Military chiefs are to rush devastating laser guns into service to meet the threat posed by Russian drones and missiles.


Royal Artillery troops will test the revolutionary 'DragonFire' weaponry, which burns holes through incoming enemy ordnance, during the summer.

The sudden urgency to roll out a suite of 'directed energy weapons' follows the Kremlin's alarming effective use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Ukraine.

British soldiers will also experiment with radio frequency weapons capable of firing magnetic pulses at enemy targets thereby cutting off their power supplies.

Russian spacecraft: The close call had NASA officials tense. This was because of the potential danger posed by debris if the two crafts had collided. Such an eventuality could pose a threat to the astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS).

An American satellite, in a recent space scare, narrowly escaped destruction after a close encounter with a Russian spacecraft. Though the incident took place on February 28, officials only recently learned that the spacecraft came within a mere 10 metres of collision.

The near collision left NASA officials on edge as there were risks involved from the potential debris had the two craft hit each other. It could be dangerous for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The Vanadis bristle worm has eyes as big as millstones - relatively speaking. Indeed, if our eyes were proportionally as big as the ones of this Mediterranean marine worm, we would need a big sturdy wheelbarrow and brawny arms to lug around the extra 100kg.

As a set, the worm's eyes weigh about twenty times as much as the rest of the animal's head and seem grotesquely out of place on this tiny and transparent marine critter. As if two giant, shiny red balloons have been strapped to its body.

Vanadis bristle worms, also known as polychaetes, can be found around the Italian island of Ponza, just west of Naples. Like some of the island's summertime partiers, the worms are nocturnal and out of sight when the sun is high in the sky. So what does this polychaete do with its walloping peepers after dark? And what are they good for?

Less than twenty minutes after finishing this article, your brain will begin to store the information that you've just read in a coordinated burst of neuronal activity. Underpinning this process is a phenomenon known as dendritic translation, which involves an uptick in localized protein production within dendrites, the spiny branches that project off the neuron cell body and receive signals from other neurons at synapses. It's a process key to memory — and its dysfunction is linked to intellectual disorders.

That makes the inner workings of dendritic translation a "holy grail for understanding memory formation," says Rockefeller's Robert B. Darnell, whose team just published a study in Nature Neuroscience describing a new platform capable of identifying the specific regulatory mechanisms that drive dendritic translation. The team leveraged a method, dubbed TurboID, to discover an entire suite of previously unknown factors in memory formation, revealing now mechanisms that underlie how protein synthesis in dendrites contributes to learning and memory. The findings may also have implications for intellectual disabilities, such as Fragile X syndrome.

Every now and then, a giant of modern science should be allowed to express himself in language that we all understand. In the informative Climate: The Movie, the 2022 Nobel physics laureate Dr. John Clauser thundered:

"I assert there is no connection whatsoever between climate change and CO₂ - it's all a crock of crap, in my opinion."

While not expressing himself in such forthright terms, the Greek scientist Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis might agree. He recently published a paper that argues it is the recent expansion of a more productive biosphere that has led to increased CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere and greening of the Earth. It is widely argued that changing atmospheric carbon isotopes prove that most if not all recent warming is caused by the 4% human contribution from burning hydrocarbons, but such anthropogenic involvement is dismissed by Koutsoyiannis as "non-discernible". Koutsoyiannis is Professor Emeritus of Hydrology and Analysis of Hydrosystems at the National Technical University of Athens.

There are hundreds and hundreds of studies showing that our wireless wonderland of EMF is not good for our health.

But you might ask: Well, HOW?

When we say "EMF", we're talking about many different types of electromagnetic waves, different frequencies, different power levels, and so on.

How could it possibly work?!

It turns out that the answer may very well be in our DNA!

Chemistry depends on heat.

Atoms or molecules bounce around randomly, collide, and form other molecules. At higher temperatures, atoms collide more and the rate at which atoms become molecules increases. Below a certain temperature, the reaction won't happen at all.

But something very weird happens at the lowest temperatures. In this extreme cold, there is essentially no heat energy, yet chemical reactions happen faster than they do at high temperatures.

