component Archives ⋆ Dimensional Bliss

Tag: component (page 1 of 2)

Infants Deeply Traumatized By Common Medical Procedures

Just Up Ahead...and Right on Schedule -- Sirian High Council -- Patricia Cori

Sayer Ji, Green Med InfoA concerning new study suggests that decades of medical procedures performed on infants without pain management has had deeply traumatizing effects.A groundbreaking study published in eLife titled, “fMRI reveals neural activity overlap between adult and infant pain,” demonstrates that the infant pain experience, despite long held assumptions to the contrary, closely resembles that of adults.Researchers discovered that when [...]

View Article Here Read More

This Kind of Olive Oil Can Kill Cancer Cells in One Hour

May 26, 2015 / Steven Laniers Metaphysical Directory - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

Karen Foster, Prevent DiseaseExtra virgin olive oil has the capacity to induce rapid death in cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact. The many implicated health benefits of olive oil is well known, however scientists have been unable to effectively confirm the anti-cancer phenomenon until now. The processing of olive oils also highly differentiates the concentration of anti-cancer compounds.Oleocanthal (OC), a phenolic compound in extra virgin olive oil (EVOO), has been impl [...]

View Article Here Read More

The Science of the Dogon

May 19, 2015 / Steven Laniers Metaphysical Directory - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

Excerpt from The Science of The Dogon, by Laird ScrantonThe information presented in the preceding chapters demonstrates a direct relationship between the symbols and themes of the Dogon creation story and known scientific facts relating to the formation of the universe, matter, and biological reproduction. This relationship is a broad and specific one that is couched in clear definitions and supported by priestly interpretations and cosmological drawings. The parallels between Dogon myth [...]

View Article Here Read More

Why Do We Still Vaccinate? – 25 Questions From A Former Vaccine Advocate

May 19, 2015 / Steven Laniers Metaphysical Directory - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

Brian Rogers, Prevent DiseaseI used to be pro vaccine. I know the feeling of thinking others were just plain crazy and wrong for not vaccinating their children and themselves. ‘Irresponsible!’ I said when pointing my finger. I’d use the same old arguments about polio and small pox and how vaccines saved us from all those horrible diseases and just swallowing and regurgitating the propaganda I was brought up with. It was only recently, in 2009 that I started question [...]

View Article Here Read More

22 Terrifying and Magical Capabilities Someone Has When You Fall For Them

May 10, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comLove is terrifying, and terror is love.How exceptional is falling in love? How breathtakingly incredible? How painful and enchanted it is to have your heart opened. It presents so many chances for overwhelming pain, an...

View Article Here Read More

"Catastrophic end" for out-of-control space cargo ship ~ Video from Spacecraft Cockpit

April 30, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from cbsnews.com A Russian Progress cargo ship bound for the International Space Station spun out of control Tuesday. Engineers were unable to direct the wayward ship and soon gave up any hope that it would be able to dock t...

View Article Here Read More

Earth’s Moon May Not Be Critical to Life Afterall

February 19, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from space.com

The moon has long been viewed as a crucial component in creating an environment suitable for the evolution of complex life on Earth, but a number of scientific results in recent years have shown that perhaps our planet doesn't need the moon as much as we have thought.

In 1993, French astronomer Jacques Laskar ran a series of calculations indicating that the gravity of the moon is vital to stabilizing the tilt of our planet. Earth's obliquity, as this tilt is technically known as, has huge repercussions for climate. Laskar argued that should Earth's obliquity wander over hundreds of thousands of years, it would cause environmental chaos by creating a climate too variable for complex life to develop in relative peace.
So his argument goes, we should feel remarkably lucky to have such a large moon on our doorstep, as no other terrestrial planet in our solar system has such a moon. Mars' two satellites, Phobos and Deimos, are tiny, captured asteroids that have little known effect on the Red Planet. Consequently, Mars' tilt wobbles chaotically over timescales of millions of years, with evidence for swings in its rotational axis at least as large as 45 degrees.

