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'Havana Syndrome' likely caused by pulsed microwave energy, government study finds

Brenda Breslauer, Ken Dilanian
Yahoo News
Sat, 05 Dec 2020 12:51 UTC
U.S. Embassy in Havana
© Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters
U.S. Embassy in Havana
The mysterious neurological symptoms experienced by American diplomats in China and Cuba are consistent with the effects of directed microwave energy, according to a long-awaited report by the National Academies of Sciences that cites medical evidence to support the long-held conviction of American intelligence officials.

The report, obtained Friday by NBC News, does not conclude that the directed energy was delivered intentionally, by a weapon, as some U.S. officials have long believed. But it raises that disturbing possibility.

The report was transferred to Congress after bipartisan calls led by U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire who is a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees. She issued the following statement:
"The health effects from these mysterious injuries have tormented those afflicted. Their illnesses and suffering are real and demand a response from Congress. American public servants and their families - who have been targeted - have requested that Congress receive and review this report, so I'm glad the State Department heeded our bipartisan call so we can get to work."
NBC News reported in 2018 that U.S. intelligence officials considered Russia a leading suspect in what some of them assess to have been deliberate attacks on diplomats and CIA officers overseas. But there was not — and is not now — conclusive intelligence pointing in that direction, multiple officials who have been briefed on the matter said.

Comment: Of course it was Russia microwaving US officials in Cuba and China. It must be true. MSM says so:
The US media were quick to draw a link with the old boogeyman Russia, saying it confirms Moscow's maliciousness. The implication is that US diplomats and intelligence officers were attacked with a sophisticated weapon that the US could not detect.
"The mere consideration of such a scenario raises grave concerns about a world with disinhibited malevolent actors and new tools for causing harm to others, as if the US government does not have its hands full already with naturally occurring threats."
Russia had already been widely described by the US media as a likely culprit behind the American officials' health problems. The country is mentioned in the study only briefly, in the context of past research into the effects of pulsed microwave exposure. It showed no proof that the supposed victims of the hypothetical attack were actually subjected to microwave radiation, yet alone that it was intentional.

But outlets covering it didn't hesitate to draw an explicit connection. NBC News and the New York Times were the first to report on the release of the research on Friday, having had access to it prior to publication. The study itself was finished months ago and was previewed in a story printed by GQ in October, to which both media outlets refer.

National Academies of Sciences sent it to the State Department in August, and for months US lawmakers "pressed the department to publicly disclose the findings, saying its failure to release the information fit with a pattern of secrecy and inaction by the Trump administration," according to NYT.

The reportage fits a pattern of stories which paint Russia as a power hostile to the US and willing to launch clandestine attacks against it, while President Trump sits on his hands reluctant to push back. Such stories also tend to suffer from a shortage of actual evidence.

One could see how pushing stories about a Russian menace is in the interest of the US' national security apparatus. The coverage of the 'microwave weapon' study may seem a particularly blatant case, however, considering the identity of one of the reporters given a preview, something many commenters pointed out.

See also:

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Info

New particle in the blood of septic patients discovered

Madeline McCurry-Schmidt
La Jolla Institute for Immunology
Fri, 04 Dec 2020 16:52 UTC
Appearance of ENDS
© Image courtesy of Alex Marki, M.D., Ley Laboratory, La Jolla Institute for Immunology
This time-lapse image shows the appearance of an ENDS and how it curls over time.
LA JOLLA — Researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) have found that people with sepsis have never-before-seen particles in their blood. The scientists are the first to show that these particles, called elongated neutrophil-derived structures (ENDS), break off of immune cells and change their shape as they course through the body.

"We actually found a new particle in the human body that had never been described before," explains LJI Instructor Alex Marki, M.D., who served as first author of the study. "That's not something that happens every day."

The research, published December 4, 2020 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine shows the importance of understanding how immune cells change over the course of a disease.

