The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
15-04-2021
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
Authorities are still working to determine the identities of the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, many of whom were apparently motivated by false conspiracy theories that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election but was cheated out of his victory due to widespread election fraud.
Conspiracy theories often rely on seeing things sharply in terms of right and wrong, and that can drive people to do things they might never have contemplated before, says Peter Ditto, a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine.
“Moralizing things mobilizes people to action,” he says. “If I believed that the American election had been stolen from the rightful winner, I’d probably storm the Capitol, too. It makes perfect sense if that really happened. The problem is, that didn’t happen.”
FILE – Trump supporter Douglas Austen Jensen, wearing a QAnon shirt, confronts police on the second floor of the U.S. Capitol after breaching security defenses, in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021.
The people most likely to embrace conspiracy theories are less inquisitive and often exhibit narcissistic tendencies, such as an inflated sense of self-importance, a deep need for attention and admiration, troubled relationships, a lack of empathy for others and fragile self-esteem, according to Emory University research published in the Journal of Personality.
Nika Kabiri, an expert on human decision-making affiliated with the University of Washington in Seattle, says everyone is potentially drawn to conspiracy theories, although some far more than others.
“We’re all potentially drawn to them because we all hate uncertainty. We all don’t like the idea of not knowing why things happen. It makes us feel like we don’t have control in the world. We want closure,” she says. “It’s a natural tendency for the human brain to look for those explanations.”
FILE – A man wearing a cap that references the QAnon slogan attends a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Oct. 31, 2020.
A conspiracy theory is thinking that blames or explains an important event or set of circumstances on a secret plot that is usually masterminded by powerful people. Conspiracy thinking can also embrace the idea that a big secret is being kept from the public.
When a prominent person, be it a movie director or a president, transmits a conspiracy theory, Kabiri says, it is like a super spreader event, and the conspiracy theory gets a lot of exposure.
“People are adhering to these beliefs because they’re already dissatisfied,” she says. “They’re already unhappy. There’s something they want to, perhaps, explain something that doesn’t sit well with them, and the story gives them an answer.”
Times of uncertainty, such as a pandemic, can help fuel the spread of conspiracy theories.
“People, in particular, that are susceptible to conspiracy thinking, they’re susceptible to them when they feel threatened and anxious, like a lot of people do right now,” Ditto says. “When the world seems confusing and incomprehensible, which it does right now. When people are lonely and they’re seeking connection with others.”
FILE – The remaining tower of New York’s World Trade Center, Tower 2, collapses in a cloud of dust and debris Sept. 11, 2001. Some conspiracy theorists believe the towers were demolished by powerful, unknown people or forces.
People often latch onto conspiracy stories because they cannot accept simple explanations for life-altering events, according to Ditto.
A major conspiracy about the 9/11 terror attacks holds that the twin towers in New York fell in a controlled demolition, rather than because planes crashed into them.
Unproven speculation about the COVID-19 pandemic holds that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab and was possibly an engineered bioweapon.
Many Americans find it hard to believe that President John F. Kennedy, a larger-than-life political figure, was killed by a lone gunman, a regular guy, which is why they embrace the unproven idea that there must have been a larger conspiracy to murder the president.
FILE – Supporters wearing shirts with the QAnon logo are seen at a Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Aug. 2, 2018.
The Emory researchers found that the people most likely to embrace conspiracy thinking are often less agreeable and less conscientious, while being associated with a sense of entitlement, grandiosity, depression and anxiety.
“If you are in a close-knit community, either on social media or in real life, with people who are all adhering to the same belief, there’s a commitment to that belief that’s even more intense than if you just held that alone,” Kabiri says.
Ditto says a million years of evolution pushes people to break into groups with like-minded people.
“We’re very tribal. We’re very provably attached to people who are like us. It’s very, very unusual to have a place where you’re supposed to make friends with, and connect with, and cooperate with, people who don’t look like you and don’t have the same values. Maybe they have a different religion,” Ditto says.
“The American experiment, essentially, is an attempt to work against all those evolutionary forces and move people in this positive way where they cooperate. It’s way easier to break people up.”
'KANS OP UITBRAAK VAN EEN COMPLEET NIEUW CORONAVIRUS WORDT ZWAAR ONDERSCHAT'
'KANS OP UITBRAAK VAN EEN COMPLEET NIEUW CORONAVIRUS WORDT ZWAAR ONDERSCHAT'
Vivian Lammerse
Het aantal diersoorten waarin nieuwe coronavirussen kunnen ontstaan, blijkt veel groter dan gedacht.