The stroke of good fortune that led to Earth possessing an unlikely moon, specifically the collision 4.5 billion years ago between Earth and a Mars-sized proto-planet that produced the debris from which our Moon formed, has become one of the central tenets of the 'Rare Earth' hypothesis. Famously promoted by Peter Ward and Don Brownlee, it argues that planets where everything is just right for complex life are exceedingly rare.

New findings, however, are tearing up the old rule book. In 2011, a trio of scientists — Jack Lissauer of NASA Ames Research Center, Jason Barnes of the University of Idaho and John Chambers of the Carnegie Institution for Science — published results from new simulations describing what Earth's obliquity would be like without the moon. What they found was surprising.

"We were looking into how obliquity might vary for all sorts of planetary systems," says Lissauer. "To test our code we began with integrations following the obliquity of Mars and found similar results to other people. But when we did the obliquity of Earth we found the variations were much smaller than expected — nowhere near as extreme as previous calculations suggested they would be."
Lissauer's team found that without the moon, Earth's rotational axis would only wobble by 10 degrees more than its present day angle of 23.5 degrees. The reason for such vastly different results to those attained by Jacques Laskar is pure computing power. Today's computers are much faster and capable of more accurate modeling with far more data than computers of the 1990s.

Lissauer and his colleagues also found that if Earth were spinning fast, with one day lasting less than 10 hours, or rotating retrograde (i.e. backwards so that the sun rose in the West and set in the East), then Earth stabilized itself thanks to the gravitational resonances with other planets, most notably giant Jupiter. There would be no need for a large moon.

Earth's rotation has not always been as leisurely as the current 24 hour spin-rate. Following the impact that formed the moon, Earth was spinning once every four or five hours, but it has since gradually slowed by the moon's presence. As for the length of Earth's day prior to the moon-forming impact, nobody really knows, but some models of the impact developed by Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute, in Boulder, Colorado, suggest that Earth could have been rotating fast, or even retrograde, prior to the collision.

Planets with inclined orbits could find that their increased obliquity is beneficial to their long-term climate – as long as they do not have a large moon.

"Collisions in the epoch during which Earth was formed determined its initial rotation," says Lissauer. "For rocky planets, some of the models say most of them will be prograde, but others say comparable numbers of planets will be prograde and retrograde. Certainly, retrograde worlds are not expected to be rare."

The upshot of Lissauer's findings is that the presence of a moon is not the be all and end all as once thought, and a terrestrial planet can exist without a large moon and still retain its habitability. Indeed, it is possible to imagine some circumstances where having a large moon would actually be pretty bad for life.

Rory Barnes, of the University of Washington, has also tackled the problem of obliquity, but from a different perspective. Planets on the edge of habitable zones exist in a precarious position, far enough away from their star that, without a thick, insulating atmosphere, they freeze over, just like Mars. Barnes and his colleagues including John Armstrong of Weber State University, realized that torques from other nearby worlds could cause a planet's inclination to the ecliptic plane to vary. This in turn would result in a change of obliquity; the greater the inclination, the greater the obliquity to the Sun. Barnes and Armstrong saw that this could be a good thing for planets on the edges of habitable zones, allowing heat to be distributed evenly over geological timescales and preventing "Snowball Earth" scenarios. They called these worlds "tilt-a-worlds," but the presence of a large moon would counteract this beneficial obliquity change.

"I think one of the most important points from our tilt-a-world paper is that at the outer edge of the habitable zone, having a large moon is bad, there's no other way to look at it," says Barnes. "If you have a large moon that stabilizes the obliquity then you have a tendency to completely freeze over."

Barnes is impressed with the work of Lissauer's team.
"I think it is a well done study," he says. "It suggests that Earth does not need the moon to have a relatively stable climate. I don't think there would be any dire consequences to not having a moon."

The effects of changing obliquity on Mars’ climate. Mars’ current 25-degree tilt is seen at top left. At top right is a Mars that has a high obliquity, leading to ice gather at its equator while the poles point sunwards. At bottom is Mars with low obliquity, which sees its polar caps grow in size.

