In case you missed it here is the UFO Headline News for today
The post UFO Headline News Weekend of Saturday June 10th/Sunday June 11th, 2017 appeared first on Inception Radio Network | UFO & Paranormal Talk Radio.
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I wish to make it clear that the complicity of Freemasons in this mind control program which uses synthetic telepathy, or voice to skull (V2K) technology, is not a theory I am proposing but point of fact, as the group that had been sending me the '...
Jay Dyer, GuestJurassic World is the sometime sequel to whatever the last Jurassic film was. InJurassic Park, a ill-conceived theme park based on genetic resurrecting of the dinosaur all-star team. Now, Hollywood shows it’s gone fully green in recycling the same plot for a new audience of zombieswith Frankensaurus Rex. While the JurassicPlot (that’s a joke) is only a sliver different from the first, this time around genetic modifica [...]
Sonia Luokkala, Earth Island JournalWaking TimesThe mesas of Monument Valley rise deep red on the horizon. We are in Diné Bikéyah, land of the Navajo.“This is John Wayne country,” trained Navajo guide Gregory Holiday repeats his lines for an enchanted group of tourists. The view opens boundless to the sacred land of the Diné people, but for visitors it is presented as the iconic west of cowboys and Americana.The sun sets and the last traveler boards t [...]
Jack Hanna is the Director Emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and the host of Jack Hanna’s Wild Countdown and Jack Hanna’s Into the Wild television shows.
Primatologist Jane Goodall's recent statement calling for the closing of zoos and aquariums such as Sea World obviously has big money wildlife theme parks very nervous. Firing back with their side of the debate is Jack Hanna, Director Emeritus (which means now retired) of the Columbus Zoo, through a Time.com feature story penned by Hanna entitled, Jack Hanna: What Zoo Critics Don’t Understand, a one-sided dialogue of pro-zoo and pro-aquarium absurdity. Isn't it funny that so often those who possess, let's say, cagey attitudes towards human and animal rights believe it is the rest of us who don't 'understand' something, and if we could just find a way to understand, then we'd see things their way.
This weak and quite scattered opposing view offered by Hanna begins its argument against animal rights supporters and their efforts to free wild life from their theme park imprisonment by first declaring just how popular zoos and aquariums are with folks. Oh well, gee, say no more Jack. Popular? Slavery was pretty popular with some folks too, perhaps we should rethink that whole abolition thing? Do go on. And on Hanna did just that.
This weak and quite scattered opposing view offered by Hanna begins its argument against animal rights supporters and their efforts to free wild life from their theme park imprisonment by first declaring just how popular zoos and aquariums are with folks. Oh well, gee, say no more Jack. Popular? Slavery was pretty popular with some folks too, perhaps we should rethink that whole abolition thing? Do go on. And on Hanna did just that.
Realizing quickly the only direction this lopsided piece could possibly go from that genius insight, I bit down hard and finished the article, which to me read more like a paid endorsement from those establishments that profit greatly from the abduction, caging, and exploitation of defenseless animals. I made it all the way to the point where the popular wildlife celebrity, whose biggest talent appears to be how he makes so many immediately see how the world was such a better place when Steve Irwin was in it, actually said that animals need to be in cages because there's not enough room for them in the wild. Here is the segment written by Jack Hanna as posted on time.com.
"Critics say the only place animals belong is in the wild, but those boundaries are shrinking each day. Having traveled the world, the only places I consider truly “wild” are Antarctica, parts of the Amazon and some places in Africa. Even in Africa, the “wild” places tend to be national parks with guarded boundaries. Animals face many challenges, including habitat loss, poaching, severe weather, and war. The “wild” is not necessarily the idyllic place people imagine..."
And you have just the 'idyllic place' for animals at your Columbus zoo, don't you Jack?
Greg Giles
Comet 67P/C-G is about as large as Central Park of Manhattan Island, New York Excerpt from nytimes.com
By JONATHAN CORUM The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft caught up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko last August, then dropped a lander onto the comet in November. Now Rosetta will follow the rubber-duck-shaped comet as it swings closer to the sun.
