Tag: meeting (page 4 of 7)

Now You See Them ~ ‘Magic Islands’ Appear on Saturn’s Moon Titan

November 11, 2014 / / 0 Comments

This near-infrared, color mosaic from NASA's Cassini spacecraft shows the sun glinting off of Titan's north polar seas.
A false-color mosaic from space shows the northern seas beneath the haze of Titan.
Photograph by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho


Excerpt from
news.nationalgeographic.com


TUCSON, Arizona—Two new "magic islands" have joined one reported last year on Saturn's giant moon Titan, Cassini spacecraft observations showed on Monday. The features add to a puzzling vanishing act playing out on the frozen world's seas.


Since Cassini first arrived at Saturn in 2004, its photos of Titan have revealed numerous seas, lakes, and rivers on the giant moon's frozen surface. This summer, images showed a mysterious feature in one sea—the first "magic island"—that appeared glinting on a lake's surface and then quickly vanished. 


The find raised speculation that scientists had captured views of waves splashing within the otherwise mirror-smooth liquid methane seas on the moon. Or else it was a fluke.


Now, an August 21 flyby has turned up two more strange reflecting features, magic islands that weren't there in earlier flybys. "They just popped up," says Cornell's Alexander Hayes, who presented the latest survey of Titan's seas at a briefing at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting.


"They could be waves, or they could be something more solid," says MIT's Jason Soderblom, a member of the Cassini team reporting the observations. "We definitely know now they are something reflecting from the surface."


Since Titan is the only body besides Earth that has rain-carved geography to study, the possibility of a lake with waves intrigued scientists enough to keep them looking.


"After ten years there, Titan still can surprise us," Hayes says. "Titan has dunes, lakes, seas, even rivers. All this makes Titan an explorer's utopia."


An August 21 flyby passing some 599 miles (964 kilometers) above Titan allowed Cassini to investigate the depth of Kraken Mare, the largest sea on the frozen moon. Radar observations from the spacecraft covered a 120-mile (200-kilometer) shore-to-shore strip of the methane sea.


That flyby revealed that Kraken Mare reaches more than 656 feet (200 meters) deep.


Cassini image of Titan's sea.
A Cassini flyby of Titan viewed a narrow stretch of the moon's Kraken Mare sea.

Photograph by NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell


Depth Charge

Though Earth and Titan are the only known worlds in the solar system with seas and lakes, the ones on Titan are quite different from Earth's. Surface temperatures on the moon are around -290°F (-179°C), and its lakes are filled with liquid methane, ethane, and other liquefied natural gases.


With spring returning to the northern hemisphere of Titan, where Kraken Mare resides, the scientists suspect they will soon see more mysteries disturbing the once placid surface of the seas of Titan.

"We are likely to see more islands showing up," Hayes says. "These lakes and seas are dynamic places."

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Amazon, Google, IBM & Microsoft Want to Store Your Genome

November 7, 2014 / / 0 Comments


Excerpt from  technologyreview.com


By Antonio Regalado

 For $25 a year, Google will keep a copy of any genome in the cloud.

Google is approaching hospitals and universities with a new pitch. Have genomes? Store them with us.

The search giant’s first product for the DNA age is Google Genomics, a cloud computing service that it launched last March but went mostly unnoticed amid a barrage of high profile R&D announcements from Google...

Google Genomics could prove more significant than any of these moonshots. Connecting and comparing genomes by the thousands, and soon by the millions, is what’s going to propel medical discoveries for the next decade. The question of who will store the data is already a point of growing competition between Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

Google began work on Google Genomics 18 months ago, meeting with scientists and building an interface, or API, that lets them move DNA data into its server farms and do experiments there using the same database technology that indexes the Web and tracks billions of Internet users.

This flow of data is smaller than what is routinely handled by large Internet companies (over two months, Broad will produce the equivalent of what gets uploaded to YouTube in one day) but it exceeds anything biologists have dealt with. That’s now prompting a wide effort to store and access data at central locations, often commercial ones. The National Cancer Institute said last month that it would pay $19 million to move copies of the 2.6 petabyte Cancer Genome Atlas into the cloud. Copies of the data, from several thousand cancer patients, will reside both at Google Genomics and in Amazon’s data centers.

