Tag: raised (page 2 of 4)

If the Moon Landings Were Real, Then Why is NASA Stumped by This?

March 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Buck Rogers, Staff WriterWaking TimesDuring the cold war era the Soviet Union and the United States were locked in an arms and technology race, each nation wanting to prove their dominance over the other, each striving to be the next reigning superpower in a world still shattered by the second world war. The Soviet’s took the lead when in April of 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin successfully orbited the earth and returned home safely. In May, president John F. Kennedy ma [...]

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8 possible explanations for those bright spots on dwarf planet Ceres

March 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Ceres  Excerpt from cnet.com It's a real-life mystery cliffhanger. We've come up with a list of possible reasons a large crater on the biggest object in the asteroid belt looks lit up like a Christmas tree.  We could be approachin...

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Bees Do It, Humans Do It ~ Bees can experience false memories, scientists say

February 27, 2015 / / 0 Comments



Excerpt from csmonitor.com


Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have found the first evidence of false memories in non-human animals.

It has long been known that humans – even those of us who aren't famous news anchors – tend to recall events that did not actually occur. The same is likely true for mice: In 2013, scientists at MIT induced false memories of trauma in mice, and the following year, they used light to manipulate mice brains to turn painful memories into pleasant ones.

Now, researchers at Queen Mary University of London have shown for the first time that insects, too, can create false memories. Using a classic Pavlovian experiment, co-authors Kathryn Hunt and Lars Chittka determined that bumblebees sometimes combine the details of past memories to form new ones. Their findings were published today in Current Biology.
“I suspect the phenomenon may be widespread in the animal kingdom," Dr. Chittka said in a written statement to the Monitor.
First, Chittka and Dr. Hunt trained their buzzing subjects to expect a reward if they visited two artificial flowers – one solid yellow, the other with black-and-white rings. The order didn’t matter, so long as the bee visited both flowers. In later tests, they would present a choice of the original two flower types, plus one new one. The third type was a combination of the first two, featuring yellow-and-white rings. At first, the bees consistently selected the original two flowers, the ones that offered a reward.

But a good night’s sleep seemed to change all that. One to three days after training, the bees became confused and started incorrectly choosing the yellow-and-white flower (up to fifty percent of the time). They seemed to associate that pattern with a reward, despite having never actually seen it before. In other words, the bumblebees combined the memories of two previous stimuli to generate a new, false memory.

“Bees might, on occasion, form merged memories of flower patterns visited in the past,” Chittka said. “Should a bee unexpectedly encounter real flowers that match these false memories, they might experience a kind of deja-vu and visit these flowers expecting a rich reward.”

Bees have a rather limited brain capacity, Chittka says, so it’s probably useful for them to “economize” by storing generalized memories instead of minute details.

“In bees, for example, the ability to learn more than one flower type is certainly useful,” Chittka said, “as is the ability to extract commonalities of multiple flower patterns. But this very ability might come at the cost of bees merging memories from multiple sequential experiences.”

Chittka has studied memory in bumblebees for two decades. Bees can be raised and kept in a lab setting, so they make excellent long-term test subjects.

“They are [also] exceptionally clever animals that can memorize the colors, patterns, and scents of multiple flower species – as well as navigate efficiently over long distances,” Chittka said.

In past studies, it was assumed that animals that failed to perform learned tasks had either forgotten them or hadn’t really learned them in the first place. Chittka’s research seems to show that animal memory mechanisms are much more elaborate – at least when it comes to bumblebees.

“I think we need to move beyond understanding animal memory as either storing or not storing stimuli or episodes,” Chittka said. “The contents of memory are dynamic. It is clear from studies on human memory that they do not just fade over time, but can also change and integrate with other memories to form new information. The same is likely to be the case in many animals.”

Chittka hopes this study will lead to a greater biological understanding of false memories – in animals and humans alike. He says that false memories aren’t really a “bug in the system,” but a side effect of complex brains that strive to learn the big picture and to prepare for new experiences.

