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.
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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!!!
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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.
20-09-2021
ENORME KANALEN ONDER DE NOORDZEE VOOR HET EERST GEDETAILLEERD IN BEELD GEBRACHT
ENORME KANALEN ONDER DE NOORDZEE VOOR HET EERST GEDETAILLEERD IN BEELD GEBRACHT
Vivian Lammerse
De kanalen – wel tien keer breder dan de Theems – voerden ooit smeltwater af en kunnen meer inzicht geven in hoe het hedendaagse gletsjers zal vergaan.
We weten dat gletsjers op dit moment in razend tempo wegkwijnen. Maar wat er precies onder deze enorme bewegende ijsmassa’s gebeurt, laat zich alleen maar raden. Daar komt mogelijk nu verandering in. Wetenschappers hebben namelijk spectaculaire beelden gemaakt van het bijzondere landschap in de Noordzee. En dit landschap bestaat uit enorme kanalen die zich vormden onder de ijskappen die duizenden tot miljoenen jaren geleden een groot deel van Europa bedekten.
Nieuwe beelden Wetenschappers zijn al een tijdje op de hoogte van de enorme gletsjergeulen in de Noordzee. In een nieuwe studie besloten onderzoekers ze echter beter te bestuderen. Met behulp van 3D seismische reflectietechnologie – vergelijkbaar met MRI – brachten ze deze kanalen in ongekend detail in beeld.
De 3D seismische reflectiegegevens vergeleken met eerder verzamelde seismische data uit de regio.
Afbeelding: James Kirkham, BAS
Meer over 3D seismische reflectietechnologie
Bij 3D seismische reflectietechnologie wordt er gebruikt gemaakt van geluidsgolven om gedetailleerde, driedimensionale beelden te vervaardigen. De methode is met name handig om oude landschappen, die diep onder het aardoppervlak begraven liggen, te bestuderen. Op een vergelijkbare manier als MRI het menselijk lichaam in beeld brengt, kunnen wetenschappers met behulp van 3D seismische reflectietechnologie onbegaanbare landschappen visualiseren. Zelfs objecten en structuren die onder honderden meters sediment begraven liggen, kunnen op dergelijke beelden zichtbaar worden.
Uit de nieuwe beelden blijkt onder andere dat de kanalen zeker tien keer breder zijn dan de Engelse rivier de Theems. Deze enorme kanalen, die honderden meters onder de zeebodem in de Noordzee begraven liggen, zijn overblijfselen van enorme rivieren, zo stellen de onderzoekers. Deze rivieren ontstonden waarschijnlijk toen oude ijskappen smolten als gevolg van stijgende luchttemperaturen en voerden lang geleden het smeltwater af.
Een kaart van de Noordzee met daarop de grens van de laatste ijskap en de begraven kanalen weergegeven.
Afbeelding: James Kirkham
Oorsprong De beelden vertellen ons dus het verhaal van hoe de tot voor kort raadselachtige kanalen het levenslicht zagen. “De oorsprong was al meer dan een eeuw een onopgeloste zaak,” zegt onderzoeker James Kirkham. Maar delicate kenmerken laten nu zien hoe water door de kanalen (onder het ijs) bewoog en zelfs hoe het ijs wegsmolt. Bovendien tonen de beelden aan hoe het ijs en de kanalen elkaar wederzijds beïnvloedden.
Inzicht Dit inzicht is heel belangrijk willen we beter gaan begrijpen hoe het hedendaagse gletsjers zal vergaan. “Het is erg moeilijk om te observeren wat er tegenwoordig onder grote gletsjers gebeurt,” vertelt onderzoeker Kelly Hogan. “En dan met name hoe bewegend water en sediment de ijsstroom beïnvloeden. Wel weten we dat dit hele belangrijke factoren zijn voor de manier waarop het ijs zich gedraagt. Als gevolg hiervan is het uiterst relevant om de oude kanalen als voorbeeld te nemen zodat we beter kunnen begrijpen hoe hedendaags ijs zal reageren op veranderende omstandigheden in een opwarmend klimaat.”
Door in het verleden te duiken, krijgen we dus ook een steeds beter beeld van de toekomst. Want de oude kanalen geven belangrijke aanwijzingen over hoe hedendaagse ijskappen zullen reageren op klimaatverandering. “De ontdekking zal ons helpen de voortdurende terugtrekking van huidige gletsjers op Antarctica en Groenland beter te begrijpen,” concludeert Kirkham. “Zoals voetafdrukken in het zand, laten gletsjers een afdruk achter op het land waarop ze stromen. En onze nieuwe geavanceerde gegevens verschaffen nu belangrijk inzicht in de verdere aftakeling van gletsjers.”
A map of the North Sea showing the distribution of buried channels (tunnel valleys) that have been previously mapped using 3D seismic reflection technology. The limit of the last ice sheet to cover the UK (around 21,000 years ago) is overlain. Picture: British Antarctic Survey (51336788)
Comparison of the buried landforms (glacial footprints) found within the tunnel valleys using the new 3D seismic reflection data (left column images) for the first time, and examples of modern landforms exposed at the margins of retreating glaciers in Svalbard and Iceland. Picture: British Antarctic Survey (51336799)
Smaller channels and islands revealed at the base of a tunnel valley for the first time using the new 3D seismic reflection data. Picture: British Antarctic Survey (51336776)
This compares the resolution of the new high-resolution 3D seismic reflection data to previous 3D seismic data from this region. The new data revolutionises our ability to image these buried channels and their internal structures, as demonstrated by the contrast between the left and right of the image. Picture: British Antarctic Survey (51336805)
From the ever-growing “What could possibly go wrong?” file comes word that a group of scientists have proposed a way to fight global warming by making clouds whiter and brighter. No … this isn’t funded by a laundry detergent company, although that’s not a bad idea. They claim brighter clouds will reflect more sunlight, leaving the Earth cooler. Before you start wondering if this involves ‘chemtrails’, they’ve got an answer for that too. Is this the ‘holy grail’ of climate change solutions that doesn’t involve us humans changing our behavior, our pollution, our corporate profits or our politics?
“Led by University of Washington scientists, a team of researchers designed a program to explore marine cloud brightening as a mechanism for cooling climate while simultaneously providing insight about cloud-aerosol effects and their influence on climate.”
As long as it’s not making chemtrails …
The Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) project is led by University of Washington cloud-aerosol scientist Dr. Robert Wood, and was inspired by a real phenomenon – ships at sea emit exhaust particles (aerosols) which mix with sea salt particles and carry them up to stratocumulus clouds over the ocean, brightening them to levels that cool the ocean below and offset increased levels of CO2. Seen from satellites, these “ship tracks” look suspiciously like airplane contrails (see for yourself here), so the purpose of the MCB Project is to ‘sea salt’ these clouds from ships without harming the atmosphere … or humans.
Ship tracks off of western U.S. coast
The arguments in favor of ‘sea salting’ clouds starts with the fact that sea water is free and environmentally harmless when it falls back to Earth. Aerosolizing seawater from sea level would use far less energy than cloud seeding by aircraft, resulting in lower costs and less polluting emissions. On the downside, the researchers don’t really know what will happen when they increase the amount of “ship tracks” to levels needed to cool off hotspots like the coast of California, Chile or south-central Africa. To answer the “What could possibly go wrong?” question, the project will entail three phases: aerosol spray development and testing, aerosol process experiments, and cloud-brightening experiments. Each will e fully completed before moving to the next phase, and the project will end if they find out what could possibly go wrong.
What could possibly go wrong?
With California redwood forests in danger of being destroyed by wildfires and coastal coral reefs in danger of dying from heat stress, the need for controlling climate change is urgent. Could a quick fix like “sea salting” clouds give us humans enough time to enact major changes … or will it give us an excuse to kick the climate change ball to another generation?
The ‘Futuro’ UFO buildings may not be genuine artifacts of an extraterrestrial civilization, but they are genuine architectural works of art. And only three remain in all of Russia.
One of the most interesting places in the Caucasus resort of Dombay has got to be the “flying saucer”, which stands on the plateau amid the snowy mountain peaks. And it’s not the only building of this type there.
The idea for constructing buildings in the shape of UFOs was conceived by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in the mid-1960s - a time when humanity found great inspiration in space flight and discussions of our future among the stars. That is how the ‘Futuro’ series appeared. The building measures four meters (13 feet) high and 8 meters (26 feet) in diameter. It was constructed out of fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic, polyester-polyurethane and poly(methyl methacrylate), had a chimney for heating, a kitchen and en-suite facilities. The result was a mobile construction that was easy to erect and fit for winter living (snow would just slide off the roof).
The “flying saucers” gained a fanbase across the world, from the U.S. to Taiwan. However, with the 1970s oil crisis in full swing, the price of plastic soared and the ‘Futuro’ project was shut down, in order to cut losses. Modern estimates suggest that some 60 units remain in the world (of the just under 100 that were built during the 1960s-1970s), most of which have turned into derelict monuments to avant-garde architecture.
And three of these “UFOs” can be found in Russia!
The Dombay hotel
The hotel in the Soviet times and nowadays.
Sozinov Vitaly/TASS; Getty Images
This highland hotel called 'Tarelka' is among the few cases where a weird building is used according to the architect’s original plans - in this case, accommodation for skiers and snowboarders. The hotel was the first of three buildings to appear - it was a present from Finnish President Urho Kekkonen, who was an avid skier.
Dombay used to be very popular among Soviet skiers. In the 1960s, a resort was built there, boasting great infrastructure. Kekkonen visited numerous times and decided to present the resort with his special creation.
The hotel functions to this day. The building was recently relocated 250 meters higher, closer to the ski lifts. It is only available to rent as a whole unit and can accommodate up to six guests. The cost is 15,000 rubles (approx. $200) per night, which includes breakfast and dinner.
That's how 'Tarelka' hotel looks inside.
dombai.online
Now, where the other two “flying saucers” came from remains a topic of debate. One version is that Kekkonen gifted not one, but three buildings to the resort. Another is that the USSR decided on purchasing several of them for the 1980 Olympics: They were to supposedly house souvenir kiosks and cafes, but the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan resulted in the kinds of sanctions that only three of the Futuro buildings managed to be purchased before the financial situation deteriorated.
The cafe, whose name literally translates as “saucer/plate”, is situated in the Crimean city of Gurzuf (Naberezhnaya Street, 7). Tarelka appeared there 30 years ago, in the late stages of the Soviet era. Around it is a wonderful park, right on the Black Sea coast. It used to be part of the ‘Sputnik’ All-Soviet Youth Center (today, it is the ‘Sputnik’ wing of the ‘Pushkino’ spa hotel).