De huidige coronacrisis heeft ons behoorlijk opgeschrikt. Want het noodlottige voorval in Wuhan heeft velen doen afvragen hoe groot de kans eigenlijk is dat er een coronavirus opduikt én overspringt naar de mens. In een nieuwe studie, gepubliceerd in het vakblad Nature Communications, hebben onderzoekers zich over die prangende vragen gebogen. En daaruit blijkt dat we de uitbraak van een compleet nieuw coronavirus zwaar hebben onderschat.
Nieuwe coronavirussen De eerste vraag is natuurlijk hoe nieuwe coronavirussen precies het levenslicht zien. “Nieuwe coronavirussen ontstaan wanneer twee verschillende stammen hetzelfde dier infecteren,” legt onderzoeksleider Maya Wardeh uit. “Hierdoor wordt het virale genetische materiaal gerecombineerd. Ons begrip van hoe vatbaar verschillende dieren zijn voor verschillende coronavirussen is beperkt. Maar dergelijke informatie zou inzicht kunnen verschaffen in waar virale recombinatie plaatsvindt.”
Kunstmatige Intelligentie De onderzoekers hebben gepoogd die kenniskloof te overbruggen door met behulp van ‘machine learning’ op zoek te gaan naar specifieke zoogdieren waarin nieuwe coronavirussen het makkelijkst kunnen ontstaan. En dat is heel belangrijk. Want door te voorspellen welke dieren mogelijk de bron zijn van een toekomstige uitbraak van een nieuw coronavirus, kunnen we het risico dat het coronavirus daadwerkelijk naar de mens overspringt, beperken. In de studie analyseerden de onderzoekers onder andere de soorten die al eerder bij uitbraken betrokken zijn, zoals de Kleine hoefijzerneus, loewak en schubdierachtigen.
Zoogdiersoorten De bevindingen zijn tamelijk verontrustend. Want de onderzoekers komen tot de conclusie dat het aantal diersoorten waarin nieuwe coronavirussen kunnen ontstaan, veel groter is dan gedacht. Zo schatten de onderzoekers dat er bijvoorbeeld 40 keer meer zoogdiersoorten bestaan die kunnen worden geïnfecteerd met een diverse reeks coronavirusstammen dan voorheen bekend was. De onderzoekers vermoeden dat de loewak en de Kleine hoefijzerneus bijvoorbeeld respectievelijk 32 en 68 verschillende coronavirussen herbergen. Het team ging nog een stap verder door de betreffende gastheren te identificeren waarin een recombinatie zou kunnen plaatsvinden. En daaruit blijkt dat er mogelijk 30 keer meer gastheersoorten zijn die nieuwe coronavirussen herbergen dan gedacht, waaronder katten, egels en konijnen. Opmerkelijke nieuwe gastheren zijn onder andere de kameel, de groene meerkat, en de vleermuis Scotophilus kuhlii.
Modelvoorspellingen over potentiële gastheren van SARS-Cov-2.
Afbeelding: Nature Communications
Het betekent dat de potentiële omvang en de kans op een uitbraak van een compleet nieuw coronavirus – afkomstig van wilde én gedomesticeerde dieren – zwaar onderschat wordt. “Gezien het feit dat coronavirussen vaak recombinaties ondergaan wanneer ze een gastheer tegelijkertijd infecteren én dat SARS-CoV-2 zeer besmettelijk is voor mensen, vormt dit de meest directe dreiging voor de volksgezondheid,” concludeert onderzoeker Marcus Blagrove. Als specifiek voorbeeld benadrukt het team het risicovolle scenario van recombinatie tussen het zeer besmettelijke SARS-CoV-2 en het meer dodelijke MERS-CoV. In de studie identificeerden de onderzoekers 102 potentiële gastheren van deze twee virussen en adviseren met klem om dit te blijven monitoren, om een vervelende afloop te voorkomen.