“Errors in human memory range from misremembering minor details of events to generating illusory memories of entire episodes,” Chittka said. “These inaccuracies have wide-ranging implications in crime witness accounts and in the courtroom, but I believe that – like the quirks of information processing that occur in well known optical illusions – they really are the byproduct of otherwise adaptive processes.”

“The ability to memorize the overarching principles of a number of different events might help us respond in previously un-encountered situations,” Chittka added. “But these abilities might come at the expense of remembering every detail correctly.”
So, if generating false memories goes hand in hand with having a nervous system, does all this leave Brian Williams off the hook?

“It is possible that he conflated the memories,” Chittka said, “depending on his individual vulnerability to witnessing a traumatic event, plus a possible susceptibility to false memories – there is substantial inter-person variation with respect to this. It is equally possible that he was just ‘showing off’ when reporting the incident, and is now resorting to a simple lie to try to escape embarrassment. That is impossible for me to diagnose.”

But if Mr. Williams genuinely did misremember his would-be brush with death, Chittka says he shouldn’t be vilified.

“You cannot morally condemn someone for reporting something they think really did happen to them,” Chittka said. “You cannot blame an Alzheimer patient for forgetting to blow out the candle, even if they burn down the house as a result. In the same way, you can't blame someone who misremembers a crime as a result of false memory processes."

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Mummified monk revealed inside Buddha statue

February 23, 2015 / / 0 Comments


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Excerpt from usatoday.com

The mummified remains of a monk have been revealed inside a nearly 1,000-year old Chinese statue of a Buddha.

The mummy inside the gold-painted papier-mâché statue is believed to be that of Liuquan, a Buddhist master of the Chinese Meditation School who died around the year 1100, researchers said. It's the only Chinese Buddhist mummy to undergo scientific research in the West.

The statue was on display last year at the Drents Museum as part of an exhibit on mummies. It was an cited as an example of self-mummification, an excruciating, years-long process of meditation, starvation, dehydration and poisoning that some Buddhist monks undertook to achieve enlightenment and veneration.

When the exhibit ended in August, a CT scan at the Meander Medical Center in the Netherlands revealed the seated skeleton. Samples taken from organ cavities provided one big surprise: paper scraps printed with ancient Chinese characters indicating the high-status monk may have been worshiped as a Buddha.

A CT scan has revealed a mummified Chinese monk inside a Buddha statue. The remains date back about 1,000 years. Video provided by Newsy Newslook
The finding was first reported in December but did not get wide notice. Irish Archaeology carried a report over the weekend, which apparently started the news ball rolling.

But the revelation is not, as some reports claim, "a shocking discovery," The History Blog notes: "It was known to be inside the statue all along ... that's why it was sent to the Drents Museum in the first place as part of the Mummies exhibition."

The mummy's existence was discovered in 1996 when the statue was being restored in the Netherlands, Live Science writes, explaining what was found, how its age was determined and when the first detailed skeletal imaging was performed.




DNA tests were conducted on bone samples, and the Dutch team plans to publish its finding in a forthcoming monograph.
Researchers still have not determined whether the monk mummified himself, a practice that was also widespread in Japan and that was outlawed in the 19th century. If he did, the process was gruesome, as Ancient Origins explains:
For the first 1,000 days, the monks ceased all food except nuts, seeds, fruits and berries and they engaged in extensive physical activity to strip themselves of all body fat. For the next one thousand days, their diet was restricted to just bark and roots. Near the end of this period, they would drink poisonous tea made from the sap of the Urushi tree, which caused vomiting and a rapid loss of body fluids. It also acted as a preservative and killed off maggots and bacteria that would cause the body to decay after death.
In the final stage, after more than six years of torturous preparation, the monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, where he would go into a state of meditation. He was seated in the lotus position, a position he would not move from until he died. A small air tube provided oxygen to the tomb. Each day, the monk rang a bell to let the outside world know he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed for the final thousand day period of the ritual.
At the end of this period, the tomb would be opened to see if the monk was successful in mummifying himself. If the body was found in a preserved state, the monk was raised to the status of Buddha, his body was removed from the tomb and he was placed in a temple where he was worshiped and revered. If the body had decomposed, the monk was resealed in his tomb and respected for his endurance, but not worshiped
If you find yourself in Budapest before May, the Buddha mummy statue is on display at the Hungarian Natural History Museum.