Scale in miles
Scale in km
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March 9 Rosetta was 45 miles from Comet 67P/C-G when it photographed the comet’s head ringed with a halo of gas and dust. These jets extend from active areas of the comet’s surface and will become much more prominent over the next few months as the comet approaches the sun.
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March 6 The comet’s head is angled down in this image of crisscrossing sunlit jets taken from 53 miles away.
Comet’s location when Rosetta was launched Rosetta launched in March 2004
Earth
Sun
Mars
Rendezvous
with Comet
67P/C-G
Orbit of
Jupiter
Rosetta today
Where is Rosetta? The Rosetta spacecraft took 10 years to match speed and direction with Comet 67P/C-G. The chase ended last August, and Rosetta will now follow the comet in its elliptical orbit as it moves closer to the sun. The spacecraft is no longer orbiting the comet because of increasing dust, but it is planning a series of close flybys.
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March 6 Rosetta was 52 miles away when it looked up at the comet’s flat underbelly. The smooth plain at center covered with large boulders is named Imhotep.
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Feb. 28 Rosetta captured a profile of the comet surrounded by curving jets of gas and dust from active regions. The spacecraft was 64 miles away.
Feb. 25–27 One day on Comet 67P/C-G is about 12 hours, the time it takes the comet to spin on its axis. The jets of gas and dust surrounding the comet are thought to curve from a combination of the comet’s rotation and the uneven gravity of its two-lobed structure.
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Feb. 20 The comet’s sunlit underbelly casts a shadow obscuring the neck that joins the two lobes. Rosetta took this image from 74 miles away.
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Feb. 18 Pale jets of gas and dust surround Comet 67P/C-G, seen from 123 miles away. Bright marks in the background are a mix of stars, camera noise and streaks from small particles ejected from the comet.
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Panorama by The New York Times
Feb. 14 On Valentine’s Day, Rosetta made its first close flyby of the comet, passing within four miles of the surface. Here the spacecraft looks down on the large depression at the top of the comet’s head.
500 FEET
Feb. 14 An image of the comet’s underbelly taken six miles above the surface during the Valentine’s Day flyby. The smooth plain in the foreground is called Imhotep.
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Feb. 9 The comet is upside down in this image from 65 miles away, and a fan-shaped jet of dust streams from the comet’s neck region.
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Feb. 6 Jets of gas and dust extend from the comet’s neck and other sunlit areas in this image taken from 77 miles away.
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Feb. 3 This close-up image of the comet’s neck was taken from 18 miles away, and was the last image taken from orbit around Comet 67P/C-G. Rosetta will continue to follow the comet, but will leave its gravity-bound orbit because of increasing dust and instead begin a series of flybys.
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Jan. 31 The comet’s head, neck and back are sunlit in this image taken from 17 miles away. A prominent jet of gas and dust extends from an active region of the surface near the comet’s neck.
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Jan. 16 The tail of the comet’s larger lobe points up, revealing a smooth plain named Imhotep at left. Rosetta was 18 miles away when it took this image.
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Jan. 3 The smooth plain named Imhotep, at center right, lies on the comet’s flat underbelly, seen here from a distance of about 18 miles.
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Cheops
IMHOTEP
Dec. 14, 2014 The large triangular boulder on the flat Imhotep plain is named Cheops, after the Egyptian pyramid. The spacecraft was about 12 miles from the comet when it took this image.
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Dec. 10 Sunlight falls between the body and head of the comet, lighting up a large group of boulders in the smooth Hapi region of the comet’s neck. To the right of the boulders, the cliffs of Hathor form the underside of the comet’s head. Rosetta took this image from a distance of 12 miles.
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Dec. 2 The round depression in the middle of the comet’s head is filled with shadow in this image taken 12 miles above the comet.
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Nov. 22 An overexposed image of Comet 67P/C-G from 19 miles away shows faint jets of gas and dust extending from the sunlit side of the comet.
Nov. 12 Rosetta’s washing-machine sized lander Philae successfully touched down on the comet’s head. But anchoring harpoons failed and Philae bounced twice before going missing in the shadow of a cliff or crater (above). Without sunlight Philae quickly lost power, but might revive as the comet gets closer to the sun. On March 12, Rosetta resumed listening for radio signals from the missing lander.
