Tag: pulling (page 1 of 2)

6 Natural Solutions To Decontaminate Soil

May 2, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Marco Torres, Prevent DiseaseWith a progressively educated population becoming more aware of the inherent dangers of the conventional food supply, urban farming has become hugely popular. However, more people are also becoming aware of contaminated soil and how heavy metals pose potential risks to their food crops. As backyard gardening continues to explode in popularity, we must ask how contaminated is our soil?Many municipalities in many countries are embracing urban agri [...]

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Is In-Flight Refueling Coming to Commercial Airlines?

April 12, 2015 / / 0 Comments




Excerpt from space.com

 This article was originally published on The Conversation. The publication contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

There’s real pressure on the aviation industry to introduce faster, cheaper and greener aircraft, while maintaining the high safety standards demanded of airlines worldwide.

Airlines carry more than three billion passengers each year, which presents an enormous challenge not only for aircraft manufacturers but for the civil aviation infrastructure that makes this extraordinary annual mass-migration possible. Many international airports are close to or already at capacity. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has estimated that, without intervention, many global airports – including major hubs such as London Heathrow, Amsterdam Schiphol, Beijing and Dubai – will have run out of runway or terminal capacity by 2020. 


The obvious approach to tackling this problem is to extend and enlarge airport runways and terminals – such as the long-proposed third runway at London Heathrow. However there may be other less conventional alternatives, such as introducing in-flight refuelling for civil aircraft on key long-haul routes. Our project, Research on a Cruiser-Enabled Air Transport Environment (Recreate), began in 2011 to evaluate whether this was something that could prove a viable, and far cheaper, solution.

If in-flight refuelling seems implausible, it’s worth remembering that it was first trialed in the 1920s, and the military has continued to develop the technology ever since. The appeal is partly to reduce the aircraft’s weight on take-off, allowing it to carry additional payload, and partly to extend its flight range. Notably, during the Falklands War in 1982 RAF Vulcan bombers used in-flight refuelling to stage what was at the time the longest bombing mission ever, flying 8,000 miles non-stop from Ascension Island in the South Atlantic to the Falklands and back.

Reducing take-off weight could offer many benefits for civilian aircraft too. Without the need to carry so much fuel the aircraft can be smaller, which means less noise on take-off and landing and shorter runways. This opens up the network of smaller regional airports as new potential sites for long-haul routes, relieving pressure on the major hubs that are straining at the seams.

There are environmental benefits too, as a smaller, lighter aircraft requires less fuel to reach its destination. Our initial estimates from air traffic simulations demonstrate that it’s possible to reduce fuel burn by up to 11% over today’s technology by simply replacing existing global long-haul flight routes with specifically designed 250-seater aircraft with a range of 6,000nm after one refuelling – roughly the distance from London to Hong Kong. This saving could potentially grow to 23% with further efficiencies, all while carrying the same number of passengers the same distance as is possible with the current aircraft fleet, and despite the additional fuel burn of the tanker aircraft.

Tornado fighter jets in-flight refuel
Imagine if these Tornado fighter jets were 250-seater passenger aircraft and you’ve got the idea.

However, this is not the whole picture – in-flight refuelling will require the aerial equivalent of petrol stations in order to deliver keep passenger aircraft in the sky. With so much traffic it simply wouldn’t be possible to refuel any aircraft any time, anywhere it was needed. The location of these refuelling zones, coupled with the flight distance between the origin and destination airports can greatly affect the potential benefits achievable, possibly pulling flights away from their shortest route, and even making refuelling on some routes impossible – if for example the deviation to the nearest refuelling zone meant burning as much fuel as would have been saved.

Safety and automation

As with all new concepts – particularly those that involve bringing one aircraft packed with people and another full of fuel into close proximity during flight – it’s quite right to ask whether this is safe. To try and answer this question, the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory and German Aerospace Centre used their flight simulators to test the automated in-flight refuelling flight control system developed as part of the Recreate project.