Nieuwe stammen Hoewel het onderzoek zorgvuldig is uitgevoerd, houden de onderzoekers een slag om de arm. Zo stellen ze dat deze bevindingen gebaseerd zijn op slechts beperkte gegevens over coronavirus-genomen en wisselwerkingen tussen virus en gastheer. Toch zetten de resultaten ons op scherp. “Het is belangrijk om op te merken dat virale recombinatie verschilt van mutaties,” onderstreept Blagrove. “Recombinatie vindt plaats over langere perioden en kan volledig nieuwe stammen of soorten genereren. Ons werk kan helpen bij het oprichten van surveillanceprogramma’s om toekomstige, alarmerende stammen te ontdekken voordat ze overspringen op de mens. Dit geeft ons een belangrijke voorsprong bij de bestrijding ervan.”
De onderzoekers zijn nu van plan om hun model uit te breiden en ook vogelsoorten onder de loep te nemen. Uiteindelijk is het doel om een volledig beeld te scheppen van de diersoorten die mogelijk belangrijke coronavirus-gastheren zijn. Want op die manier wordt de kans op een volgende desastreuse uitbraak van een nieuw coronavirus, flink ingedamd.
Russian state laboratory Vector has announced a new research project in which it will probe ancient animals frozen in the Siberian permafrost, looking for ancient. The aim of the project is to identify such viruses and conduct advanced research into virus evolution.
“We hope that interesting discoveries in the world of viruses await us, one researcher was quoted.”
The remains of many Paleolithic creatures are trapped in the icy grip of the Siberian permafrost. Aided by global warming that melted some of the ice, expeditions have uncovered the remains of numerous kinds of animals preserved by the freezing temperatures. The remains are interesting by themselves, but Russian researchers now want to probe even further, and look at what type of viruses these organisms may have hosted.
The study will be focused on remains discovered in 2009 in Yakutia, a vast region of north-eastern Siberia where remains of Paleolithic animals including mammoths, elk, dogs, partridges, rodents, hares, and many others have been discovered. The researchers will be probing these groups looking for ancient viruses, called paleoviruses.
“We are conducting studies on paleoviruses for the first time,” said Maxim Cheprasov, head of the Mammoth Museum laboratory at Yakutsk University, who added that they have already carried out several bacterial studies on the samples.
The research is a collaboration between Vector and the University of Yakutsk. The work began with analysis of tissues extracted from a prehistoric horse thought to be at least 4,500 years old. Researchers drill a tiny hole and take tissue samples, placing them in a test tube. They then carry out a series of analyses on this sample, from genome sequencing to isolation of total nucleic acids, to obtain data on the entire biodiversity of the microorganisms in the sample.
“If nucleic acids aren’t destroyed, we will be able to obtain data on their composition and establish how it changed, what was the evolutionary development of microorganisms. Vector researcher Olesya Okhlopkova explains in a press release. She adds that they will also “determine the epidemiological potential of currently existing infectious agents.”
Sergei Fedorov, one of the participating researchers, adds that the findings are kept in a special freezer at temperatures of -16 to -18 degrees Celsius (around 0-3 degrees Fahrenheit). Mammoths will be a point of particular interest for the project, but researchers will look at samples from various ancient animals. “We hope that interesting discoveries in the world of viruses await us,” says Fedorov
Vector is a secluded research institute that, in Soviet times, was weaponized and used in the Soviet biological warfare program. The laboratory made important progress in smallpox research, but also researched the production of various viruses and toxins. In post-Soviet times, the center focuses on vaccine research (for Hepatitis A or influenza, for instance), diagnosis systems, and other epidemiological research.
Vector also developed a COVID-19 vaccine (EpiVacCorona, not the Sputnik V) which was licensed in October in Russia and is scheduled to begin mass production in February.
Lucid dreaming happens when you’re aware that you’re dreaming, as opposed to being completely immersed in the experience and totally decoupled from reality. Some lucid dreamers are so good at it they can consistently enter this state of awareness in their sleep and can even control their dream’s storyline to their liking. If you find all of this fascinating, you’re not alone — and scientists have now published a new study in which they’ve tapped into the brains of lucid dreamers while they had real-time dialogues.
Despite the ubiquity of dreams, scientists still know surprisingly very little about them. Most people have trouble remembering their dreams, which are subject to distortion, fragmentation, and forgetting, making neuroscience studies of dreaming highly challenging. In typical dreams, people judge their experience But this is where lucid dreamers come in.
In a new study, researchers led by Karen Konkoly, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, attempted to communicate in real-time with 36 individuals who were in rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. The participants hailed from the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and were assessed by four independent laboratories.
“Why do we have dreams? How are dream scenarios created? Does dreaming confer any benefit for brain function? These and other questions have remained open, in part, because of the limited options available for peering into dream experiences,” wrote the researchers in the journal Current Biology.