Photo illustration by The New York Times
How big is the comet? The body of Comet 67P/C-G is about as long as Central Park. For images of Rosetta’s rendezvous and the Philae landing, see Landing on a Comet, 317 Million Miles From Home.
Sources: European Space Agency and the Rosetta mission. Images by ESA/Rosetta, except where noted. Some images are composite panoramas created by ESA, and most images were processed by ESA to bring out details of the comet’s activity.
Excerpt from nbcnews.com
By Katie Linendoll
FOUNTAIN HILLS, Ariz. — If words like UFO, extraterrestrial, crops circles and abductee have ever piqued your paranormal interest, do yourself a favor and head to the International UFO Congress.
The annual conference—which holds the Guinness record for being the largest convention dedicated to unidentified flying objects—takes place in the picturesque desert town of Fountain Hills, and this year it ran from Feb. 18 to 22. It's worth noting that Arizona is known as a hotbed of activity when it comes to sightings. Thousands flock to the annual event, which is produced by Open Minds, a paranormal research organization.
Each attendee has his or her own reason for being there. My goal was to find out if modern science and technology have changed the game when it comes to UFO sightings and evidence gathering.
"A lot of people think, go to a UFO convention, it's going to be tinfoil hats, but that's not what this is. We have NASA astrobiologists speak, scientists, high-ranking military officials, the works. I mean, there's a lot of really credible people covering this subject," said UFO Congress co-organizer and paranormal journalist Maureen Elsberry.
Air Force UFO documents now available online
When attending a UFO conference, the best approach is to come in with an open mind, ask lots of questions and talk with people about why they are there. Everyone has a story, from the speakers to the attendees, and even the vendors (some of whom double as ufologists).
The highlight of this year's conference was undeniably the speaker series, and it was standing room only to see one man, Bob Lazar. Lazar first spoke out in 1989, claiming that he'd worked as a government scientist at a secret mountainside facility south of Area 51's main site, where he saw remarkably advanced UFO technology. Critics have sought to discredit Lazar, questioning his employment record and educational credentials.
During the conference, George Knapp, an investigative TV reporter in Las Vegas who broke the Lazar story in '89, led an onstage question-and-answer session with Lazar, who discussed the work he did at a place called S4. Lazar spoke in detail about the alien UFO hangars and UFO propulsion systems he was allegedly asked to reverse engineer, and even loosely sketched them out for the audience.
"All the science fiction had become reality," said Lazar, who was noticeably uncomfortable and clearly surprised by the fact that, decades later, he remains such a draw.
You never know whom you'll bump into at the Congress. In the vendor hall, I met sculptor Alan Groves, who traveled all the way from Australia to peddle his "true to scale" Zetan alien figurines. I wondered if his side gig was lucrative, only to realize he was selling the figures like hotcakes. Then we talked about his day job, and he told me he's worked on special and creature effects for films such as "Star Wars," "Alien," "Labyrinth" and "Jurassic Park."
Many of the attendees told me that hard evidence is a requirement for ufologists and paranormal field experts. Derrel Sims, also known as Alien Hunter, told me he spent two years in the CIA, and also has served as a police officer and licensed private investigator.
He said his first alien encounter happened at age 4, and others in his family have also seen aliens. In 38-plus years of alien research, Sims has learned this: "If you look, the evidence is there." To date, he said, more than 4,000 pieces of that evidence exist.
Sims is adamant about only working with evidence-based methods, using DNA tests and collecting samples as well as relying on ultraviolet, infrared and x-ray tools in his research. He said that, in 1992, he discovered aliens leave their own kind of fluorescent fingerprint, and he continues to test for these clues. He added that if you have had an alien encounter, it's important to react quickly to gather evidence: "fluorescence" stays on the skin for only 24 hours. He said that other marks aliens leave include "scoop" marks, which are an identifying thread some abductees have in common.
Another commonality he's discovered is heritage. He said that, in his research, he has found 45 percent of all abductions happen to Native Americans, Irish and Celtic people, and he said that women also have a higher chance of being abducted.