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History Repeating? Study shows Ancient cities were bigger and denser, just like modern cities

February 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments




Excerpt from  thenextdigit.com

Recently, a new research has been done, which found that the ancient cities were similar to the current modern-day cities in terms of size as well as the density of those settlements. In the research paper, the researcher explains that modern cities with large amount of populations as well as density, are similar to the characteristics of ancient cities. The research claims that the character of the inhabitants of ancient cities is similar to those of inhabitants of modern cities.

 The study was done by the researchers at Santa Fe Institute and at the University of Colorado Boulder. The main objective of the researchers is to find the functionality of the settlements and they started to find out whether current cities and ancient cities are similar in nature.

Scott Ortman, Researcher at Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder says,
“Our findings indicate the fundamental processes behind the emergence of scaling in modern cities have structured human settlement organization throughout human history, and that contemporary urban systems are best-conceived as lying on a continuum with the smaller-scale settlement systems known from historical and archaeological research.”
The researcher grouped together and analyzes the structures as well as dimensions of both cities and estimated the way of construction of monuments, housing styles, the amount of people stayed in a region and so on. They found the place or region where the density was high, the productivity was more.

Ortman also said that the results were amazing and unbelievable for them and added that the modern world is radically different from the ancient world with its capitalism, democracy, industrialization and so on. They also noticed that, once the population of a particular area grew, then the productivity of that same place rose high. Even a few patterns that are used in the ancient human societies were same as that we are following in our modern urban system.
“It was amazing and unbelievable,” Ortman said. “We’ve been raised on a steady diet, telling us that, thanks to capitalism, industrialization, and democracy, the modern world is radically different from worlds of the past. What we found here is that the fundamental drivers of robust socioeconomic patterns in modern cities precede all that.”

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Mayday! Mayday! Mars One a ‘suicide mission’, warn leading space scientists

February 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments




By Victoria Weldon

IT'S been described as science fiction made real - but now, just as the final selection process gets under way for the folk with the right stuff to make a manned mission to Mars, scientists have dashed the dreams of planet Earth by warning the journey will probably never happen and will end in disaster if it does.
Privately run space exploration programme Mars One wants to send four people to the red planet for the rest of their (probably not very long) lives and film it for reality TV in order to help finance the endeavour.

Thousands have set their sights on becoming the first settlers to land on the planet - and have now been whittled down to a short list of 100, including a Scottish PhD student - but with questionable technology, a lack of funding and an unrealistic timeframe, experts claim it is a "suicide mission".

Mars One believes it can achieve a manned mission in 2024 - sooner than NASA, the European Space Agency, the Russians or Chinese, and on a fraction of their budgets.

If the project does go ahead, the crew would have to make it through nine months of interplanetary travel without being killed by mishap, radiation - or each other.

And even then, a recent study suggested they will only last 68 days on Mars before dying - due to lack of food and water.

However, Anu Ojha OBE, director of the UK National Space Academy Programme, has warned the applicants not to get their hopes up as the mission is unlikely to ever leave the ground.

Ojha said: "Obviously this is something that has captured the public's imagination, and Mars One obviously has a great PR team, but space engineering obeys the laws of physics not PR."
Mars One is the brainchild of Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp who was inspired by the images of Mars sent back by the Sojourner rover in 1997, when he was a student.

Lansdorp, who will not make the journey himself, has an impressive team working on the project including former NASA employees Dr Norbert Kraft, who specialises in the physiological and psychological effects of space travel and space architect Kristian von Bengtson.

Physicist Arno Wielders, who previously worked for Dutch Space, is also on board, as well as a number of other advisers from around the world with backgrounds in space engineering, science and technology, marketing, design and television production.

