Tag: white (page 3 of 10)

UV light reveals hidden colors in ancient shells

UV light revealed the way ancient shells looked millions of years ago.

Using ultra-violet (UV) light, scientists have revealed astonishing colors of about 30 ancient seashells. According to PLOS, the seashells, which are estimated to be between 6.6 and 4.8 million years old, were looking white in regular white light. The true colors of the shells appeared in UV light.

According to the researchers, “The biology of modern Conidae (cone snails)-which includes the hyperdiverse genus Conus-has been intensively studied, but the fossil record of the clade remains poorly understood, particularly within an evolutionary framework”.

In the presence of UV light, the organic matter remaining in the shells fluoresces. With this, the shells appeared similar to what they looked when living creatures used to live in them. It is yet unclear which particular compounds in the shells are releasing the light when exposed to UV rays. With the help of the technique, the researchers were able to document the coloration patterns of 28 different cone shell species found in the Dominican Republic. Out of these 28 shells, 13 were found to be the species, which were not known earlier. And this could help know about the relationship between modern species.

San Jose State University geologist Jonathan Hendricks exposed over 350 fossil specimens to ultraviolet light.

The coloration patterns of the ancient species were compared with existing animals and doing this, researchers found many displayed similarities. According to this finding, some modern species emerge from lineages. These lineages began in the Caribbean millions of years ago.

The newly distinguished species, Conus carlottae, was also among the newly distinguished species and it has a polka-dotted shell, which is not found in modern cone snails today. Researchers are now using UV light to emit color from porcelain white seashell fossils.

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MRSA superbug killed by 1,100-year-old home remedy, researchers say

March 31, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

MRSA attacks a human cell. The bacteria shown is the strain MRSA 252, a leading cause of hospital-associated infections. (Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH)

Excerpt from washingtonpost.com

By Justin Wm. Moyer

Even in the age of AIDS, avian flu and Ebola, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA, is terrifying.

The superbug, which is resistant to conventional antibiotics because of their overuse, shrugs at even the deadliest weapons modern medicine offers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated MRSA contributed to the deaths of more than 5,000 people in the United States in 2013. It even attacked the NFL, and some say it could eventually kill more people than cancer. And presidential commissions have advised that technological progress is the only way to fight MRSA.

But researchers in the United Kingdom now report that the superbug proved vulnerable to an ancient remedy. The ingredients? Just a bit of garlic, some onion or leek, copper, wine and oxgall — a florid name for cow’s bile.

This medicine sounds yucky, but it’s definitely better than the bug it may be able to kill.

“We were absolutely blown away by just how effective the combination of ingredients was,” Freya Harrison of the University of Nottingham, who worked on the research, told the BBC.

The oxgall remedy, billed as an eye salve, was found in a manuscript written in Old English from the 10th century called “Bald’s Leechbook” — a sort of pre-Magna Carta physician’s desk reference. Garlic and copper are commonly thought to have antibiotic or antimicrobial properties, but seeing such ingredients in a home remedy at Whole Foods is a far cry from researchers killing a superbug with it.

According to Christina Lee, an associate professor in Viking studies at Nottingham, the MRSA research was the product of conversations among academics of many stripes interested in infectious disease and how people fought it before antibiotics.

“We were talking about the specter of antibiotic resistance,” she told The Washington Post in a phone interview. The medical researchers involved in the discussions said to the medievalists: “In your period, you guys must have had something.”

Not every recipe in Bald’s Leechbook is a gem. Other advice, via a translation from the Eastern Algo-Saxonist: “Against a woman’s chatter; taste at night fasting a root of radish, that day the chatter cannot harm thee.” And: “In case a man be a lunatic; take skin of a mereswine or porpoise, work it into a whip, swinge the man therewith, soon he will be well. Amen.”

Though the Leechbook may include misses, it may help doctors find a solution to a problem that only seems to be getting worse.

If the oxgall remedy proves effective against MRSA outside of the lab — which researchers caution it may not — it would be a godsend. Case studies of MRSA’s impact from the CDC’s charmingly named Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report seem medieval.

“In July 1997, a 7-year-old black girl from urban Minnesota was admitted to a tertiary-care hospital with a temperature of 103 F.” Result: Death from pulmonary hemorrhage after five weeks of hospitalization.