When it comes to filming hard-to-explain phenomena, Patty Greer, who makes documentaries about crop circles, said that quadcopters — a.k.a. drones — have added production value to her films. Lynne Kitei, who covered a mass UFO sighting in her book and in the documentary The Phoenix Lights, said that even low-tech tools, like the 35mm film she used, are still a reliable way to gather proof of inexplicable flying craft, especially because they offer something an iPhone doesn't: negatives.
White House responds to UFO request
Night vision also offers added opportunities for UFO researchers, according to Ben Hansen, who was the host and lead investigator of SyFy channel's "Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files." He's now the owner of Night Vision Ops, an online store that sells night-vision technology. Hansen said that the consumer accessibility of new military-grade technologies in thermal and light amplification scopes are upping the game for the everyday UFO enthusiast.
To close out an intense few days on site at the Congress, Hansen's team invited me to a night watch near Arizona's Superstition Mountains. It was fascinating to see the latest optics add incredible clarity to the night sky, amplifying available light up to 50,000 times beyond what the unaided eye can see. Using the right technology, we were also able to see that a certain flying object, which made everyone nearby jump, wasn't a UFO after all. It was a bat.
I was surrounded by some serious tech all weekend, and it was eye-opening to see the ways that UFO hunters are gathering scientific evidence to learn more about the paranormal world. But I have to say, the gadget that was the most useful to me at the conference was my iPhone, which I used to download a free nightlight app for kids. For the few hours I managed to sleep, it was with the soothing illumination provided by "Kiwi the Green Koala." In short, I was officially freaked out.
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| WinSun claims that their new 3D printed five-story building is the tallest of its kind in the world. |
Excerpt from
Back in April, a team of Chinese construction workers used a 3D printer to construct houses. By day’s end, there were 10 standing. They were compact and fairly bare bones — nothing much to look at besides the “wow!” factor of there being as many as — count them — 10. But this time around, those same builders have taken the wraps off an achievement that’s roundly more impressive.
In Suzhou Industrial Park, adjacent to Shanghai, stands a five-story structure that the WinSun Decoration Design Engineering firm claims is “the world’s tallest 3D-printed building.” Next to it is the equally massive 3D-printed mansion, which measures 11,840 square feet. Like the previous buildings, the walls are comprised of a mix of concrete and recycled waste materials, such as glass and steel, and formed layer by printed layer. The company stated that the total cost for the mansion was roughly $161,000.
In a broader sense, this latest feat is yet another indication of how rapidly additive manufacturing techniques are advancing. Once used primarily as a means to quickly render miniature model versions of products, the technology has reached a point where large-scale printers are now capable of making life-sized working creations, such as automobiles, in mere days. For instance, it took less than 48 hours for start-up Local Motors to print a two-seater called the Strati into existence and drive it off the showroom.
Many of these designs, however, typically don’t amount to much beyond being passion projects meant to push 3D printing into new frontiers and drum up some publicity along the way. One example of this is the massive 3D Print Canal House that’s being constructed entirely on-site along a canal in Amsterdam, a process that’s slated to take longer and is less feasible than standard construction, Phil Reeves of UK-based 3D printing research firm Econolyst recently told CNN.
More promising, though, is a system developed by Behrokh Khoshnevis, a University of Southern California engineering professor. His concept machine, called Contour Crafting, involves a clever combination of mechanical cranes and 3D layering to print and assemble entire homes simultaneously — complete with insulation and indoor plumbing — in less than a day.
The approach employed by WinSun isn’t anywhere near that level of sophistication, but it may well prove to be the most practical – at least thus far. There is some labor and equipment costs that comes from trucking in and piecing together the various sections on-site, though the manner in which it all comes together is comparable to the ease of prefab assembly. It’s also reportedly greener thanks to the addition of recycled materials.
To pitch the advantages of their technology, the company held a news conference to announce that they had taken on orders for 20,000 smaller units as well as highlight some significant cost-cutting figures. According toindustry news site 3Der:
The sheer size of the printer allows for a 10x increase in production efficiency. WinSun estimates that 3D printing technology can save between 30 and 60 percent of building materials and shortens production times by 50 to even 70 percent, while decreasing labor costs by 50 up to even 80 percent. Future applications include 3D printed bridges or tall office buildings that can be built right on site.