The ultimate aim is to see a large, self-sustaining colony on Mars, but Ojha, who is also a director at the National Space Centre in Leicester, said there are three major stumbling blocks for the mission: technology, funding and human psychology.

"In terms of technology, it's pushing the absolute boundaries and there seems to be a lot of technological naivety on the part of the people running it", he said.

"There are some elements that seem reasonable, but overall it's concerning, and the timescales are also questionable."

While Mars One is planning the one way mission for 2024, NASA, with its long established expertise and technology, is looking to be able to send humans to Mars and bring them back again by the mid 2030s.

This is estimated to cost up to as much as £100 billion (£64.9bn) for the space agency, while Mars One believes it can do it for an optimistic $6 billion (£3.9bn) - and there are even questions over whether or not they will be able to achieve that much funding.
The private enterprise is hoping to raise money through a TV deal and additional funding from the exposure that will bring the project.

Last year it said it had teamed up with programme makers Endemol, but the Big Brother creators recently pulled out of the deal claiming they were "unable to reach agreement on the details of the contract".

Mars One did not respond to questioning by the Sunday Herald over its funding, but its website showed that as at January this year, it had raised just $759,816 from donations, merchandising, and a crowdfunding campaign.

It is unclear what other funding the project has.

Ojha said: "The business model has so many holes in it, it's shaky to say the least. And when you ask them how much money they have raised, they say it's still ongoing. The time scales and the business model - they're completely unrealistic."

Mars One plans to send several unmanned rockets to Mars ahead of the 2024 mission, with the first of these scheduled to take place in 2018.

These will include missions with robots to find a suitable location for a base and assemble it ahead of the humans' arrival.
The project claims it will use only existing technology for the mission, buying in materials from proven suppliers including Lockheed Martin or SpaceX.

The equipment involved includes several simulation outposts for training, a rocket launcher, a transit vehicle to take the crew to Mars, a Mars landing capsule, two rovers, a Mars suit and a communications system.

However, experts have warned that much of this equipment has not been fully tested. 

Physicist professor Todd Huffman is a big supporter of attempting a manned mission to Mars, but he also has serious concerns about Mars One, claiming it is "scientifically irresponsible".

He said: "The plan stretches the technology in many places.
"The launch vehicle they want to use has not actually ever launched yet, let alone make a trip to Mars.

"The living spaces have not been made nor has it been tested whether they can be robotically assembled and by what kind of robot.

"A suitable site would also need to be found for the living spaces and the details of how water extraction will take place have not been understood.

"If you assign a 90 per cent chance to success to each of those things, all of which are necessary for human survival, you end up with about a 50 per cent chance of failure, ending in the death of the colonists - and that would likely not make good television."
He added: "Unless we [wait for] quite a lot of technology and exploration to happen first, it is basically worse than a one-way ticket for the colonists - it is almost surely a suicide mission if carried out within this next decade."

Although most scientists believe the mission will not go ahead, some have also warned of the psychological impact on the people selected for the mission if it does.

Ojha said: "The thing that's really captured the public's imagination is this idea of it being a one way trip, but this brings another set of problems in terms of human psychology.

"The longest period a human has spent in space is 438 days - they're talking about sending people on a one way trip.
"Lots of the people I've seen interviewed, they're really excited about taking part, but have they really thought about what they're doing and what the implications are?

"I would tell them to go to Antarctica for six months in the middle of winter and that's about 1 per cent of what they'll be experiencing on Mars.

"Human psychology is far more fragile than we think."

However, while many scientists warn of the dangers and do not believe the mission will proceed, they have praised Mars One for sparking the public's interest in planetary science.

Dr John Bridges, of the Space Research Centre in Leicester, said: "It's a very interesting and innovative project, but the time scales are very challenging.

"I believe they're planning for 2024 and it's 2015 now. So for something as major as this, it's a very challenging timescale
"But it's fantastic that people are thinking about this, that industry is getting involved and raising awareness of planetary science."

Ojha added: "Mars One has been great in a way because it's once again drawn people's imagination to the idea of space engineering and exploration. 