One simulator replicated the manoeuvre from the point of view of the tanker equipped with an in-flight refuelling boom, the other simulated the aircraft being refuelled mid-flight. Critical test situations such as engine failure, high air turbulence and gusts of wind were simulated with real flight crews to assess the potential danger to the operation. The results were encouraging, demonstrating that the manoeuvre doesn’t place an excessive workload on the pilots, and that the concept is viable from a human as well as a technical perspective.

So far we’ve demonstrated the potential aerial refuelling holds for civilian aviation, but putting it into practice would still pose challenges. Refuelling hubs would need to be established worldwide, shared between airlines. There would need to be fundamental changes to airline pilot training, alongside a wider public acceptance of this departure from traditional flight operations.

However, it does demonstrate that, in addition to all the high-tech work going into designing new aircraft, new materials, new engines and new fuels, the technology we already have offers solutions to the long-term problems of ferrying billions of passengers by air around the world.

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Cluster Filled with Dark Matter May House ‘Failed Galaxies’

February 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The Coma Cluster


Excerpt space.com

 A strange set of 48 galaxies appears to be rich in dark matter and lacking in stars, suggesting that they may be so-called "failed" galaxies, a new study reports.

The galaxies in question are part of the Coma Cluster, which lies 300 million light-years from Earth and packs several thousand galaxies into a space just 20 million light-years across. To study them, Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and his colleagues used the Dragonfly Telephoto Array in New Mexico.

The array's eight connected Canon telephoto lenses allow the researchers to search for extremely faint objects that traditional telescope surveys miss. Often, such as when the researchers used the array to search for the faint glow that dark matter might create, the hunt comes up empty. 


But when van Dokkum and his colleagues looked toward the Coma Cluster, they found a pleasant surprise.

"We noticed all these faint little smudges in the images from the Dragonfly telescope," van Dokkum told Space.com.

The mysterious blobs nagged at van Dokkum, compelling him to look into the objects further. Fortuitously, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope had recently captured one of these objects with its sharp eye. 

"It turned out that they're these fuzzy blobs that look somewhat like dwarf spheroidal galaxies around our own Milky Way," van Dokkum said. "So they looked familiar in some sense … except that if they are at the distance of the Coma Cluster, they must be really huge."

And with very few stars to account for the mass in these galaxies, they must contain huge amounts of dark matter, the researchers said. In fact, to stay intact, the 48 galaxies must contain 98 percent dark matter and just 2 percent "normal" matter that we can see. The fraction of dark matter in the universe as a whole is thought to be around 83 percent. 

But before making this claim, the team had to verify that these blobs really are as distant as the Coma Cluster. (In fact, the team initially thought the galaxies were much closer.). But even in the Hubble image the stars were not resolved. If Hubble — one of the most powerful telescopes in existence — can't resolve the stars, those pinpricks of light must be pretty far away, study team members reasoned. 

Now, van Dokkum and his colleagues have definitive evidence: They've determined the exact distance to one of the galaxies. The team used the Keck Telescope in Hawaii to look at one of the objects for two hours. This gave them a hazy spectrum, from which they were able to tease out the galaxy's recessional velocity — that is, how fast it is moving away from Earth.

That measure traces back to the Hubble Telescope's namesake. In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered one of the simplest and most surprising relationships in astronomy: The more distant a galaxy, the faster it moves away from the Milky Way.

Today, astronomers use the relationship to measure a galaxy's recessional velocity and thus calculate the galaxy's distance. In this case, the small fuzzy blob observed with Keck was moving away from Earth at 15.7 million mph (25.3 million km/h). That places it at 300 million light-years away from Earth, the distance of the Coma Cluster.

So the verdict is officially in: These galaxies must be associated with the Coma Cluster and therefore must be extremely massive.
"It looks like the universe is able to make unexpected galaxies," van Dokkum said, adding that there is an amazing diversity of massive galaxies.

But the clusters still present a mystery: The team doesn't know why they have so much dark matter and so few stars.

Though they look serene and silent from our vantage on Earth, stars are actually roiling balls of violent plasma. Test your stellar smarts with this quiz.
One possibility is that these are "failed" galaxies. A galaxy's first supernova explosions will drive away huge amounts of gas. 

