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.
19-05-2021
First nuclear detonation created ‘impossible’ quasicrystals
First nuclear detonation created ‘impossible’ quasicrystals
Their structures were once controversial. Now researchers have discovered quasicrystals in the aftermath of a 1945 bomb test.
This sample of red trinitite was found to contain a previously unknown type of quasicrystal.
Credit: Luca Bindi, Paul J. Steinhardt
Scientists searching for quasicrystals — so-called ‘impossible’ materials with unusual, non-repeating structures — have identified one in remnants of the world’s first nuclear bomb test.
The previously unknown structure, made of iron, silicon, copper and calcium, probably formed from the fusion of vaporized desert sand and copper cables. Similar materials have been synthesized in the laboratory and identified in meteorites, but this one, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 17 May, is the first example of a quasicrystal with this combination of elements1.
Impossible symmetries
Quasicrystals contain building blocks made up of arrangements of atoms that — unlike those in ordinary crystals — do not repeat in a regular, brickwork-like pattern. Whereas ordinary crystal structures look identical after being translated (shifted along certain directions), quasicrystals have symmetries that were once considered impossible: for example, some have pentagonal symmetry, and so look the same if rotated by one-fifth of a full twist.
Materials scientist Daniel Shechtman, now at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, first discovered such an impossible symmetry in a synthetic alloy in 1982. It had pentagonal symmetry when rotated in each of various possible directions, something that would occur if its building blocks were icosahedral — that is, had a regular shape with 20 faces2. Many researchers initially questioned Shechtman’s findings, because it is mathematically impossible to fill space using only icosahedrons. Shechtman ultimately won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.
At around the same time, Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist now at Princeton University in New Jersey, and his collaborators had begun to theorize the possible existence of non-repeating 3D structures. These had the same symmetry as an icosahedron, but were assembled from building blocks of several different types, which never repeated in the same pattern3 — thus explaining why the mathematics of symmetrical crystals had missed them. Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, now at the University of Oxford, UK, and other researchers had previously discovered analogous patterns in two dimensions, which are called Penrose tilings.
Steinhardt recalls the moment in 1982 when he first saw the experimental data from Shechtman’s discovery and compared it with his theoretical predictions. “I stood up from my desk and went and looked at our pattern, and you couldn’t tell the difference,” he says. “So that was kind of an amazing moment.”
In subsequent years, materials scientists synthesized many types of quasicrystal, expanding the range of possible forbidden symmetries. And Steinhardt and his colleagues later found the first naturally occurring ‘icosahedrite’ in fragments from a meteorite recovered in Eastern Siberia, Russia. This quasicrystal probably formed in a collision between two asteroids in the early Solar System, Steinhardt says. Some of the lab-made quasicrystals were also produced by smashing materials together at high speed, so Steinhardt and his team wondered whether the shockwaves from nuclear explosions might form quasicrystals, too.
‘Slicing and dicing’
In the aftermath of the Trinity test — the first ever detonation of a nuclear bomb, which took place on 16 July 1945 at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Bombing Range — researchers found a vast field of greenish glassy material that had formed from the liquefaction of desert sand. They dubbed this trinitite.
The plutonium bomb had been detonated on top of a 30-metre-high tower, which was laden with sensors and their cables. As a result, some of the trinitite that formed had reddish inclusions, says Steinhardt. “It was a fusion of natural material with copper from the transmission lines.” Quasicrystals often form from elements that would not normally combine, so Steinhardt and his colleagues thought samples of the red trinitite would be a good place to look for quasicrystals.
“Over the course of ten months, we were slicing and dicing, looking at all sorts of minerals,” Steinhardt says. “Finally, we found a tiny grain.” The quasicrystal has the same kind of icosahedral symmetry as the one in Shechtman’s original discovery.
“The dominance of silicon in its structure is quite distinct,” says Valeria Molinero, a theoretical chemist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “However, after many quasicrystals have been synthesized in the lab,” she says, “what I find truly intriguing is that they are so scarce in nature.” Steinhardt says this might be because the formation of quasicrystals involves “unusual combinations of elements and unusual arrangements”.
Like most known quasicrystals, the trinitite structure seems to be an alloy — a metal-like material made up of positive ions in a sea of electrons. This is unusual for silicon, which typically occurs in rock in an oxidized form: reversing the oxidation would require extreme conditions, such as the intense heat and pressure of a shockwave, says Lincoln Hollister, a geoscientist at Princeton.
Steinhardt suggests that quasicrystals could be used for a kind of nuclear forensic science, because they might reveal sites where a covert nuclear test has occurred. Quasicrystals might also form in other materials that were generated in violent conditions, such as fulgurite, the material made when lightning strikes rock, sand or other sediments. “The quasicrystal saga will continue!” says Hollister.
Het is zeer waarschijnlijk dat de hoeveelheid microplastics in de oceanen, zeeën en havens over de hele wereld minimaal twee keer zo groot is als voorheen werd gedacht. Een nieuw onderzoek toont aan dat de vervuilingvan de wereldoceanen door microplastics veel dramatischer blijkt te zijn dan eerder gedacht en geschat werd.
2 keer zoveel microplastics in oceanen dan gedacht | Foto: Pixabay
Nieuw onderzoek – de cijfers
Dit is ontdekt in een nieuwe studie, gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift Environmental Pollution, waarbij een nog fijnere versie van het fijnmazig net dat voor eerdere onderzoek gebruikt werd is ingezet om microplastics op te vangen.
Professor Pennie Lindeque, onderzoeker van de Plymouth Marine Laboratory in het Verenigd Koninkrijk, leidde het onderzoek. In het onderzoek werden netten met maaswijdtes gebruikt van 100 microns (100 microns = 0,1 mm), 333 microns en 500 microns. Er werden 2,5 keer zo veel deeltjes gevonden in het fijnste net dan in het 333 micron net wat normaal gesproken gebruikt wordt om microplastics te filteren en 10 keer zoveel deeltjes als in het 500 micron net. De deeltjes waren grotendeels vezels van textielen zoals touwen, netten en kleding.
Onderzoekers zeefden de kustwateren van zowel het Verenigd Koninkrijk als de Verenigde Staten en vonden beduidend meer deeltjes met netten met een maaswijdte van 100 microns. De globale schattingen van microplastics aan de oppervlakte van het water zijn daarmee gestegen van tussen de 5 en 50 biljoen deeltjes naar tussen de 12 biljoen en 125 biljoen deeltjes. En zelfs deze schatting kan te laag zijn, er kunnen namelijk nog kleinere microplastic deeltjes in de oceanen en zeeën rondzwerven die niet door de 100 micron visnetten gevangen kunnen worden.
Lindeque voegde hier nog het volgende aan toe:
“Gebruikmakend van een extrapolatie, zijn we van mening dat de microplasticsdichtheid meer dan 3.700 deeltjes per kubieke meter kan zijn, wat veel meer is dan de hoeveelheid zoöplankton per kubieke meter. Deze microscopische dieren zijn één van de meest overvloedige diersoorten op aarde.”
De vraag is natuurlijk, wat heeft het voor invloed op het biosysteem als er minuscule plastic deeltjes drijven in de oceaan? Om daar een passend antwoord op te geven moeten we iets dieper kijken naar hoe de voedselketen precies is opgesteld in de oceanen en zeeën wereldwijd. Hieronder een diagram van de voedselketen van zeedieren om dit iets duidelijker te maken. De oorsprong van elke pijl is het dier dat voedsel is van het dier waar de pijl eindigt.
Het punt in deze voedselketen waar microplastics een probleem vormen begint bij zoöplankton, wat een verzamelnaam is voor dieren die niet tegen de stroming kunnen inzwemmen. Dit zijn voornamelijk minuscule dieren (zoals de roeipootkreeftjes, van 0,5 mm tot 5 mm, die driekwart van alle zoöplankton in de Noordzee uitmaken), al behoren kwallen ook tot deze categorie. Om de roeipootkreeftjes als voorbeeld te nemen, dit dier is één van de vele soorten zoöplankton en naar schatting zijn er 1 biljoen roeipootkreeftjes in alle oceanen en zeeën in de wereld. Uit het nieuwe onderzoek is gebleken dat er in sommige wateren meer microplastic deeltjes zijn dan zoöplankton.
De microplasticdeeltjes zijn ongeveer dezelfde grootte als het voedsel van zoöplankton en komt via het zoöplankton terecht in de voedselketen van zeedieren. Het is ook mogelijk dat plastic wordt opgegeten door vissen en zeezoogdieren wanneer zij hun voedsel proberen op te eten, wanneer dan door de grote dichtheid van microplastics in sommige gebieden de deeltjes ook worden opgenomen.
Zoöplankton, tezamen met de plantaardige variant fytoplankton, vormen een belangrijke basis voor de voedselketen in de oceanen, ze dienen als voedsel voor de kleinste vissen tot de grootste walvissen. Echter, ze zijn meer dan alleen de grootste voedselbron voor al het leven in de zee. Zo zorgt fytoplankton voor 70% van de zuurstof op aarde en zorgen de verschillende plankton soorten samen ervoor dat de aarde afkoelt. Het is onlangs ontdekt dat boven oceanen met grote hoeveelheden geconcentreerde planktongroepen een grotere hoeveelheid wolken tot stand komt dan in wateren zonder plankton. De grotere hoeveelheid wolken helpt weer om de aarde af te koelen. Het is dus belangrijk dat plankton gezond blijft, niet alleen voor het leven in de zee, maar ook voor onze levens.