“In January 1998, a 16-month-old American Indian girl from rural North Dakota was taken to a local hospital in shock and with a temperature of 105.2 F.” Result: After respiratory failure and cardiac arrest, death within two hours of hospital admission.

“In January 1999, a 13-year-old white girl from rural Minnesota was brought to a local hospital with fever, hemoptysis” — that’s coughing up blood — “and respiratory distress.” The result: Death from multiple organ failure after seven days in the hospital.

“We believe modern research into disease can benefit from past responses and knowledge, which is largely contained in non-scientific writings,” Lee told the Telegraph. “But the potential of these texts to contribute to addressing the challenges cannot be understood without the combined expertise of both the arts and science.”

Lee stressed that it was the combination of ingredients that proved effective against MRSA — which shows that people living in medieval times were not as barbaric as popularly thought. Even 1,000 years ago, when people got sick, other people tried to figure out how to help.

“We associate ‘medieval’ with dark, barbaric,” Lee said. “… It’s not. I’ve always believed in the pragmatic medieval ages.”
The research will be presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for General Microbiology in Birmingham. In an abstract for the conference, the team cautioned oxgall was no cure-all.

“Antibacterial activity of a substance in laboratory trials does not necessarily mean the historical remedy it was taken from actually worked in toto,” they wrote.

Lee said researchers hope to turn to other remedies in Bald’s Leechbook — including purported cures for headaches and ulcers — to see what other wisdom the ancients have to offer.

“At a time when you don’t have microscope, medicine would have included things we find rather odd,” she said. “In 200 years, people will judge us.”

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Jupiter May Be Behind The Mysterious ‘Gaping Hole’ In Our Solar System

March 30, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comWhen astronomers began studying other solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy back in the 1990s, they noticed something peculiar: most of these systems have big planets that circle their host stars in tight orbits, a fin...

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Top Secret Government Programs That Your Not Supposed To Know About

March 23, 2015 / Steven Laniers Metaphysical Directory - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

Originally Posted at in5d.com The following is the alleged result of the actions of one or more scientists creating a covert, unauthorized notebook documenting their involvement with an Above Top Secret government program. Government publications and information obtained by the use of public tax monies cannot be subject to copyright. This document is released into the public domain for all citizens of the United States of America. THE ‘MAJIC PROJECTS’ SIGMA is the project whic [...]

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

March 21, 2015 / Steven Laniers Metaphysical Directory - Main Article Directory / 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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Neanderthals Turned Eagle Talons Into ‘Stunning’ Jewelry

March 13, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

The eight eagle talons from Krapina were arranged with an eagle phalanx that was also found at the site.

Excerpt from nbcnews.com

Long before they shared the landscape with modern humans, Neanderthals in Europe developed a sharp sense of style, wearing eagle claws as jewelry, new evidence suggests.

Researchers identified eight talons from white-tailed eagles — including four that had distinct notches and cut marks — from a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal cave in Croatia. They suspect the claws were once strung together as part of a necklace or bracelet.

"It really is absolutely stunning," study author David Frayer, an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas, told LiveScience. "It fits in with this general picture that's emerging that Neanderthals were much more modern in their behavior."

The talons were first excavated more than 100 years ago at a famous sandstone rock-shelter site called Krapina in Croatia.
There, archaeologists found more than 900 Neanderthal bones dating back to a relatively warm, interglacial period about 120,000 to 130,000 years ago. They also found Mousterian stone tools (a telltale sign of Neanderthal occupation), a hearth, and the bones of rhinos and cave bears — but no signs of modern human occupation. Homo sapiens didn't spread into Europe until about 40,000 years ago.

The eagle talons were all found in the same archaeological layer, Frayer said, and they had been studied a few times before. But no one noticed the cut marks until last year, when Davorka Radovcic, curator of the Croatian Natural History Museum, was reassessing some of the Krapina objects in the collection.

The researchers don't know exactly how the talons would have been assembled into jewelry. But Frayer said some facets on the claws look quite polished — perhaps made smooth from being wrapped in some kind of fiber, or from rubbing against the surface of the other talons. There were also nicks in three of the talons that wouldn't have been created during an eagle's life, Frayer said.

The findings were published March 11 in the journal PLOS ONE.