The phenomenon is called quantum superchemistry. And it was finally demonstrated last year, more than 20 years after physicists first proposed it.

A paper published in March of 2021 in the journal Science Advances reports on the discovery of evidence for a large airburst type impact within the SØr Rondane Mountains, Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica. The report bears the names of a 15-member international team that did the research. The lead author was M. Van Ginneken with the Belgian Geological Survey. In the first sentence of the abstract to the article the authors support something I have been saying for literally decades: "Large airbursts, the most frequent hazardous impact events, are estimated to occur orders of magnitude more frequently than crater-forming impacts."

This fact is confirmed simply because airbursts don't leave impact craters. In this case the fingerprints of the event took the form of condensation spherules resulting from "a touchdown event, in which a projectile vapor jet interacts with the Antarctic ice sheet." The authors go on to explain that "Finding evidence of these low-altitude meteoritic events thus remains critical to understanding the impact history of Earth and estimating hazardous effects of asteroid impacts." They further report that "In recent years, meteoritic ablation debris resulting from airburst events have been found in three different locations of Antarctica. The material . . . all appears to have been produced during a Tunguska-like airburst event 480 thousand years (ka) ago."

With respect to their research, they say: "Here, we present the discovery of extraterrestrial particles formed during a significantly larger event recovered on . . . Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica. The characteristic features of the recovered particles attest to an unusual type of touchdown event, intermediate between an airburst and a crater-forming impact, during which the high-velocity vapor jet produced by the total disruption of an asteroid reached the Antarctic ice sheet." This event was estimated by the team to have occurred about 430 thousand years ago.

The authors provide some critical perspective on the effects of these type of impacts:

"The impact hazards resulting form the atmospheric entry of an asteroid that are currently being addressed by impact mitigation programs depend mainly on whether the impactor reaches the ground or is entirely disrupted in the atmosphere (i.e., airburst). For small-to medium-sized impactors (50- to 150-m diameter) producing airbursts, the main hazard is limited to blast effects resulting in strong overpressures over areas of up to 100,000 km2 wide. [38,600 sq miles] Thermal radiation may also result in fires over an area of 10 to 1000 km2 wide. . . . in addition to shockwaves and thermal radiation covering the aforementioned areas, these events are potentially destructive over a large area, corresponding to the area of interaction between the hot jet and the ground. The authors point out that such an event over Antarctica would inject ice crystals and impact dust into the upper atmosphere but would not directly affect human activity. However, they explain that "if a touchdown impact event takes place above a densely populated area, this would result in millions of casualties and severe damages over distances of up to hundreds of kilometers."

Now comes a new report in Earth and Planetary Science Letters on the discovery of evidence for yet another airburst event over Antarctica. The 11-member team responsible for the report is comprised of geologists, astrophysicists, and archaeologists from the U.S., the United Kingdom, Belgium, Russia, Japan, France and Italy.

Transhumanism may lead to super-human capabilities for some & mind control for others: perspective

The Internet of Bodies ecosystem may lead to the Internet of Brains sometime between 2035 and 2050, according to a UK Defence-commissioned RAND report.

"An 'internet of bodies' may also ultimately lead to an 'internet of brains', i.e. human brains connected to the internet to facilitate direct brain-to-brain communication and enable access to online data networks"

RAND Corporation, March 2024

Commissioned by the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and conducted by RAND Europe and Frazer Nash Consulting, the study "Cultural and technological change in the future information environment" looks at six technologies and information environments and their implications for British defense.

Suddenly, amateur astronomers are seeing a naked-eye comet in the evening sky. It's Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, also known as the 'devil comet'. Waiting for next Monday's solar eclipse in Mexico, Petr Horálek photographed the comet last night and found it much brighter than the last time he saw it:

"I assume an outburst is in progress," says Horálek. "My estimate of the comet's magnitude is +3.5. Definitely worth taking a look in the next hours and days."

Indeed, now is a good time to look. After sunset, the comet emerges in the western sky not far from the planet Jupiter. Naked-eye observers will see a dim fuzzball. Cameras and small telescopes reveal the comet's magnificent tail.