Invloed buiten de oceanen
Een ander, nieuw onderzoek laat zien hoe microplastics ook de voedselketen rondom rivieren binnen is gedrongen, waarbij de onderzochte vogels (waterspreeuwen) die als voeding waterinsecten hebben zo’n 200 plastic deeltjes consumeren per dag. Deze deeltjes waren voornamelijk vezels, en een kwart van deze deeltjes waren groter dan 500 microns. Zij voedden deze deeltjes dan vervolgens ook weer aan hun kuikens. Uit het onderzoek bleek dat ongeveer de helft van de waterinsecten microplastic deeltjes in zich hadden.
De onderzoeksleider, Professor Steve Ormerod van Cardiff University, zei hierover:
“In de bijna 40 jaar dat we deze rivieren en waterspreeuwen onderzoeken had ik nooit gedacht dat onze onderzoeksresultaten ooit zouden aantonen dat deze spectaculaire vogels in gevaar zouden komen door de inname van plastic. Het is een aanduiding van hoe het vervuilingsprobleem ons beslopen heeft.“
Microplastics hebben inmiddels de gehele planeet vervuild, van de Arctische sneeuw en berg bodems tot vele rivieren en de diepste oceanen. Het wordt ook geconsumeerd en ingeademd door mensen en wat voor gevolgen dit heeft voor onze gezondheid is tot dusver niet bekend. Wat wel bekend is, is dat de plasticvervuiling de vruchtbaarheid, groei en overleving van zeedieren schaadt.
Oorzaak en gevolg
De oorzaak van de hoeveelheid plastic op aarde is eenvoudig, het is een ontzettend handig materiaal en we gebruiken het voor van alles. Sinds het in de jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw in massaproductie is gegaan, hebben we 6,3 miljard ton (6,300.000.000.000 kg!) plastic verbruikt. Hiervan is 600 miljoen ton gerecycled. De rest is of in stortplaatsen of in de natuur terechtgekomen.
Onderzoek dat afgelopen maand is gepubliceerd liet zien dat microplastics in grotere hoeveelheden dan ooit tevoren zich op de bodem van de oceaan bevinden. Het onderzoek gaf ook aan dat honderdduizenden tonnen aan microplastics jaarlijks op de kust terechtkomen door de wind en het getij.
Onze redacteur Roy Geers was vorig jaar op rondreis door Vietnam, waarbij hij langs het vissersdorpje Mui Ne kwam. Toen hij googlede op ‘Mui Ne’ kwamen verschillende foto’s tevoorschijn, met prachtige, witte stranden, schone wateren. Paradijs op aarde. De afbeelding hieronder is de eerste afbeelding die Google laat zien. De tweede afbeelding is één van de foto’s die hij had gemaakt toen hij er was. Dit was vrijwel de gehele kustlijn zo, behalve bij de stranden voor 5 sterren resorts.
Foto: Agonda.com
Foto: Roy Geers
Oplossingsgerichte initiatieven
Er zijn de laatste jaren al vele initiatieven geweest om het plasticprobleem tegen te gaan. Van kleine zaken zoals het weghalen van gratis plastic tassen in supermarkten en winkels tot grotere zaken zoals ‘The Ocean Cleanup’, opgericht door de Nederlandse Boyan Slat. De initiatieven verschillen in aanpak, schaal en effectiviteit. De hierboven beschreven initiatieven zijn reactief, en waar de maatregel vanuit de overheid meer een pleister op een open wond is, is het project van Boyan Slat een stuk effectiever.
Het is echter ook belangrijk om het probleem bij de wortels aan te pakken en op een proactieve manier het gebruik van plastic verminderen en/of vervangen. Het probleem van ons plastic gebruik is namelijk dat we het niet alleen voor langdurige producten gebruiken, maar ook voor producten die maar een paar dagen/weken worden gebruikt. Sinds het erg lang duurt voordat plastic producten afbreken en er specifieke eisen aan vast hangen (bijvoorbeeld oxidatie), is het noodzakelijk om de toepassing van plastic in de producten die we gebruiken aan te passen.
Er zijn vele verschillende alternatieven die de laatste jaren uitgevonden zijn en sommige daarvan worden al voor een gedeelte toegepast. Het is echter zo dat sommige van deze alternatieven niet beter zijn dan plastic en alleen afbreekbaar zijn in ideale omstandigheden. Een voorbeeld daarvan is biologisch afbreekbare plastic tassen, wat in de meeste gevallen alleen in een stortplaats afbreekt en vaak ook niet kan afbreken in combinatie met andere plastic soorten. Een beter alternatief zou zijn composteerbare vuilniszakken, welke gewoon thuis in de achtertuin afgebroken kunnen worden. Een goed alternatief voor plastic producten in de supermarkt is MarinaTex, een bioplastic gemaakt van rode algen en organisch afval van de visserij. Dit is zowel eetbaar door mensen en vissen als dat het snel en overal afbreekbaar is.
Puntje bij paaltje kan er natuurlijk van alles gedaan worden om de verspreiding van plastic en daardoor dus ook microplastics tegen te gaan, maar achteraan de streep zijn wij met zijn allen verantwoordelijk. Manieren om de plasticvervuiling te verminderen zijn door een oude plastic tas mee te nemen voor die trip naar de supermarkt, of nog beter, koop een boodschappentas van verantwoorde materialen. Probeer te minderen in plastic gebruik en als het niet anders kan, hergebruik plastic. Gooi uw afval netjes weg en als u wat tegenkomt op straat, raap het op en stop het in een afvalbak. Doneer aan initatieven en stichtingen die het milieu beschermen. Als we allemaal ons best doen, kunnen zowel wij als onze kinderen genieten van de natuur die er nog is.
In nauwelijks zeventig jaar hebben we zoveel plastic geproduceerd en gebruikt dat microplastics in ieder ecosysteem op aarde terug te vinden zijn. De mobiliteit van die deeltjes begint stilaan te lijken op die van andere globale cyclussen zoals water of koolstof.
Tot nu toe werd aangenomen dat microplastics (plasticdeeltjes kleiner dan 5 milimeter) zich voornamelijk ophopen in zeeën en oceanen. Maar de microscopische deeltjes blijken mobieler dan gedacht, en verplaatsen zich evengoed vanuit maritieme ecosystemen via de atmosfeer terug naar het land. 'De rol van het maritiem milieu als een soort reservoir van microplastics is goed onderzocht,' verduidelijkt professor Janice Brahney, expert in aquatische systemen verbonden aan Utah State University. Brahney en haar team onderzochten hoe minusule plasticdeeltjes zich over de wereld verplaatsen. 'Onze bevindingen laten zien dat deze deeltjes ook vanuit de oceanen in de atmosfeer terecht komen en via neerslag opnieuw op land terecht komen. Meer nog, specifiek langs dit atmosferisch traject komt meer plastic aan land dan omgekeerd.'
Microplastics bewegen door verschillende biosystemen op een manier die vergelijkbaar is met andere biogeochemische kringlopen. Dat zijn wereldwijde kringlopen waarlangs chemische substanties zoals water, zuurstof of koolstof zich door verschillende sferen van de planeet bewegen. 'Neem water,' vertelt Brahney. 'Dat verdampt boven de zee, beweegt zich door de atmosfeer, regent uit boven het land om via de bodem en vervolgens rivieren weer naar zee te stromen. Microplastics volgen een vergelijkbaar traject. Bijvoorbeeld via afvalwater via een rivier naar de zee, om daar via verdamping van water in de atmosfeer terecht te komen en uit te regenen boven land. Daar slaan ze neer in de bodem, om later via de wind of erosie weer in beweging te komen.
Artificiële cyclus
Het maritieme milieu vormt dus geen eindpunt voor minuscule plastic deeltjes, aldus Brahney. ‘Microscopische plastic deeltjes reizen met het water mee, maar dat is niet de enige manier. We gingen ervan uit dat de atmosfeer enkel microplastics van het land naar de oceanen bracht. Dat blijkt niet zo te zijn, integendeel. De atmosfeer als traject voor microplastics brengt meer plastic van de zee naar het land dan omgekeerd. Dat valt te verklaren uit het feit dat er zich de voorbije decennia dermate veel plastic in het maritieme milieu heeft opgehoopt dat het een bron van microplastics is geworden via de atmosferische cyclus.'
Microplastics zijn ondertussen overal op aarde terug te vinden, van de diepzee tot in de lichamen van ijsberen op de Noordpool. ‘Net als andere chemische verbindingen bewegen de deeltjes zich door het water, de lucht, de bodem en de het leven op aarde. In enkele decennia tijd is er dus een nieuwe biogeochemische kringloop ontstaan die zich uitstrekt over de hele planeet, eentje die we in tegenstelling tot andere kringlopen volledig zelf gecreëerd hebben.'
2 keer zoveel microplastics in oceanen dan gedacht | Foto: Pixabay
Linda Moulton Howe: RH Negative The Experiencer Blood Type Connection, Hybrids and Human Survival
Linda Moulton Howe: RH Negative The Experiencer Blood Type Connection, Hybrids and Human Survival
Number of US COVID deaths more than 600,000 – India performing mass cremations as cases rise to more than 300,000 new cases per day – US lifts pause on use of J&J vaccine – COVID-19 can cause blood clots and is labelled a “viral thrombotic fever” Blood – Rh factor is a protein found on the surface – Rh+ is the most common blood type. – MUFON survey found that 33% of respondents were RH negative.
MUFON member and experiencer Denise Stoner hypnosis recollection by Kathleen Marden – “The entities are not showing themselves” – “they don’t want to frighten us…humans have been misinformed” – “they are very concerned about our use of nuclear weapons”
ET's Genetic Manipulation of Mankind, Its Still Happening, Alan Steinfeld
ET's Genetic Manipulation of Mankind, Its Still Happening, Alan Steinfeld
ET’s Genetic Manipulation of Mankind, Its Still Happening, Alan Steinfeld
Alan Steinfeld is the host and producer of the long-running television program New Realities where he keeps track of the leading trends in spirituality, the arts and social history.