Normally, the galaxy has such a strong gravitational pull that most of the expelled gas falls back onto the galaxy and forms the next generations of stars. But maybe the strong gravitational pull of the other galaxies in the Coma Cluster interfered with this process, pulling the gas away.

"If that happened, they had no more fuel for star formation and they were sort of stillborn galaxies where they started to get going but then failed to really build up a lot of stars," said van Dokkum, adding that this is the most likely scenario. 

Another possibility is that these galaxies are in the process of being ripped apart. But astronomers expect that if this were the case, the galaxies would be distorted and streams of stars would be flowing away from them. Because these effects don't appear, this scenario is very unlikely.

The next step is to try to measure the individual motions of stars within the galaxies. If the team knew those stars' speeds, it could calculate the galaxies' exact mass, and therefore the amount of dark matter they contain. If the stars move faster, the galaxy is more massive. And if they move slower, the galaxy is less massive. 
However, this would require a better spectrum than the one the team has right now.

"But it's not outside the realm of what's possible," van Dokkum assured. "It's just very hard."

The original study has been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read it for free on the preprint site arXiv.org.

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Ancient rocks show life could have flourished on Earth 3.2 billion years ago

February 17, 2015 / / 0 Comments


photo of red rocks and blue sky
The oldest samples are sedimentary rocks that formed 3.2 billion years ago in
northwestern Australia. They contain chemical evidence for nitrogen
fixation by microbes.R. Buick / UW



Excerpt from
washington.edu

A spark from a lightning bolt, interstellar dust, or a subsea volcano could have triggered the very first life on Earth.
But what happened next? Life can exist without oxygen, but without plentiful nitrogen to build genes – essential to viruses, bacteria and all other organisms – life on the early Earth would have been scarce.

The ability to use atmospheric nitrogen to support more widespread life was thought to have appeared roughly 2 billion years ago. Now research from the University of Washington looking at some of the planet’s oldest rocks finds evidence that 3.2 billion years ago, life was already pulling nitrogen out of the air and converting it into a form that could support larger communities.

“People always had the idea that the really ancient biosphere was just tenuously clinging on to this inhospitable planet, and it wasn’t until the emergence of nitrogen fixation that suddenly the biosphere become large and robust and diverse,” said co-author Roger Buick, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences. “Our work shows that there was no nitrogen crisis on the early Earth, and therefore it could have supported a fairly large and diverse biosphere.”
The results were published Feb. 16 in Nature.

The authors analyzed 52 samples ranging in age from 2.75 to 3.2 billion years old, collected in South Africa and northwestern Australia. These are some of the oldest and best-preserved rocks on the planet. The rocks were formed from sediment deposited on continental margins, so are free of chemical irregularities that would occur near a subsea volcano. They also formed before the atmosphere gained oxygen, roughly 2.3 to 2.4 billion years ago, and so preserve chemical clues that have disappeared in modern rocks.

Even the oldest samples, 3.2 billion years old – three-quarters of the way back to the birth of the planet – showed chemical evidence that life was pulling nitrogen out of the air. The ratio of heavier to lighter nitrogen atoms fits the pattern of nitrogen-fixing enzymes contained in single-celled organisms, and does not match any chemical reactions that occur in the absence of life.

“Imagining that this really complicated process is so old, and has operated in the same way for 3.2 billion years, I think is fascinating,” said lead author Eva Stüeken, who did the work as part of her UW doctoral research. “It suggests that these really complicated enzymes apparently formed really early, so maybe it’s not so difficult for these enzymes to evolve.”

Genetic analysis of nitrogen-fixing enzymes have placed their origin at between 1.5 and 2.2 billion years ago.

“This is hard evidence that pushes it back a further billion years,” Buick said.

Fixing nitrogen means breaking a tenacious triple bond that holds nitrogen atoms in pairs in the atmosphere and joining a single nitrogen to a molecule that is easier for living things to use. The chemical signature of the rocks suggests that nitrogen was being broken by an enzyme based on molybdenum, the most common of the three types of nitrogen-fixing enzymes that exist now. 