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A Complete Guide to the March 20th Total Solar Eclipse

March 12, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Totality! The 2012 total solar eclipse as seen from Australia. Credit and copyright: www.hughca.com.

Excerpt from universetoday.com

The first of two eclipse seasons for the year is upon us this month, and kicks off with the only total solar eclipse for 2015 on Friday, March 20^th.

And what a bizarre eclipse it is. Not only does this eclipse begin just 15 hours prior to the March equinox marking the beginning of astronomical spring in the northern hemisphere, but the shadow of totality also beats path through the high Arctic and ends over the North Pole.

An animation of the March 20th eclipse. Credit: NASA/GSFC/AT Sinclair.

Already, umbraphiles — those who chase eclipses — are converging on the two small tracts of terra firma where the umbra of the Moon makes landfall: the Faroe and Svalbard islands. All of Europe, the northern swath of the African continent, north-central Asia and the Middle East will see a partial solar eclipse, and the eclipse will be deeper percentage-wise the farther north you are .
2015 features four eclipses in all: two total lunars and two solars, with one total solar and one partial solar eclipse. Four is the minimum number of eclipses that can occur in a calendar year, and although North America misses out on the solar eclipse action this time ’round, most of the continent gets a front row seat to the two final total lunar eclipses of the ongoing tetrad on April 4^th and September 28^th.

How rare is a total solar eclipse on the vernal equinox? Well, the last total solar eclipse on the March equinox occurred back in 1662 on March 20^th. There was also a hybrid eclipse — an eclipse which was annular along a portion of the track, and total along another — on March 20^th, 1681. But you won’t have to wait that long for the next, as another eclipse falls on the northward equinox on March 20^th, 2034.

The path of the March 20th eclipse across Europe, including start times for the partial phases, and the path of totality, click to enlarge. For more maps showing the percentage of occlusion, elevation, and more, click here. Credit: Michael Zeiler/GreatAmercianEclipse.com.

Note that in the 21^st century, the March equinox falls on March 20^th, and will start occasionally falling on March 19^th in 2044. We’re also in that wacky time of year where North America has shifted back to ye ‘ole Daylight Saving (or Summer) Time, while Europe makes the change after the eclipse on March 29^th. It really can wreak havoc with those cross-time zone plans, we know…
The March 20^th eclipse also occurs only a day after lunar perigee, which falls on March 19^th at 19:39 UT. This is also one of the closer lunar perigees for 2015 at 357,583 kilometres distant, though the maximum duration of totality for this eclipse is only 2 minutes and 47 seconds just northeast of the Faroe Islands.

Views from selected locales in Europe and Africa. Credit: Stellarium.

This eclipse is number 61 of 71 in solar saros series 120, which runs from 933 to 2754 AD. It’s also the second to last total in the series, with the final total solar eclipse for the saros cycle occurring one saros later on March 30^th, 2033.

What would it look like to sit at the North Pole and watch a total solar eclipse on the first day of Spring? It would be a remarkable sight, as the disk of the Sun skims just above the horizon for the first time since the September 2014 equinox. Does this eclipse occur at sunrise or sunset as seen from the pole? It would be a rare spectacle indeed!

An equinoctal eclipse as simulated from the North Pole. Credit: Stellarium.

Practicing eclipse safety in Africa. Credit: Michael Zeiler/GreatAmericanEclipse.com

Safety is paramount when observing the Sun and a solar eclipse. Eye protection is mandatory during all partial phases across Europe, northern Asia, North Africa and the Middle East. A proper solar filter mask constructed of Baader safety film is easy to construct, and should fit snugly over the front aperture of a telescope. No. 14 welder’s goggles are also dense enough to look at the Sun, as are safety glasses specifically designed for eclipse viewing. Observing the Sun via projection or by using a pinhole projector is safe and easy to do.

A solar filtered scope ready to go in Tucson, Arizona. Credit: photo by author.

Weather is always the big variable in the days leading up to any eclipse. Unfortunately, March in the North Atlantic typically hosts stormy skies, and the low elevation of the eclipse in the sky may hamper observations as well. From the Faroe Islands, the Sun sits 18 degrees above the horizon during totality, while from the Svalbard Islands it’s even lower at 12 degrees in elevation. Much of Svalbard is also mountainous, making for sunless pockets of terrain that will be masked in shadow on eclipse day. Mean cloud amounts for both locales run in the 70% range, and the Eclipser website hosts a great in-depth climatology discussion for this and every eclipse.