“In typical dreams, people judge their experience with a high degree of acceptance and a lack of critical evaluation; they fail to realize that their experience is merely a dream. On the other hand, a “lucid dream” differs in that the dreamer gains the elusive insight of being in a dream.”
The participants’ experience with lucid dreaming varied — which was exactly what the researchers were looking for. Some had minimal experience with lucid dreaming, while others were frequent lucid dreamers. One patient with narcolepsy claimed he almost always had lucid dreams.
IN (lower left) refers to methods whereby information was transmitted from experimenter to dreamer. OUT (lower right) refers to methods whereby information was transmitted from dreamer to experimenter. Credit: Current Biology.
To verify that the participants were indeed dreaming, the researchers placed electrodes close to their eyes, as well as on the scalp and chin. This device records brainwave activity and eyeball movement, which are closely linked to deep sleep.
During this stage, people are likely dreaming. But how do you know they are also aware they’re dreaming? In order to identify which participants were lucid dreaming, the researchers asked certain questions that some participants answered with pre-arranged eyeball movements.
Credit: Current Biology.
For instance, one participant was asked for the answer to eight minus six, to which he correctly answered “two” by making two eye movements from left to right. When asked to repeat the answer, the participant once again performed the correct eye movement.
After the participants woke up and the sessions were over, the researchers made a tally and found 18% of the trials involved clear and accurate communication as described above, 17% seemed to acknowledge they were being asked questions but made unintelligible answers, 3% gave wrong answers, and 60% had no reaction at all.
Mysterious lifeforms have been discovered in one of the most inhabitable places on our planet. Deep below the Antarctic ice shelf is very dark with subzero temperatures but some species are surprisingly thriving down there.
Located on a seafloor boulder were several species. In fact, this is the first time ever that stationary creatures attached to one specific location have been found underneath the ice of Antarctica.
Huw Griffiths, who is a biogeographer at the British Antarctic Survey and an author of the study, explained this further, “This discovery is one of those fortunate accidents that pushes ideas in a different direction and shows us that Antarctic marine life is incredibly special and amazingly adapted to a frozen world.”
Since it is so difficult to study what’s underneath Antarctica’s ice shelves, scientists are only able to make holes in the ice and lower equipment into the depths of the water. Based on evidence gathered from eight of their borehole surveys, they do know that there is some life beneath the ice, such as jellies, fish, crustaceans, and worms. But the fact that they found sponges was incredibly surprising.
Antarctica
They found the sponges underneath 890 meters of ice (2,920 feet) on the seafloor which was 1,233 meters down (4,045 feet). Located on the seafloor boulder was one sponge on a stalk while 15 others were without them. Furthermore, they discovered 22 organisms that have yet to be identified but could possibly be sponges, hydroids, ascidians, cnidaria, barnacles, or polychaetes. (Pictures can be seen here.)
Griffiths noted that there are still many unanswered questions like how they got there; how long have they been there; what do they eat; how many boulders have this type of life attached to them; are they new species and what would happen to them if the ice shelves ended up collapsing?
Since the majority of life on our planet needs sun to survive, it’s amazing to think that these creatures reside in complete darkness and are still able to live. Chemosynthesis is when organisms use the energy from reactions created by inorganic chemicals when there isn’t any sunlight around. Thermal vents found in the ocean release volcanic chemicals and heat, and bacteria uses chemosynthesis to make sugar for their food chain.
Antarctica
Organisms that live beneath glaciers chemosynthesise hydrogen and some chemosynthetic ecosystems depend on methane. Interestingly, a methane leak has been discovered in the waters of Antarctica.
With that being said, the living creatures underneath Antarctica’s ice shelves probably depend on a chemosynthetic food chain but much more research needs to be conducted in order to know for sure. Nevertheless, it’s incredibly interesting to know that several different species can survive beneath the freezing cold ice shelves of Antarctica.
When researchers are drilling almost one kilometer of ice, they’re not expecting to find all that much life. But in a recent survey in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, they came across multiple life forms living in complete darkness, at temperatures of -2.2°C (28 °F)
“This discovery is one of those fortunate accidents that pushes ideas in a different direction and shows us that Antarctic marine life is incredibly special and amazingly adapted to a frozen world,” says biogeographer and lead author, Dr. Huw Griffiths of British Antarctic Survey.