In the 1990s, the building housed an elite restaurant that gradually lost its status and was eventually converted into a disco bar. The view that opened up from the veranda was truly marvelous! There were numerous private attempts at returning the building to its former glory, but the crowds never really took to it. Today, it tries to reel in customers with promises of BBQs with a view.
‘Chaynaya Tarelka’ cafe in Krasnodar
In the western district of Krasnodar, another Futuro “flying saucer” was built. Located at Atarbekova Street, 54/1, the building became a prominent spot in this residential area with its otherwise neverending apartment blocks. Similar to the building in Gurzuf, it stands on a tall base, which houses the main hall and the kitchen.
At first, the building belonged to ‘Sputnik’, a popular ice cream cafe. In the 1990s, it was turned into a squalid bar. It would change owners and names throughout the years, serving as bars, storage spaces and even a household chemicals store.
In later years, the building presented itself as a tea-drinking cafe, for which it is now known as ‘Chaynaya Tarelka’ (‘Tea Saucer’), boasting a wide variety of teas and absolutely stunning interior design: red and yellow walls and comfy couches with different-colored pillows around the perimeter. The reviews were also very positive, with people loving the atmosphere.
Cafe in 1987.
Peshtakovsky/Sputnik
Sadly, the cafe also closed down. Today, you’ll find fruit and vegetable sellers around the building.
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RENNENDE BEERDIERTJES WETEN ONDERZOEKERS BEHOORLIJK TE VERRASSEN
RENNENDE BEERDIERTJES WETEN ONDERZOEKERS BEHOORLIJK TE VERRASSEN
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Dat beerdiertjes kunnen lopen, is al heel verrassend. Maar nu blijken ze ook nog op een heel opmerkelijke manier te rennen!
Beerdiertjes mogen zich regelmatig in de aandacht van wetenschappers verheugen. En dat is ook niet zo gek. De amper 0,5 millimeter lange diertjes spreken namelijk nogal tot de verbeelding, omdat ze zoveel kunnen hebben. Zo kun je ze 30 jaar invriezen en er vervolgens getuige van zijn dat ze – na ontdooiing – hun leven gewoon weer oppakken. Ook zijn ze tijdens ruimtereizen bestand gebleken tegen vacuüm en kosmische straling. En toen onderzoekers ze recent in een speciaal geweer stopten om ze af te vuren, konden de beerdiertjes dat ook gewoon navertellen.
Aan de wandel Maar ook buiten extreme experimenten om weten de beerdiertjes ons te verrassen. En wel wanneer ze aan de wandel gaan. Wetenschappers van de Rockefeller University legden enkele beerdiertjes onder de microscoop om eens in detail vast te kunnen leggen hoe de diertjes zich nu precies voortbewegen. En wat blijkt? Ze verplaatsen zich op dezelfde manier als insecten, die vele malen groter zijn. “De overeenkomsten tussen de wijze waarop zij zich voortbewegen en de wijze waarop veel grotere insecten en gewervelden dat doen, roept enkele heel interessante vragen op,” aldus onderzoeker Jasmine Nirody.
Een beerdiertje aan de wandel.
Afbeelding: Lisset Duran.
Pootjes Dankzij eerder onderzoek wisten we al dat beerdiertjes uitgerust zijn met piepkleine pootjes. En dat is op zichzelf al heel opmerkelijk. “Als we kijken naar dieren die over pootjes beschikken, zijn beerdiertjes om twee redenen heel uniek,” zo vertelt Nirody aan Scientias.nl. “Allereerst vanwege hun omvang.” Beerdiertjes zijn met een lengte van 0,5 millimeter heel klein. “Normaal gesproken kiezen dieren die zo klein zijn een andere, efficiëntere manier om zich voort te bewegen.” Wat daarnaast opvalt, is dat de beerdiertjes – in tegenstelling tot veel andere dieren met pootjes – tot de ongewervelden behoren en dus een zacht lichaam hebben. “Dieren die een zacht lichaam hebben (zoals bijvoorbeeld ook wormen of slakken) kruipen vaak over de grond en moeten het zonder pootjes doen.” Maar beerdiertjes hebben dus wel pootjes. Acht stuks, om precies te zijn. En daarmee kunnen ze zich prima voortbewegen door water, op het land en onder de grond. Een analyse van de wijze waarop een beerdiertje zijn pootjes gebruikt, levert nu echter nóg een verrassing op.
Rennen als insecten Nirody en collega’s legden de beerdiertjes onder de microscoop en keken toe. “Als je ze lang genoeg onder een microscoop legt, kun je een breed scala aan gedragingen observeren. We dwongen ze niet om iets te doen. Soms waren ze heel ontspannen en wandelden ze wat rond. En soms zagen ze iets en renden er naartoe.” En zodra de onderzoekers dat zagen gebeuren, werd het interessant. “Wanneer gewervelden in plaats van lopen, gaan rennen, is er sprake van discontinuïteit,” vertelt Nirody. Een bekend voorbeeld daarvan is bijvoorbeeld het paard, dat in draf of galop een heel ander stappenpatroon kent dan wanneer het rustig loopt. Insecten doen dat anders. Wanneer zij sneller gaan lopen, houden ze hetzelfde stappenpatroon aan. Ze versnellen alleen. En de onderzoekers zagen hetzelfde gebeuren bij het beerdiertje. Wanneer het haast kreeg, bleef het de pootjes op dezelfde manier, maar dan wat versneld, neerzetten.
Groter en harder Het is opmerkelijk, omdat insecten zo heel anders zijn dan deze beerdiertjes. Zo zijn ze allereerst veel groter (wel 500.000 groter!). En ten tweede is het beerdiertje zacht, terwijl alle insecten gekenmerkt worden door een hard exoskelet.
Vervolgonderzoek Een verklaring voor deze overeenkomst tussen beerdiertjes en insecten is er nog niet. Mogelijk delen beerdiertjes en insecten zoals fruitvliegjes en mieren een voorouder en zijn ze uitgerust met een vergelijkbaar neuraal netwerk. Een andere mogelijkheid is dat beerdiertjes en insecten hun tred onafhankelijk van elkaar verkregen hebben. Beide hypothesen zijn intrigerend, vindt Nirody. “Als er een voorouderlijk neuraal systeem is dat de tred van alle Panarthropoda (een niet onomstreden clade die geleedpotigen, mosbeertjes en fluweelwormen omvat, red.) controleert, dan valt er nog veel te leren. Maar aan de andere kant: als geleedpotigen en waterdiertjes onafhankelijk van elkaar op deze strategie zijn uitgekomen, dan valt er weer veel meer te zeggen over wat deze aanpak zo aantrekkelijk maakt voor soorten die in uiteenlopende omgevingen leven.”
Over de tred van rennende beerdiertjes is het laatste dan ook nog niet gezegd. “Ik wil er graag verder over nadenken en deze theorieën testen.” Dat laatste is echter nog niet zo gemakkelijk. “De beste manier om dit te doen, is door studies zoals die van ons te combineren met moleculair onderzoek, waarbij we kijken naar de onderliggende neurale structuren. Dat moet je vervolgens onder een breed scala aan geleedpotigen doen en combineren met fylogenetische studies die helpen om de evolutie van het onderliggende systeem beter te begrijpen.” Een hele klus. “Maar ik denk dat het de moeite waard is.”
Het geeft namelijk niet alleen meer inzicht in waarom beerdiertjes lopen zoals ze lopen, maar kan ook van pas komen bij de ontwikkeling van zachte micro-robots. “De biomechanische strategie (van beerdiertjes, red.) kan ons veel leren over hoe kleine objecten met een zacht lichaam zich het beste kunnen voortbewegen,” aldus Nirody.
SEM image of Milnesium tardigradum in active state.
Credit: PLoS ONE 7(9): e45682. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045682
Omdat ze op het Australische Phillip-eiland geen natuurlijke vijand hebben, bevinden deze vraatzuchtige duizendpoten zich wonderbaarlijk genoeg aan de top van de voedselketen.
Als je aan een duizendpoot denkt, denk je misschien aan die kleine, krioelende beestjes in de zanderige grond. Maar in Australië nemen zelfs deze diertjes bizarre vormen aan. Onderzoekers hebben namelijk ontdekt dat de Cormocephalus coynei, een duizendpoot die leeft op het onbewoonde, Australische Phillip-eiland, niet alleen gigantisch is, maar ook een wat opmerkelijk dieet volgt.
Meer over de Cormocephalus coynei
Cormocephalus coynei is een duizendpootsoort die voorkomt op Phillip- en Nepean-eiland, gelegen ten zuiden van het Australische Norfolkeiland. De soort werd voor het eerst gezien op Phillip-eiland in 1792, maar werd pas in 1984 formeel beschreven. De duizendpoot kan maar liefst 23,5 cm lang worden en is roodbruin en oranje van kleur. Maar het meest opmerkelijke is zijn bizarre gewoonte om op gewervelde dieren te jagen.
In de studie besloten onderzoekers het dieet van de duizendpoot te bestuderen. Want dat deze diertjes een bijzondere eetlust hebben, weten we al langer. Zo staan ze erom bekend om op gekko’s, stinken en vissen te jagen. Maar soms hebben de beestjes zelfs nog grotere honger.
Een gekko is ten prooi gevallen aan een vleesetende duizendpoot.
Afbeelding: D. Terrington (2019)
Zeevogels De onderzoekers kwamen namelijk tot de ontdekking dat de duizendpoten op Phillip-eiland het zelfs op zeevogels hebben voorzien. “Er zijn aanwijzingen dat grote duizendpoten over de hele wereld gewervelde dieren verorberen,” zegt onderzoeksleider Luke Halpin. “Maar dit is de eerste keer dat we ontdekken dat de duizendpoot op zeevogels jaagt.”
Dieet De onderzoekers hebben het opmerkelijke dieet van Cormocephalus coynei nauwkeurig in kaart gebracht. En daaruit blijkt dat het bizarre eetpatroon van deze roofzuchtige duizendpoot voor 48 procent bestaat uit gewervelde dieren en 52 procent uit ongewervelde dieren. 30,5 procent bestaat uit hagedissen, waaronder de inheemse Lord Howe Island Skink en de endemische hagedis Christinus guentheri. Opvallend genoeg bestaat 7,9 procent van het dieet van de duizendpoot uit de zwartvleugelstormvogel (met name de kuikentjes) en 9,6 procent uit zeevissen die door in bomen nestelende zeevogels op de bosbodem zijn gedropt.