Of course, the moon does have a hand in other factors important to life besides planetary obliquity. Tidal pools may have been the point of origin of life on Earth. Although the moon produces the largest tides, the sun also influences tides, so the lack of a large moon is not necessarily a stumbling block. Some animals have also evolved a life cycle based on the cycle of the moon, but that's more happenstance than an essential component for life.

"Those are just minor things," says Lissauer.

Without the absolute need for a moon, astrobiologists seeking life and habitable worlds elsewhere face new opportunities. Maybe Earth, with its giant moon, is actually the oddball amongst habitable planets. Rory Barnes certainly doesn't think we need it.
"It will be a step forward to see the myth that a habitable planet needs a large moon dispelled," he says, to which Lissauer agrees.
Earth without its moon might therefore remain habitable, but we should still cherish its friendly presence. After all, would Beethoven have written the Moonlight Sonata without it?

View Article Here Read More

Move Over Hubble, Meet the New High Powered Star Searcher

January 16, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

NASA'S James Webb Space Telescope

Excerpt from space.com

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, will probe the cosmos to uncover the history of the universe from the Big Bang to alien planet formation and beyond.
Scientists are planning to use the infrared telescope to search for the first galaxies that formed at the beginning of the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will also have the ability to look through cosmic dust clouds to find newly forming planetary systems and seek out the chemical origins of life in the solar system.

The powerful $8.8 billion spacecraft is also expected to take amazing photos of celestial objects like its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

Instruments on board

The JWST will come equipped with four science instruments.

Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) — Provided by the University of Arizona, this infrared camera will detect light from stars in nearby galaxies and stars within the Milky Way. It will also search for light from stars and galaxies that formed early in the universe's life. NIRCam will be outfitted with coronagraphs that can block a bright object's light, making dimmer objects near those stars (like planets) visible.
Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) — NIRSpec will observe 100 objects simultaneously, searching for the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. NIRSpec was provided by the European Space Agency with help from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) — MIRI will produce amazing space photos of distant celestial objects, following in Hubble's tradition of astrophotography. The spectrograph that is a part of the instrument will allow scientists to gather more physical details about distant objects in the universe. MIRI will detect distant galaxies, faint comets, forming stars and objects in the Kuiper Belt. MIRI was built by the European Consortium with the European Space Agency and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Fine Guidance Sensor/Near InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (FGS/NIRISS) — This Canadian Space Agency-built instrument is more like two instruments in one. The FGS component is responsible for keeping the JWST pointed in exactly the right direction during its science investigations. NIRISS will scope out the cosmos to find signatures of the first light in the universe and seek out and characterize alien planets.

The telescope will also sport a tennis court-size sunshield and a 21.3 foot (6.5 meter) mirror — the largest mirror ever launched into space. Those components will not fit into the rocket launching the JWST, so both will unfurl once the telescope is in space.

Infrared: Inside the huge space observatory that operates from a point in space four times further away than the moon.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is an $8.8 billion space observatory built to observe the infrared universe like never before. See how NASA's James Webb Space Telescope works in this Space.com infographic

James Webb the man

The JWST is named for former NASA chief James Webb. Webb took charge of the space agency from 1961 to 1968, retiring just a few months before NASA put the first man on the moon.

View Article Here Read More

Extreme Storms on Uranus Puzzle Astronomers

November 13, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

These infrared images of the planet Uranus show a white spot that is actually a massive storm on the planet. This image was recorded by the Keck II telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii on Aug. 6, 2014 in the 2.2-micron wavelength.

Excerpt from space.com
By Elizabeth Howell

Uranus is finally having some summer storms, seven years after the planet reached its closest approach to the sun, leaving scientists wondering why the massive storms are so late.

The usually quiet gas giant now has such "incredibly active" weather that some of the features are even visible to amateurs, said Imke de Pater, the project's lead researcher and an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. Astronomers first announced the extreme storms on Uranus in August, and have been trying to understand them ever since.