The view of totality and the planets as seen from the Faroe Islands. Credit: Starry Night.

But don’t despair: you only need a clear view of the Sun to witness an eclipse!

Solar activity is also another big variable. Witnesses to the October 23^rd, 2014 partial solar eclipse over the U.S. southwest will recall that we had a massive and very photogenic sunspot turned Earthward at the time. The Sun has been remarkably calm as of late, though active sunspot region 2297 is developing nicely. It will have rotated to the solar limb come eclipse day, and we should have a good grasp on what solar activity during the eclipse will look like come early next week.

And speaking of which: could an auroral display be in the cards for those brief few minutes of totality? It’s not out of the question, assuming the Sun cooperates. Of course, the pearly white corona of the Sun still gives off a considerable amount of light during totality, equal to about half the brightness of a Full Moon. Still, witnessing two of nature’s grandest spectacles — a total solar eclipse and the aurora borealis — simultaneously would be an unforgettable sight, and to our knowledge, has never been documented!

We also put together some simulations of the eclipse as seen from Earth and space:

Note that an area of southern Spain may witness a transit of the International Space Station during the partial phase of the eclipse. This projection is tentative, as the orbit of the ISS evolves over time. Be sure to check CALSky for accurate predictions in the days leading up to the eclipse.

The ISS transits the Sun during the eclipse around 9:05 UT as seen from southern Spain. Credit: Starry Night.

Can’t make it to the eclipse? Live in the wrong hemisphere? There are already a few planned webcasts for the March 20^th eclipse:

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Bird Thought To Be Extinct Resurfaces In Myanmar

March 6, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Jerdon's BabblerExcerpt from techtimes.comJerdon's Babbler is a species of bird that was believed to be extinct until this species unexpectedly resurfaced in Myanmar. This brown and white bird is roughly the size of a house sparrow.The bird was last ...

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Archaeologists find two lost cities deep in Honduras jungle

March 6, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Archaeologists in Honduras have found dozens of artifacts at a site where they believe twin cities stood. Photograph: Dave Yoder/National Geographic

Excerpt from theguardian.com

Archaeological team say they have set foot in a place untouched by humans for at least 600 years in a site that may be the ‘lost city of the monkey god’

Archaeologists have discovered two lost cities in the deep jungle of Honduras, emerging from the forest with evidence of a pyramid, plazas and artifacts that include the effigy of a half-human, half-jaguar spirit.
The team of specialists in archaeology and other fields, escorted by three British bushwhacking guides and a detail of Honduran special forces, explored on foot a remote valley of La Mosquitia where an aerial survey had found signs of ruins in 2012.
Chris Fisher, the lead US archaeologist on the team, told the Guardian that the expedition – co-coordinated by the film-makers Bill Benenson and Steve Elkins, Honduras and National Geographic (which first reported the story on its site) – had by all appearances set foot in a place that had gone untouched by humans for at least 600 years.
“Even the animals acted as if they’ve never seen people,” Fisher said. “Spider monkeys are all over place, and they’d follow us around and throw food at us and hoot and holler and do their thing.”
“To be treated not as a predator but as another primate in their space was for me the most amazing thing about this whole trip,” he said.
Fisher and the team arrived by helicopter to “groundtruth” the data revealed by surveying technology called Lidar, which projects a grid of infrared beams powerful enough to break through the dense forest canopy.

The dense jungle of Honduras. Photograph: Dave Yoder/National Geographic — The dense jungle of Honduras.Photograph: Dave Yoder/National Geographic