Warday is a 1984 novel written by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka (and with Strieber himself playing the key role in the story). It makes for grim and disturbing reading. It’s an excellently written book, too; a book that tells the story of a limited nuclear attack on the United States, but which still kills more than sixty million people – from the initial atomic blasts, famine and starvation, radiation, and a wave of out-of-control influenza. The United States is devastated by what is known as Electromagnetic Pulse weaponry. Strieber and Kunetka skillfully tell a story that could, one day, become all too real. In Warday, the United States is a shell of its former self, with chaos, death and destruction rampant. Warday makes it very clear that had the confrontation between the United States and the old USSR escalated beyond a limited one, the result would have been unthinkable: complete and utter obliteration in the northern hemisphere. There’s a reason why I’m bringing this up, as you’ll soon find out. But, first, some background to the story. Here’s a brief summary of Warday:
“The former Undersecretary of Defense tells Strieber that the United States was deploying Spiderweb, an advanced anti-ballistic missile system which could use an orbiting particle beam to destroy both land and submarine launched missiles. To prevent its deployment, the Soviets destroyed the Space Shuttle Enterprise with a hunter-killer satellite. The Soviets then detonated a set of six large nuclear warheads in space above the United States, causing a massive electromagnetic pulse that crippled electronics across the country. The Soviets then launched a limited first strike using satellites to deploy their warheads. In response, the U.S. president, aboard Boeing E-4 NEACP, authorized a counterattack, destroying Moscow, Leningrad, Sevastopol, and the capitals of the Soviet Republics. Shortly afterwards, the NEACP, crippled by the electromagnetic pulse, crash-landed in North Carolina, killing the President but leaving other survivors including the Undersecretary. The ‘limited attack’ by the Soviets destroyed Washington, D.C., San Antonio, and most of Long Island, and ICBM missile fields and major air bases in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, killing about 7 million people. The subsequent firestorms and fallout destroyed most of Brooklyn, Queens, Baltimore, and most of southwest Texas. The Soviet Navy also launched nuclear attacks that destroyed about 90 percent of the United States Navy. The duration of the war was 36 minutes.”
And here’s some background on EMP technology. As Interesting Engineering note: “EMPs, or electromagnetic pulses, are intense bursts of electromagnetic energy that can be utilized to damage electronics. Man-made nuclear EMPS are impressive weapons of war that are sparingly used due to their highly destructive nature. There are natural EMPs that can be caused in small form due to lightning or in large form due to geomagnetic storms. Man-made EMPs are generally created through nuclear explosions. Essentially, these weapons emit a pulse that damages or destroys the electronic systems in an object due to damaging current and voltage surges.”
EveryCRSReport.com state: “Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) is an instantaneous, intense energy field that can overload or disrupt at a distance numerous electrical systems and high technology microcircuits, which are especially sensitive to power surges. A large scale EMP effect can be produced by a single nuclear explosion detonated high in the atmosphere. This method is referred to as High-Altitude EMP (HEMP). A similar, smaller-scale EMP effect can be created using non-nuclear devices with powerful batteries or reactive chemicals. This method is called High Power Microwave (HPM). Several nations, including reported sponsors of terrorism, may currently have a capability to use EMP as a weapon for cyber warfare or cyber terrorism to disrupt communications and other parts of the U.S. critical infrastructure. Also, some equipment and weapons used by the U.S. military may be vulnerable to the effects of EMP.”
There’s a reason for me bringing up this issue. Over the last four or five years I’ve received accounts from people who have had graphic EMP-type dreams that spiraled into total nightmares. And it has happened again – just a few days ago. Of course, this may all be due to the fraught state the world is in right now. Most of those I spoke with, however, didn’t see their dreams as “just dreams” (as one put it), but as glimpses of a terrible, catastrophic future of the real kind. Let’s hope not. Certainly, there’s a down-to-earth reason for it (that you can find it here).
Tech companies are selling the idea of ‘digital resurrection.’ That’s only a problem if we’re dumb enough to buy it.
Transhumanists have hyped the new religion of high technology for decades now. The basic idea, fairly prevalent in Silicon Valley, is that rapid advances in scientific knowledge and tech innovation will culminate in our de facto omniscience and omnipotence. Even though humanity is lost in a godless cosmos, digital devices will allow us to transcend our ape-like forms.
As Google’s Ray Kurzweil famously quipped, “Does God exist? I would say, ‘Not yet.’”
One day soon, they promise, we’ll use artificial intelligence to overcome the limits of our meat-based cognition. According to Yuval Noah Harari’s 2015 best-seller “Homo Deus,” computer programmers will realize the age-old fantasies of shamans and prophets by creating a virtual version of the spiritual realm. These Davos darlings are certain “God is dead,” but Google still wants to patent His best ideas.
Ultimately, they hope to replicate the fabric of ourselves in cyberspace, where we can all live happily ever after — that is, until the electricity goes out. A recent paper by Russian transhumanist Alexey Turchin argues this “digital resurrection” is not only possible but necessary to reach our full potential. We just need enough power — both computational and electric — to create a virtual afterlife and then keep it running.
For Turchin, the solution is to construct a Dyson Sphere around the sun — a megastructure 186 million miles in diameter that’s covered in solar panels to capture the dying star’s rays. That way, we can run the gargantuan super-computers required to house our digital selves. Sounds easy enough, I suppose. Maybe we can fill the potholes in the road while we’re at it.
Joining the race to boost fashionable ideas, the once sober Popular Mechanics covered Turchin’s work enthusiastically:
Think about the end of your life and what might happen next. … If your soul exists, you continue on after death and everything is wonderful. And if it doesn’t and your fate is utter demise, well, some part of you could still continue infinitely as a digital copy. ‘It’s a win-win situation in both scenarios,’ Turchin says.
If these lunatics convince enough people their scheme is truly working, they’ll expect the rest of us to treat these gibbering clones like real people. Even worse, given the shrill demands for “religious tolerance,” we’ll have to pretend we enjoy their company.
Into The Machine
The concept behind digital resurrection goes back to the “Ship of Theseus” paradox, articulated by the ancient Greeks. Imagine you have a huge wooden ship. You gradually replace the rotten boards with new wood, plank by plank. Eventually, every old part has been replaced by something new. Is it not the same ship as before, only better?
Transhumanists seek to do the same with the human personality. Every neuron will be replaced by networked processors — and then some. For example, to preserve himself for future immortality, Alexey Turchin submits the details of his life to “ubiquitous surveillance.” In addition to keeping a trivia-packed diary, he records every conversation, videotapes his behaviors, and wears an EEG headset while making art or listening to music. He has faith that one day some godlike AI will use this tedious information to “resurrect” him.
You could call this self-obsessed behavior a personal quirk, but Turchin is hardly alone in this endeavor. For many, it’s been part of the new normal since before the New Normal.
The Scan Truck is a good illustration, both literally and allegorically. Based in Los Angeles, the company developed a “mobile photogrammetry studio” decked out with more than 200 digital cameras “to capture the uppermost, photorealistic models.” The experience is like stepping into an inside-out insect eye.
Subjects who enter The Scan Truck’s portable Panopticon — preferably in the buff — have a million pics snapped from every possible angle. The resulting composite image is then used to create a “digital double.” This second self includes every scar, pore, and birthmark. The service has become enormously popular among special effects specialists in the movie industry. It’s also used to create hyper-realistic avatars to inhabit a virtual environment.
Clever enough, but what about one’s inner self?
‘Alexa, Upload My Soul’
In line with Turchin’s methodology, a “digital immortality industry” has emerged to monitor every aspect of your life. Their services, as advertised, will create a lasting imprint of your earthly persona for friends and family to enjoy when you’re gone.
Start-ups with names like Eterni.me, Replika, DeadSocial, and Deep Nostalgia are working hard to re-create deceased loved ones from photographs, home videos, personal diaries, intimate letters, second-hand anecdotes, and of course, online tracking technology. Replika offers an AI talk therapy app that probes living subjects to get at the core of their personality. The constant refrain is that we need to “break down privacy barriers” and “become vulnerable” to digital invasion.
For a modest price, this data is correlated with the subject’s physical attributes. The resulting electro-wraith can then speak to the bereaved from beyond the grave. Just open your laptop, and there’s your late grandma, insisting you have another plate of chicken casserole.
What about grandma’s subjective soul, though — that mysterious entity who watched you grow up from behind her smiling eyes?
When transhumanists tackle this issue — which is less often than you’d think — they typically deny the existence of a stable, spiritual self that’s distinct from brain activity. When the body dies, that “soul” will disappear. That’s why creating an electronic backup is so important.
For one thing, AI augmentation will make Grandma 2.0 smarter and less whimsical. For another, some rude guest is bound to sit in her empty chair if you don’t replace her with a digital super-being.
Throughout that process, the still-embodied subject is scanned, probed, and reconstructed as a digital double. Making multiple copies is even better, but anything beats total oblivion. As years pass, the biological version will wither like a butterfly cocoon. The digital double will soar into the future on a cloud of 1’s and 0’s.
For those guided by materialist philosophies — where transcendence is only available via physical means — there’s no better way to overcome the finality of death. Naturally, transhumanists tend to see people who believe in a spiritual existence beyond this mortal coil as quaint at best. As a quaint heathen myself, I suspect their well-heeled megalomania is far more irrational than any traditional religion.
Transhuman Heaven Sounds Like Hell
These technocratic delusions are only a problem to the extent we’re forced to participate. I’m content to live my life as a caveman and let others become cyborgs, so long as they keep their crossed wires to themselves. That’s not the world they’re creating, though. The insidious elements of their techno-cult — from materialist self-obsession to ubiquitous surveillance — have crept into our daily lives for decades now.