Bekijk in deze video hoe een duizendpoot een kuikentje vangt.
Het is een vrij merkwaardige samenstelling voor een duizendpoot. “Het vertegenwoordigt een ongewoon hoog percentage gewervelde dieren in het dieet van een ongewervelde,” constateert Halpin. “We laten zien hoe roofzuchtige geleedpotigen druk uitoefenen op gewervelde populaties.”
Top van voedselketen Maar dat is niet eens het enige. Aangezien geen enkel roofdier op het eiland het op de duizendpoot heeft voorzien, zijn deze langbenige monstertjes de onbetwiste toproofdieren op Philip-eiland. Ze bevinden zich wonderbaarlijk genoeg aan de top van de voedselketen.
Sleutelrol Hoe maf het ook klinkt, volgens de onderzoekers is de vraatzuchtige eetlust van de duizendpoten eigenlijk van vitaal belang voor het ecosysteem op het eiland. Dat komt omdat ze belangrijke voedingsstoffen uit de zee (die de zeevogels meenemen) naar het land brengen. Volgens onderzoeker Rohan Clarke spelen de gigantische duizendpoten dan ook een sleutelrol in de vormgeving van het natuurlijke systeem. “Het benadrukt echt de complexiteit van de natuur,” aldus de Clarke.
De duizendpoten houden dus de dynamiek van het ecosysteem op het eiland in balans. En daar kunnen wij ook een belangrijke les uit trekken. “Het laat zien hoe belangrijk het is om de resterende natuurlijke gebieden te behouden,” benadrukt Clarke. “Op die manier kunnen we voorkomen dat complexe interacties zoals deze – die uiteindelijk het leven op aarde ondersteunen – verder worden verstoord.”
We’veWe’ve been destroying the earth for a long time, and because sci-fi cinema has distilled and explored those concerns for decades (from Soylent Green to Waterworld to WALL-E to Snowpiercer), the genre has become a kind of echo chamber. Our planet becomes uninhabitable. Humanity travels elsewhere to start again. Were we the problem all along? The repetitive setup of these concerns, and a lack of creativity in considering them, results in films like director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum’s The Colony.
Visually gorgeous but narratively inert, The Colony tips its hat toward fellow genre classics like Aliens and Children of Men with questions about reproduction, colonialism, and communal responsibility. Its protagonist, Blake (Nora Arnezeder), evokes Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley with her physical strength, her steely stare, and her tenderness toward children. The film’s characters are divided into warring factions fighting over who should control the planet’s scant resources, with Earth’s natives being dismissed as backward and unsophisticated. The allure of space, and the potential it holds, is discussed at length. But for all the time The Colony spends on wistful, melancholy rumination over these ideas, it falls short of offering a singular perspective about any of them.
Intertitles inform us that because of climate change, pandemics, and war, “the ruling elite” escaped Earth to settle on the distant planet Kepler 209. But the planet isn’t perfect: There are no large bodies of water, but there is widespread radioactivity, making survival difficult. Most importantly, people are losing the ability to naturally conceive. With the potential end of humanity looming, the Kepler-ians begin an astronaut program to return to Earth. The first spaceship they send back, Ulysses 1, disappears without ever sending back a return transmission. A generation later, Kepler launches Ulysses 2, and puts all their hope on the shoulders of this three-person crew, including Blake.
Photo: Saban Films
Can you recognize a place where you’ve never lived? Does that kind of knowledge exist as an existential inheritance? As Blake wanders around a humid, foggy beach, lifting up horseshoe crabs and poking at jellyfish, Arnezeder exudes both confusion and familiarity. Her expressive face reflects those conflicting emotions well, and her lithe physicality captures a warrior and explorer accustomed to tension and trained to analyze the unknown. But even with all that preparation, Blake is caught off guard when ambushed by the planet’s survivors, led by a woman named Narvik (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina). They speak in a mishmash of languages, they carry weapons and live nomadically, and unlike the humans on Kepler, they have children. Among the youngsters is a girl named Maila (Bella Bading), whom Blake befriends — and who is kidnapped when this group of survivors is attacked by another heavily armed group who takes what they want, including all the female children.
Blake’s primary mission is to send a message back to Kepler to let them know that reproduction still works on Earth, but when Maila is taken, her Aliens-style protectiveness kicks in. When she follows that second group of survivors to their enclave of gigantic, abandoned cargo ships and aircraft carriers caught on the beach, Fehlbaum gets another chance to show off visually. But when he shifts the film into action mode, The Colony becomes reactive rather than proactive. And while the secrets Blake learns from Gibson (Iain Glen), the second community’s leader, connect to her childhood back on Kepler and provide some solid character development, The Colony then follows a fairly predictable path regarding what Blake chooses to do now that she’s on Earth.
In its early scenes, The Colony works as a plaintive visual exploration of what survival might look like if we continue on our ruinous climate path: constant flooding and swirling waters, movable cities built on rickety ships, nomadic people wrapped in outfits that protect them from the elements and allow for ease of movement. Cinematographer Markus Förderer and production designer Julian R. Wagner create a haunting world, but The Colony is sometimes too literal. Fehlbaum’s presentation of loneliness is packed with thuddingly obvious imagery (Blake alone on the beach, Blake alone in a well flooding with tidewater), but its first 20 or so minutes are a disquieting visualization of loss.
But The Colony isn’t nearly as thoughtful in its character development, and it doesn’t push far enough. So much remains unexplored: How long have the different groups of survivors been at war? What effect does the return of people from Kepler have? How does Blake feel about the societal demand of reproduction? What is the rest of Earth like? Why is a science fiction film, supposedly about exploring a possible future, so incurious about the details?
Photo: Saban Films
The film’s offhanded descriptions of death, like “Flood took him” in describing a missing character, suggest a life of endless hardship. But because The Colony sticks so firmly with Blake’s perspective, it doesn’t make much space for anyone else. The film suggests a class analysis with that “ruling elite” intertitle, but does nothing with it. And while Arnezeder and Boussnina have unbelievable chemistry, The Colony doesn’t allow for any queer subtext, and isn’t actually interested in person-to-person human emotions like romantic love.
Its considerations are loftier: Is world peace realistic between people who were able to leave a dying planet, and those forced to stay behind? What about “coming home” could spark physical changes? Especially recently, as we sail past the deadline for preventive action to combat climate change — with the August 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report describing climate change as “widespread, rapid, and intensifying” — nearly every sci-fi film seems to be revisiting the end of Earth as we know it. But similar to Chaos Walking, Settlers, and Voyagers, The Colony sidesteps the hard work needed to fix or reverse the devastation we have wrought. These characters move in a world that is stunningly visualized but superficially conceived, and The Colony embodies a genre that seems — perhaps like humanity itself — unable to take a step forward in imagining a different future.
The Colony opens on August 27 in theaters, on VOD, and on digital rental platforms like Amazon and Vudu.
Planet Earth is host to a remarkably diverse range of organisms. The variety that exists between different life forms, while very real, may at times be superficial in that some scientists argue whether the differences between humans and other mammals are really so great.
Nonetheless, the uniqueness of at least a few traits that set humans aside from other organisms cannot be so easily debated. Even while certain other species display the use of tools, as well as the rudiments of what were once considered cultural concepts exclusive to humans, no other species on Earth has developed such capabilities to the advanced degree that we have.
Herein lies a great mystery. How is it that humans could have developed so differently–and so much–from other species, enough so that we eventually emerged as the dominant force on this planet?
In 1980, one study carried out at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in England took its analysis of this question to the microscopic level, looking at what clues might be found in human genetic material.
Appearing in Nature, the paper, titled “Distinctive sequence of human mitochondrial ribosomal RNA genes” by I. C. Eperon, S. Anderson and D. P. Nierlich, called human mitochondria a “radical departure” from that of other organisms,” a conclusion with rather novel implications in terms of the mysterious origins of humanity.
“The nucleotide sequence spanning the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes of cloned human mitochondrial DNA reveals an extremely compact genome organization,” the study’s authors wrote in the paper’s abstract, “wherein the putative tRNA genes are probably ‘butt-jointed’ around the two rRNA genes.”
“The sequences of the rRNA genes are significantly homologous in some regions to eukaryotic and prokaryotic sequences, but distinctive” they added, noting that “the tRNA genes also have unusual nucleotide sequences.”
For those among us who aren’t molecular biologists, what the study’s authors present here may seem convoluted. However, the final line of the study’s abstract brought into rather stark focus what the authors interpreted this all to mean.
“It seems that human mitochondria did not originate from recognizable relatives of present-day organisms,” they concluded. But if not “recognizable” ancestors to the kinds of organisms present on Earth today, then what kinds of organisms had they been talking about?
Inherent to the structure of all living cells in higher organisms are mitochondria. These organelles are the areas within cells where functions like respiration and generation of energy take place. Since mitochondria possess their own unique genetic material, scientists have suggested that they might represent the aftermath of an invasion that occurred in the ancient world, in which bacteria stormed the cells of ancient organisms and took up residence within them. The question is, what kind of bacteria might have caused the “radically different” mitochondria found today in modern humans?
The study by Eperon, et al, raises several questions. One has to do with the undeniably unique traits that humans appear to possess when compared with other species on our planet; might it be the case that mitochondria is actually at the root of these distinctions? Another question has to do with whether mitochondrial changes occurring in ancient organisms might have spearheaded the evolutionary trends that eventually led to our ancient hominid ancestors and, eventually, resulted in Homo sapiens.
Other theories exist as well, which give consideration to speculative ideas about the appearance of novel kinds of bacteria from unusual places—possibly even from space—which might have arrived on Earth after being carried over great distances on cosmic debris. This theory that novel kinds of bacteria or viruses could arrive from space, while challenged by most in the scientific community, formed the basis of astronomer Fred Hoyle and his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe’s theory of panspermia or “Cosmic Ancestry,” which entails that all life on Earth may actually have origins in outer space.
Even if ready-made bacteria had not been brought to Earth on cosmic debris, many astrobiologists have entertained the notion that the building blocks of life might have been brought to Earth from elsewhere long ago, having eventually formed into complex proteins over time, and eventually giving rise to simple life forms that evolved over the eons into the biodiversity we see on our planet today.