That data showed a human-created landscape, Fisher said of sister cities not only with houses, plazas and structures, but also features “much like an English garden, with orchards and house gardens, fields of crops, and roads and paths.”
In the rainforest valley, they said they found stone structural foundations of two cities that mirrored people’s thinking of the Maya region, though these were not Mayan people. The area dates between 1000AD and 1400AD, and while very little is known without excavation of the site and surrounding region, Fisher said it was likely that European diseases had at least in part contributed to the culture’s disappearance.
The expedition also found and documented 52 artifacts that Virgilio Paredes, head of Honduras’s national anthropology and history institute, said indicated a civilisation distinct from the Mayans. Those artifacts included a bowl with an intricate carvings and semi-buried stone sculptures, including several that merged human and animal characteristics.
The cache of artifacts – “very beautiful, very fantastic,” in Fisher’s words – may have been a burial offering, he said, noting the effigies of spirit animals such as vultures and serpents.
Fisher said that while an archaeologist would likely not call these cities evidence of a lost civilisation, he would call it evidence of a culture or society. “Is it lost? Well, we don’t know anything about it,” he said.
The exploratory team did not have a permit to excavate and hopes to do so on a future expedition. “That’s the problem with archaeology is it takes a long time to get things done, another decade if we work intensively there, but then we’ll know a little more,” Fisher said.

“This wasn’t like some crazy colonial expedition of the last century,” he added.
Despite the abundance of monkeys, far too little is known of the site still to tie it to the “lost city of the monkey god” that one such expedition claimed to have discovered. In about 1940, the eccentric journalist Theodore Morde set off into the Honduran jungle in search of the legendary “white city” that Spanish conquistadors had heard tales of in the centuries before.
He broke out of the brush months later with hundreds of artifacts and extravagant stories of how ancient people worshipped their simian deity. According to Douglas Preston, the writer National Geographic sent along with its own expedition: “He refused to divulge the location out of fear, he said, that the site would be looted. He later committed suicide and his site – if it existed at all – was never identified.”
Fisher emphasised that archaeologists know extraordinarily little about the region’s ancient societies relative to the Maya civilisation, and that it would take more research and excavation. He said that although some academics might find it distasteful, expeditions financed through private means – in this case the film-makers Benenson and Elkins – would become increasingly commonplace as funding from universities and grants lessened.
Fisher also suggested that the Lidar infrared technology used to find the site would soon be as commonplace as radiocarbon dating: “People just have to get through this ‘gee-whiz’ phase and start thinking about what we can do with it.”
Paredes and Fisher also said that the pristine, densely-wooded site was dangerously close to land being deforested for beef farms that sell to fast-food chains. Global demand has driven Honduras’s beef industry, Fisher said, something that he found worrying.
“I keep thinking of those monkeys looking at me not having seen people before. To lose all this over a burger, it’s a really hard pill to swallow.”

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This Awesome 3D View Of Deep Space May Be The Best Ever

March 2, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

The background image in this composite shows the Hubble Space Telescope image of the region known as the Hubble Deep Field South. The boxes show distant galaxies that were invisible to Hubble.Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comAlong with Earthrise ...

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

February 27, 2015 / Greg Giles / 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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What It’s Like to Be at the 24th International UFO Congress

February 26, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

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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White Dwarf Stars to Collide in Catastrophic Supernova

February 10, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Pictured: An artist's impression of the center of the Henize 2-428 planetary nebula, containing two white dwarf stars. (Photo : ESO/L. CALÇADA)

Excerpt from natureworldnews.com

Reported in the journal Nature, the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile was originally studying how some stars produce strangely shaped, asymmetric nebula. They focused on Henize 2-428 and found something they did not expect - not just one star, but two.

"Further observations made with telescopes in the Canary Islands allowed us to determine the orbit of the two stars and deduce both the masses of the two stars and their separation. This was when the biggest surprise was revealed," co-author Romano Corradi, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, said in a press release.

The next shocker was that the two stars were white dwarfs - tiny, extremely dense stars with a total mass about 1.8 times that of the Sun. The fact that there are two stars supports the theory that double central stars may explain the odd shapes of some of these nebulae.

They've also found that the stars orbit every 4 hours and due to the emission of gravitational waves, they are slowly spiraling into one another. Within the next 700 million years, these stars will merge and under the stress of their combined mass, explode in a giant supernova.

"Until now, the formation of supernovae Type Ia by the merging of two white dwarfs was purely theoretical," said co-author David Jones, an ESO Fellow at the time the data were obtained. "The pair of stars in Henize 2-428 is the real thing!"

"It's an extremely enigmatic system," added lead researcher Santander-García. "It will have important repercussions for the study of supernovae Type Ia, which are widely used to measure astronomical distances and were key to the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating due to dark energy."

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