Consider the widespread adoption of monitored electronic communication. In olden times, the idea that our most intimate letters could be intercepted, analyzed, and added to detailed personal dossiers kept by tech executives and government agents — to be used at their pleasure — would be laughable. Today, it’s as routine as driving a few blocks to the grocery store.
In the blink of an eye, we saw the rapid migration of personal interaction to social media. It’s now normal to document a child’s life for public consumption by total strangers. For many, the privacy barriers have already been broken down. We’ve made ourselves vulnerable. The craziest part is that most have enjoyed it.
The next steps in this supposedly inevitable process are just over the horizon. After years of stops and starts, virtual reality will soon be as commonplace as a television set. Many youngsters already idolize “virtual influencers“ who dance across their touchscreens. These bubblegum apparitions are elaborate, entirely fictitious pop stars made from scratch by devious programmers. Some kids have no clue they’re not real people.
For years now, men of fighting age have retreated into video games. Would-be mothers are using dating apps to run out the biological clock. Having been conditioned by porn for generations, wealthy incels are sleeping with eerily convincing silicone dolls. Super-real sexbots are just around the corner. When the snozzberries taste like snozzberries, you’ll know the end is nigh.
Virtualized Detachment From Reality
In all of this, we see an increasing detachment from the real world of visceral struggle, heartbreak, and redemption. Without these challenges, people don’t develop character or deep social bonds. Anime-obsessed man-babies are a symptom of this tendency. The insane desire for “digital immortality” is another.
Technocracy is being normalized at an alarming pace. If a population can be convinced that kids need state-supplied hormone blockers to become self-realized, it’s only a matter of time before they’re ready to upload their souls to corporate data banks. In fact, just hack into their smartphone and you’ll see they’re already doing it.
One of the darker tenets of the techno-cult is that their innovations are necessary for survival. Anyone who chooses to reject body modification, cognitive enhancement, or mind-uploading will be like job applicants who come to an interview with no smartphone or social media account. They’ll get left in the dust.
In a competitive technocracy, organic humans are doomed to extinction. Trendy cyborgs will transition to digital immortality, while the rest of us become fossils. To the extent that Big Tech holds sway over our lives, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yet the transhumanists have it backward — at least in the long run. The Egyptians were convinced they would reign forever, as were the Romans. Ultimately, however, their arrogance proved futile. The same will be said of Silicon Valley oligarchs and their consumerist disciples. One day, “immortal digital souls” will be displayed in museums like crumbling marble statues.
Until then, we’d be wise to build high fences as nature takes its course. We’re still free to choose our own paths. This is a spiritual conflict on their terms, but I’m keeping faith that anything is possible.
Joe Allen is a fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees. For years, he worked as a rigger on various concert tours. Between gigs, he studied religion and science at UTK and Boston University. Find him atwww.joebot.xyzor@EvoPsychosis.
New Steve Quayle: Human Extinction Accelerated on The Hagmann Report
New Steve Quayle: Human Extinction Accelerated on The Hagmann Report
New Steve Quayle: Human Extinction Accelerated on The Hagmann Report
Steve Quayle is a researcher and author of over a dozen books dealing with advanced ancient technology and civilizations. His documentary film production company Gensix Productions films the “True Legends The Series” all over the world in search of the Lost Cities and the giants of history who were the builders of the great megalithic structures of the ancient world.
Steve is a former talk radio show host who has been warning against genetic armageddon and the end of the human race for decades. He claims transhumanism and the hybrid age is the most dangerous advancement in the technological war against humanity in history.
The wild is a scary place. Filled with so many predators, a day out in the real wilderness is a game of survival. Luckily, we are tucked away from the dangers of these wild animals but occasionally one might skip the fence and make its way to our neighborhood. Though fatalities from such encounters are usually very rare, it does happen. But we aren’t here today talking about animals which eat other animals, but something quite surprising. Meet the 10 plants that eat animals and some of them can be grown in your own garden.
A visit to the beach is something we often look forward to. There’s nothing quite like letting off some steam by just sitting on the coastline and enjoying the view of the sea and the waves crashing. But sometimes, an innocent wave might drop off something unexpected and take you by surprise. Here are 10 strangest recent beach discoveries from around the world and you won’t believe it.
Plastic Is Falling From the Sky. But Where’s It Coming From?
Plastic Is Falling From the Sky. But Where’s It Coming From?
At any given time, 1,100 tons of microplastic are floating over the western US. New modeling shows the surprising sources of the nefarious pollutant.
PHOTOGRAPH: MIKE KEMP/GETTY IMAGES
IF YOU FIND yourself in some secluded spot in the American West—maybe Yellowstone, or the deserts of Utah, or the forests of Oregon—take a deep breath and get some fresh air along with some microplastic. According to new modeling, 1,100 tons of it is currently floating above the western US. The stuff is falling out of the sky, tainting the most remote corners of North America—and the world. As I’ve said before, plastic rain is the new acid rain.
But where is it all coming from? You’d think it’d be arising from nearby cities—western metropolises like Denver and Salt Lake City. But new modeling published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that 84 percent of airborne microplastics in the American West actually comes from the roads outside of major cities. Another 11 percent could be blowing all the way in from the ocean. (The researchers who built the model reckon that microplastic particles stay airborne for nearly a week, and that’s more than enough time for them to cross continents and oceans.)
Microplastics—particles smaller than 5 millimeters—come from a number of sources. Plastic bags and bottles released into the environment break down into smaller and smaller bits. Your washing machine is another major source: When you launder synthetic clothing, tiny microfibers slough off and get flushed to a wastewater treatment plant. That facility filters out some of the microfibers, trapping them in “sludge,” the treated human waste that’s then applied to agricultural fields as fertilizer. That loads the soil with microplastic. A wastewater plant will then flush the remaining microfibers out to sea in the treated water. This has been happening for decades, and because plastics disintegrate but don’t ever really disappear, the amount in the ocean has been skyrocketing.
COURTESY OF JANICE BRAHNEY
In fact, this new research shows there may now be more microplastic blowing out of the ocean at any given time than there is going into it. Put another way: So much has accumulated in the ocean that the land may now be a net importer of microplastic from the sea. “That's really highlighting the role of legacy pollution,” says Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University and co-lead author of the new PNAS paper. “The amount of plastics that are in our ocean is just overwhelming compared to anything that we produce in any given year in the terrestrial environment.”
These microplastics aren’t just washing ashore and accumulating on beaches. When waves crash and winds scour the ocean, they launch seawater droplets into the air. These obviously contain salt, but also organic matter and microplastics. “Then the water evaporates, and you're left just with the aerosols,” or tiny floating bits of particulate matter, says Cornell University researcher Natalie Mahowald, who co-led the work with Brahney. “Classically, we atmospheric scientists have always known that there are sea salts coming in this way,” she continues. But last year, another group of researchers demonstrated this phenomenon with microplastics, showing that they turn up in sea breezes.
This time, Mahowald and Brahney thought bigger, using atmospheric models to show how far marine microplastics might travel after they take to the air. They also looked at other sources of microplastic emissions, like roads, cities, and agricultural fields. They knew, for instance, how much dust is generated from fields and how much microplastic might be in that dust.
The researchers then combined this atmospheric modeling with real-world data. Brahney used air samplers scattered in remote locations throughout the American West, so at a given time she could say how many plastic particles had fallen out of the sky. Mahowald’s modeling could also say what the atmospheric and climate conditions were like at that time, allowing the researchers to trace where the particles had likely blown in from.
They found that agricultural dust only provided 5 percent of atmospheric microplastics in the West. And surprisingly, cities supplied only 0.4 percent. “If you were to ask anyone how plastics are getting into the atmosphere, they would say from urban centers,” says Brahney. “I like to think of it more as the roads that are leaving the cities that are the most important.”
COURTESY OF JANICE BRAHNEY
When a car rolls down a road, tiny flecks fly off its tires as part of normal wear and tear. This material isn’t pure rubber; it contains added synthetic rubbers and a slew of other chemicals. Tire particles, then, are technically microplastics, and they’re all over the place. One study in 2019 calculated that 7 trillion microplastics wash into San Francisco Bay each year, most of it from tires.
Cities actually do produce an astonishing amount of microplastic through road traffic and from litter breaking apart, but it doesn’t seem to get high into the atmosphere. That’s for two reasons, Brahney and Mahowald think: Buildings block the wind from scrubbing the surfaces of a city and propelling those bits away, and people drive cars slower in metro areas, so there’s less agitation of tire particles that end up on the roadway. But get out onto the interstate highways and there’s a lot more open space where winds can whip up debris. Plus, says Mahowald, “cars are moving at 60 miles an hour. That's a lot of energy. And little tiny particles can get in the atmosphere with that energy.”
But why did these scientists go through all the trouble of modeling the extreme complexities of the atmosphere, instead of just looking at the characteristics of the microplastics that landed in their traps to figure out where they originated? The sad reality is that these plastics have so thoroughly saturated the environment that, in a sense, they’ve homogenized. Particles from synthetic clothing and from degrading bottles and packaging seem to be moving between the air, land, and sea with such regularity—and enough intermixing—that it’s hard to pinpoint the source of a particular polymer.
“It's not quite hard—it's nearly impossible,” says University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Deonie Allen, who wasn’t involved with this new research. (She coauthored last year’s study that documented microplastics in sea breezes.) “If you model it, you can figure out potentially where it might come from. But if you just look at the chemical signature of the types of plastics you've got in your bucket or in your filter, there's no way for you to tell where they may have come from.” Maybe if you can identify a piece of rubber, there's a good chance it came from a tire. “But the rest of them,” Allen adds, “they could come from anywhere.”