This is by far the most active weather de Pater's team has seen on Uranus in the past decade, examining its storms and northern convective features. It also paints a different picture of the quiet planet Voyager 2 saw when the NASA spacecraft flew by in 1986.

An infrared composite image of the two hemispheres of Uranus obtained with Keck Telescope adaptive optics. The component colors of blue, green, and red were obtained from images made at near infrared wavelengths of 1.26, 1.62, and 2.1 microns respectively. The images were obtained on July 11 and 12, 2004. The North pole is at 4 o'clock. Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison/W.W. Keck Observatory

"This type of activity would have been expected in 2007, when Uranus' once-every-42-year equinox occurred and the sun shined directly on the equator," research co-investigator Heidi Hammel, of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, said in a statement. "But we predicted that such activity would have died down by now. Why we see these incredible storms now is beyond anybody's guess."

But here's where the mystery comes in: As far as anyone can tell, Uranus has no source of internal heat. Sunlight is thought to be responsible for changes in its atmosphere, such as storms. But the sun's light is currently weak in Uranus' northern hemisphere, so scientists are puzzled as to why that area is so active today.

Huge storms on Uranus

Based on the colors and structure of the storm spotted by amateurs, professional astronomers believe it could hint at a vortex deeper in the atmosphere — similar to phenomena spotted on Jupiter, such as the Great Red Spot.

Follow-up observations with the Keck II telescope revealed that the storm was still raging, although it had changed its shape, and possibly its intensity.

Also contributing to the effort was the Hubble Space Telescope, which examined the entire planet of Uranus Oct. 14 in several wavelengths. The observations revealed storms spanning several altitudes, over a distance of about 5,592 miles (9,000 kilometers).

"If, indeed, these features are high-altitude clouds generated by flow perturbations associated with a deeper vortex system, such drastic fluctuations in intensity would indeed be possible," said Larry Sromovsky, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who performed the newer work.

View Article Here Read More

Think You Could Live on Mars? Think Again

October 15, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from
time.com

A new analysis of Mars One's plans to colonize the Red Planet finds that the explorers would begin dying within 68 days of touching down

Hear that? That’s the sound of 200,000 reservations being reconsidered. Two hundred thousand is the announced number of intrepid folks who signed up last year for the chance to be among the first Earthlings to colonize Mars, with flights beginning as early as 2024. The catch: the trips will be one way, as in no return ticket, as in farewell friends, family, charbroiled steaks and vodka martinis, to say nothing of such everyday luxuries as modern hospitals and, you know, breathable air.
But the settlers in Jamestown weren’t exactly volunteering for a weekend in Aspen either, and in both cases, the compensations—being the first people on a distant shore—seemed attractive enough. Now, however, the Mars plan seems to have run into a teensy snag. According to a new analysis by a team of grad students at MIT, the new arrivals would begin dying within just 68 days of touching down.

An artist concept of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission. Launched in November 2013, the mission will explore the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind.

The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft launches from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 41, Monday, Nov. 18, 2013, Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA’s Mars-bound spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, inside a payload fairing, is hoisted to the top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41 on Nov. 8, 2013.

Inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, engineers and technicians perform a spin test of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft. The operation is designed to verify that MAVEN is properly balanced as it spins during the initial mission activities.

Lockheed Martin/NASA

The organizers of the burn-your-boats expedition is a group called Mars One, headed by Bas Lansdorp, a Dutch entrepreneur and mechanical engineer. As Lansdorp sees things, habitat modules and other hardware would be sent to the Red Planet in advance of any astronauts, who would arrive in four-person crews at two-year intervals—when Mars and Earth make their closest approach, which holds the outbound journey to a brief (relatively speaking) eight months. The crew-selection process would be part of (yes) a sponsored reality show, which would ensure a steady flow of cash—and since the settlers would grow their own food onsite, there would be little to carry along with them. All that would keep the overall cost of the project to a shoestring (relative again) $6 billion.