Is it also possible that some of the evolutionary mysteries about human origins could have been influenced by such cosmic sources at some point in the distant past? Such questions raise a number of possibilities about the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos, and whether or not it might differ entirely from what we have come to expect of life on Earth.
In fact, if Earth organisms actually do have their roots in outer space, any prospective aliens out there might not only resemble us, but they might actually be cousins of ours, in a sense. In other words, we Earthlings might be far more “alien” than we even realize.
Drone Captures What No One Was Supposed to See via Missing Files
Drone Captures What No One Was Supposed to See via Missing Files
Drone Captures What No One Was Supposed to See via Missing Files
A couple of decades ago, drones were merely a science fiction idea from the future! Nowadays, everyone and their dog has a drone, and they seem to be a regular fixture in our skies! Whether people are filming their hometown or capturing mind blowing footageon vacation, there is a whole world of incredible drone footage out there! However, not everyone loves being filmed by drones, and sometimes their pilots capture things they were never supposed to see. Yep, turns out there is a dark side to drones!
From the haunting birds eye view of one of the most infamous and deadly ghost towns on the planet, to the extreme footage that gets closer to a raging tornado than anyone ever has before in human history, these are the Drone Captures What No One Was Supposed to See
Hoe zal België eruitzien als de aarde blijft opwarmen?
Hoe zal België eruitzien als de aarde blijft opwarmen?
Wat betekent het voor België als de aardopwarming zich verder doorzet? Klimatoloog en glacioloog Philippe Huybrechts geeft antwoord. 'De ergste gevolgen voelen we over honderd jaar. Zo ongelooflijk ver is dat niet.'
In een spraakmakend rapport bevestigde het IPCC onlangs de link tussen klimaatverandering en weersextremen, zoals hittegolven, extreme neerslag en droogte. Philippe Huybrechts, professor klimatologie en glaciologie aan de Vrije Universiteit Brussel, werkte mee aan het rapport.
Welke gevolgen heeft de aardopwarming voor het klimaat in deze contreien?
‘Ongeveer tot het midden van de eeuw ligt dat al vast. Wat we ook doen met de uitstoot van broeikgasgassen, tot 2050 ligt het klimaat al vast. Daarna, aan het einde van de eeuw, zal het een groot verschil maken of we gestopt zijn broeikasgassen uit te stoten of niet. Op het einde van het IPCC-rapport vind je er een interactieve atlas waar je kunt zien wat de projecties zijn per regio. Dat is dan niet specifiek voor België, maar voor de regio West- en Centraal-Europa.’
'Vooral het stijgende zeeniveau is voor ons een probleem'
‘De atlas wordt voorgesteld ten opzichte van het globale warming level. Dat is de globale temperatuursverandering ten opzichte van de periode 1850-1900. Vandaag zitten we op een warming level van 1,1 graad. De andere belangrijke levels staan op 1,5 graden, 2 graden en 4 graden.'
‘De temperatuur zal in West-Europa altijd meer stijgen dan het globale gemiddelde. Dat komt omdat West-Europa vasteland is. Land warmt nu eenmaal sneller op dan de oceaan. In de projecties liggen we altijd ongeveer een graad hoger dan het gemiddelde. Hoeveel de temperatuur exact zal stijgen, hangt af van hoe we omgaan met broeikasgassen.’
Het probleem is niet alleen dat de temperatuur in het algemeen stijgt, maar dat de extremen ook vaker voorkomen?
‘We zullen inderdaad vaker extremen zien, en ze zullen intenser zijn. De patronen die we zien bij een opwarming van 1 graad, zien we ook bij 2 en 4 graden, alleen veel sterker.’
'Hoe warmer de temperatuur van de lucht, hoe meer neerslag die kan bevatten'
‘Een hittegolf die in de 19de eeuw één keer om de vijftig jaar voorkwam, zal bij een opwarming van 1 graad al vijf keer in vijftig jaar tijd voorkomen. Voor een opwarming van 2 graden komt die bijna veertien keer in vijftig jaar voor. Bij een opwarming van 4 graden is dat nog meer: bijna veertig keer per halve eeuw.’
‘De hittegolven worden intenser. Een hittegolf die maar één keer in vijftig jaar voorkomt, is bij 1 graad globale opwarming al 1,2 graden warmer, maar bij een algemene opwarming van 4 graden worden de hittegolven liefst 5,3 graden warmer.’
Krijgen we dan ook meer koudegolven?
‘Nee, we krijgen minder vorst en minder koudegolven. Dat is vandaag al het geval, en het zal zich in alle scenario's doorzetten. We krijgen meer hittegolven en minder koudegolven.’
Zullen de verschillen tussen seizoenen vervagen?
‘De seizoenen worden bepaald door de baan van de aarde rond de zon. Dat zal niet veranderen. Zelfs als de aarde met 3 graden opwarmt, dan nog zul je een temperatuurverschil zien tussen zomer en winter. Het is trouwens ook niet uitgesloten dat er geen koudere winters meer zullen zijn. Misschien dat er ooit nog een Elfstedentocht komt, maar de kans wordt alsmaar kleiner.’
'Je krijgt overstromingen als het langdurig hard regent. En die kans stijgt'
Hoe zit het met de neerslag?
‘In deze contreien zullen we weinig verschil zien in de gemiddelde jaarlijkse hoeveelheid neerslag. Dat is niet zo in Noord-Europa, waar er veel meer neerslag zal zijn. En in Zuid-Europa zal er net veel minder neerslag zijn. Voor ons is het een nuloperatie, al wordt de neerslag wel anders verdeeld. We krijgen er meer in de winter en minder in de zomer. In beide gevallen zullen we een verschil zien van ongeveer 10 procent. We krijgen langere droge periodes, maar als het eens regent, zullen de buien heviger zijn.’
'De dagelijkse maximale hoeveelheid neerslag zal toenemen. De extremen worden dus extremer. Ze zullen ook vaker voorkomen. Een zogeheten heavy precipitation event dat maar één keer voorkwam tussen 1850 en 1900 komt nu al 1,3 keer meer voor. Bij een opwarming van 2 graden zal dat 1,7 keer zijn. En bij een opwarming van 4 graden stijgt dat cijfer tot 2,7.’
'De ergste gevolgen voelen we over 100 jaar. Zo ongelooflijk ver is dat niet. De mensen die nu geboren worden, maken het mogelijk nog mee'
‘De intensiteit versterkt ook. Dat is een puur fysisch verschijnsel. Het heeft te maken met de hoeveelheid water die de lucht kan bevatten. Hoe warmer de luchttemperatuur, hoe meer vocht die kan bevatten. Die heavy precipitation events komen dan niet alleen vaker voor, ze worden ook natter.’
Krijgen we straks meer overstromingen te slikken?
‘Ja, het risico op overstromingen stijgt. Ik heb het dan wel over onze regio. In het Middellandse Zeegebied is dat bijvoorbeeld niet zo. Daar gaat alles sterk verdrogen.’
Wat gebeurt er met het zeeniveau?
‘Uit waarnemingen blijkt dat het niveau aan de Belgische kust ongeveer evenveel zal stijgen als het globale gemiddelde. Sinds 1900 is het globale zeeniveau met ongeveer 20 cm gestegen, dat is ook aan onze kust zo. Bij zwaar stormweer zal het niveau nog hoger liggen, wat het overstromingsrisico verder vergroot.’
'Het is niet dat een bos brand vat gewoon omdat het droog staat. Er moet ook een vonk zijn en dat is vaak het gevolg van mensen'
‘Als we bij een globale opwarming van 1,5 graden kunnen blijven, zal het zeeniveau deze eeuw nog met zo’n 30 centimeter stijgen. Als de aarde sterker opwarmt, dan kan het niveau stijgen met 1 meter, of meer. In het allerslechtste geval begint tegen het einde van deze eeuw de West-Antarctische ijskap in te storten. Dan kan het zeeniveau met 2 meter stijgen. Maar dat is geen deel van de projecties.'
‘Het zeeniveau reageert langzaam op klimaatverandering. De stijging zal daarom nog honderden of duizenden jaren blijven doorgaan. Als we de opwarming kunnen beperken tot 1,5 graden, dan stijgt het zeeniveau aan het einde van de eeuw weliswaar met ongeveer 30 centimeter, maar na tweeduizend jaar zal het alsnog zijn gestegen met 2 tot 6 meter.'
‘En als de opwarming zich doorzet, dan zal het water nog verder stijgen. Dat is de verandering die mij het meeste zorgen baart. De stijging zal traag gaan, maar ze zal niet te stoppen zijn - wat we ook doen. Alleen een volgende ijstijd kan daar dan verandering in brengen.’
Hoezeer zou het zeeniveau moeten stijgen voordat in de Lage Landen overstromingsgevaar dreigt?
‘Met de huidige dijken hebben we niet zoveel overschot. Misschien een halve meter. Dijkverhogingen en andere maatregelen zijn hoe dan ook noodzakelijk.'
Krijgen we straks in de Ardennen bosbranden zoals die in Griekenland en de Verenigde Staten?
‘We kunnen er zelfs in Vlaanderen mee worden geconfronteerd. Dat gebied is minder bosrijk, maar er is genoeg heide die snel vuur kan vatten.’
‘Er zijn drie factoren die moeten samenspelen om een bos gevoelig te maken voor brand. Het moet heel warm zijn. Het moet lang droog geweest zijn. En er moet een felle wind zijn. De eerste twee elementen zullen vaker voorkomen in de toekomst. Dat is al voldoende om het risico op bosbranden te doen stijgen.’
'Vlaanderen heeft niet zoveel bos, maar wel heide die snel in brand vliegt'
‘Het probleem is wel iets ingewikkelder dan dat. Het is niet dat een bos brand vat gewoon omdat het droog staat. Er moet ook een vonk zijn en dat is vaak het gevolg van mensen. Kijk maar naar wat er recent gebeurde in Brecht, nadat het Belgische leger er oefende met brandbare tracers. De hele heide vatte vlam.’
‘Goed bosbeheer kan het risico op bosbranden reduceren. Dat kan, bijvoorbeeld, door droge takken op te rapen. Ook corridors in de bossen maken helpt. Op die manier kan het vuur niet zo gemakkelijk overslaan naar andere delen van het bos. Dat is zo in de Ardennen.’
Waarop mogen we hopen voor België als we voldoende maatregelen treffen?