Breaking all the rules
Antarctica is the world’s harshest continent, and yet life seems to find a way even in these conditions. Few creatures can survive in Antarctica in the first place, but to do it in such hellish conditions is truly stunning. This is the first study to find stationary animals attached to a boulder on the Antarctic seafloor, the authors say, and they’re “breaking all the rules.”
Researchers found several sponge-like species, including some species previously unknown to science. It’s very unlikely that they just got lucky and hit the needle in the Antarctic haystack — the one place where such animals happen to survive in these conditions. Instead, Griffiths says, there’s probably much more like this waiting to be discovered.
“There appear to be at least three species present in the images, possibly more. Given that this is the first record of a hard substrate community observed from a habitat that covers 1.6 million km2 then I would be very surprised if we had been lucky enough to find all the species on a single boulder, so I would expect that there are many more waiting to be found,” Griffiths told ZME Science.
We don’t yet know much about these species, and in a way, their discovery seems to pose more questions than it answers. They appear to be a group of unpretentious filter-feeders — creatures that feed by straining suspended matter (food) from the water. But where does their food even come from, and how common are these life forms? Since it’s so dark, there can’t be any talk of photosynthesis, and there doesn’t seem to be any hydrothermal vent, so Griffiths suspects the food comes from farther away.
“From looking at the video it appears to be a filter-feeding community, obviously this community must be able to cope with less food than others elsewhere. There are no obvious signs of chemosynthesis, these sponges are not the typical hydrothermal vent or methane seep fauna and the water temperatures are very cold. As far as we know the most likely source of food is what washed in from beyond the ice shelf by the currents, but this requires further investigation,” Griffiths added in an email.
British Antarctic Survey camera travelling down the 900-meter-long bore hole in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. (Marine creature pictured is unrelated to the discovery).
Image credits: Dr Huw Griffiths/British Antarctic Survey.
Tantalizing information for life on Earth and beyond
The discovery of an established community on a boulder 260 km from the ice raises “significant questions,” the researchers note, forcing us to rethink what we think about how life survives under ice shelves. The findings have wide implications not just in regards to creatures inhabiting the Earth now, but also to creatures that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, in a period called the “snowball earth” — and even for potential life on frozen bodies such as Jupiter’s satellite Europa.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that these creatures are filter-feeders. Filter-feeders depend on a supply of food from above, so they are among the first to disappear as you move away from open water and sunlight. Yet, here they are, probably covering large habitats, showing just how much we’ve still yet to learn about these extreme environments.
“Ice shelves cover roughly a third of the Antarctic’s 5 million km2 continental shelf and the Ronne-Filchner Ice Shelf [where the creatures were found] covers around 420,000 km2, so these environments are surprisingly common but we know virtually nothing about them. Finding filter feeding animals so far from their food source shows us that life beneath ice shelves is more resilient and widespread than we expected.”
Now, researchers will continue to study these creatures and see what they can understand about these extremophilic communities. But they also leave a warning: we may end up destroying these communities before we even truly understand them. Despite being remarkably well adapted for the cold, they are vulnerable to the global heating that could wreck their entire ecosystem.
“If these communities turn out to be new species, only found under ice shelves then this would make them very vulnerable to climate change and ice shelf collapse, which could destroy their entire habitat in the future,” Griffiths concludes.
1177 BC: The year civilization collapsed by Eric Cline Princeton University Press // Buy on Amazon
“Modern scholars refer to them collectively as the “Sea Peoples,” but the Egyptians who recorded their attack on Egypt never used that term,” Eric Cline poignantly writes in the beginning of his book on what he calls “the most interesting year in history.
We’re over 3,000 years in the past, and the Eastern Mediterranean is riddled with thriving civilizations. The Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Minoans, and Mycenaeans are all vying for progress and power, establishing refined trade routes that build on intermingled and surprisingly advanced civilizations. We’re 3,000 years in the past, and yet the people of the time are surprisingly like us.
Nowadays, we often talk about Ancient Greece and Rome, but a millennium before that, several Mediterranean civilizations had established a Golden Age. They traded with each other, they gave gifts and called on each other for help, and of course, at times, they waged war with each other. Yes, at a time when the Roman Empire was centuries away, these civilizations (including the likes of the mythical Troy) ruled the land with stunning prowess.