So what could go wrong? That’s what the four MIT students set out to find out, and the short answer is: a lot.

The biggest problem, the students discovered, concerns that business of breathable air. One of the things that’s always made Earth such a niftily habitable place to live is that what animals exhale, plants inhale, and vice versa. Since the Martian astronauts and their crops would be living and respiring in the same enclosed habitats, a perfect closed loop should result in which we provide them all the carbon dioxide they need and they return the favor with oxygen.

Only it doesn’t, the MIT students found. The problem begins with the lettuce and the wheat, both of which are considered essential crops. As lettuce matures, peaking about 30 days after planting, it pushes the 02 level past what’s known as .3 molar fractions, which, whatever it means, doesn’t sound terribly dangerous — except it’s also the point at which the threat of fire rises to unacceptable levels. That risk begins to tail off as the crop is harvested and eaten, but it explodes upward again, far past the .3 level, at 68 days when the far gassier wheat matures.

A simple answer would be simply to vent a little of the excess O2 out, which actually could work, except the venting apparatus is not able to distinguish one gas from another. That means that nitrogen—which would, as on Earth, make up the majority of the astronauts’ atmosphere—would be lost too. That, in turn, would lower the internal pressure to unsurvivable levels—and that’s what gets your 68-day doomsday clock ticking.

There is some question too about whether the hardware that Mars One is counting on would even be ready for prime time. The mission planners make much of the fact that a lot of what they’re planning to use on Mars has already been proven aboard the International Space Station (ISS), which is true enough. But that hardware is built to operate in microgravity—effectively zero g—while Mars’s gravity is nearly 40% of Earth’s. So a mechanical component that would weigh 10 lbs. on Earth can be designed with little concern about certain kinds of wear since it would weigh 0 lbs. in orbit. But on Mars it would be 4 lbs., and that can make all the difference.

“The introduction of a partial gravity environment,” the grad students write, “will inevitably lead to different [environmental] technologies.”

For that and other reasons, technical breakdowns are a certainty. The need for replacement parts is factored into Mars One’s plans, but probably not in the way that they should be. According to the MIT team, over the course of 130 months, spare parts alone would gobble up 62% of the payload space on resupply missions, making it harder to get such essentials as seeds, clothes and medicine—to say nothing of other crew members—launched on schedule.

Then too, there is the question of habitat crowding. It’s easy to keep people alive if you feed them, say, a single calorie-dense food product every day. But energy bars forever means quickly losing your marbles, which is why Mars One plans for a variety of crops—just not a big enough variety. “Given that the crop selection will significantly influence the wellbeing of the crew for the entirety of their lives after reaching Mars,” the authors write, “we opt for crop variety over minimizing growth area.”

Then there is the question of cost—there’s not a space program in history whose initial price tag wasn’t badly lowballed—to say nothing of maintaining that biennial launch schedule, to say nothing of the cabin fever that could soon enough set the settlers at one another’s throats. Jamestown may not have been a picnic, but when things got to be too much you could always go for a walk by the creek.

No creeks here, nor much of anything else either. Human beings may indeed colonize Mars one day, and it’s a very worthy goal. But as with any other kind of travel, the best part of going is often coming home.

View Article Here Read More

First Russian woman lifts off to International Space Station

September 25, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Elena Serova of Russia, a member of the International Space Station crew, gestures as she boards the Soyuz TMA-14M spacecraft at t...

View Article Here Read More

What is Enlightenment?

September 20, 2014 / Steven Lanier's Journey - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

Thomas Razzeto, GrahamHancock.comMy most passionate plea is for you to wake up to your true self as pure awareness. We have all heard it said that you are not a human being having a spiritual experience, but instead, you are a spiritual being having a human experience. Yet you are not a being of any kind, spiritual or physical. You are pure awareness! And most importantly, your awareness is the One Awareness – the Divine Awareness – and as such, it is the only reality tha [...]

View Article Here Read More