WinSun did not respond to a request to disclose how they arrived at those numbers, but Enrico Dini, an Italian civil engineer and chairman of competing start-up Monolite, says that he suspects the calculations may be a tad bit inflated. Still, he emphasized that his own data does back up the claim that, compared to conventional methods, layering may boost overall efficiency.
“It would be very difficult to fabricate such large sections with traditional concrete casting,” he says. “With 3D printing, you have a lot less waste because you’re only printing out as much material as you need and you can custom shape whole sections on the spot, which can be a big challenge.”
WinSun’s 3D-printed villa has several rooms and has been deemed to be up to China’s national safety standards.
One major concern is whether these large-scale dwellings can hold up over time against the elements. According to 3Der, Ma Rongquan, chief engineer of China Construction Bureau, inspected the building’s structural integrity and found them to be up to code, but was careful to note that state officials have yet to establish specific criteria for assessing the long-term safety of 3D printed architecture.
And as Dini, who supports the technology, points out, there is the possibility that the use of additive manufacturing may pose some degree of risk. “The only issue is that as the layers of concrete are bonded together, they’re drying at slightly different rates and that’s not very ideal,” he explains. “So there’s maybe a higher chance of it fracturing at the contact point if there’s a strong enough force at play.”
Regardless, Dini says he’d feel completely safe going inside any floor of either building since construction materials used today are likely to contain special additives to enhance strength and resistance. One such formulation, fiber-reinforced Ductal, has been shown in some tests to be 10 times stronger and last twice as long as regular concrete. He stressed that walls should also be tested to ensure that other properties, such as acoustics, ventilation and thermal insulations are on par with existing buildings.
“In Italy, building standards are extremely strict,” he noted. “But I can’t say I can say the same about China.”
Excerpt from space.com Over the next two weeks, you have an excellent chance to spot one of the most rarely observed objects in the sky, the zodiacal light. The zodiacal light takes its name from the ancient band of 12 constellations through which the...
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| Various features on a smooth part of the comet's surface in the region named Imhotep. |
Excerpt from wired.com
The Rosetta spacecraft has been studying comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko up close since August, collecting data of unprecedented detail and taking pictures of a starkly beautiful comet-scape. While the Philae lander has enjoyed much of the spotlight—partly thanks to its now-famous triple landing—Rosetta has been making plenty of its own discoveries.
One of the biggest came last month, when scientists found that the chemical signature of the comet’s water is nothing like that on Earth, contradicting the theory that crashing comets supplied our planet with water. Comet 67P belongs to the Jupiter family of comets, and the findings also imply that these kinds of comets were formed at a wider range of distances from the sun than previously thought, says Michael A’Hearn, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, and member of the Rosetta science team.
Today, scientists have published the first big set of results from Rosetta in a slew of papers in the journal Science. The results include measurements and analyses of the comet’s shape, structure, surface, and the surrounding dust and gas particles. Here are just a few of the amazing things they’ve discovered about Rosetta’s comet so far:
The surface is fantastically weird
The comet has quite the textured landscape, covered with steep cliffs, boulders, weird bumps, cracks, pits, and smooth terrain. There are fractures of all sizes, including one that’s several yards wide and stretches for more than half a mile along the comet’s neck. Researchers don’t yet know what caused these cracks. The pits have steep sides and flat bottoms, ranging in size from a few tens to hundreds of feet wide. Jets of dust shoot out from some of the pits, suggesting that the ejection of material formed these features. Another strange feature is what scientists are calling goosebumps—weird bumpy patches found particularly on steep slopes.
While other features such as pits and fractures range in sizes, all of the goosebumps are about 10 feet wide. No one knows what kind of process would make the bumps, but whatever it is could have played an important part in the comet’s formation. It may be breezy Rosetta spotted dune- and ripple-like patterns,wind tails behind rocks, and even moats surrounding rocks, suggesting that a light breeze may blow dust along the surface. Such a gentle wind would have to come from gases leaking from below.
Because of the extremely low gravity on the comet, it wouldn’t take a strong gust to blow things around. It may have formed from two separate pieces Or not. The most distinct feature of comet 67P is its odd, two-lobed shape, which resembles a duck. Although scientists have seen this lobed structure in other comets before, namely Borrelly and Hartley 2, none are as pronounced as comet 67P’s. Borrelly and Hartley 2 look more like elongated potatoes while 67P has a clearly defined head and body. The strange shape suggests the comet was once two separate pieces called cometesimals—what are now the duck’s head and body—that stuck together.