They were, argues Cline, much like us. For starters, they had many of the same problems we have today: environmental issues (serious drought), pestilence (COVID-19), a struggle for resources. They were also intertwined in many of the ways that we are today, especially through trade. The Mediterranean Sea made for the perfect place to trade your goods, from gold and silver to more practical aspects like wood and tin. They built monumental architecture so impressive that centuries later, people would believe it was mythical. They had advanced writing systems and wrote their adventures, woes, and plans on pieces of papyrus or clay tablets.
Yet despite all this, they disappeared one after the other almost simultaneously, leaving archaeologists thousands of years later wondering what had happened.
The Sea Peoples
Picture this: in this mosaic of civilizations, a group of mysterious sea marauders enter the stage. We don’t know where they came from, what they did, or even who they were. We just know that they came, in great numbers, and they attacked — and even this, we only know because the Egyptians described it in great detail.
The Egyptians didn’t consider the Sea Peoples a unitary group, instead considering them a sort of marine confederation, but the proof is so scarce that we can’t really be sure who they were. The Egyptians claimed they defeated the Sea Peoples, but it must have been a Pyrrhic victory, because after one war, the Egyptian civilization collapsed into a dark age it took centuries to recover from.
It wasn’t just the Egyptians: one after the other, all civilizations in the area collapsed, for no clear reason. It was like the fall of Rome — an end of civilization and the beginning of a long Dark Age. It’s not clear that 1177 is the year when this happened, but sometime around that year, this transition took place — and it’s as good a placeholder as any.
Could it be that these Sea Peoples, who we don’t even know who they are, could have single-handedly collapsed Bronze Age civilization? For a long time, this is what many archaeologists thought — and some still do. But in Cline’s book, he presents a different hypothesis: it wasn’t just one factor, it was a “perfect storm” of different factors, and the Sea Peoples were just one of them.
For instance, other civilizations don’t really mention the Sea Peoples, but that doesn’t mean they never fought them — it’s possible that we just haven’t found their writings, or they got lost or destroyed. But they do mention other problems, like droughts, diseases, or earthquakes. In the period leading to 1177, they all seemed to suffer from some big problem that brought their demise.
1177 is their story — to the extent that we know it.
A story of times past and present
Cline does an excellent job at setting the stage for these events, not just in terms of integrating archaeological and historic evidence, but also in terms of storytelling. The story features different people (some familiar, like Nefertiti or Tutankhamun, and others unknown), different areas, and many intriguing episodes, and yet despite all this information, it flows effortlessly. It’s not just interesting, it’s enthralling. Reading the book, I found myself wanting to learn more about these people in this period. I was surprised by how much we know about them, and saddened to see how much there’s still to discover.
For instance, one such episode features a king that ruled some 3750 years ago and organized expeditions to bring ice from high in the mountains during the cold season. He also built a special ice house where the ice was kept in a solid state until summertime, where he would enjoy his cooled beverage. Another episode features a military strategy recreated with success by a World War I general, who said he learned it from an ancient Egyptian ruler.
Then, of course, there is the intertwining of myth and history. Troy, the legendary city over which gods and men fought, was a real place, and the boundary between myth and reality is not always clear. Then, there’s the biblical Exodus and how it ties (or doesn’t) with archaeological evidence. The Christian myth of the Flood, copied almost exactly from the Babylonians who had described it a thousand years prior.
It all makes for a gripping reading, where you learn while enjoying the story of one of history’s greatest mysteries. Was it the unknown invaders that shattered these bustling civilizations? Was it a sum of factors? Was it something else entirely? Some parts of the puzzle are still missing, but Cline does a great job of walking through the available evidence, presenting it in an easy-to-follow fashion, and drawing what conclusions can be drawn.
The book does at times feel vague or indeterminate, maybe because that’s just the nature of archaeological evidence. Cline also spends a lot of time building a beautiful picture of the world during the Late Bronze Age, looking at what may have caused this collapse, yet at one point he seems to dismiss it as an inevitable collapse of a complex system, leaving the reader wanting more. Still, it’s a thought-provoking read, and a timely second edition as well. With the ongoing pandemic, we’ve seen just how much our lives can change in a moment. Humans often like to think themselves as invincible. Just like these ancient people, we think our society can bend, but nothing can truly break it. The pandemic is just one aspect — researchers have warned for decades that climate change is looming and it could soon cause catastrophic damage.
