankton that can use it as a nutrient,” adding, We always thought green icebergs were just an exotic curiosity, but now we think they may actually be important.”
Icebergs break off of glaciers and ice shelves that extend out into the sea. Normal glacier ice is created when several layers of snow build up and eventually harden up, meaning that it has air pockets that light reflects off of. However, some icebergs in Antarctica contain a layer of marine ice which is water from the ocean that has frozen to the bottom of an overhanging ice shelf. Since marine ice doesn’t have any air pockets that reflect light, it is darker and much clearer than glacier ice. When Warren and his colleagues studied the green icebergs, they noticed that the green areas were in fact made up of marine ice instead of glacier ice.
Iceberg in Antarctica
Iron oxides that are found in soil, common rust, and rocks typically have warm, earthy colors such as yellow, orange, brown, and red. That’s why Warren was thinking that the iron oxides in the marine ice were turning the blue ice into a green color.
When glaciers move over bedrock, the rocks end up grinding into a very fine powder called glacier flour that ends up going into the ocean. The pieces of rock dust could then become part of the marine ice if it gets trapped under an ice shelf.
Warren, along with iron researchers from Australia are now planning to sample different colored icebergs in order to find out exactly how much iron they contain as well as how much light they reflect. If their theory is proven, that would be a huge discovery in regards to the study of icebergs, especially since iron is such an important and beneficial nutrient to marine life.
Seawater sometimes freezes to the underside of ice shelves, creating a layer of what’s called marine ice.
Credit: AGU.
A partly-capsized iceberg embedded in sea ice. The clear, light blue ice is made of marine ice. The boundary between the glacier ice and marine ice (originally horizontal) is now tilted about 60 degrees.
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 75 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.
'It would be like having a butt on your forehead': Apple...
'There are babies everywhere': Octavius the lone octopus...
Deep-sea expedition stumbles upon 'garden' of more than a...
Octo-pea! Scientists find two tiny baby octopus the size of...
.jpg)