‘België is maar een klein land. We moeten globaal actie ondernemen. Als we er wereldwijd in slagen om tegen 2050 geen broeikasgassen meer uit te stoten en misschien zelfs een negatieve emissie realiseren door CO2 uit de lucht te halen, dan kunnen we de opwarming beperken tot 1,5 graden. Nu zitten we op 1,1 graden - veel marge is er niet meer. Bij een opwarming van 1,5 graden wordt het iets warmer dan vandaag, iets extremer. Je ziet nu al hoeveel schade dat kan veroorzaken: vorige zomer droogde alles op, en deze zomer loopt alles onder.’
Wat gebeurt er als we niets doen?
‘Als we naar een opwarming van 4 graden zouden gaan, komen we in een hele andere wereld terecht. Die kan ik mij niet goed voorstellen. Dan wordt het in ieder geval erg. We krijgen zeer extreem weer in alle richtingen. Vooral het zeeniveau wordt dan een probleem. Ik denk dat we Vlaanderen dan uiteindelijk zullen moeten ontruimen. Grote stukken van de wereld zullen onleefbaar worden door de combinatie van zeer extreme hitte en hoge vochtigheid.’
'België is maar een kleine speler. Er moet globaal actie ondernomen worden'
‘En, ja, dat is pas over 100 jaar, maar de mensen die nu geboren worden, leven waarschijnlijk nog in 2100. Zo ongelooflijk ver is het niet.’
Kunnen wij op individueel vlaak genoeg doen om een impact hebben?
‘Ik zal daar het volgende op zeggen: ik denk niet dat we er gaan geraken door alleen een beroep te doen op individuele verantwoordelijkheid. Minder vlees eten en met de fiets gaan, kan natuurlijk geen kwaad, maar dat is niet de grote oplossing.’
‘Om van die uitstoot af te geraken, hebben we vooral een sterk beleid nodig. We hebben een overheid nodig die regels oplegt en ons gedrag stuurt. De mensen moeten er wel ontvankelijk voor zijn. Ze moeten meewerken in het verhaal. Ik zeg altijd dat het meest effectieve is om op de juiste mensen te stemmen, degenen met het krachtigste klimaatbeleid. Door er een individuele verantwoordelijkheid van te maken, geef je mensen alleen maar schuldgevoelens. Mensen maken keuzes die voor hen het meest voordelig of gemakkelijk zijn. De overheid moet dus de juiste keuzes het meest aantrekkelijk te maken. Maak, bijvoorbeeld, de treinverbindingen beter en goedkoper zodat er minder met vliegtuigen wordt gevlogen.’
In een ideale situatie, wat zijn de beste stappen die de overheid kan nemen?
‘Dat gaat over zoveel zaken. Als we kijken naar België: waar zit de grote uitstoot? Die zit in transport, in de verwarming van de huizen, in de opwekking van elektriciteit en in de industrie. In de industrie wordt dat aangepakt door er een prijs op te plakken met de Koolstofmarkt. Als je warmte met fossiele brandstoffen opwekt, moet je daar een boete voor betalen. Dat stimuleert om het productieproces zodanig te veranderen dat je die boete kan vermijden.’
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Things You will See for the First Time in Your Life
Things You will See for the First Time in Your Life
It’s not so bizarre to see a three-legged dog nowadays, after all, puppies are resilient little creatures. We’ll somewhere further along we’ll show you a picture of a dog with not three but two legs. I know it’s out of this world, but oh well. That’s what the episode is about. We have a whole bunch of other things too coming up which will blow your mind away.
TRERLATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
12 Rarest Places on Earth That Are Extremely Clean
12 Rarest Places on Earth That Are Extremely Clean
Do you get to a place where you feel that you live in an area that has trash left, right and center? You need a breath of fresh air, you need to get out of the city life filled with all types of hustling, bustling and garbage. Add this next list of places into your list of travel destinations. These places are surreal with clean air, magnificent scenery and clear blue skies.
There are a few places on this green earth that you should not dare visit even if you get a free ticket and an all-expenses paid trip. Some of these are caves that will kill you in minutes, caves that will have your temperature at boiling point, radioactivity enough to melt you as well as rats that will give you plagues. This belief might make you put your passport very far away.
The coronavirus sports a luxurious sugar coat. “It’s striking,” thought Rommie Amaro, staring at her computer simulation of one of the trademark spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, which stick out from the virus’s surface. It was swathed in sugar molecules, known as glycans.
“When you see it with all the glycans, it’s almost unrecognizable,” says Amaro, a computational biophysical chemist at the University of California, San Diego.
Many viruses have glycans covering their outer proteins, camouflaging them from the human immune system like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But last year, Amaro’s laboratory group and collaborators created the most detailed visualization yet of this coat, based on structural and genetic data and rendered atom-by-atom by a supercomputer. On 22 March 2020, she posted the simulation to Twitter. Within an hour, one researcher asked in a comment: what was the naked, uncoated loop sticking out of the top of the protein?
Amaro had no idea. But ten minutes later, structural biologist Jason McLellan at the University of Texas at Austin chimed in: the uncoated loop was a receptor binding domain (RBD), one of three sections of the spike that bind to receptors on human cells (see ‘A hidden spike’).
Source: Structural image from Lorenzo Casalino, Univ. California, San Diego (Ref. 1); Graphic: Nik Spencer/Nature
In Amaro’s simulation, when the RBD lifted up above the glycan cloud, two glycans swooped in to lock it into place, like a kickstand on a bicycle. When Amaro mutated the glycans in the computer model, the RBD collapsed. McLellan’s team built a way to try the same experiment in the lab, and by June 2020, the collaborators had reported that mutating the two glycans reduced the ability of the spike protein to bind to a human cell receptor1 — a role that no one has previously recognized in coronaviruses, McLellan says. It’s possible that snipping out those two sugars could reduce the virus’s infectivity, says Amaro, although researchers don’t yet have a way to do this.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have been developing a detailed understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 infects cells. By picking apart the infection process, they hope to find better ways to interrupt it through improved treatments and vaccines, and learn why the latest strains, such as the Delta variant, are more transmissible.
What has emerged from 19 months of work, backed by decades of coronavirus research, is a blow-by-blow account of how SARS-CoV-2 invades human cells (see ‘Life cycle of the pandemic coronavirus’). Scientists have discovered key adaptations that help the virus to grab on to human cells with surprising strength and then hide itself once inside. Later, as it leaves cells, SARS-CoV-2 executes a crucial processing step to prepare its particles for infecting even more human cells. These are some of the tools that have enabled the virus to spread so quickly and claim millions of lives. “That’s why it’s so difficult to control,” says Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London.
It starts with the spikes. Each SARS-CoV-2 virion (virus particle) has an outer surface peppered with 24–40 haphazardly arranged spike proteins that are its key to fusing with human cells2. For other types of virus, such as influenza, external fusion proteins are relatively rigid. SARS-CoV-2 spikes, however, are wildly flexible and hinge at three points, according to work published in August 2020 by biochemist Martin Beck at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, and his colleagues3.
That allows the spikes to flop around, sway and rotate, which could make it easier for them to scan the cell surface and for multiple spikes to bind to a human cell. There are no similar experimental data for other coronaviruses, but because spike-protein sequences are highly evolutionarily conserved, it is fair to assume the trait is shared, says Beck.
Cryo-electron tomography images of SARS-CoV-2 virions. (Scale bar: 30 nanometres.)
Credit: B. Turoňová et al./Science
Early in the pandemic, researchers confirmed that the RBDs of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins attach to a familiar protein called the ACE2 receptor, which adorns the outside of most human throat and lung cells. This receptor is also the docking point for SARS-CoV, the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). But compared with SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 binds to ACE2 an estimated 2–4 times more strongly4, because several changes in the RBD stabilize its virus-binding hotspots5.
Worrying variants of SARS-CoV-2 tend to have mutations in the S1 subunit of the spike protein, which hosts the RBDs and is responsible for binding to the ACE2 receptor. (A second spike subunit, S2, prompts viral fusion with the host cell’s membrane.)
The Alpha variant, for example, includes ten changes in the spike-protein sequence, which result in RBDs being more likely to stay in the ‘up’ position6. “It is helping the virus along by making it easier to enter into cells,” says Priyamvada Acharya, a structural biologist at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute in Durham, North Carolina, who is studying the spike mutations.
The Delta variant, which is now spreading around the world, hosts multiple mutations in the S1 subunit, including three in the RBD that seem to improve the RBD’s ability to bind to ACE2 and evade the immune system7.
Restricted entry
Once the viral spikes bind to ACE2, other proteins on the host cell’s surface initiate a process that leads to the merging of viral and cell membranes (see ‘Viral entry up close’).
The virus that causes SARS, SARS-CoV, uses either of two host protease enzymes to break in: TMPRSS2 (pronounced ‘tempress two’) or cathepsin L. TMPRSS2 is the faster route in, but SARS-CoV often enters instead through an endosome — a lipid-surrounded bubble — which relies on cathepsin L. When virions enter cells by this route, however, antiviral proteins can trap them.
SARS-CoV-2 differs from SARS-CoV because it efficiently uses TMPRSS2, an enzyme found in high amounts on the outside of respiratory cells. First, TMPRSS2 cuts a site on the spike’s S2 subunit8. That cut exposes a run of hydrophobic amino acids that rapidly buries itself in the closest membrane — that of the host cell. Next, the extended spike folds back onto itself, like a zipper, forcing the viral and cell membranes to fuse.
An animation of the way SARS-CoV-2 fuses with cells.
The virus then ejects its genome directly into the cell. By invading in this spring-loaded manner, SARS-CoV-2 infects faster than SARS-CoV and avoids being trapped in endosomes, according to work published in April by Barclay and her colleagues at Imperial College London9.
The virus’s speedy entry using TMPRSS2 explains why the malaria drug chloroquine didn’t work in clinical trials as a COVID-19 treatment, despite early promising studies in the lab10. Those turned out to have used cells that rely exclusively on cathepsins for endosomal entry. “When the virus transmits and replicates in the human airway, it doesn’t use endosomes, so chloroquine, which is an endosomal disrupting drug, is not effective in real life,” says Barclay.
The discovery also points to protease inhibitors as a promising therapeutic option to prevent a virus from using TMPRSS2, cathepsin L or other proteases to enter host cells. One TMPRSS2 inhibitor, camostat mesylate, which is approved in Japan to treat pancreatitis, blocked viral entry into lung cells8, but the drug did not improve patients’ outcomes in an initial clinical trial11.