1177 BC, The Year Civilization Collapsed, is a remarkable book that brings forth not just a piece of history, but also lessons from the past. It may very well be that drought or war brought an end to their society, and there is a warning there for us as well. Unlike these ancient people, however, we are generally aware of what’s going on in the world and what’s happening to us, though whether or not we’ll act on it is a different thing.
A triple-threat of climate change, biodiversity loss and overpopulation is bearing down on Earth.
Charred trees are seen along Pallet Creek Road during the Bobcat Fire in Valyermo, California, September 18, 2020. Climate change is poised to exacerbate the frequency and intensity of annual wildfires. (Image credit: Kyle Grillot/ Getty)
Humanity is barreling toward a "ghastly future" of mass extinctions, health crises and constant climate-induced disruptions to society — one that can only be prevented if world leaders start taking environmental threats seriously, scientists warn in a new paper published Jan. 13 in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science.
In the paper, a team of 17 researchers based in the United States, Mexico and Australia describes three major crises facing life on Earth: climate disruption, biodiversity decline and human overconsumption and overpopulation. Citing more than 150 studies, the team argues that these three crises — which are poised only to escalate in the coming decades — put Earth in a more precarious position than most people realize, and could even jeopardize the human race.
The point of the new paper isn't to scold average citizens or warn that all is lost, the authors wrote — but rather, to plainly describe the threats facing our planet so that people (and hopefully political leaders) start taking them seriously and planning mitigating actions, before it's too late.
"Ours is not a call to surrender," the authors wrote in their paper. "We aim to provide leaders with a realistic 'cold shower' of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future."
What will that future look like? For starters, the team writes, nature will be a lot lonelier. Since the start of agriculture 11,000 years ago, Earth has lost an estimated 50% of its terrestrial plants and roughly 20% of its animal biodiversity, the authors said, citing two studies, one from 2018 and the other from 2019. If current trends continue, as many as 1 million of Earth's 7 million to 10 million plant and animal species could face extinction in the near future, according to the new paper.
Such an enormous loss of biodiversity would also disrupt every major ecosystem on the planet, the team wrote, with fewer insects to pollinate plants, fewer plants to filter the air, water and soil, and fewer forests to protect human settlements from floods and other natural disasters, the team wrote.
Meanwhile, those same phenomena that cause natural disasters are all predicted to become stronger and more frequent due to global climate change. These disasters, coupled with climate-induced droughts and sea-level rise, could mean 1 billion people would become climate refugees by the year 2050, forcing mass migrations that further endanger human lives and disrupt society.
Overpopulation will not make anything easier.
"By 2050, the world population will likely grow to ~9.9 billion, with growth projected by many to continue until well into the next century," the study authors wrote.
This booming growth will exacerbate societal problems like food insecurity, housing insecurity, joblessness, overcrowding and inequality. Larger populations also increase the chances of pandemics, the team wrote; as humans encroach ever farther into wild spaces, the risk of uncovering deadly new zoonotic diseases — like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 — becomes ever greater, according to a study published in September 2020 in the journal World Development.
While we can see and feel the effects of global warming on a daily basis — like record-setting heat across the world and increasingly active hurricane seasons, for instance — the worst effects of these other crises could take decades to become apparent, the team wrote. That delay between cause and effect may be responsible for what the authors call an "utterly inadequate" effort to address these encroaching environmental threats.
"If most of the world's population truly understood and appreciated the magnitude of the crises we summarize here, and the inevitability of worsening conditions, one could logically expect positive changes in politics and policies to match the gravity of the existential threats," the team wrote. "But the opposite is unfolding."
Indeed, just last week a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change revealed that humans have already blown past the global warming targets set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, and we are currently on track to inhabit a world that is 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than average global temperatures in the pre-industrial era — slightly more than halfway to the United Nation's "worst-case scenario." Nations have similarly failed to meet basic biodiversity targets set by the U.N. in 2010, the authors note.
The dark future described in this paper is not guaranteed, the authors wrote, so long as world leaders and policymakers start immediately taking the problems before us seriously. Once leaders accept "the gravity of the situation," then the large-scale changes needed to conserve our planet can begin. Those changes must be sweeping, including "the abolition of perpetual economic growth … [and] a rapid exit from fossil-fuel use," the authors wrote.
But the first step is education.
"It is therefore incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to … avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and 'tell it like it is,'" the team concluded. "Anything else is misleading at best … potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst."
Face In Clouds Watching! Texas, USA 1-26-2021, UFO Sighting News.