"But the reality is that there are serious concerns about the project's space engineering, funding and medical implications."

Lansdorp has previously said that most people are "surprised to hear that the manned missions will be happening in ten years time, with a budget ten times less than Nasa".

He added: "But I think that if you really spend time studying Mars One, you cannot believe there is not a good chance we will make it.
"At the same time, it's a hugely ambitious plan, there's many things that can go wrong with such a big plan.

"But I believe we have a good plan and we can overcome the challenges."

However, he has also conceded that the current plans are an "optimum schedule", adding: "If one rocket doesn't launch, or a lander doesn't work on Mars before a human goes, any major malfunctions will result in a two year delay."

Mars One declined the Sunday Herald's request to interview someone from the project and failed to answer any of our questions.

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NASA probe snaps amazing image of Ceres

February 6, 2015 / / 0 Comments



    NASA's Dawn space probe has taken the sharpest-yet image of Ceres, a dwarf planet in our solar system's asteroid belt.

    Excerpt from SPACE.com

    By Mike Wall  

    NASA's Dawn spacecraft has taken the sharpest-ever photos of Ceres, just a month before slipping into orbit around the mysterious dwarf planet.

    Dawn captured the new Ceres images Wednesday (Feb. 4), when the probe was 90,000 miles (145,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet, the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

    On the night of March 5, Dawn will become the first spacecraft ever to orbit Ceres — and the first to circle two different solar system bodies beyond Earth. (Dawn orbited the protoplanet Vesta, the asteroid belt's second-largest denizen, from July 2011 through September 2012.) 

    "It's very exciting," Dawn mission director and chief engineer Marc Rayman, who's based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said of Dawn's impending arrival at Ceres. "This is a truly unique world, something that we've never seen before."


    The 590-mile-wide (950 km) Ceres was discovered by Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. It's the only dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, and contains about 30 percent of the belt's total mass. (For what it's worth, Vesta harbors about 8 percent of the asteroid belt's mass.)

    Despite Ceres' proximity (relative to other dwarf planets such as Pluto and Eris, anyway), scientists don't know much about the rocky world. But they think it contains a great deal of water, mostly in the form of ice. Indeed, Ceres may be about 30 percent water by mass, Rayman said.

    Ceres could even harbor lakes or oceans of liquid water beneath its frigid surface. Furthermore, in early 2014, researchers analyzing data gathered by Europe's Herschel Space Observatory announced that they had spotted a tiny plume of water vapor emanating from Ceres. The detection raised the possibility that internal heat drives cryovolcanism on the dwarf planet, as it does on Saturn's moon's Enceladus. (It's also possible that the "geyser" was caused by a meteorite impact, which exposed subsurface ice that quickly sublimated into space, researchers said).

    The interior of Ceres may thus possess liquid water and an energy source — two key criteria required for life as we know it to exist.
    Dawn is not equipped to search for signs of life. But the probe — which is carrying a camera, a visible and infrared mapping spectrometer and a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer — will give scientists great up-close looks at Ceres' surface, which in turn could shed light on what's happening down below. 

    For example, Dawn may see chemical signs of interactions between subsurface water, if it exists, and the surface, Rayman said.
    "That's the sort of the thing we would be looking for — surface structures or features that show up in the camera's eye, or something about the composition that's detectable by one of our multiple spectrometers that could show evidence," he told Space.com. "But if the water doesn't make it to the surface, and isn't in large enough reservoirs to show up in the gravity data, then maybe we won't find it."

    Dawn will also attempt to spot Ceres' water-vapor plume, if it still exists, by watching for sunlight scattered off water molecules above the dwarf planet. But that's going to be a very tough observation to make, Rayman said.

    "The density of the water [observed by Herschel] is less than the density of air even above the International Space Station," he said. "For a spacecraft designed to map solid surfaces of airless bodies, that is an extremely difficult measurement." 

    Merging onto the freeway

    Dawn is powered by low-thrust, highly efficient ion engines, so its arrival at Ceres will not be a nail-biting affair featuring a make-or-break engine burn, as most other probes' orbital insertions are.