The other possibility is that erosion ate away the parts around the neck. Preliminary evidence points to the first hypothesis.
“Probably most of us on the OSIRIS team lean toward thinking it was two cometesimals,” A’Hearn said. (OSIRIS is one of Rosetta’s imaging instruments.) But the scientists won’t have conclusive evidence until they study the comet in more detail. For example, they now see layering along the neck—if erosion carved out the comet’s duck shape, they should find the same same layering pattern continuing onto the other side of the neck.
Black, with a tinge of red
Even Rosetta’s color pictures show a grayish comet, but if you were to see it in person, you would see a pitch-black chunk of dust and ice, as it reflects only six percent of incoming light. By comparison, the moon reflects 12 percent of incoming light and Earth reflects 31 percent. But comet 67P’s not completely black, as it has a hint of red. Water, water, nowhere? The comet’s covered in opaque, organic compounds. Although comet 67P is undoubtedly icy, it hardly shows any water ice on its surface at all.
Which isn’t too surprising, as comets Tempel 1 and Hartley 2 didn’t have much ice on their surfaces either, A’Hearn says. Rosetta has yet to see sunlight reach every side of the comet yet, so there may still be some icy patches hidden from view. But, researchers do see the comet spraying water vapor into space, which means water ice likely lies just beneath the surface. The ice doesn’t have to be more than a centimeter deep to be invisible from the infrared instruments that detect the ice. Indeed, the data from Philae’s first bounce suggested that there’s a hard layer of ice beneath 4 to 8 inches of dust.
This duck floats
If you could find a big enough pond, that is. Like other known comets, the density of comet 67P is about half that of water ice. Initial measurements reveal that it’s also very porous—as much as 80 percent of it may be empty space. Rosetta has found depressions, which may have formed when the surface collapsed over particularly porous material underneath.
Different from every angle
As the comet nears the sun, it heats up, and ices and other volatile chemicals sublimate, spraying gases into space. So far, the most prominent gases that have been ejected are water vapor, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. They spew out in different amounts from different parts of the comet. In particular, a lot of the water has been observed gushing out from the neck.The comet will continue to get more active as it reaches its closest approach to the sun in mid-August. It will burst with stronger jets of gas and dust, and maybe even blast off chunks of itself. If the comet is this interesting now, A’Hearn says, just wait until it gets to its nearest point to the sun, when it’s just 1.29 times farther from the sun than Earth is.
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The moon pairs with the brightest star in the constellation Virgo on Tuesday. Illustration by A.Fazekas, SkySafari |
Excerpt from news.nationalgeographic.com
An eclipse of a volcanic moon by the king of planets, Jupiter, will thrill stargazers this week, as Earth's moon rides above the ringed world, Saturn.
Moon meets Maiden. On Tuesday, January 13, early birds will enjoy a particularly close encounter with the last quarter moon of the month and with the bright star Spica. All the action takes place in the constellation Virgo, the Maiden, halfway up the southern sky at dawn.
The 250-light-year-distant star appears only 2 degrees below the moon, a distance equal to about the width of your thumb held at arm's length.
It's amazing to realize that the light from Spica left on its journey to Earth back in 1765. That's the year that Great Britain passed the Stamp Act, the first direct tax levied on the American colonies and a prelude of the parliamentary oversteps that led to the American Revolution.
Mercury at its best. Look for faint Mercury about a half-hour after sunset on Wednesday, January 14, just above the southwestern horizon.
The innermost planet will appear at its farthest point away from the sun, a moment called the greatest elongation. Sitting 19 degrees east of the sun, it would be challenging to track down its faint point of light if it weren't for the nearby, superbright Venus.
The planetary duo will appear only 1.3 degrees apart, making the pair particularly impressive when viewed through binoculars or a small telescope. Look carefully and you may notice that Mercury appears to be a miniature version of the half-lit moon...
This skychart shows Venus and Mercury in close conjunction in the southwest sky after sunset on Wednesday.