That’s why atmospheric modeling is critical to better understanding how microplastics are moving between environments. Researchers are just beginning to do this—there have been only a few dozen papers so far. Yet scientists need way more data on how much plastic is falling out of the sky, and where. This new research, for instance, concentrated on the American West, but the generation and distribution of particles might work differently elsewhere. The Western states are quite dry, so maybe it’s easier for cars to kick up microplastics there than it is in the soggy South. Also, in Europe, waste plastic is often incorporated into roads as a construction material, which is a noble idea, but it may mean that those roads shed even more plastics, mixing with the ones from tires.
But bit by bit, researchers are developing a clearer picture of how these particles are cycling all over the planet. A major driver appears to be the atmospheric transport detailed in this new research. “We live on a ball inside a bubble,” says University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Steve Allen, who wasn’t involved in the research. (He and Deonie Allen are spouses.) “There's no borders, there's no edges. And this is clearly showing that microplastic is going into the sea and back out of the sea. It's raining on the land and then getting blown back up into the air again, to move somewhere else. There's no stopping it once it's out.”
“It could just be moving around the surface of the Earth endlessly,” agrees Brahney. “That's just really horrifying to think about.”
I’ve discussed this time period for a few months now and we are almost there. plus, i will probably be out of pocket during this time period. Stay aware & Stay cool.
Major Eatchquake Forecast For March 23rd through March 26th.
James Ralph Jarrett was born on September 11, 1923. In December of 1966, 43 year old Ralph was working as a mechanical engineer for Union Carbide and living at 2523 Winter St., which was located in the River Lake Estates subdivision of St. Albans, WV. That December would be one that would change the course of his entire life.
At around 1:50 p.m. on Saturday, December 3, Mr. Jarrett and his brother were working on the north side of his Winter St. home. The day was cold, but it was calm, and the sun was very bright. The brother, Hugh Jarrett, was the first to see the unidentified object and alerted Ralph. The two men observed what they described as a wobbling piece of aluminum foil 200 feet above the Coal River. The object was gaining altitude, but Ralph managed to grab his binoculars within 40 seconds of the initial sighting, and further watched the object. He couldn’t make out much detail as it was fairly far away, but could tell that it was disc-shaped, and that it reflected the sun. It made no noise and emitted no exhaust.
On Saturday, January 14, 1967, Ralph and his father, Hugh Jarrett Sr., spotted ANOTHER unidentified object. It was another clear day, but the temperatures were much milder on this day. At about 5:50 pm, as dusk was setting and a bright red sun was on the horizon, the two men stepped out into the backyard of Ralph’s home. Ralph looked straight up and saw what he described as a brilliant star, brighter than anything else in the sky, moving south very quickly. But, once again Ralph was quicker. This time, instead of running to grab his binoculars, he ran next door and grabbed his neighbor, Donald Reitz, and Reitz’s son, Karl, to witness the strange event before the object disappeared over the horizon.
A third sighting took place on Monday, January 23rd. It was a mild, clear night about 7:10 pm and Ralph was walking east in front of his home when he saw a weird light effect in the trees atop a steep cliff, due north behind his home. He thought it may have been a car’s abnormally bright taillight, but then he realized he could see both the white light AND the orange-red light at the same time, and further, a car couldn’t reach that point on the cliff.
Jarrett shows a map of recent UFO sightings. January 29, 1967 edition of Gazette-Mail.
Around this time, local newspapers reported three additional sightings from the nearby area. On January 19th, Tad Jones had his infamous close encounter with a spherical craft on Interstate 64 near Dunbar. On Tuesday, January 24th, two boys in Nitro’s River Dell Acres saw a ball of light on the mountain. And finally, on Wednesday, January 25th at about 6:20 am, Mrs. Robert Drake of Sun Valley Drive, St. Albans saw an oval-shaped, glowing, pulsating object just below the moon and near the crest of a hill about a quarter of a mile away (believed to be the same hill/cliff where Jarrett saw the object).
Jarrett reached out to all the witnesses, and compiled data about each sighting, plotting all the information on a map, which he sent to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in Washington, D.C. He was convinced that if this wasn’t the same object, these sightings within such close proximity of each other must be related in some other way. His interest in UFO research would only grow from there.
By February 1967, he had built a simple device to detect magnetic mass, and thus, hopefully detect UFOs. Jarrett stated his theory behind the device in a February 5 article in the Sunday Gazette-Mail. He believed that such an object to move without noise and exhaust and in such as manner must be utilizing magnetic field, and thus, “a permanent magnet when suspended from its midpoint will align itself with the earth’s magnetic field. If extraneous electrical fields are brought within the limits of the magnet, it immediately re-aligns with the fields and will experience movement.”
Jarrett’s UFO detection machine. February 5, 1967 edition of Sunday Gazette-Mail
Ralph continued to read articles, interview UFO witnesses around the area, and speculate as to what so many people, including himself were seeing in the skies. His interest led him to become president of UFO Investigators, a coalition of UFO researchers and investigators. This group not only investigated UFO sightings, but was instrumental in bringing UFO education to the Kanawha Valley.
The group sponsored a presentation by the infamous UFO researcher from Clarksburg, Gray Barker in April of 1968, and set up a PO Box that people could write to to share their experiences or request further information. One of the more significant events held by the group was the 6th Annual Convention of The Congress of Scientific Ufologists. Ralph, along with Gray Barker, put in a bid to have the convention held in Charleston, WV because, as Ralph states, West Virginia was a ‘ufo capital’ because the state had more sightings per capita and of a greater variety than any other state in the union.
The convention was held June 20th and June 21st, 1969. The first night was a closed session, open only to members of the Congress of Scientific Ufologists, and held at the Daniel Boone Hotel in Charleston. The next evening, the event was open to the public, and offered both a ‘flea market’ where attendees could purchase books, magazines and other UFO-related materials as well as a line-up of various speakers. It was held in the Little Theater section of the Charleston Civic Center and admission cost $1.50.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find much more about Ralph Jarrett’s involvement in the UFO community past the 1960′s. He passed away on August 2, 2007. I’m so glad I recently stumbled upon his name while researching the Tad Jones sighting. Although I’ve lived within 15 minutes of St. Albans my entire life and have had an interest in paranormal phenomena as long as I can remember, I had never heard of him and his close involvement with West Virginia’s UFO history!
I believe this is the property where Jarrett’s three UFO sightings happened
I’m endlessly fascinated by stories of the quirks that were built into the TV system where the well-laid plans of the system simply fell apart because it was asked to do too many things.
Nearly five years ago, I wrote about one of them, the tale of how radio broadcasters were able to shoehorn an additional FM station into the radio because of the proximity of TV’s channel 6 to the rest of the radio feed.
So when I was informed that there was another oddity kinda like this involving the TV lineups, I decided I had to take a dive in.
It’s a tale that centers around channel 37, which was a giant block of static in most parts of the world during the 20th century.
The reason for that was simple: it couldn’t fend off its scientific competition.
1952
The year that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission opened up the television system to use UHF, or ultra high frequency signals. The practical effect of this addition of bandwidth was that the total number of potential TV stations increased dramatically, from 108 to 2,051, overnight. The first UHF applications were granted on July 11, 1952, according to The History of UHF Television, a site dedicated to the higher-frequency television offerings.
THE RADIO TELESCOPE AT THE VERMILLION RIVER OBSERVATORY, NEAR DANVILLE, ILLINOIS.
IMAGE: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
The radio telescope that became a headache for the television industry
Within a 600-mile radius of the city of Danville, Illinois, population 31,246, are numerous major cities — among them Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Toronto, and Washington, DC.
Nearly the entire length of the Mississippi River fits into that radius. If Danville was located just a little farther to the east, the radius would also include Philadelphia and New York City. For all intents and purposes, a 600-mile radius from Eastern Illinois covers basically the entire East Coast except the state of Florida and the Northeast.
(Importantly to this story, New Jersey generally does not fall into this 600-mile radius.)
But there was something located in Danville that was important enough to scientists that they didn’t want to share it with anyone else.
And that thing was a 400-foot-wide radio telescope, operating along the 610 MHz frequency. It was something of a monster of astronomy at the time, operating 12 to 16 hours per day, and researchers at the University of Illinois aimed to keep it that way.
The research that led to the creation of the radio telescope was, basically, an accident — but a fundamental one that taught us more about the universe than we might have learned with a mere optical telescope.
In 1931, a radio engineer and Bell Laboratories employee named Karl Jansky was trying to uncover the source of static that was interfering with radio waves … and found it had an extraterrestrial source, particularly at the center in the Milky Way galaxy.
Jansky wasn’t an astronomer, but an engineer, and despite discovering a new field of astronomy, his position at Bell Labs did not allow him to pursue it further.
But after World War II ended, others eventually did pursue radio astronomy, including George C. McVittie, a British cosmologist who built the astronomy department at the University of Illinois in the 1950s, and George Swenson, who helped to build the university’s radio telescope.
Speaking to the Royal Astronomical Society as part of an oral history in 1978, McVittie, who played a central role in the creation of the telescope, stated that the device was developed in the late 1950s with a goal of being cost effective:
Well, we wanted to build this parabolic cylinder. I sent George Swenson on a tour of radio astronomy outfits in the world, Australia, England and so on, and he came back with the idea of the parabolic cylinder, a fixed transit instrument that sweeps out the sky simply by the earth rotating. And we decided for engineering reasons that we could only build a really big one if we had a frequency round about 600 megahertz. Otherwise, the perfection of the reflector, if we went to a shorter wavelength, was not something that you could [do] by the acre, at least not at that time, which was the late 1950s. And so we picked upon this 610 megahertz band as the observing frequency.