    Indeed, as of Friday (Feb. 6), Dawn is closing in on Ceres at just 215 mph (346 km/h), Rayman said —and that speed will keep decreasing every day.

    "You take a gentle, curving route, and then you slowly and safely merge onto the freeway, traveling at the same speed as your destination," Rayman said. "Ion propulsion follows that longer, more gentle, more graceful route."

    Dawn won't start studying Ceres as soon as it arrives. The spacecraft will gradually work its way down to its first science orbit, getting there on April 23. Dawn will then begin its intensive observations of Ceres, from a vantage point just 8,400 miles (13,500 km) above the dwarf planet's surface.

    The science work will continue — from a series of increasingly closer-in orbits, including a low-altitude mapping orbit just 230 miles (375 km) from Ceres' surface — through June 30, 2016, when the $466 million Dawn mission is scheduled to end.
    Rayman can't wait to see what Dawn discovers.

    "After looking through telescopes at Ceres for more than 200 years, I just think it's really going to be exciting to see what this exotic, alien world looks like," he said. "We're finally going to learn about this place."

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    Liftoff! SpaceX Gets $1 Billion From Google and Fidelity

    January 20, 2015 / / 0 Comments

     Excerpt from  nbcnews.com SpaceX, the California-based rocket company that now has its sights set on a globe-spanning satellite constellation, says it has received a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity that values the c...

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    Scientists ‘confident’ comet lander will wake up

    November 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments

    ASSOCIATED PRESSA burst of sunshine in the spring could be just the wake-up call for Europe's comet lander.Scientists raised hopes Monday that as the Philae lander nears the sun its solar panel-powered battery will recharge, and the first spacecraft ...

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    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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    How can there be ice on Scorching Mercury? NASA Report

    October 16, 2014 / / 0 Comments

    NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washingtonnasa.govMESSENGER Finds New Evidence for Water Ice at Mercury's Poles Mercury's North Polar Region Acquired By The Arecibo Observatory A Mosaic of MESSEN...

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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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    Criticism of Study Detecting Ripples From Big Bang Continues to Expand

    September 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

    The lab housing the Bicep2 telescope near the South Pole. Credit Steffen Richter, Harvard University
    nytimes.com

    Stardust got in their eyes.
    In the spring a group of astronomers who go by the name of Bicep announced that they had detected ripples in the sky, gravitational waves that were the opening notes of the Big Bang. The finding was heralded as potentially the greatest discovery of the admittedly young century, but some outside astronomers said the group had underestimated the extent to which interstellar dust could have contaminated the results — a possibility that the group conceded in its official report in June.

    Now a long-awaited report by astronomers using data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite has confirmed that criticism, concluding that there was enough dust in Bicep’s view of the sky to produce the swirly patterns without recourse to primordial gravitational waves.
    “We show that even in the faintest dust-emitting regions there are no ‘clean’ windows in the sky,” the Planck collaboration, led by Jean-Loup Puget of the Astrophysical Institute in Paris, wrote in a paper submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and posted online Monday.
    As a result, cosmologists like the Bicep crew cannot ignore dust in their calculations. “However,” said Jonathan Aumont, another of the Planck authors, also from the Paris institute, “our work does not imply that they did not measure at all a cosmological signal.

    Moreover, due to the very different observation techniques and signal processing in the Bicep2 and Planck experiments, we cannot say how much of the signal they measured is due to dust” and how much to gravitational waves.

    So this is not the end of the story, both the Planck scientists and the Bicep group agree. But the original euphoria that the secrets of inflation and quantum gravity might be at hand has evaporated. Planck and Bicep are now collaborating on a detailed comparison of their results.

    John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the Bicep paper, said the new report confirmed in greater detail the trend suggested by the first Planck papers in the spring, which indicated there is more dust even in the cleanest parts of the galaxy than anyone had thought.

    Raphael Flauger of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J., who first raised the issue of dust in the Bicep report, said it confirmed what he had thought. “It doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room,” he wrote in an email, “and it seems clear that at least the majority of the signal is caused by dust.”