Illustration by A.Fazekas, SkySafari
Volcanic moon eclipse. Sky-watchers armed with telescopes will witness a distant eclipse of Jupiter's moon Io in the early morning hours of Friday, January 16.
At 12:27 a.m. EST, the gas giant's own shadow will glide across the tiny disk of the volcanic moon, which will be visible to the west of the planet.
Also early on Thursday night at 10:56 p.m. EST, Jupiter's massive storm, the Great Red Spot, crosses the middle of the planet's disk. Appearing as an orange-pink oval structure, this hurricane circles the planet every 12 hours or so and is three times larger than the Earth.
This wide-angle skychart shows the location of Jupiter in the southeast sky on Thursday evening and early morning Friday. The insert telescope view shows Jupiter and location of its moon Io just before it enters the planet’s shadow.
Illustration by A.Fazekas, SkySafari
Luna and Saturn. Later on, near dawn on Friday, January 16, the waning crescent moon will appear to park itself just 2 degrees north of Lord of the Rings.
The ringed world can't be missed with the naked eye since it is the brightest object visible in the southeastern predawn sky. Its proximity to the moon will make it that much easier to identify.
Train a telescope on this yellow-tinged point of light, and it will readily reveal its stunning rings, tilted a full 25 degrees toward Earth. Currently Saturn sits nearly 994,000 miles (1.6 billion kilometers) away from Earth, which means that the reflected sunlight off its cloud tops takes 87.4 minutes to reach our eyes.Happy hunting!
By Zeeya Merali
Many researchers believe that physics will not be complete until it can explain not just the behaviour of space and time, but where these entities come from.
“Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk, describing what sounds like a pitch for a science-fiction film. But for Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, this scenario is a way to think about reality. If it is true, he says, “everything around us — the whole three-dimensional physical world — is an illusion born from information encoded elsewhere, on a two-dimensional chip”. That would make our Universe, with its three spatial dimensions, a kind of hologram, projected from a substrate that exists only in lower dimensions.
This 'holographic principle' is strange even by the usual standards of theoretical physics. But Van Raamsdonk is one of a small band of researchers who think that the usual ideas are not yet strange enough. If nothing else, they say, neither of the two great pillars of modern physics — general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space and time, and quantum mechanics, which governs the atomic realm — gives any account for the existence of space and time. Neither does string theory, which describes elementary threads of energy.
Van Raamsdonk and his colleagues are convinced that physics will not be complete until it can explain how space and time emerge from something more fundamental — a project that will require concepts at least as audacious as holography. They argue that such a radical reconceptualization of reality is the only way to explain what happens when the infinitely dense 'singularity' at the core of a black hole distorts the fabric of space-time beyond all recognition, or how researchers can unify atomic-level quantum theory and planet-level general relativity — a project that has resisted theorists' efforts for generations.
“All our experiences tell us we shouldn't have two dramatically different conceptions of reality — there must be one huge overarching theory,” says Abhay Ashtekar, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.
Finding that one huge theory is a daunting challenge. Here, Nature explores some promising lines of attack — as well as some of the emerging ideas about how to test these concepts...
“Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk, describing what sounds like a pitch for a science-fiction film. But for Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, this scenario is a way to think about reality. If it is true, he says, “everything around us — the whole three-dimensional physical world — is an illusion born from information encoded elsewhere, on a two-dimensional chip”. That would make our Universe, with its three spatial dimensions, a kind of hologram, projected from a substrate that exists only in lower dimensions.
This 'holographic principle' is strange even by the usual standards of theoretical physics. But Van Raamsdonk is one of a small band of researchers who think that the usual ideas are not yet strange enough. If nothing else, they say, neither of the two great pillars of modern physics — general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space and time, and quantum mechanics, which governs the atomic realm — gives any account for the existence of space and time. Neither does string theory, which describes elementary threads of energy.
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Zeeya Merali discusses some of the theories that are trying to explain the origins of space and time.“All our experiences tell us we shouldn't have two dramatically different conceptions of reality — there must be one huge overarching theory,” says Abhay Ashtekar, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.
Finding that one huge theory is a daunting challenge. Here, Nature explores some promising lines of attack — as well as some of the emerging ideas about how to test these concepts...
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