“From my perspective, we should have such protease inhibitors as broad antivirals available to fight new disease outbreaks and prevent future pandemics at the very beginning,” says Stefan Pöhlmann, director of the Infection Biology Unit at the German Primate Center in Göttingen, who has led research on ACE2 binding and the TMPRSS2 pathway.
Deadly competition
The next steps of infection are murkier. “There are a lot more black boxes once you are inside the cell,” says chemist Janet Iwasa at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who is developing an annotated animation of the viral life cycle. “There’s more uncertainty, and competing hypotheses.”
After the virus shoots its RNA genome into the cell, ribosomes in the cytoplasm translate two sections of viral RNA into long strings of amino acids, which are then snipped into 16 proteins, including many involved in RNA synthesis. Later, more RNAs are generated that code for a total of 26 known viral proteins, including structural ones used to make new virus particles, such as the spike, and other accessory proteins. In this way, the virus begins churning out copies of its own messenger RNA. But it needs the cell’s machinery to translate those mRNAs into proteins.
How a rampant coronavirus variant blunts our immune defences
Coronaviruses take over that machinery in many ways. Virologist Noam Stern-Ginossar and her team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, zoomed in on three mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 suppresses the translation of host mRNA in favour of its own. None are exclusive to this virus, but the combination, speed and magnitude of the effects seem unique, says Stern-Ginossar.
First, the virus eliminates the competition: viral protein Nsp1, one of the first proteins translated when the virus arrives, recruits host proteins to systematically chop up all cellular mRNAs that don’t have a viral tag. When Stern-Ginossar’s team put that same tag on the end of a host mRNA, the mRNA was not chopped up12.
Second, infection reduces overall protein translation in the cell by 70%. Nsp1 is again the main culprit, this time physically blocking the entry channel of ribosomes so mRNA can’t get inside, according to work from two research teams13,14. The little translation capacity that remains is dedicated to viral RNAs, says Stern-Ginossar.
Finally, the virus shuts down the cell’s alarm system. This happens in numerous ways, but Stern-Ginossar’s team identified one clear mechanism for SARS-CoV-2: the virus prevents cellular mRNA from getting out of the nucleus, including instructions for proteins meant to alert the immune system to infection. A second team confirmed this finding, and again pointed to Nsp1: the protein seems to jam up exit channels in the nucleus so nothing can escape15.
Because gene transcripts can’t get out of the nucleus, the infected cells don’t release many interferons — these are signalling proteins that alert the immune system to the presence of a virus. SARS-Cov-2 is particularly efficient at shutting down this alarm system: compared with other respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV and respiratory syncytial virus, SARS-CoV-2 infection induces significantly lower levels of interferons16. And this June, researchers reported mutations in the Alpha variant that seem to enable it to subdue interferon production even more efficiently17.
“It’s clear that SARS-CoV-2 is a very fast virus that has a unique ability to prevent our immune system from recognizing and combating infection in the first stages,” says Stern-Ginossar. By the time the immune system does realize there is a virus, there is so much of it that immune-response proteins sometimes flood the bloodstream at a faster rate than normal — which can cause damage. Doctors saw early in the pandemic that some people with COVID-19 who become very ill are harmed by an overactive immune response to SARS-CoV-2, as well as by the virus itself. Some proven treatments work by dampening down this immune response.
Renovation station
Once the virus has taken over host translation, it starts a home makeover, extensively remodelling the interior and exterior of the cell to its needs.
First, some of the newly made viral spike proteins travel to the surface of the cell and poke out of the host-cell membrane. There, they activate a host calcium-ion channel, which expels a fatty coating onto the outside of the cell — the same coating found on cells that naturally fuse together, such as muscle cells. At this point, the infected cell fuses to neighbouring cells expressing ACE2, developing into massive individual respiratory cells filled with up to 20 nuclei.
Fused cell structures (syncytia) seen in cells expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (green). Nuclei are in blue and the cell skeleton is in red.
Credit: Mauro Giacca
These fused structures, called syncytia, are induced by viral infections such as HIV and herpes simplex virus, but not by the SARS virus, says molecular biologist Mauro Giacca at King’s College London, who led the team that published the finding in April18. He hypothesizes that forming syncytia allows infected cells to thrive for long periods of time, churning out more and more virions. “This is not a hit-and-run virus,” he says. “It persists.” A second team, led by researcher Qiang Sun at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, found that some COVID-19-infected cells even form syncytia with lymphocytes — one of the body’s own immune cells19. This is a known mechanism of immune evasion by tumour cells, but not by viruses. It suggests that infected cells avoid immune detection by simply grabbing on to and merging with nearby immune scouts.
On the inside of the cell, even more change is occurring. Like other coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 transforms the long, thin endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a network of flat membranes involved in protein synthesis and transport, into double-membrane spheres, as if the ER were blowing bubbles. These double-membrane vesicles (DMVs) might provide a safe place for viral RNA to be replicated and translated, shielding it from innate immune sensors in the cell, but that hypothesis is still being investigated.
Proteins involved in making DMVs could be good drug targets, because they seem to be necessary for viral replication. For instance, a host protein, TMEM41B, is needed to mobilize cholesterol and other lipids to expand the ER membranes so that all the virus parts will fit inside20. “When you take TMEM41B out, it has a major impact on infection,” says Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who was involved in the research. The coronavirus transmembrane protein Nsp3 could also be a target: it creates a crown-like pore in the walls of the DMVs to shuttle out newly made viral RNA21.
Most viruses that have an outer wrapping, known as an envelope, form this feature by assembly directly at the edge of the cell, co-opting some of the cell’s own plasma membrane on their way out. But newly made coronavirus proteins take a different path.
For years, evidence has suggested that coronaviruses are transported out of the cell through the Golgi complex, an organelle that works like a post office, packaging molecules in membranes and sending them off to other parts of the cell. There, the virus forms a lipid envelope from the Golgi complex’s membrane; newly formed virions are then carried inside Golgi vesicles to the cell surface, where they are spat out of the cell, says virologist and cell biologist Carolyn Machamer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has studied coronaviruses for 30 years.
But in December, cell biologist Nihal Altan-Bonnet at the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and her colleagues reported that they had detected coronaviruses leaving the cell through lysosomes — cellular rubbish bins full of enzymes that break down cell parts22. Blocking the Golgi-based secretory pathway didn’t seem to affect the amount of infectious virus being released, says Altan-Bonnet. Her team’s evidence22 suggests that viral proteins form an envelope by budding into the ER, then take over lysosomes to get out of the cell. The researchers are currently testing inhibitors that block the lysosomal exit process as potential antiviral candidates.
Leaving a cell through either the Golgi or lysosomes is slow and inefficient compared with budding out of a plasma membrane, so scientists don’t know why SARS-CoV-2 does it. Machamer suspects that the lipid composition of a Golgi- or lysosome-derived envelope is somehow more beneficial to the virus than one from the plasma membrane. “If we understood this part a little bit better, there would be great opportunities for novel antiviral therapeutics,” she says.
Last slice
On the way out of the cell, one more event makes this virus into an infectious juggernaut: a quick snip at a site of five amino acids prepares the virus to strike its next target.
Where other coronaviruses have a single arginine amino acid at the junction of the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike, SARS-CoV-2 has a line of five amino acids: proline, arginine, arginine, alanine and arginine. “Because the site was unusual, we focused on it, and it turned out that, yes, the site is essential for invasion of lung cells,” says Pöhlmann. In May 2020, he and his colleagues reported that a host-cell protein called furin recognizes and clips that string of amino acids — and the cut is “essential” for the virus to enter human lung cells efficiently23.
It’s not the first time that researchers have identified a furin cleavage site on a virus; highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses also have it, says Barclay. When a colleague sent Barclay a strain of SARS-CoV-2 in culture that had spontaneously lost the furin cleavage site, her team found that ferrets infected with this strain shed viral particles in lower amounts than did those infected with the pandemic strain, and did not transmit the infection to nearby animals9. At the same time as Barclay’s team reported its results in a September 2020 preprint, a study in the Netherlands also found that coronavirus with an intact furin cleavage site enters human airway cells faster than do those without it24.
Furin is suspected to cut the site at some point during virion assembly, or just before release. The timing might explain why the virus exits through the Golgi or lysosomes, says Tom Gallagher, a virologist at Loyola University Chicago in Illinois. “The virus, once assembled, moves into an organelle where it can be bathed in the presence of the furin protease.”
By snipping the bond between the S1 and S2 subunits, the furin cut loosens up virion spike proteins so that during cell entry they respond to a second cut by TMPRSS2, which exposes the hydrophobic area that rapidly buries itself in a host-cell membrane, says Gallagher. If spikes are not pre-clipped by furin —and they aren’t always — they bypass TMPRSS2, and enter through the slower endosomal pathway, if at all.
The race for antiviral drugs to beat COVID — and the next pandemic
Two coronavirus variants, Alpha and Delta, have altered furin cleavage sites. In the Alpha variant, the initial proline amino acid is changed to a histidine (P681H) ; in the Delta variant, it is changed to an arginine (P681R). Both changes make the sequence less acidic, and the more basic the string of amino acids, the more effectively furin recognizes and cuts it, says Barclay. “We would hypothesize that this is the virus getting even better at transmitting.”
More furin cuts mean more spike proteins primed to enter human cells. In SARS-CoV, less than 10% of spike proteins are primed, says Menachery, whose lab group has been quantifying the primed spike proteins but is yet to publish this work. In SARS-CoV-2, that percentage rises to 50%. In the Alpha variant, it’s more than 50%. In the highly transmissible Delta variant, the group has found, greater than 75% of spikes are primed to infect a human cell.
Known unknowns
The scientific community is still scratching the surface of its understanding of SARS-CoV-2. Key unknowns include the number of ACE2 receptors needed to bind to each spike protein; when exactly the S2 site is cleaved by TMPRSS2; and the number of spikes needed for virus–cell membrane fusion, says McLellan — and that’s just for entry. In April 2020, a team at the University of California, San Francisco, identified at least 332 interactions between SARS-CoV-2 and human proteins25.
It is not easy to keep pace with the quickly mutating virus. Most mutations so far are associated with how effectively the virus spreads, not with how much the virus damages the host, experts agree. This month, a study reported that the Delta variant grew more rapidly and at higher levels inside people’s lungs and throats than did earlier versions of the virus26.