    The gravitational waves may exist, although they would be weaker than the Bicep analysis indicated, causing theorists to reshuffle their ideas. As Richard Bond, an early universe expert at the University of Toronto and a Planck team member, put it: “Planck showed that dust could possibly be the entire Bicep2 signal, but Planck alone cannot decide. We have to do this in combination with Bicep2.”

    The joint comparison and Planck’s own polarization maps are due at the end of the year.

    If true, Bicep’s detection of gravitational waves would confirm a theory that the universe began with a violent outward antigravitational swoosh known as inflation, the mainspring of Big Bang theorizing for the last three decades.

    The disagreement over the Bicep finding will not mean the end of inflation theory; it just means it will be harder for cosmologists to find out how it worked. The Bicep group and an alphabet soup of competitors are soldiering on with new telescopes and experiments aimed at peeling away the secrets of the sky.

    Michael S. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said: “This is going to be a long march, but the goal of probing the earliest moments of the universe makes it well worth the effort. Dust is the bane of the existence of astrophysicists — and cosmologists. It is everywhere, and yet our understanding of it is very poor.”

    Others are less optimistic. Paul J. Steinhardt of Princeton University, a critic of the Bicep paper — and of inflation theory — said in an email that the Bicep paper should be retracted, “and we should return to good scientific practice.”

    The Bicep observations are the deepest look yet into a thin haze of microwaves, known as cosmic background radiation, left over from end of the Big Bang, when the cosmos was about 380,000 years old.

    According to theory, the onset of inflation, less than a trillionth of a second after time began, should have left ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. They would manifest as corkscrew patterns in the direction of polarization of the cosmic microwaves.
    The Bicep group — its name is an acronym for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization — is led by Dr. Kovac; Jamie Bock of Caltech; Clement Pryke of the University of Minnesota; and Chao-Lin Kuo of Stanford. They have deployed a series of radio telescopes at the South Pole in search of the swirl pattern. Their most recent, Bicep2, detected a signal in the sweet spot for some of the most popular models of inflation, leading to a splashy news conference and a summer of controversy and gossip.
    As the critics pointed out, things besides quantum ripples from the beginning of time could produce those swirls, including light from interstellar dust polarized by magnetic fields in space.
    Planck, launched in 2008 to survey the cosmic microwave sky, can distinguish the characteristic signature of dust by comparing the sky brightness in several radio frequencies, as well as measuring its direction of polarization. Bicep2, in contrast, looked at only one frequency, 150 gigahertz.

    The Bicep astronomers asked for Planck data on their patch of sky, but it was not available until now because of suspected instrument problems, Dr. Aumont said. So they extrapolated from existing data to conclude that there was little dust interfering with their observations.

    The new Planck report has knocked the pins out from under that. But there are still large uncertainties that leave room for primordial gravitational waves at some level. For example, the Planck team had to extrapolate some of its own measurements.

    As the Planck report says, “This result emphasizes the need for a dedicated joint Planck-Bicep2 analysis.”

    The group hopes this analysis will include data from the latest Bicep telescope, called the Keck Array, which has been gathering data for several months. In an interview this summer, Dr. Kovac said, “It’s been a funny year to be in the spotlight like this.” He said the group stood behind its work, even if the ultimate interpretation of the measurements is up for grabs.

    Acknowledging that dust would not be as sexy a discovery as ripples from inflation, Dr. Kovac said, “It’s really important as an experimentalist that you can divorce yourself from an investment in what the answer is.”

    He went on: “One thing that would distress me bitterly is if a major mistake in the measurement or of the analysis would come to light. The most pressing question is, what are the dust contributions to the signal?”

    Stay tuned.

    Lyman Page, an astrophysicist at Princeton, said the episode illustrated the messy progress of science.

    “Taking a step back,” he said by email, “it is amazing that a precise measurement of the cosmos can be made, discussed in fullness, and refuted by another measurement in such a short amount of time. It is testament to a healthy field.”

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