Tag: Executive Director

We’re About To Learn A Lot More About Area 51

March 14, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comWhen the National Atomic Testing Museum of Las Vegas opened its "Area 51: Myth or Reality" exhibit two years ago, it became an instant hit. It wasn't just the only place that had a comprehensive knowledge of Area 51 -...

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Volunteers Sought for Christmas Bird Count

December 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments





Excerpt from
yourdailyjournal.com 


ROCKINGHAM — The National Audubon Society is inviting Richmond County birdwatchers to participate in the longest-running citizen science survey in the world, the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count.

Beginning Sunday, hundreds of birders and nature enthusiasts across North Carolina will take part in this long-standing tradition where data collected has helped to shape influential conservation efforts nationwide.

As North Carolina’s landscape continues to evolve with changes... the data collected during the annual Christmas Bird Count is crucial to understanding the health of native and migrating bird populations throughout North Carolina. During the 2013 CBC, five snowy owls were spotted from Asheville to Wilmington, and local citizen scientists were on hand to detail the rare event.

North Carolina’s birding circles are some of the top performing in the country, and last year, a record 51 counts across the state reported 1,113,012 individual birds from 225 species.

“In a state where inspiring conservation action is vital to the health of birds facing the damaging effects of climate change, Audubon North Carolina is excited to be a leader in statewide conservation efforts,” Executive Director Heather Hahn said in a release. “As climate change continues to affect populations of the brown-headed nuthatch, American oystercatcher, wood thrush and many more iconic species, the data collected during this annual event becomes even more important to ongoing efforts to protect our birds.”

Each year, the Audubon Christmas Bird Count mobilizes more than 70,000 volunteer bird counters in more than 2,400 locations across the Western Hemisphere. The Audubon Christmas Bird Count utilizes the power of volunteers to track the health of bird populations at a scale that professional scientists could never accomplish alone. Data compiled across North Carolina will record every individual bird and bird species seen in a specified area, contributing to a vast citizen science network that continues a tradition stretching back more than 100 years.

Birders of all ages are welcome to contribute to this fun winter tradition and nationwide citizen science project, which provides ornithologists with a crucial snapshot of native bird populations during the winter months. Each individual count is performed in a count circle with a diameter of 15 miles.

At least 10 volunteers, including a compiler to coordinate the process, count in each circle. The volunteers break up into small parties and follow assigned routes, which change little from year to year, counting every bird they see. In most count circles, some people also watch feeders instead of following routes.

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Be Your Own Therapist ~ Tibetan Buddhist nun Robina Courtin ~ Video

November 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments

We spend our lives being seduced by the outside world, believing without question that happiness and suffering come from "out there." In reality, Buddhist teachings explain that they come from the way we perceive and interpret things, not the things...

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NASA proposes generating revenue by mining on asteroids close to the Earth

November 25, 2014 / / 0 Comments





Excerpt from thewestsidestory.net

The American space agency, NASA, is working on a project which has the potential of becoming a source of revenue for the cash strapped agency. It has already signed contracts with two companies namely Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries for carrying the project further. The new proposed project will involve asteroid mining. Together with the two of them, NASA has already started chalking out a strategy for gathering resources in space.

According to experts, bringing resources from the space to earth will cost about $5,000 to $25,000, which means, taking resources in space will be the only alternative the two associated companies will the focusing on. In order to bring down the operational cost, they will also need to find out asteroids that are located closest to our planet and are rich sources of minerals, silicates, carbonaceous minerals and metals.

asteroid-mining

“Communicating about any future asteroid threat will not be easy,” said Michael Simpson, SWF’s Executive Director, according to Discovery.com. “People will need messages they can act on, and they will deserve to know the limitations on what modern science can predict.”

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Has Amelia Earhart’s plane finally been found? Not so fast

November 4, 2014 / / 0 Comments


 


Excerpt from

A small group of wreckage hunters purports to have found a bit of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra aircraft. It’s a good story, but critics of the find are more vocal than ever.


A metal sheet, some small bones and an “ointment pot” may be the final artifacts of Amelia Earhart’s failed 1937 journey around the world, if a small group of wreckage hunters is to be believed. They could also be the remains of some other plane, a turtle and trash. 

But the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar), which first found the warped bit of aluminum on a 1991 trip to the tiny atoll of Nikumaroro, in the Republic of Kiribati, says the 19in-by-23in slab has to be part of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra aircraft, which disappeared while she was flying over the Pacific. 

Tighar’s executive director Ric Gillespie made headlines this week by announcing “new research” into the 1991 fragment that he says answers earlier critics and proves it is from Earhart’s plane. 