The idea is to create “cancer genome clouds” where scientists can share information and quickly run virtual experiments as easily as a Web search, says Sheila Reynolds, a research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. “Not everyone has the ability to download a petabyte of data, or has the computing power to work on it,” she says.

Also speeding the move of DNA data to the cloud has been a yearlong price war between Google and Amazon. Google says it now charges about $25 a year to store a genome, and more to do computations on it. Scientific raw data representing a single person’s genome is about 100 gigabytes in size, although a polished version of a person’s genetic code is far smaller, less than a gigabyte. That would cost only $0.25 cents a year.


The bigger point, he says, is that medicine will soon rely on a kind of global Internet-of-DNA which doctors will be able to search. “Our bird’s eye view is that if I were to get lung cancer in the future, doctors are going to sequence my genome and my tumor’s genome, and then query them against a database of 50 million other genomes,” he says. “The result will be ‘Hey, here’s the drug that will work best for you.’ ”


At Google, Glazer says he began working on Google Genomics as it became clear that biology was going to move from “artisanal to factory-scale data production.” He started by teaching himself genetics, taking an online class, Introduction to Biology, taught by Broad’s chief, Eric Lander. He also got his genome sequenced and put it on Google’s cloud.

Glazer wouldn’t say how large Google Genomics is or how many customers it has now, but at least 3,500 genomes from public projects are already stored on Google’s servers. He also says there’s no link, as of yet, between Google’s cloud and its more speculative efforts in health care, like the company Google started this year, called Calico, to investigate how to extend human lifespans. “What connects them is just a growing realization that technology can advance the state of the art in life sciences,” says Glazer.

Datta says some Stanford scientists have started using a Google database system, BigQuery, that Glazer’s team made compatible with genome data. It was developed to analyze large databases of spam, web documents, or of consumer purchases. But it can also quickly perform the very large experiments comparing thousands, or tens of thousands, of people’s genomes that researchers want to try. “Sometimes they want to do crazy things, and you need scale to do that,” says Datta. “It can handle the scale genetics can bring, so it’s the right technology for a new problem.”

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6,000-year-old temple discovered in prehistoric Ukraine settlement

October 22, 2014 / / 0 Comments

An overhead shot of the excavated 6,000-year-old temple. (Burdo/Videiko/Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) Excerpt from upi.com  NEBELIVKA, Ukraine, Oct. 21 (UPI) -- Researchers in Ukraine have be...

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BBC: Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show

September 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments


Winston Churchill

bbc.com/news/uk


The government took the threat of UFOs so seriously in the 1950s that UK intelligence chiefs met to discuss the issue, newly-released files show.
Ministers even went on to commission weekly reports on UFO sightings from a committee of intelligence experts.
The papers also include a wartime account claiming prime minister Winston Churchill ordered a UFO sighting be kept secret to prevent "mass panic".
Drawing of UFO sighting
 Spotters often drew what they saw and sent pictures to the MoD

The files show reports of UFOs peaked in 1996 - when The X Files was popular.
The Joint Intelligence Committee is better known for providing briefings to the government on matters relating to security, defence and foreign affairs.
But the latest batch of UFO files released from the Ministry of Defence to the National Archives shows that, in 1957, the committee received reports detailing an average of one UFO sighting a week.
The files also include an account of a wartime meeting attended by Winston Churchill in which, it is claimed, the prime minister was so concerned about a reported encounter between a UFO and RAF bombers, that he ordered it be kept secret for at least 50 years to prevent "mass panic".
X Files
Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.
"But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.
"The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."
Reports of sightings of UFOs peaked in 1996 in the UK - when science fiction drama The X Files was popular.
According to the files, there were more than 600 reports in 1996, compared with an average of 240 in the previous five years.