"ENDS are not normal — they are not detectable in healthy people or mice," says LJI Professor Klaus Ley, M.D., who served as senior author of the study. "But ENDS are very high in sepsis, and I would not be surprised if they were high in other inflammatory diseases."
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Laptop

A quantum computer that measures light has achieved quantum supremacy

Leah Crane
New Scientist
Thu, 03 Dec 2020 08:08 UTC
Lasers
© IM_VISUALS/Shutterstock
Lasers are used in a new type of quantum computing called boson sampling
A new type of quantum computing called boson sampling is capable of calculations that no classical computer could accomplish in any reasonable amount of time. This is the second time this feat, known as quantum supremacy, has been claimed for a quantum algorithm after Google said in 2019 that its Sycamore device had achieved this.

Boson sampling relies on a strange quantum property of photons - particles of light - that is displayed when they travel through a beam splitter, which divides a single beam of light into two beams propagating in different directions. If two identical photons hit the beam splitter at exactly the same time, they don't split from one another. Instead, they stick together and both travel in the same direction.

If you shoot many photons through a sequence of beam splitters many times in a row, patterns begin to emerge in the paths of the photons that are extraordinarily difficult to simulate or predict with classical computers. Finding possible sets of photon paths in this set-up is called boson sampling, and a boson sampling device is a type of quantum computer, albeit one with a very narrow purpose.

Comment: See also: Google AI touts a 'quantum supremacy' experiment using a programmable superconducting processor

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Chalkboard

Numbers expert claims to have cracked algorithm that stole the election for Biden in Georgia

Edward Solomon
thedonald.win
Fri, 04 Dec 2020 20:23 UTC
mathematics algebra
© Shutterstock
Smoking Gun, Part 2: Ratio Transfers Proved; Entire Algorithm Reversed, net 200,353 votes for Biden in seized precincts in Atlanta.

Affidavits signed.



Watch the video. You will know.

Summary: Final hijacked state is 287,424 total votes. 242,434 Biden, 42,109 Trump, Net gain 200,325

Final hijacked state is 14.65% Trump.

All hijacked precincts after release report: 93,327 Trump out of 504,700. That is 18.49%. If we subtract the hijacked votes from the final aggregate state we get: 51,218 Trump out of 217,276, which is 23.57% Trump.

That the final hijacked state of all precincts can have their total votes changed to a uniform number, such as 20,000 total votes per precinct, and the percentage remains the same (14.65%), which is proof that a simple linear algebra algorithm was adjusting requisite precinct totals against a flat polarized template.

The precincts seized more than once were most likely to be early in alphanumeric order, proving the software takes the first available precinct from an ordered alphanumeric list by County, Precinct.

Comment: An attempt at a layman's explanation, from Twitter user @KingMakerFT:
Here is Edward Solomon explaining his reverse engineering to determine the Dominion algorithm used in GA. He concludes it gave Biden over 200,000 votes, the majority from Fulton County, plus a handful of precincts in other counties. He builds on the transfer of ratios he first observed in PA. He found the same phenomenon in most precincts in Fulton County and in some precincts in a handful of other counties. He explains in this video how he reverse engineered from there, deriving an intricate fractal pattern diagramed as vectors on a wheel, representing the roots and branches of the ratios used. He also explains that this pattern of these ratios cannot be random or coincidental- they are designed to produce a certain percentage of votes for Trump, sufficiently low to give Biden the win. The ratios are applied only for discreet periods of time, shifting over time to other precincts. He describes the precincts during periods for which ratios are applied as being "virtual precincts" meaning the algorithm has taken over vote counting temporarily. This is hard to follow, but he's convinced he's found the smoking gun.

Two issues I think need to be addressed, the first of which Solomon mentions in passing, is how use of the algorithm squares with ballot stuffing that apparently went on in Fulton County, and why wouldn't the recount expose the 200,000 plus votes shifted to Biden?
See the Twitter discussion linked above for speculation on the questions raised. In a nutshell, it would require injections of fraudulent votes for Biden, and removal of Trump ballots. This can be achieved in several ways, including via the duplicate adjudication process (where Dominion employees manually 'cure' problem ballots), test ballots, and other means of counterfeiting ballots for injection into the batches. But it would require coordination between the programmers and the ballot stuffers.