(The telescope was more expensive to maintain than to build, McVittie added.)
The area around the 610 MHz band has, over the years, gained a reputation as being important to scientific research because of its placement in the context of two other frequencies important to radio astronomy, 410 MHz and 1.4 GHz.
As space and astronomy writer Bob King of Universe Todayput it in 2013: “Without it, radio astronomers would lose a key window in an otherwise continuous radio view of the sky. Imagine a 3-panel bay window with the middle pane painted black. Who wants THAT?”
There was just one problem — the sudden, high popularity of television made the general bandwidth area where the telescope operated, 608–614 MHz, a bit of a hot commodity. It was literally the spot where channel 37 was supposed to go — and broadcasters wanted access to that channel.
It threatened to cover up a key window.
18
The number of stations that had been allocated to use channel 37 in the U.S. in 1952, according to The History of UHF Television. One of those communities was Paterson, New Jersey, located within the New York City metro area — which is relevant to this story. In the end, no channel 37 actually ended up on the air in analog form in the U.S., though you may find a digital equivalent today thanks to differences in how signals are allocated.
IMAGE: PATRICK TOMASSO/UNSPLASH
Why the existence of channel 37 became such a problem for scientists
At the time the University of Illinois had built out its radio telescope, television was still in its infancy, and not every TV could actually access UHF signals. But soon, UHF went from optional upgrade to standard feature on television sets, and that meant this radio telescope was in the way.
Fortunately for the scientists that relied on this telescope, they had the support of the global community. A meeting of the International Telecommunication Union in 1959 set aside a series of frequencies that were important for different scientific and technical uses. One of those frequencies was where channel 37 sat.
The University of Illinois, wanting to protect its radio telescope investment, went to the FCC basically immediately after the ITU meeting. In 1960, it asked that channel 37 be allocated to radio telescopes exclusively.
As McVittie recalled, fellow scientists considered the push to block out an entire television channel a big ask:
Most of our radio astronomy friends said, “Look here, you two, Swenson and McVittie, you are just crazy. Do you mean to say you are asking the American public to give up one television channel for science? Who ever heard of anything so absurd?” So we said, “Well, the channel isn’t being used.” “Yes, that’s true, it’s not being used very much but it is being used in the neighborhood of New York, and places like that.” So I said, “We’re not in the neighborhood of New York.” Anyway, we got laughed at.
The FCC disagreed with the university’s assessment, feeling that it was too early to make such a call.
But just a couple of years later, stations were starting to call the FCC up for access to that specific station — particularly one directly outside of the antenna’s 600-mile radius, in New Jersey. (According to reports from the era, prospective broadcasters wanted to put a Spanish-language network in the spot.)
Because of FCC rules and limitations elsewhere, the city of Paterson had no other options to bring a TV station on air other than channel 37. But even with the channel being located hundreds of miles away and targeted at the New York City market, there was concern among scientists that even far-away interference could get in the way of scientific research.
The regulators, faced with a conflict that pitted a niche use case against a massive commercial windfall, tried to come up with a compromise. The compromise included:
No stations on channel 37 within a 600-mile radius of the antenna until at least 1968, allowing one specific scientist, McVittie, to complete a survey of radio star sources he was doing on the 610 MHz frequency.
No stations anywhere listed under channel 37 could air anything between midnight and 7 a.m. Keeping in mind time zones, this effectively would give McVittie four hours a night that were open to allowing for such research.
The FCC’s attempt to balance science and commerce was not well-accepted by said scientists, who took their story to the media.
What initially was seen as an absurd ask, even a silly one, gained momentum among fellow scientists. A letter sent to the FCC in regards to the debate puts the passion around the conflict into focus: “The FCC Docket suggests an appalling lack of comprehension within the FCC of the nature and needs of radio astronomy and yet the Commission has power to cripple and perhaps even destroy radio astronomy.”
That’s from an October 1963 document from the FCC that announced the commission’s decision to bar the use of channel 37 in the U.S. — while encouraging its neighbors in Canada and Mexico to do the same.
(The FCC did defend itself against the observer’s claim, writing: “Assertions charging the Commission with a lack of comprehension of the nature and needs of radio astronomy and implications that the Commission might cripple and even destroy radio astronomy are unjustified and can not be supported by facts.”)
The FCC agreed to a 10-year moratorium on channel 37 being used, which eventually became permanent.
The fun part about this is that McVittie, who helped to set the wheels in motion for the blanket ban of channel 37 in the U.S., never learned exactly why the FCC made the decision to flip its mindset on this issue. He speculated that media attention put the issue in front of the average person, allowing for wide-scale public support to mount up in favor of radio astronomy:
Somehow the news got around that here was this new way of listening to little green men on Mars. This is what radio astronomy seemed to the ordinary public. And the FCC was preventing it from being developed in the United States. We got rumors, George particularly from friends he knew, that gradually a huge accumulation of letters arrived at the FCC, protesting against this nonsupport of this new science, whatever it was. And that this finally persuaded the FCC that they’d better give in. Nobody knows.
Fortunately, we have the document explaining its thinking, and the thinking was essentially this:
It is probable that channel 37 operations at Paterson, New Jersey would interfere with observations at Danville to a certain extent. Also, (since interference from different sources would probably not occur simultaneously) the situation would be complicated by interference from other channel 37 stations if authorized. Moreover, any interference which would exist, even though for only a small percentage of time, might occur at critical times in the observing process. To the extent that observation programs would be interfered with, the time of completing them might well be substantially increased, so that a longer period of protection would be required to achieve the same results.
In other words, the commission didn’t necessarily know how putting channel 37 on the dial was going to impact scientific research in the long run, so best not risk it.
Ultimately, channel 37 went completely unused throughout the analog era in much of North America as well as most other countries — with a handful of exceptions, particularly in the Caribbean countries of the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago. (Today, channel 37 technically can appear as an over-the-air digital channel, but it is usually a so-called “virtual channel,” allowing a network to be positioned there no matter its position in the spectrum.)
In the end, the scientists won.
2000
The year that the FCC allowed for the use of wireless medical telemetry services (a.k.a. devices that allow for the tracking of patient vitals, like heartbeat, wirelessly) on the same band as channel 37. “Despite existing constraints in these bands, this allocation is flexible enough to allow spectrum to be available for medical telemetry services in all locations while protecting radio astronomy and government operations currently operating in the allocated spectrum,” the commission said at the time. Despite occasional rumors that the spectrum would go unlicensed eventually, it has yet to happen.
The tale of channel 37 reflects one thing: Without resistance, a commercial use case will usurp a noncommercial use case for a given resource.
A 1963 op-ed in The Harvard Crimson put it best: “Because the communication industries try to send strong signals to all parts of the globe and radio astronomy tries to receive weak extra-terrestrial signals, the growth of these two fields must inevitably lead to conflict.”
Think about this in terms of other things that have nothing to do with astronomy, like the internet. A year or two ago, there was a big conflict involving who owned the .org top-level domain, with commercial interests attempting to hone in on something intended to support nonprofits. The only reason it didn’t happen, just like the Channel 37 saga, was because people in the world of nonprofits and technology came together to lobby against it.
Ultimately, in the case of channel 37, scientists were able to save a small sliver of what was mostly going to be otherwise used commercially. Perhaps it looked like static to everyone else — but it was worth fighting for.
A version of this post originally appeared onTedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. Also published at https://www.vice.com.
UFOs/UAPs in the mainstream crept up again when famous scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson was recently asked in an interview as to whether or not aliens exist
On March 4th, Tyson wrote a tweet stating
This tweet sent UFO Twitter into a frenzy, because Tyson has been very critical of the idea that space ships and little grey men are visiting the planet. As a scientist, he wants proof. He wants the landing on the front of the White House lawn. Now I am not a scientist, nor do I try to play one like some in the UFO community. But Tyson’s ignorance to look deeply into the topic really highlights some of the pitfalls we have in bringing the subject of ufology into the mainstream limelight. Like it or not, the To The Stars Academy was able to crash through that barrier with the media. But for scientists like Tyson, who have a lot of pull with the mainstream, it’s still a work in progress.
It doesn’t take a genius to be able to see the brilliant minds that are working on this subject from a scientific perspective. It’s actually quite easy. Harvard Theoretical Physicist Avi Loeb took a lot of heat from the scientific community for coming out and saying that Omuamua was likely something alien entering our solar system. There was no official picture of Omuamua, however, Loeb was convinced that this was some sort of visitation that couldn’t be ruled out, especially with the way the foreign object was acting and reacting to planetary gravity as it flew on by. Does this mean Loeb could be wrong? Of course it does. However, the possibility that Loeb is right, and we did get visited, well, to be honest it can’t be ruled out.
But back to Tyson. Over the last few years he has been highly critical of the evidence or lack there of when it comes to UFOs. He dismissed the three Nimitz videos, (Go Fast, Tic Tac and Gimbal), has too hazy to determine what the objects could be. He has dismissed, almost with an arrogance, all the pilots both commercial and military who’ve had close encounters with strange objects. Pilots are like Doctors, they are some of the most highly trained and brightest individuals on this planet. They work in an area where they can tell the difference between a batman balloon and an object making maneuvers and flying at speeds that are undeniable and go against established physics. How does a scientist, whose job it is to test the limits and to push to find what’s unknown, be so negative towards the ample amounts of evidence that is out there? But it goes further than this.
It’s obvious Tyson also ignores the work of the SCU, otherwise known as the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. This is a group of scientists from around the world that has come together to further the study of this phenomenon. On the SCU website, explorescu.org, it states “The Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) is a think tank of scientists, researchers and professionals stretching across organizations, governments and industries to scientifically and publicly explore anomalous phenomena known around the world as UAPs, UFOs, USOs and OVNIs.” What they do? “We conduct, promote and encourage the rigorous scientific examination of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (UAP), commonly known as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). We utilize scientific principles, methodologies and practices in the study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena observed and reported around the globe. We provide scientific case analysis to support witness cases, other scientific organizations, and government entities who are looking for the certitude of facts for this phenomenon.”