“Start Quote

UFOs have become the third-most popular subject for people to write to the ministry of defence saying please could you release this file”
Dr David Clarke National Archives UFO consultant

The figures for 1996 show 609 reported sightings of unidentified flying objects, 343 letters from the public to the MoD's UFO desk and 22 enquiries and questions from MPs.
But by 2009, the MoD's UFO inquiry desk -Sec(AS)2 - had been closed down.
The 18 files released on Thursday are the latest to come out as part of a three-year project between the MoD and the National Archives.
Dr David Clarke, a UFO consultant to the National Archives, explained why the papers are being made public now.
Dr Clarke told the BBC: "Since the Freedom of Information Act arrived in 2005, this subject - UFOs - have become the third-most popular subject for people to write to the Ministry of Defence saying 'please could you release this file, or papers that you hold on this particular case'.
"What they've decided to do is to be totally open and to say, 'look we're not holding any secrets back about this subject we've got all these files and we're going to make them available to the public'."
One includes details on "aerial phenomena" prepared for a meeting of the Cabinet Office's Joint Intelligence Committee in April 1957.
According to a note included in the Red Book, the weekly intelligence survey, four incidents involving UFOs tracked by RAF radars were "unexplained".
'Spaceman' The documents also include reports of a famous incident dubbed the "Welsh Roswell" in 1974, where members of the public reported seeing lights in the sky and feeling a tremor in the ground.
Other cases included in the files are:

  • A near-miss with an "unidentified object" reported by the captain and first officer of a 737 plane approaching Manchester Airport in 1995.
  • A mountain rescue team called to investigate a "crashed UFO" in the Berwyn Mountains in Wales in 1974.
  • Attempted break-ins at RAF Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire - sometimes referred to as Britain's "Area 51" - the US's secretive desert military base.
  • The Western Isles incident, when a loud explosion was reported in the sky over the Atlantic in the Outer Hebrides.
  • The 14-minutes of "missing" film relating to the Blue Streak missile test launch in 1964, believed by some to show a "spaceman".
  • A gambler from Leeds who held a 100-1 bet on alien life being discovered before the end of the 20th Century, and who approached the government for evidence to support his claim after the bookmakers refused to pay out. The MoD said it was open-minded about extra-terrestrial life but had no evidence of its existence.
The files come from more than 5,000 pages of UFO reports and letters and drawings from members of the public, as well as questions raised by MPs in Parliament.

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Can You Fathom A World Without Money And Without Disease?

September 22, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Michael Forrester, Prevent DiseaseIn many ways we’ve already selected monetary systems for termination. Money itself is not the root of all evil, however humans have bound money so tightly to contracts that it can no longer be used to benefit us in its current form and with the mindset to transcend all that it represents. Humanity has realized this and it’s only a matter of time before our monetary structures evolve to something else. That something will benefit all the struggl [...]

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War Is Destroying Syria’s Ancient Treasures, Satellite Photos Show

September 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments



War Is Destroying Syria's Ancient Treasures, Satellite Photos Show
Satellite images show how much destruction has happened in Syria between December 2011 and July 2014. The Ministry of Justice building (red arrow) is damaged, as is the Khusriwiye Mosque (green arrow).

Excerpt from news.yahoo.com
By Laura Geggel, Staff Writer

Three years of heavy fighting have taken a toll on Syria's archaeological treasures. Five of the country's six World Heritage sites "exhibit significant damage," and some buildings are now "reduced to rubble," according to high-resolution satellite images examined by the nonprofit and nonpartisan American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

"Only one of Syria's six World Heritage sites — the ancient city of Damascus — appears to remain undamaged in satellite imagery since the onset of civil war in 2011," Susan Wolfinbarger, director of the Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights Project at AAAS, said in a statement.

Damage to the other five sites is extensive, the AAAS said. These sites include the ancient city of Aleppo, the ancient city of Bosra, the ancient site of Palmyra, a site with two castles (Crac des Chevaliers and Qal'at Salah El-Din), and the ancient villages of northern Syria (Jebel Seman, Jebel Barisha, Jebel Al A'la, Jebel Wastani and Jebel Zawiye.