Molybdenum is now abundant because oxygen reacts with rocks to wash it into the ocean, but its source on the ancient Earth – before the atmosphere contained oxygen to weather rocks – is more mysterious.

The authors hypothesize that this may be further evidence that some early life may have existed in single-celled layers on land, exhaling small amounts of oxygen that reacted with the rock to release molybdenum to the water.

“We’ll never find any direct evidence of land scum one cell thick, but this might be giving us indirect evidence that the land was inhabited,” Buick said. “Microbes could have crawled out of the ocean and lived in a slime layer on the rocks on land, even before 3.2 billion years ago.”

Future work will look at what else could have limited the growth of life on the early Earth. Stüeken has begun a UW postdoctoral position funded by NASA to look at trace metals such as zinc, copper and cobalt to see if one of them controlled the growth of ancient life.

Other co-authors are Bradley Guy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, who provided some samples from gold mines, and UW graduate student Matthew Koehler. The research was funded by NASA, the UW’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory, the Geological Society of America and the Agouron Institute.

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Jupiter at its biggest, brightest for two weeks

February 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from pressofatlanticcity.comBy FRED SCHAAF  ...

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Neptune-Like Planets Could Transfom Into Habitable Worlds

January 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Strong irradiation from the host star can cause planets known as mini-Neptunes in the habitable zone to shed their gaseous envelopes and become potentially habitable worlds.Credit: Rodrigo Luger / NASA imagesExcerpt from sciencedaily.com Two ph...

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Elusive dark matter may be detected with GPS satellites

November 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments


This two-clocks-illustration shows the pattern of how two atomic clocks would desynchronize and then resynchronize due to a lump of dark matter sweeping through a Global Positioning System or other atomic clock based network. Photo courtesy of Andrei Derevianko, University of Nevada, Reno.


Excerpt from
sciencerecorder.com


Global Positioning System, or GPS for short, devices are typically used for navigation purposes. But this satellite network could also alert us to something else: the presence of dark matter.

Dark matter is thought to form 80% of the universe, but is difficult to detect because it rarely interacts with ordinary matter. Its makeup is unknown, as it has never been viewed by science. Some have suggested that dark matter is a particle; however, a new study indicates that dark matter may consist of kinks in the quantum field.

According to Andrei Derevianko at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, dark matter may be made of quantum field cracks that can be detected by GPS. The theory is a revolutionary one, and would change the nature of time and space where the kinds are located.

One of these elements is time, which is tracked by the extremely accurate GPS system. With a network of satellites spanning 50,000 kilometers and traveling through space at 300 kilometers a second, a cosmic kink could disturb the GPS clocks. This quantum crack would require 170 seconds to jump across the networks.

GPS clocks could be interrupted by other factors, but Deverianko and Pospelov believe that only dark matter could disturb the system’s timekeeping in a certain way.

Derevianko is currently pulling data from 15 years of GPS records to search for signs of dark matter’s presence. If no fingerprints are detected, he will use the ground-based atomic clocks belonging to the Network for European Accurate Time and Frequency Transfer.
If dark matter is nothing more than cosmic kinks, it could give some people a new thing to grumble about. “I hear these stories about people getting lost using GPS,” said Derevianko. “Now they could have another excuse: maybe it was dark matter that caused them to lose their way.”

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Researchers take second look at near-death experiences

November 2, 2014 / / 0 Comments



Excerpt from

news4sanantonio.com

By Jeff Abell
News 4 San Antonio

BALTIMORE - Those who have skirted death often talk about their 'near-death' experiences. 

At times, the stories sound like a scene from the twilight zone. But what some researchers discount as hallucinations, others are beginning to take a closer look.  Some scientists now seem convinced the stories may actually be real.

Ellyn Dye is a professional writer who didn't quite learn the lessons of life until she discovered death.

"There really is more than who we human beings are," says Dye.

She made her life-changing discovery on a drive to the supermarket 30 years ago, not far from her Silver Spring home. Another motorist veered into her path sending Dye crashing.

"I had enough time to think, ‘oh my God he's.’  I felt no impact. I felt nothing.  And the next thing I knew I was looking down from the top of my car," she says.