Face In Clouds Watching! Texas, USA 1-26-2021, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: January 26, 2021
Location of sighting: East Texas, USA
Here is a face caught by a young woman driving along East Texas last week. The face has an incredible detail to it and its facing downward toward the car on the road. As if it were deliberately looking at the eyewitness. The detail of the face really stands out...it has two eyes, a nose, a mustache, a beard. Strange one...It looks deliberate and meaningful, not a coincidence at all. It almost looks like the sacred Shroud of Turin with the Jesus face in it, but the hair on the face in the cloud is very different. I am left speechless.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
I took the video on Tuesday, January 26, 2021 around 6:15 P.M My fiance and I were driving to our friends house in East Texas, not far from our own home. I was of course doing something on my phone when my fiance said "Hey, look up".... & as soon as I did, I automatically seen it. There was a face clear as day in the clouds or cloud.... I was in total shock as to what I was seeing before me. It was shocking, creeping wow moment. It even seem to have eyes inside as if it was watching us. I seen videos of this anomaly but never experienced one. I've always been a believer of anything paranormal or unusual unexplained happenings but this set it in stone for me.
RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
Images, real or fake? Video with the possible solution?
Drawing With Drones Over the Salt Flats of Bolivia
Drawing With Drones Over the Salt Flats of Bolivia
Reuben Wu uses LED-equipped drones to illuminate mysterious shapes in one of the world’s strangest landscapes.
PHOTOGRAPH: REUBEN WU
In July, Reuben Wu and two companions took a week-long road trip through Bolivia, capturing some of the country's most stunning landscapes.
REUBEN WU HAS photographed some of the world’s most remote and extreme places: Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Bisti Badlands of New Mexico, the Arctic tundra of Norway, Peru’s Pastoruri glacier. But few locations compare to the site of his latest project, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni. Stretching across more than 4,000 square miles of South America’s Altiplano (high plain), Salar de Uyuni (literally, the salts of Uyuni, the nearest town) is the world’s largest salt flat, a nearly featureless white landscape left behind by the evaporation of prehistoric lakes.
Shooting the salt flats was the culmination of a week-long Bolivian road trip Wu and two companions took last July. Between the freezing nighttime temperatures, high altitudes (the Altiplano averages 12,000 feet above sea level), and long drives, the team got little sleep. “We were cold, we were light-headed, and doing anything physical was very hard,” Wu recalls. “There were times when I really struggled.”
But the hardships paid off when the crew finally reached the salt flats. Because it was the dry season, most of the Salar de Uyuni looked like a geometrically patterned moonscape. Still, Wu was lucky enough to find a standing puddle large enough to capture the rainy-season mirror effect, too. In addition to more traditional landscape photography, Wu created several of his signature aeroglyphs—glowing geometric shapes that float mysteriously in the sky. Wu draws the aeroglyphs by piloting LED-equipped drones in precise patterns while keeping his shutter open to create a long exposure.
Over the course of the road trip Wu documented a variety of Bolivian landscapes ranging from sandy deserts to rocky palisades, but the Salar de Uyuni emerged as the highlight. “If it were in the US, it would be swarming with tourists,” he says. “Instead, we had the whole thing to ourselves except for the occasional farmer and a cow.” The salt flats are rich in deposits of lithium, a key element in smartphone and electric car batteries, but lithium mining operations are still in their infancy thanks to the region’s inaccessibility and the reluctance of recently ousted president Evo Morales to greenlight foreign investment.
Throughout the trip, Wu used a Phase One XT, a compact medium-format digital camera that allowed him to take ultrahigh-resolution images on the go. Back in his studio, he used software to tinker with the images until arriving at the final product. Wu thinks of photography as “painting with light” and doesn’t fetishize authenticity. “For me, everything’s a tool,” he says. “The camera’s a tool, the computer’s a tool. Just so long as the technology and the tools don’t overwhelm the vision.”
Magnetic Pole Shift Update, Life, Nova, Quake Watch | S0 News Jan.30.2021
Magnetic Pole Shift Update, Life, Nova, Quake Watch | S0 News Jan.30.2021
Magnetic Pole Shift Update, Life, Nova, Quake Watch | S0 News Jan.30.2021
Pole Shift (magnetic): A shift in “magnetic” poles is one of the more common and accepted theories across the world, however, this is not to be confused with those that speak of a “geographic” pole shift. Even though these events can occur at the same time, they actually have quite different affects on Earth.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 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.