The analysis showed widespread damage in Aleppo, one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in the world, which dates back to the second millennium B.C.

A before-and-after analysis from 2011 to 2014 indicates new damage to historic mosques, Koranic schools called madrasas, the Great Mosque of Aleppo, the Souq al-Madina, the Grand Serail of Aleppo, the Hammam Yalbougha an-Nasry, the Khusruwiye Mosque, the Carlton Citadel Hotel, the Khan Qurt Bey caravanserai and other historic buildings south and north of the citadel. 

The Great Mosque has extensive damage. Satellite imagery showed destruction of the roof and a destroyed minaret, or tall spire, as well as two craters on the mosque's eastern wall. Researchers saw the heaviest damage south of the citadel, but the area to the north, which has buildings from the late Mamluk to Ottoman periods (13th to 19th centuries) also showed signs of destruction.
The other World Heritage sites have damage ranging from mortar impacts near an ancient Roman theater in Bosra to newly constructed military compounds on an archaeological site. New roads and mounds of earth are scattered through the Northern Roman Necropolis in Palmyra.

Palmyra sits in a desert just northeast of Damascus. Its ruins combine Greco-Roman art with Persian influences, and UNESCO said it "contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centers of the ancient world."

The AAAS released the analysis yesterday (Sept. 18), a day before the Smithsonian Institution's meeting to honor the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property. Researchers plan to discuss the damage and intervention efforts in Syria at the meeting.

"There is hope, and it lies with our Syrian colleagues because they are the stewards and caretakers of these sites, and they see the value in preserving and protecting them for future generations," said Corine Wegener, cultural heritage preservation officer for the Smithsonian Institution. "What they need from their international colleagues is some help to do that — training, materials and other support in the international arena for the notion that it is possible to mitigate and prevent damage to cultural heritage, even in the midst of conflicts."

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Archangel Michael, Ashtar June-20,19-2013

June 21, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Message from Archangel Michael
Channeled by Meredith Murphy http://www.expectwonderful.com
Telepathic Transmission – 20 June 2013
http://expectwonderful.typepad.com/messages/2013/06/solstice-message-june-2013-the-meeting-of-the-new-earth-with-the-new-human.html
Copyright (c) 2009 – 2013 by Meredith Murphy. All rights

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Galactic Federation of Light Sheldan Nidle April-16-2013

April 17, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Sheldan Nidle’s Update for April-16-2013
http://www.paoweb.com/sn041613.htm

13 Cib, 4 Kank’in, 9 Eb
Selamat Jarin! We return! Let us begin today by reviewing what has transpired so far. As you know,

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Galactic Dreamflight April-13-2013

April 10, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Galactic Lightship Dreamflights 13APR2013
Thanks to Wes Annac: http://aquariusparadigm.com/2013/04/10/galactic-lightship-dreamflights-13apr2013/

Original Link: http://spirittrainchronicles.com/2013/04/10/galactic-lightship-dreamflights-13apr2013/

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Heavenletter #4185 The Prime of Life, May 10, 2012

May 10, 2012 / / 0 Comments

{mainvote}

God said:

What wonderful words will I speak today? From where within your heart shall I approach? Ah, yes, it is you who must come to Me because I am already here. Drag yourself over to Me. Or leap over to Me. I am here. I am neve...

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NUMEROLOGY – 2012

March 24, 2012 / / 0 Comments

  THE MEETING OF TIME – 2012   2012 is not the end of the world. It is the end of a system which has brought our world to a state of such inequality, unfairness and imbalance, that we can no longer survive without drastic changes of pri...

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Cosmic Awareness Newsletter 2012-01

March 8, 2012 / / 0 Comments

{mainvote}

7 March 2012

Channeler: Will Berlinghof

Well...Anasazi1 just made me realize that there was no Cosmic Awareness message posted here recently,so here's the most recent one avaiable right one,as the CAC newsletter is for mem...

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"A Beginners 12 Step Meeting"

November 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

A Beginners 12 Step MeetingHow It Workswww.themasterteacher.tv

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