Dye was clinically dead and viewing her own crash scene from a distance. It was an out of body experience that sounded all too familiar.

"The tunnel of light showed up. You can see this bright, bright, light, but the most important part is you can feel it. I saw, almost immediately, saw all of my relatives who have passed. You know how happy they were to see me and how proud of me they are," Dye says.

Her experience confirmed what she had forever believed, that life exists even after death.

"And I really do think that the worst thing we can be is afraid," she adds.

"I never had a question whether it was real or not. It was real for me," says Jack Dunlavey. Five years ago, Dunlavey was knocking on death’s door. Not long after pulling his tractor out of the barn, it gave way to the soggy ground.

"Four thousand pounds is what the tractor guy told me," he says.

All 4,000 pounds overturned and landed on Dunlavey's back.

"Instantly, I knew I was going to die," he says.

What happened next is similar to what happened to Dye. A bright tunnel appeared and so did familiar faces.

"But when I walked in and floated into that, all my concerns were gone.  As I was in there I also saw my parents coming toward me," Dunlavey says.

Scientists have long believed that these out of body experiences were simply hallucinations.  But after studying the stories of more than 2,000 heart attack survivors, some researchers now seem convinced those "near death" experiences may actually be real. The study, which is the largest to date, found that more than 40 percent of survivors describe having some form of awareness long after they were declared dead.

"In general, they described seeing lights, getting peaceful, seeing relatives almost as if they were walking them to where they were going," says Dr. Sam Parnia.

But one New York surgeon says, "No, there's no life after death."

He adds that there is a scientific explanation for those near death experiences. For as long as five minutes after the heart stops neurons, he says, are still pumping images through the brain.

"So when we talk about that bright light, that's happening in your occipital lobe," the surgeon says.

"Some people can't comprehend that something like that can happen, but it’s getting more common now so people are starting to listen," says Dunlavey.

For Dye, the research bolsters what she's known for years.

"It doesn't convince me more that my experience was real because it was very real. I can say I saw all my relatives who have died.  They were alive and more alive than they ever were on planet earth."

It took death for Dye to learn to live. She now leads a Maryland support group for those who have had near death experiences.

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The Unstoppable Awakening of Humanity

September 25, 2014 / / 0 Comments

by Zen GardnerWe’re undergoing an amazing transformation. Absolutely diametrically opposed to the constant, gradual attempt by elitists to shut down humanity via eons of engineered subjugation, we’re being consciously and vibrationally liberated by the very nature of the Universe in spite of all their efforts.It’s not readily apparent to most, but it’s very clearly there.It’s subtle and yet obvious at the same time. Knowledge of this change or shift in conscio [...]

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Hollow Earth Conspiracy: The HOLE Truth

September 15, 2014 / / 0 Comments

by Will Storr For centuries, Hollow Earth conspiracy theorists have tried to prove that there’s a whole other world beneath our own. But first they need to find the way in...Late at night, on October 4 2002, a strange guest appeared on a cult American radio show. Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell had a reputation for exploring weird themes with fascinating guests, but few had ever sounded as excited as this one. Dallas Thompson was a former personal trainer who had spent his [...]

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Galactic Federation of Light The Pleiadians May-03-2013

May 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Channeled Interview with the Pleiadians: Increased Energy, Expanding upon Dedication and the Various Laws of Manifestation by Wes Annac: http://aquariusparadigm.com/2013/05/03/channeled-interview-with-the-pleiadians-increased-energy-expanding-upon-dedication-and-the-various-laws-of-manifestation/

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Heaven Letters April-29-2013

April 29, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Heavenletter #4539 The Time of Your Life, April 29, 2013
Gloria Wendroff
http://www.heavenletters.org/the-time-of-your-life.html

God said:
Time is quite a bug-a-boo in the world. Time comes and goes like the

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Galactic Federation of Jesus April-24-2013

April 25, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Fear is an illness, and it is healed by Love, compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance
April 24, 2013 by John Smallman
http://johnsmallman2.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/fear-is-an-illness-and-it-is-healed-by-love-compassion-forgiveness-and-acceptance/

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