The story he proposes is not implausible: the metal’s rivets don’t match with the Electra’s design, but that’s because because it’s actually a patch made to repair the aircraft after a bad landing in Miami, earlier on Earhart’s trip. Gillespie’s team managed to find a Miami Herald photo from 1937 which shows, over the place where a window should be, a particularly shiny piece of metal. In fact, a lab tested the metal back in 1996 and found it to be “essentially the same” 24ST Alclad aluminum that was to cover most aircraft of the 30s, including Earhart’s Electra. Gillespie says that “the patch was as unique to her particular aircraft as a fingerprint is to an individual … [the aluminum] matches that fingerprint in many respects”.
Metal fragment believed to be from Amelia Earhart's plane
The aluminium fragment believed to be from Amelia Earhart’s aircraft.Photograph: Tighar/Reuters

Under Gillespie’s theory, Earhart made it to the island, sent radio signals “for at least five nights before the Electra was washed into the ocean”, and eventually died there.

But Gillsepie’s been here before, and his critics are not quiet, with one saying: “Everybody should have facts to back up [their] opinions, and Mr Gillespie, well, he doesn’t.” (A second, more concisely, says: “He’s very creative.”) After discovering the metal, Gillespie gave a 1992 press conference to say that “every possibility has been checked, every alternative eliminated … We found a piece of Amelia Earhart’s aircraft.”

Objectors immediately pointed out that he had not checked the fragment’s rivets, which did not match Earhart’s Electra. Now, 22 years later, the photo could indeed explain the discrepancy – but Gillespie still lacks a wreck to compare the pattern to. As a substitute, Gillespie’s team went to a Kansas facility that’s restoring an Electra and claims to have found – by holding the patch up alongside the restored plane – that the rivets seemed consistent with the pattern. No independent researchers have confirmed their findings.

To be fair, Tighar realizes they know less about the scrap than they’d like: “If the artifact is not the scab patch from NR16020, then it is a random piece of aircraft wreckage from some unknown type involved in an unknown accident that just happens to match the dozens of material and dimensional requirements of the patch.”

Considering the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and the sheer amount of wreckage scattered across it over the past century, this actually seems pretty reasonable, but Tighar doubles down on its implication of certainty: “[That would mean] this incredibly specific, but random, piece of debris just happened to end up on Nikumaroro, the atoll where so much other evidence points to Earhart.”

What evidence does Tighar present? In 2011 they tested three bones found near a turtle shell, which could perhaps have been human or that of a turtle. DNA tests were inconclusive. (Gillespie says “the door is still open for it to be a human finger bone.”)

Gillespie told the Miami Herald earlier this year that “the key to it is her final message, where she says ‘line of position 157 dash 337’ … That’s a line that Noonan calculated from the sunrise, running 337 degrees to the north-west and 157 degrees to the south-east. And if you follow it far enough, there are two deserted islands on it, McKeon Island and Gardner Island.” 

It’s a good story, just like the one ex-marine Floyd Kilts used to tell about how a tribesman told him about a partial human skeleton and a woman’s shoe, which ended up with a British official and disappeared afterward. (Micronesians settled on the island a year after Earhart vanished.) But despite all the story and circumstantial evidence, no expedition in the past 70 years has found the Electra on or near either island.

But Tighar of course thinks it might. It found a “sonar streak” 600ft below the surface “the right size, the right shape … in the right place to be part of the Electra”, which the group has so far had neither the time nor funding to investigate. Gillespie admits it could also be part of a reef, a geological formation or any number of things once lodged into the seabed and now drifted away. He intends to explore the site in a 2015 expedition. Whether he turns up with Earhart’s lost Electra or something else entirely, he will have a new story.

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Law enforcement agencies will begin tracking animal abuse

September 21, 2014 / / 0 Comments

    myfoxtampabay.comThe public sees or hears reports of animal abuse on a regular basis. But "all the time" is not a statistic. Crime statistics come from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, and sta...

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Goldman Sachs Executive Director Resigns: Alludes to Extraterrestrial Presence at Meetings

March 15, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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by Greg Giles

Goldman Sachs new multi-billion dollar Manhattan headquarters, conspicuously absent of any identifying markers as part of the financial giant’s attempts to hide from the irate public in lieu of their complicity...

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Facebook tracks your every move, even after logging out

September 29, 2011 / / 0 Comments

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by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) The social media empire Facebook has unveiled some new "features" on its platform in recent days that many allege are a total and compete privacy-breaching nightmare. But one...

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Extraterrestrials on Earth: A challenge we can no longer ignore

August 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

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Submitted by A. R. Bordon on Thu, 07/28/2011 - 12:17

Santa Monica, CALIFORNIA -- I was quite taken with Brad Steiger’s article "A Pre-Historic Nuclear War? World Before Our Own" and by the two questions that have ...

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Farmers and Seed Producers Launch Preemptive Strike against Monsanto

April 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

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March 30th, 2011

Lawsuit Filed To Protect Themselves from Unfair Patent Enforcement on Genetically Modified Seed

Action Would Prohibit Biotechnology Giant from Suing Organic Farmers and Seed Growers If Innocently Contaminated ...

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Internet: The Best Tool For Peace

September 21, 2010 / / 0 Comments

All parties who's images and recordings have granted explicit permission for use in this video and subsequent uses at the discretion of the owner. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------...

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