But it is not yet certain how Delta’s mutations have supercharged the variant in this way, says Stern-Ginossar. “This is something many labs are trying to figure out.”
Researchers in Tibet have uncovered 33 viruses — 28 of which were previously unknown to science — frozen up in glacier ice that formed up to 15,000 years ago.
The team from theOhio State University analysed two cores of ice from the Guliya ice cap on the far western Kunlun Shan on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau.
Employing a novel method of analysing microbes and viruses in ice samples without contaminating them, the researchers concluded the viruses lived in soil or plants.
The findings, the team said, may help scientists to better understand how viruses have evolved over the centuries.
Researchers in Tibet have uncovered 33 viruses — 28 of which were previously unknown to science — frozen up in glacier ice that formed 15,000 years ago. Pictured: the Guliya ice cap on the far western Kunlun Shan on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, in China, as seen in 1992
The study was undertaken by microbiologist and palaeoclimatologist Zhi-Ping Zhong of the Ohio State University and colleagues.
'These glaciers were formed gradually — and along with dust and gases, many, many viruses were also deposited in that ice,' said Professor Zhong.
'The glaciers in western China are not well-studied, and our goal is to use this information to reflect past environments.
In their study, the researchers analysed two core samples collected in 2015 from the Guliya ice cap — the summit of which, where the ice would have originally formed, lies some 22,000 feet (6.7 kilometres) above sea level.
As the ice accumulated in layers year-after-year, trapping material from the surroundings as it grew, the glacier has formed a record that allows scientists to learn more about atmospheric composition, climate and microbiota of the past.
With respect to the latter, the team's analysis revealed the genetic codes for 33 viruses from ice dating back as far as some 15,000 years — four of which were known to science, but at least 28 of which are novel.
The four familiar viruses belong to families that normally infect bacteria, and were found in far lower concentrations that they have been in oceans or soils.
Yet, according to the team, around half of the viruses appear to have survived at the time in which they were frozen not despite the ice, but rather because of it.
Employing a novel method of analysing microbes and viruses in ice samples (like the pictured core) without contaminating them, the team concluded the viruses lived in soil or plants
In their study, the researchers analysed two core samples collected in 2015 from the Guliya ice cap — the summit of which, where the ice would have originally formed, lies some 22,000 feet above sea level. Pictured: the topography of the ice cap, showing the core locations
As the ice accumulated in layers year-after-year, the glacier has formed a record that allows scientists to learn more about atmospheric composition, climate and microbiota of the past. With respect to the latter, the team's analysis revealed the genetic codes for 33 viruses from ice dating back as far as some 15,000 years — four of which were known to science, but at least 28 of which are novel. Depicted: cross sections of the two of the core sample, showing the locations and ages of some of the bacteria and viruses identified
'These are viruses that would have thrived in extreme environments,' explained paper author and microbiologist Matthew Sullivan, also of Ohio State University.
'These viruses have signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments — just surreal genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions.'
Based on the environment and comparison to known viruses, the team believe that the newly-discovered viruses likely came from the soil or plants — rather than infecting animals or humans.
'These are not easy signatures to pull out, and the method that Zhi-Ping developed to decontaminate the cores and to study microbes and viruses in ice could help us search for these genetic sequences in other extreme icy environments.'
'These settings could included locations like Mars, for example, the moon, or closer to home in Earth’s Atacama Desert.'
According to the researchers, the study of viruses found preserved in glaciers is a relatively new field — their paper is only the third of its kind — but it is an area of investigation that will become more important as the Earth warms and glaciers melt.
'We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there,' said paper author and earth scientist Lonnie Thompson, also of the Ohio State University.
'The documentation and understanding of that is extremely important: How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we’re in now?'
The full findings of the study were published in the journal Microbiome.
The team from the Ohio State University took two cores of ice from the Guliya ice cap on the far western Kunlun Shan on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, in China
HOW DO VIRUSES WORK?
A virus particle, or virion, is made up of three parts: a set of genetic instructions, either DNA or RNA; coat of protein that surrounds the DNA or RNA to protect it; a lipid membrane, which surrounds the protein coat.
Unlike human cells or bacteria, viruses don't contain the chemical machinery, called enzymes, needed to carry out the chemical reactions to divide and spread.
They carry only one or two enzymes that decode their genetic instructions, and need a host cell, like bacteria, a plant or animal, in which to live and make more viruses.
When a virus infects a living cell, it hijacks and reprograms the cell to turn it into a virus-producing factory.
Proteins on the virus interact with specific receptors on the target cell.
The virus then inserts its genetic code into the target cell, while the cell's own DNA is degraded.
The target cell is then 'hijacked', it begins using the virus' genetic code as a blueprint to produce more viruses.
The cell eventually bursts open to release the new, intact viruses that then infect other cells and begin the process again.
Once free from the host cell, the new viruses can attack other cells.
Because one virus can reproduce thousands of new viruses, viral infections can spread quickly throughout the body.
A melting glacier in Tibet has revealed over two dozen previously unknown viruses. The researchers found the viruses in 15,000-year-old ice from the Guliya ice cap of the Tibetan Plateau. They found a total of 33 viruses with 28 of them being completely new to science.
Zhi-Ping Zhong, who is a microbiologist from Ohio State University, went into further details, “These glaciers were formed gradually, and along with dust and gases, many, many viruses were also deposited in that ice.” The same microbes could have possibly been in the atmosphere during that time. “Melting will not only lead to the loss of those ancient, archived microbes and viruses, but also release them to the environments in the future.”
The viruses incredibly would have been thriving in that type of environment with “signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments – just surreal genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions,” as explained by Matthew Sullivan who is a microbiologist at Ohio State University.
The researchers then found that the most common viruses found in the ice were bacteriophages that infect Methylobacterium. They were closely related to viruses in Methylobacterium strains that have been found in soil and plants. In other words, the team thinks that the viruses originated in soil and plants.
There are still many questions that need to be answered, such as “How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we’re in now?” asked Earth scientist Lonnie Thompson, adding, “We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there.”
In other ancient virus news, analysis of 31,600-year-old baby teeth has indicated that the common cold has been around much longer than modern humans. The three baby teeth were found at an archaeological site called Yana “Rhinoceros Horn Site” (RHS) in Siberia and belonged to two different children who lost them between the ages of 10 and 12.
The DNA analysis of the teeth suggests that human adenovirus C (or HAdV-C), which is a virus that causes a mild cold, could have possibly originated hundreds of thousands of years ago (viruses can enter teeth from the bloodstream). Specifically, they believe that the HAdV-C split from other adenoviruses at least 700,000 years ago. The team noticed that the genomes found in the ancient teeth were similar to adenoviruses that were around between the 1950s and 2010s. That is one long-lasting virus.
A melting glacier in Tibet has revealed over two dozen previously unknown viruses. The researchers found the viruses in 15,000-year-old ice from the Guliya ice cap of the Tibetan Plateau. They found a total of 33 viruses with 28 of them being completely new to science.
Zhi-Ping Zhong, who is a microbiologist from Ohio State University, went into further details, “These glaciers were formed gradually, and along with dust and gases, many, many viruses were also deposited in that ice.” The same microbes could have possibly been in the atmosphere during that time. “Melting will not only lead to the loss of those ancient, archived microbes and viruses, but also release them to the environments in the future.”
The viruses incredibly would have been thriving in that type of environment with “signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments – just surreal genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions,” as explained by Matthew Sullivan who is a microbiologist at Ohio State University.
The researchers then found that the most common viruses found in the ice were bacteriophages that infect Methylobacterium. They were closely related to viruses in Methylobacterium strains that have been found in soil and plants. In other words, the team thinks that the viruses originated in soil and plants.
There are still many questions that need to be answered, such as “How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we’re in now?” asked Earth scientist Lonnie Thompson, adding, “We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there.”
In other ancient virus news, analysis of 31,600-year-old baby teeth has indicated that the common cold has been around much longer than modern humans. The three baby teeth were found at an archaeological site called Yana “Rhinoceros Horn Site” (RHS) in Siberia and belonged to two different children who lost them between the ages of 10 and 12.
The DNA analysis of the teeth suggests that human adenovirus C (or HAdV-C), which is a virus that causes a mild cold, could have possibly originated hundreds of thousands of years ago (viruses can enter teeth from the bloodstream). Specifically, they believe that the HAdV-C split from other adenoviruses at least 700,000 years ago. The team noticed that the genomes found in the ancient teeth were similar to adenoviruses that were around between the 1950s and 2010s. That is one long-lasting virus.
Susan Sheppard was someone I first got to know in 2014at that year’s annual Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. I next caught up with Susan at the 2016 gig and had a great time. That was the last time I saw Susan. Tragically, Susan passed away in April of this year. In part, her obituary read as follows: “Susan Sheppard, noted poet, author, artist and creator of the Haunted Parkersburg Ghost Tours, died at her home on Monday, April 19, 2021, after a brief but courageous battle with cancer…In the 1990s, Susan started researching and presenting talks about hauntings and the history of downtown Parkersburg and the surrounding areas. Eventually, these talks evolved into the ‘Haunted Parkersburg Walking Tours,’ which she and her helpers presented on weekends during the Halloween season for the past 25 years. Susan’s Tours became some of the most popular in the US, according to several websites that rank them. She also appeared on many nationally-broadcast TV shows about the hauntings in the Mid-Ohio Valley on the Travel Channel, Syfy Channel and others.” Susan gave me one of her reports that made for fascinating reading. And, she very generously let me share it with anyone else who might have liked to read it, too. So, that’s exactly what I’ve done. It’s surely one of those cases that put Susan on the path to try and solve the mysteries in the areas right around her.
Susan Sheppard (Nick Redfern, 2016)
In Susan’s own words: “In late winter of 1967 a church bus was driving over Route 50 that then went directly through the small town of West Union, where I was raised. The occupants of the bus noticed on nearby Shannon’s Knob that a UFO was hovering over my family’s home. Shannon’s Knob was the hillside I grew up on and the highest point in the town. A woman who was a passenger on the bus called my parents to tell them about the spacecraft suspended over our home but my parents were disbelieving. The following spring my friend Regina Ball and I were playing on the hillside above my family’s house. At the peak of Shannon’s Knob was the entire power source for the town of West Union. We walked up a hill near a clearing to play “Indians” like we always did. As Jeanie and I played, we suddenly heard men’s voices. Turning, we saw two men dressed in black near the rise above us. We were frolicking near the bushes but when we noticed the Men in Black we became scared and hid. We watched silently as the two men measured a spot on the hillside.”