Let’s talk about the other scientists and engineers that are working diligently on this subject to try and understand what’s going on? Dr. Diana Pasulka has been working on the history of ET and UFO phenomenon. What about Steve McDaniel who has engineered a machine, called SkyHub, that is working on tracking anomalous aerial phenomenon. Dr. Bob McGwier, who retired last year as one of the science and mathematics board members at Virginia Tech University. Is Bob all of the sudden not credible because he’s now searching for alien life? What about Dr. Eric Davis who has worked closely with the U.S. Government, as an Astrophysicist and advisor to the Pentagon regarding off-world vehicles? What about the late Stanton Friedman? The nuclear physicist, who was known in the scientific community for his research into everything from Roswell to dozens of UFO sightings and alien encounters around the world. Did he all of the sudden lose his credibility because he went into the world of ‘Woo’? Credible people from the late Ben Rich to Steve Justice, both formerly of Lockheed Skunkworks seemed to believe in the technology that was out there. You have to be pretty smart to be in the positions they were in. This list goes on and on. Has Tyson had conversations with Lue Elizondo, Chris Mellon, Stanford’s Dr. Gary Nolan, Jacques Vallee, Jim Semivan, Dr. Hal Puthoff, Dr. Michael Masters, and hundreds of others who are enlightened to the fact that the current evidence does show there is something going on! Apparently NDT didn’t get the memo!
Now I don’t know too much about science or how things work, but I’m bright enough to know that science is not opinion. To break science down to terminology the majority of us can understand, it’s the proving or disproving of theory. Yet when it comes to UFOs and the UAP Phenomenon, science really does seem to be thrown out the window. It’s about grants. It’s about tenure. It’s about position of authority to be a voice of reason. Tyson shows that he’s a brilliant man, but his opinion overtakes the reality of the evidence that is out there. Is it arrogance? Is it ignorance? I don’t know? I’ve never talked to the man. But it’s not doing him any favours to refute evidence when he refuses to believe the subject is very real.
Large ship floating in the sky - A glitch in reality?
Large ship floating in the sky - A glitch in reality?
David Morris and his son walking along a beach near Gillan in England when they noticed a huge ship apparently floating in the sky. Although they were stunned to see the strange phenomenon, they say that they had seen this phenomenon before.
Credit image: David Morris.
It turns out they witnessed a so-called superior mirage, an optical illusion which occurs because of the weather condition known as a temperature inversion.
Although most of these phenomena are optical illusions, not all of these appearances can be explained. Apparitions or similar events that cannot be explained are often interpreted as a "holographic" display from a parallel universe or glitches in reality.
Glitches in reality, might just be some of the weirdest phenomenon occurring today. Also known as 'glitches in the matrix,' these unusual events help provide evidence to the theory that our existence may be nothing more than part of a computer simulation, a simulated reality that keeps humanity unaware that intelligent machines have actually taken over the world. In other words, the plot of the movie The Matrix is our reality.
Thousands of residents from Jiangxi and Foshan in China reported seeing a "floating city" in the sky earlier this month. The images and grainy video footage appear to show towering skyscrapers poking out of the clouds and looming over the ground below.
Of course, the news has got people's imaginations turned up to overdrive when trying to figure out what was going on. Explanations for the event have ranged from a glitch in the matrix, alternate universes opening up and NASA attempting to establish a new world order through a plan called the "Blue Beam Project".
However, it appears the explanation is actually a rare type of mirage called Fata Morgana. It’s essentially an optical illusion caused by specific weather conditions bending light rays. As Wired explains, it occurs when the Sun heats up a layer of the atmosphere but the layer of air below it remains cool. When different layers of the atmosphere are different temperatures, a temperature gradient is generated. These different temperatures also mean differing densities between the layers.
When light hits a boundary between two layers of the atmosphere that are different temperatures and thus densities, it is bent, or refracted, and subsequently enters the next layer at a different angle. Our brain can't automatically account for this, so when light hits our eyes, our brain assumes that it traveled in a straight path. When it has been refracted, we therefore perceive the object is where it would be if the light had run straight – which is higher than it actually is.
Fata Morganas have been confusing people and messing with minds for centuries. They’re named after Morgan le Fay, a powerful enchantress from the tales of King Arthur. It’s believed they are the explanation behind the legendary ghost ship the Flying Dutchman and sailor’s stories of floating castles which lured men to their deaths.
So there you have it. Although, we’ve got our eye on you NASA…
A LMU team has shown that slight alterations in transfer-RNA molecules (tRNAs) allow them to self-assemble into a functional unit that can replicate information exponentially. tRNAs are key elements in the evolution of early life-forms.
Life as we know it is based on a complex network of interactions, which take place at microscopic scales in biological cells, and involve thousands of distinct molecular species. In our bodies, one fundamental process is repeated countless times every day. In an operation known as replication, proteins duplicate the genetic information encoded in the DNA molecules stored in the cell nucleus – before distributing them equally to the two daughter cells during cell division. The information is then selectively copied (‘transcribed’) into what are called messenger RNA molecules (mRNAs), which direct the synthesis of the many different proteins required by the cell type concerned.
A second type of RNA – transfer RNA (tRNA) – plays a central role in the ‘translation’ of mRNAs into proteins. Transfer RNAs act as intermediaries between mRNAs and proteins: they ensure that the amino-acid subunits of which each particular protein consists are put together in the sequence specified by the corresponding mRNA.
How could such a complex interplay between DNA replication and the translation of mRNAs into proteins have arisen when living systems first evolved on the early Earth? We have here a classical example of the chicken-and-the-egg problem: Proteins are required for transcription of the genetic information, but their synthesis itself depends on transcription.
LMU physicists led by Professor Dieter Braun have now demonstrated how this conundrum could have been resolved. They have shown that minor modifications in the structures of modern tRNA molecules permit them to autonomously interact to form a kind of replication module, which is capable of exponentially replicating information. This finding implies that tRNAs – the key intermediaries between transcription and translation in modern cells – could also have been the crucial link between replication and translation in the earliest living systems. It could therefore provide a neat solution to the question of which came first – genetic information or proteins?
Complex relationship
Strikingly, in terms of their sequences and overall structure, tRNAs are highly conserved in all three domains of life, i.e. the unicellular Archaea and Bacteria (which lack a cell nucleus) and the Eukaryota (organisms whose cells contain a true nucleus). This fact in itself suggests that tRNAs are among the most ancient molecules in the biosphere.
Like the later steps in the evolution of life, the evolution of replication and translation – and the complex relationship between them – was not the result of a sudden single step. It is better understood as the culmination of an evolutionary journey. “Fundamental phenomena such as self-replication, autocatalysis, self-organization and compartmentalization are likely to have played important roles in these developments,” says Dieter Braun. “And on a more general note, such physical and chemical processes are wholly dependent on the availability of environments that provide non-equilibrium conditions.”
In their experiments, Braun and his colleagues used a set of reciprocally complementary DNA strands modeled on the characteristic form of modern tRNAs. Each was made up of two ‘hairpins’ (so called because each strand could partially pair with itself and form an elongated loop structure), separated by an informational sequence in the middle. Eight such strands can interact via complementary base-pairing to form a complex. Depending on the pairing patterns dictated by the central informational regions, this complex was able to encode a 4-digit binary code.
It is therefore conceivable that such a replication mechanism could have taken place on a hydrothermal microsystem on the early Earth.PROF. DIETER BRAUN, SYSTEMS BIOPHYSICS, LMU
A step closer to the reconstruction of the origin of life
During the copying process, complementary strands (drawn from the pool of molecules) pair up with the informational segment of the template strands. In the course of time, the adjacent hairpins of these strands also pair up to form a stable backbone, and temperature oscillations continue to drive the amplification process. If the temperature is increased for a brief period, the template strands are separated from the newly formed replicate, and both can then serve as template strands in the next round of replication.
The team was able to show that the system is capable of exponential replication. This is an important finding, as it shows that the replication mechanism is particularly resistant to collapse owing to the accumulation of errors. The fact that the structure of the replicator complex itself resembles that of modern tRNAs suggests that early forms of tRNA could have participated in molecular replication processes, before tRNA molecules assumed their modern role in the translation of messenger RNA sequences into proteins.
“This link between replication and translation in an early evolutionary scenario could provide a solution to the chicken-and-the-egg problem,” says Alexandra Kühnlein. It could also account for the characteristic form of proto-tRNAs, and elucidate the role of tRNAs before they were co-opted for use in translation.
Laboratory research on the origin of life and the emergence of Darwinian evolution at the level of chemical polymers also has implications for the future of biotechnology. “Our investigations of early forms of molecular replication and our discovery of a link between replication and translation brings us a step closer to the reconstruction of the origin of life,” Braun concludes.
Contacts and sources:
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Publication:
tRNA sequences can assemble into a replicator.
Alexandra Kühnlein, Simon A Lanzmich, Dieter Braun. eLife, 2021; 10 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.63431
DOOIEND ARCTISCH PERMAFROST POMPT VEEL MEER CO2 IN DE LUCHT DAN GEDACHT
DOOIEND ARCTISCH PERMAFROST POMPT VEEL MEER CO2 IN DE LUCHT DAN GEDACHT
Vivian Lammerse
En de boosdoeners zijn hongerige, ijzer-verorberende microben…
De aarde warmt op. En dat is slecht nieuws voor permafrost; een normaliter permanent bevroren laag aarde. Stijgende mondiale temperaturen zorgen er namelijk voor dat bevroren Arctische permafrost dooit. Hierdoor komt er methaan en koolstofdioxide vrij, dat er al voor duizenden jaren in opgeslagen zat. In klimaatmodellen is hier al rekening mee gehouden. Maar mogelijk is de hoeveelheid CO2 die vrijkomt door dooiend Arctisch permafrost onderschat. Want waar onderzoekers niet aan hebben gedacht, is aan hongerige, ijzer-verorberende bodemmicroben.