We also lack details of how exactly the 'hand recount' was conducted, and how accurate it was. There are some allegations of precincts simply reporting their original numbers, others that counting was done using the same machines (thus the same algorithm), and no word on how the digital adjudication was 'hand counted' during the recount. Were all of the latter re-adjudicated? Or were the digital ballot images simply recounted by Dominion employees, as they were during the first count?

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Attention

Jupiter herding micrometeors towards Earth suggest new theory

Anthony Watts
Watts Up with That
Sat, 05 Dec 2020 16:16 UTC
New theory suggests Earth's 60‐Year climate cycle may be driven by planetary oscillations directing micrometeors toward Earth, creating more dust - which change cloud cover.
Jupiter
© Wikipedia
An image of Jupiter taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters claims there is increasing evidence that Earth's 60-year climate cycle may be driven by planetary oscillations. They claim a 60-year climate cycle is found in the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, aurora sightings, rainfall, and ocean climatic records.

The paper says:
"...the orbital eccentricity of Jupiter presents prominent oscillations with a period of quasi 60 years due to its gravitational coupling with Saturn." The authors propose that the planetary system modulates the interplanetary dust falling on Earth and modifying the cloud coverage.

The orbital eccentricity of Jupiter presents a strong 60‐year oscillation that is well correlated with several climatic records and with the 60‐year oscillation found in long meteorite fall records since the 7th century.

Since meteorite falls are the most macroscopic aspect of infalling space dust, we conclude that the interplanetary dust should modulate the formation of the clouds and, thus, drive climate changes."
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Info

Unusual planetary nebula fades mere decades after it arrived

James Urton
University of Washington
Thu, 03 Dec 2020 17:16 UTC
Stingray Nebula,
© NASA/ESA/Bruce Balick/Martín Guerrero/Gerardo Ramos-Larios
Two images of the Stingray Nebula, located in the direction of the southern constellation Ara — or the Altar — captured 20 years apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The image on the left was taken in March 1996, while the image on the right was captured in January 2016.
Stars are rather patient. They can live for billions of years, and they typically make slow transitions — sometimes over many millions of years — between the different stages of their lives.

So when a previously typical star's behavior rapidly changes in a few decades, astronomers take note and get to work.

Such is the case with a star known as SAO 244567, which lies at the center of Hen 3-1357, commonly known as the Stingray Nebula. The Stingray Nebula is a planetary nebula — an expanse of material sloughed off from a star as it enters a new phase of old age and then heated by that same star into colorful displays that can last for up to a million years.

The tiny Stingray Nebula unexpectedly appeared in the 1980s and was first imaged by scientists in the 1990s using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. It is by far the youngest planetary nebula in our sky. A team of astronomers recently analyzed a more recent image of the nebula, taken in 2016 by Hubble, and found something unexpected: As they report in a paper accepted to the Astrophysical Journal, the Stingray Nebula has faded significantly and changed shape over the course of just 20 years.

If dimming continues at current rates, in 20 or 30 years the Stingray Nebula will be barely perceptible, and was likely already fading when Hubble obtained the first clear images of it in 1996, according to lead author Bruce Balick, an emeritus professor of astronomy at UW.
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Cloud Lightning

Adapt 2030 Ice Age Report: Three cycles of time converge on Dec 21, 2020


Adapt 2030
Sat, 05 Dec 2020 06:14 UTC
Superbolts
© YouTube/Adapt 2030 (screen capture)
On December 21, 2020 these cycles will converge in time. The change of elements in astrology from Earth to Air in it's 700 year cycle, entering the first degree of the first minute of Aquarius in the Precession of the Equinoxes and the Grand Solar Minimum is intensifying all on the Winter Solstice.