Susan continued: “The men exuded an uncanny energy which I immediately sensed. They also looked differently from each other. One man appeared to be of European descent while the other one had an East Asian appearance. The one with the Asian appearance had what looked to be dyed blond hair that was cut very short. Neither was wearing a hat, nor did they wear a suit and tie. They simply had on a black shirt and black pants. The men seem interested only in the landscape and spoke to each other in low voices. Jeanie and I spied on the two men until they left. There was no vehicle anywhere close. Where they came from, we did not know. Jeanie and I went home and forgot all about them. In years to come, we would both suffer from migraine headaches and just overall poor health. We never linked the Men in Black up on the hill with our headaches.”
Mothman statue (Nick Redfern, 2016)
There was more to come from Susan: “A few days after some boys were playing on the same hillside. The boys noticed a circular impression in the grass that was about 15-20 feet wide in a treeless area on Shannon’s Knob. They went home and reported it to their parents. My brother came home from school relaying the story from his friends. In my child’s mind, I made the connection. It was almost like a secret that only I was privy to. To my knowledge, no one ever followed up on the circular impression on Shannon’s Knob nor the UFO sighting over our house. In the winter and spring of 1967, when my grandfather was hit and killed by a train and we witnessed the Men in Black up on Shannon’s Knob, we had other bizarre happenings. Our home became an epicenter for poltergeist activity. Ceramic birds flew off our living room mantle. Pictures fell off the walls. A heavy iron was tossed from my bedroom into the bedroom of my parents and slid under the bed where my Dad was sleeping.”
Continuing from Susan: “But nothing was quite as strange as the footsteps I heard walking on the roof at night. This was the winter of 1967 and for the most part, appearances of these footsteps went on for as long as up until 1970. On certain nights, around 2:00 a.m. a loud bang would punctuate the stillness of my bedroom. It originated from the roof above me. It sounded like someone had jumped out of a helicopter onto our roof with a boom. There would be a pause of a few moments, and then, whoever it was, began to walk on the roof. The roof would creak under the weight. If I would scream for my parents, which I did often, the footsteps would pause until it grew quiet again and they would start right back up. At first my parents did not believe me. However, one morning I heard them talking amongst themselves. My parents had heard the footsteps on the roof as well.
Nick Redfern (2016)
And, finally from Susan: “I began to sleepwalk. Sometimes I would wake up to hear the radio playing what sounded like a Catholic Mass but there were no active Catholic churches in my town. I reached over to turn off the radio and found that the radio wasn’t on. Then I would lie there and listen to a ‘broadcast’ of an ‘angel choir’ with no source for the music until the cords faded as the sun finally came up. One morning I woke up in a different bedroom that my family never used with a sheet pulled over my head like I was a dead person on a gurney ready to be taken to the morgue. As I stirred from sleep, I felt my skin had grown cold against the clammy air and realized every stitch of my clothing had been removed. I had no idea how I got there nor why my clothes had been taken off me. Embarrassed, I jumped from the bare bed, put my clothes on and never told a soul. My parents were sleeping normally in theirs. I was seven years old. Perhaps the strangest tale of all was one about our house more than a decade before we moved in. A young woman was babysitting at what would later be our home. She thought she heard something attempting to climb up the side wall of the house. Too frightened to go check for herself, the girl called the West Union city police. When cops came to check the house, they were shocked when their flashlights shone up the side of the wall. There were muddy footprints traveling up the side of the house. Whether they were human or something else, that part I don’t know. From then on our house became known as one that was ‘haunted’ in town. But by what?” What, indeed.
I have written about this before, but this story just got a whole lot stranger. In previous years, most Americans haven’t been too concerned when giant swarms of insects have devoured crops on the other side of the globe, but now this is actually happening right here in the good old United States of America on a massive scale. The hot, dry conditions in the western half of the nation have created ideal conditions for grasshoppers to flourish, and millions upon millions of them are now wreaking havoc wherever they go. In fact, the National Weather Service says that some of the grasshopper swarms are so large that they are showing up on radar…
The National Weather Service (NWS) Glasgow says the radar is lighting up, but not with rain.
Instead, the radar is picking up “countless” grasshoppers in the area according to a post from the NWS.
The grasshoppers are flying as high as 10,000 feet above the ground and are being picked up by the radar the NWS said.
I have never heard of such a thing happening in this nation in my entire lifetime.
They’re arriving in swarms so dense it can appear the earth is moving. They’re covering roads and fields, pelting ATV riders, and steadily devouring grains and grass to the bedevilment of farmers and ranchers.
A massive population of grasshoppers is proliferating in the sweltering American west, where a deep drought has made for ideal conditions for grasshopper eggs to hatch and survive into adulthood.
Agricultural production in the western half of the country was already going to be below expectations because of the endless megadrought, and now these grasshoppers are “steadily devouring” fields that farmers have meticulously cultivated.
Not only that, grasshoppers are also eating much of what our cattle herds were supposed to be eating as well…
Grasshoppers, which thrive in hot, dry weather, have been defoliating trees and competing with cattle for food — and the bugs are winning. Ranchers are selling cattle “due to poor forage conditions and a lack of feed,” according to the latest US drought monitor.
This is not a small problem that we are talking about.
Around 93% of the West is in some level of drought this week, and a bizarre impact of this pernicious dry condition is the explosion of the grasshopper population. Grasshoppers have devoured so much vegetation that many ranchers fear rangelands could be stripped bare.
A 2021 grasshopper hazard map from the US Department of Agriculture shows each square yard of land contains at least 15 grasshoppers in parts of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska.
That is nuts. I knew that this crisis was bad, but I didn’t know that it was this bad.
From the moment that they are born until the moment they die, these grasshoppers are constantly eating.
In the past, I have used the term “voracious” to describe them, and that is precisely what they are. They are never satisfied, and they are always looking for new fields to ravage.
One rancher in southern Oregon is absolutely horrified that they have shown up in his area in such massive numbers this year…
“I can only describe grasshoppers in expletives,” said Richard Nicholson, a cattle rancher in Fort Klamath, a small community in southern Oregon, who once recalled seeing grasshopper bands eat 1,000 acres a day and cover the ground like snow. The insects cause innumerable headaches for farmers and ranchers, competing with cattle for tough-to-find wild forage and costing tens of thousands of dollars in lost crops and associated costs. “They are a scourge of the Earth … They just destroy the land, destroy the crops. They are just a bad, bad predator.”
Needless to say, this is yet another factor which will have a huge impact on agricultural production this year.
Food prices have already been rising quite aggressively in recent months, and this certainly isn’t going to help matters.
Just when you think that things can’t possibly get any worse in the western half of the country, somehow they do, and many believe that what we have experienced so far is just the beginning.
Scientists are telling us that there is no end in sight for the endless megadrought that is affecting so many western states right now, and that means that the grasshoppers will be with us for the foreseeable future as well.
The summer of 2021 is only a couple of weeks old, but already there have been so many problems. Hopefully things will start to return to “normal” soon, but personally I have a feeling that a whole lot more chaos is just around the corner.
***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe. I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.
Archeologists have determined that 107 ancient Roman coins found on the banks of the Aa river in the village of Berlicuma in the Netherlands were left there by superstitious travelers crossing the waterway to ensure their safe passage. For positive proof, they need to find a troll booth.
The NYPD’s official beekeeper amazed tourists and Manhattan residents by removing a swarm of approximately 25,000 bees from a spot on Times Square and transporting them to a safe location. Which, in New York City, is anyplace besides Times Square.
Facebook’s AI research team joined forces with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and the University of California, Berkeley, to train a four-legged robot to use AI learning to walk over sand, rocks and other difficult surfaces, adjusting its stride as it moves to keep from falling. When they do this with a two-legged robot looking at a cellphone, let us know.
The European Space Agency’s Fast Kinetic Deflection (FastKD project proposes in a new study that large telecommunications satellites used for TV broadcasting could be quickly and easily repurposed as asteroid deflectors if a space rock were to threaten Earth. But only if they don’t interrupt Dr. Who.
Researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a new radar scanning system that uses one receiver and many transmitters to create real-time images and video of objects are hidden behind walls or moving at hypersonic speeds. If you have something moving at hypersonic speed inside your wall, it’s time to move.
A research team in China declassified an unmanned underwater drone that can recognize, follow and attack an enemy submarine without human instruction — which was developed in secret by the military more than a decade ago. If it flies too, we need to learn the Chinese word for Tic-Tac.
At the recent Goodwood Festival of Speed, a British designer unveiled a car that removes pollution from the air as it travels around town. It can’t be driven in U.S. cities yet because the container in the trunk is way too small.
Using new data from satellite laser instruments, NASA scientists have penetrated Antarctica’s thick ice sheet and discovered two new hidden but active subglacial lakes which cyclically fill and drain into the Southern Ocean. Thanks, NASA, for some cool news in this record-breaking hot summer.
A team from NASA and NOAA found that Earth’s “energy imbalance” doubled between 2005 and 2019, meaning Earth is retaining more than twice as much heat annually as it was 15 years ago, and the causes are melting ice, which reduces the amount of reflective white surface, and greenhouse gases, which prevent radiation from escaping, increasing the overall energy retained. Thanks, NASA, for reminding us why there’s so little ‘cool’ news these days.
Three towns in Wisconsin — Belleville, Dundee and Elmwood — are fighting over which one is the UFO capital of the state, with Dundee claiming to have an alien in a jar, Elmwood having a police officer as a reliable witness to one, and Elmwood with one picked up by FAA radar. Cows in Wisconsin are relieved humans are finally fighting over something besides cheese.
A team of nanoscientists in China have discovered a way to grow microfibers of water ice that can flex and bend into a loop without breaking the ice surface. This could completely change figure skating at the Winter Olympics into an extreme event.
12 Biggest Sinkholes Caught Swallowing Things On An EPIC Scale
12 Biggest Sinkholes Caught Swallowing Things On An EPIC Scale
If you haven’t seen any sinkholes, let us tell you that they are pretty terrifying to watch, let alone be close to. Just imagine the fear anyone would feel while being swallowed by the earth under their feet. It’s pretty much the same as being buried alive. Although not all sinkholes turn out to be utterly devastating, some are the epitome of danger. In today’s video, we’ll be telling you all about the craziest sinkholes that were caught on camera, from a sinkhole that boiled people alive to the one that swallowed an entire beach.
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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 74 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.
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