CO2 Zoals gezegd zit er in Arctisch permafrost heel veel koolstof gevangen. De hoeveelheid koolstof die in het permafrost opgesloten zit, wordt geschat op vier keer zoveel als de gecombineerde hoeveelheid CO2 die moderne mensen hebben uitgestoten. Het is dan ook niet voor niets dat wetenschappers zich zorgen maken. Want wanneer alle broeikasgassen die het permafrost herbergt een weg naar onze atmosfeer weten te vinden, zou dat dus een enorme impact hebben op ons mondiale klimaat.
Studie Wetenschappers proberen dan ook al enige tijd de processen achter de dooi beter te doorgronden. En in een nieuwe studie reisden onderzoekers hiervoor af naar het Zweedse natuurreservaat Stordalen Mire. “Het dooien van het permafrost is één van de grootste verhalen van deze tijd,” zegt onderzoeker Monique Patzner in een interview met Scientias.nl. “Wat er gaande is, is geen toekomstige zorg. We ondervinden het al aan den lijve. De permafrost in ons onderzoeksgebied zal tegen 2050 naar verwachting volledig verdwenen zijn. Elk jaar, zelfs tussen de seizoenen in, zien we veranderingen en instortingen in het veld, veroorzaakt door het verlies van permafrost. Dit betekent dat de transformatie heel rap gaat.”
Ondertussen in Alaska Niet alleen in Zweden smelt permafrost weg. Ook in Alaska zien wetenschappers permafrost dooien. Dat komt omdat het in Alaska een stuk regenachtiger is geworden. Sterker nog, De Amerikaanse staat beleeft de regenachtigste vijf jaar op rij ooit. In plaats van sneeuw, komt er dus regen naar beneden zetten. En dat is behoorlijk verontrustend. Want de regen zorgt ervoor dat er steeds meer permafrost verdwijnt. Daarnaast hebben ook ijverige bevers een vinger in de pap. Hoe? Gewapend met hun scherpe tanden bouwen de bevers van struiken en bomen dammen, waardoor er kleine poeltjes ontstaan die uitgroeien tot nieuwe meren die soms wel een paar hectare omvatten. En dat gaat rap. In slechts vijf jaar tijd hebben bevers woonachtig in noordwest-Alaska 56 nieuwe meren gecreëerd. Ook al bestaande meren dijen door toedoen van de bever uit. En dat gaat ten koste van kwetsbaar permafrost. Het water is namelijk warmer dan de omringende grond. En dus kunnen deze meren en vijvers de dooi van permafrost versnellen.
Hoewel dat al verontrustend genoeg is, zijn de onderzoekers er nu achtergekomen dat we mogelijk de hoeveelheid CO2 die vrijkomt door dooiend Arctisch permafrost hebben onderschat. In feite kan er zelfs veel meer CO2 vrijkomen dan onze worstcase-modellen hebben voorspeld. En dat komt volgens de onderzoekers omdat we geen rekening hebben gehouden met hele actieve bodemmicroben. Onderzoekers zijn zich al wel langer bewust dat micro-organismen een sleutelrol spelen bij het vrijkomen van CO2 als permafrost smelt. Als reactie op de stijgende temperaturen worden microben in de grond namelijk wakker en beginnen organisch materiaal dat jarenlang in het permafrost lag opgeslagen, af te breken. Daarbij komt CO2 en methaan vrij. Maar onderzoekers hebben nu ontdekt dat bodemmicroben mogelijk een nóg grotere rol spelen dan gedacht.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
Nieuwe ontdekking Men veronderstelde dat het mineraal ijzer koolstof bindt, zelfs als permafrost dooit. Maar onderzoekers uit de nieuwe studie hebben ontdekt dat hongerige microben die zich verschuilen in de Arctische bodem, het vermogen van ijzer om koolstof vast te houden, uitschakelen. “Bevroren grond heeft een hoog zuurstofgehalte, waardoor de ijzermineralen stabiel blijven en koolstof zich aan kan binden,” legt onderzoeker Carsten Müller uit. “Maar zodra het ijs smelt en in water verandert, daalt het zuurstofgehalte en wordt het ijzer instabiel. Tegelijkertijd geeft het ijs toegang tot bacteriën. En die gebruiken vervolgens de ijzermineralen als voedselbron. Terwijl ze eten, worden de bindingen die koolstof bevatten vernietigd en komt het vrij in de atmosfeer als broeikasgas.” Het zijn verontrustende bevindingen. Want de hoeveelheid extra koolstof die kan vrijkomen – en momenteel nog gevangen en gebonden is door het ijzer – wordt geschat op circa twee tot vijf keer de hoeveelheid koolstof die jaarlijks vrijkomt door antropogene emissies van fossiele brandstoffen. “Dit betekent dat we een grote nieuwe bron van CO2-uitstoot hebben gevonden die in klimaatmodellen moet worden opgenomen en nader bestudeerd moet worden,” aldus Müller.
Vragen Hoewel de onderzoekers slechts één moerasgebied in het Noord-Zweedse Abisko hebben bestudeerd, besloten ze hun resultaten te vergelijken met gegevens uit andere delen van het noordelijk halfrond. En daaruit blijkt dat de nieuwe resultaten mogelijk ook van toepassing zijn op andere permafrost-gebieden. Het is behoorlijk zorgelijk. Al is er ook nog een hoop dat we niet weten. Hoewel koolstof opgeslagen in duizenden jaren oud permafrost een grote impact heeft op ons wereldwijde klimaat, weten onderzoekers eigenlijk nog heel weinig over de mechanismen die bepalen of koolstof in de bodem wordt omgezet in broeikasgassen. Het merendeel van het klimaatonderzoek in het noordpoolgebied richt zich op de hoeveelheid opgeslagen koolstof en hoe gevoelig deze is voor klimaatverandering. Er is veel minder aandacht voor de diepere mechanismen die koolstof in de bodem vasthouden. “De vraag blijft bijvoorbeeld of de vrijkomende koolstof door permafrost-dooi echt wordt uitgestoten als broeikasgasemissies, of opnieuw wordt opgeslagen, bijvoorbeeld in toenemende biomassa,” zegt Patzner. Ook weten we niet precies welke micro-organismen de boosdoeners zijn. “Welke microben het ijzer verorberen en zo de bijbehorende organische koolstof vrijgeven, is momenteel de focus van onze lopende onderzoeken,” gaat Patzner verder. “Ook is het heel belangrijk om de hoeveelheid ijzer in diepere lagen, de hoeveelheid koolstof gebonden aan reactieve ijzermineralen in de talrijke permafrost-gebieden en de biologische beschikbaarheid van deze koolstof na het vrijkomen ervan verder te bepalen.”
Al met al laat dit onderzoek wederom de complexe mechanismen van onze aarde zien. “Dankzij de studie krijgen we een beter begrip van de ingewikkelde processen die plaatsvinden in deze complexe permafrost-gebieden,” zegt Patzner. “Dit is van fundamenteel belang om de snelheden van broeikasgasemissies zoals kooldioxide en methaan te bepalen, wat nodig is om betere voorspellingen te doen over klimaatverandering.” Het betekent bovendien dat de kans groot is dat we onze huidige klimaatmodellen moeten herzien. En dat door hele kleine microben die ver onder onze voeten, zich hongerig te goed doen aan hun omgeving.
Food for Life Found in 3.5 Billion Year Old Rocks in Australia
Food for Life Found in 3.5 Billion Year Old Rocks in Australia
For the first time, biologically-relevant organic molecules have been detected in Archaean fluid inclusions, which most likely served as nutrients for early life on Earth.
A research team including the geobiologist Dr. Helge Mißbach from the University of Cologne has detected organic molecules and gases trapped in 3.5 billion-year-old rocks. A widely accepted hypothesis says that the earliest life forms used small organic molecules as building materials and energy sources. However, the existence of such components in early habitats on Earth was as yet unproven.
3.5 billion year old barite (bottom) with a fossilized microbial mat (top). The barite is part of the Dresser Formation in NW Australia
The current study, published in the journal ‘Nature Communications’, now shows that solutions from archaic hydrothermal vents contained essential components that formed a basis for the earliest life on our planet.
Specifically, the scientists examined about 3.5 billion-year-old barites from the Dresser Formation in Western Australia. The barite thus dates from a time when early life developed on Earth. ‘In the field, the barites are directly associated with fossilized microbial mats, and they smell like rotten eggs when freshly scratched. Thus, we suspected that they contained organic material that might have served as nutrients for early microbial life,’ said Dr. Helge Mißbach of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy and lead author of the study.
In the fluid inclusions, the team identified organic compounds such as acetic acid and methanethiol, in addition to gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. These compounds may have been important substrates for metabolic processes of early microbial life. Furthermore, they are discussed as putative key agents in the origin of life on Earth. ‘The immediate connection between primordial molecules emerging from the subsurface and the microbial organisms – 3.5 billion years ago – somehow surprised us. This finding contributes decisively to our understanding of the still unclear earliest evolutionary history of life on Earth,’ Mißbach concluded.
Contacts and sources:
Jan Voelkel University of Cologne
Dr. Helge Mißbach Arbeitsgruppe Geobiologie Institut für Geologie und Mineralogie University of Cologne
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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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