Comment: 'Superbolts' detected above atmosphere are over 1,000 times brighter than normal lightning

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Alarm Clock

Cluster of Alaskan islands could be super volcano

American Geophysical Union
Heritage Daily
Fri, 04 Dec 2020 19:49 UTC
Kagamil volcano

Kagamil volcano: Scientists suggest that a small group of volcanic islands in Alaska's Aleutian chain might be part of a single, undiscovered giant volcano.
If the researchers' suspicions are correct, the newfound volcanic caldera would belong to the same category of volcanoes as the Yellowstone Caldera and other volcanoes that have had super-eruptions with severe global consequences.

The Islands of the Four Mountains in the central Aleutians is a tight group of six stratovolcanoes named Carlisle, Cleveland, Herbert, Kagamil, Tana and Uliaga. Stratovolcanoes are what most people envision when they think of a volcano: a steep conical mountain with a banner of clouds and ash waving at the summit. They can have powerful eruptions, like that of Mount St. Helens in 1980, but these are dwarfed by far less frequent caldera-forming eruptions.

Researchers from a variety of institutions and disciplines have been studying Mount Cleveland, the most active volcano of the group, trying to understand the nature of the Islands of the Four Mountains. They have gathered multiple pieces of evidence showing that the islands could belong to one interconnected caldera.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Question

Newly discovered ghostly 'odd radio circles' can't be explained by current theories

Professor Ray Norris
The Conversation
Wed, 02 Dec 2020 17:37 UTC
In September 2019, my colleague Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she'd found while browsing our new radio astronomical data. She had started noticing very weird shapes she couldn't fit easily to any known type of object.

Among them, labelled by Anna as WTF?, was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was. A few days later, our colleague Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than Anna's.

Ghostly ORC
© Image by Bärbel Koribalski, based on ASKAP data, with the optical image from the [Dark Energy Survey](https://www.darkenergysurvey.org), Author provided
The ghostly ORC1 (blue/green fuzz), on a backdrop of the galaxies at optical wavelengths. There’s an orange galaxy at the centre of the ORC, but we don’t know whether it’s part of the ORC, or just a chance coincidence.
Anna and Emil had been examining the new images from our pilot observations for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, made with CSIRO's revolutionary new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope.

EMU plans to boldly probe parts of the Universe where no telescope has gone before. It can do so because ASKAP can survey large swathes of the sky very quickly, probing to a depth previously only reached in tiny areas of sky, and being especially sensitive to faint, diffuse objects like these.

I predicted a couple of years ago this exploration of the unknown would probably make unexpected discoveries, which I called WTFs. But none of us expected to discover something so unexpected, so quickly. Because of the enormous data volumes, I expected the discoveries would be made using machine learning. But these discoveries were made with good old-fashioned eyeballing.
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Galaxy

Black hole's structure possibly glimpsed, as dust ring casts shadows and rays far across space


RT
Sun, 22 Nov 2020 18:43 UTC
Hubble image core galaxy IC 5063
© NASA/ESA/STScI/W.P. Maksym (CfA)
Hubble image showing bright rays and dark shadows coming from the blazing core of the galaxy IC 5063.
Astronomers believe they are getting a glimpse of the structure of a black hole, after the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a collection of rays and shadows beaming out from the center of a galaxy millions of light-years away.

Black holes are the universe's greatest monsters, rapidly consuming everything in their vicinity. Their gravity is so powerful that not even light can escape them, an extraordinary fact which also makes them invisible to us and thus incredibly hard to study.

However, experts have noticed vast shadows and narrow, bright rays stretching out from the center of the galaxy IC 5063, as if something enormous is standing in the way of the intense light.

Galaxy IC 5063 - rays
© NASA, ESA, STScI/W.P. Maksym (CfA)
Bright rays and dark shadows coming from the blazing core of the galaxy IC 5063.
Experts believe this could be a black hole in the heart of the galaxy casting its shadow into space, and a quirk of alignment may be allowing them a glimpse of its structure.
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