Science & Technology
The probe captured the first-ever close-up pictures after coming within 7,800 miles (12,550km) of the dwarf planet back in July 2015, providing us Earthlings with a whole new perspective of the icy rock at the edge of our solar system.
The newly-released NASA video, based on data from the New Horizons spacecraft and digital elevation models of Pluto, offers incredible insight into what it would be like to zoom over the dwarf planet.
The model shows off Pluto's icy plains and mountain ranges, showing its remarkable terrain in stunning detail.
It is based on the cosmological model of:
■ An initial state of nothingness which then exploded as the LeMaitre-Gamow Cosmic Big Bang Event when T=0, (time)Plate tectonics replaced Continental Drift theory that was itself based on the amazing coincidence of the near parallelism of the coasts of the Americas and Africa.
■ Some time afterwards another miracle happened and the exploding matter, exploding in all directions, started to locally slow down to gravitational attraction (How, don't ask) and forming primal clusters of matter
■ These small clusters of gravitationally accreted matter started to clump to other nearby clumps that, over time, started forming stars where gravitational accretion was so intense that nuclear reactions started and lo, there was light!
■ Other, not so bright, clumps formed planets where the accretionary force of gravity continues to operate.
■ Today we live in a gravitational universe in which observations that don't fit theory are explained by ad hoc adjustments including Dark Matter, Black Holes, Dark Energy, String Theory, Quantum Mechanics, particle duality where electrons are either particles or waves, and what other miracles will be needed to explain future observations.
Because gravity is THE force, it is continually attracting and compressing matter so that the Earth is unable to expand and remains thus fixed in size and, obviously, volume.

The multiple images of the discovered galaxy are indicated by white arrows (bottom right shows the scale of the image in seconds of arc).
Using this effect, a team of scientists from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) led by researcher Anastasio Díaz-Sánches of the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPT) has discovered a very distant galaxy, some 10 thousand million light years away, about a thousand times brighter than the Milky Way. It is the brightest of the submillimetre galaxies, called this because of their very strong emission in the far infrared. To measure it they used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma).
"Thanks to the gravitational lens" notes Anastasio Díaz Sánchez, a researcher at the UPCT and first author of the article "produced by a cluster of galaxies between ourselves and the source, which acts as if it was a telescope, the galaxy appears 11 times bigger and brighter than it really is, and appears as several images on an arc centered on the densest part of the cluster, which is known as an "Einstein Ring." The advantage of this kind of amplification is that it does not distort the spectral properties of the light, which can be studied for these very distant objects as if they were much nearer."
In 1998, purported extraterrestrial contactee Jerry Wills claimed a tall blonde humanoid named Zo taught him how to access Aramu Muru and enter "another universe." Wills further claimed that Zo illustrated to him how our universe is an experimental simulation within his species' universe. They built it to understand their own reality, which is itself nested inside a larger universe.
The next year, in 1999, the blockbuster science fiction film The Matrix came out and forever emblazoned into our collective subconscious the idea that our existence is a simulation created by a more advanced race of beings. Incidentally, the film also made long black trench coats, black sunglasses, and my last name all the rage, but I digress...
A few years after the release of The Matrix, philosopher Nick Bostrom published the Simulation Argument, a concise paper entitled "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" It presented a trilemma, a mathematical breakdown of why at least one of three provocative scenarios must be true.
On Friday, Verily announced the launch of Debug Fresno, the first field study in their Debug Project to "to reduce the devastating global health impact that disease-carrying mosquitoes inflict on people around the world."
The company says it has developed an autonomous robot that can breed 150,000 mosquitoes a week. It plans to release 1 million infected mosquitoes every week for 20 weeks over the summer in an attempt to decrease the wild mosquito population in two 300 acre neighborhoods in the Fresno area.

Something big enough, namely the existence of Planet 10, could be interfering with orbital plane and causing the warp on Kuiper Belt.
The search for distant worlds and solar systems has made great headways, but debates and uncertainties remain. A case in point: the existence of Planet 9. Now, new observations offer evidence of a planetary mass hiding closer to home, revealing itself by its effects on the space rocks in the Kuiper Belt.
Planet 10: Causing Warp On Kuiper Belt?
The Kuiper Belt shelters minor planets, space rocks, and other objects that orbit the sun with a specific inclination. A new survey by Renu Malhotra and Kat Volk of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL), however, showed that the most distant objects in the vicinity divert from this particular inclination and are tilted away from the orbital plane by 8 degrees.
What this meant: something big enough could be interfering with such plane and causing the warp on Kuiper Belt.

The captive ravens in the study were tested on two tasks: using tools and bartering with humans.
Scientists from Sweden say ravens are able to think about the future, showing a general planning ability previously documented only in people and great apes.
Researchers Can Kabadayi and Mathias Osvath, of Lund University, tested five captive ravens in two tasks they do not do in the wild: using tools and bartering with humans. The results were published on Thursday by the journal Science.
Ravens, along with crows, jays and others, belong to a bird group called corvids. Some corvids have shown that in hoarding food, they do some planning for the future instead of just acting on natural urges.
The Lund University ravens showed they could also plan by setting aside a tool that they suspected would get them a tasty treat later. They also prepared for future bartering.
The Yuncheng Salt Lake, also known as the 'Dead Sea of China' due its high salt levels, is a popular tourist destination and it's easy to see why. It seems, however, that its natural bright colors are best observed from above, as shown in this image snapped by Deimos Imaging.
But new techniques developed at the Morgridge Institute for Research and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have produced, for the first time, functional arterial cells at both the quality and scale to be relevant for disease modeling and clinical application.
Reporting in the July 10 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists in the lab of stem cell pioneer James Thomson describe methods for generating and characterizing arterial endothelial cells — the cells that initiate artery development — that exhibit many of the specific functions required by the body.
Further, these cells contributed both to new artery formation and improved survival rate of mice used in a model for myocardial infarction. Mice treated with this cell line had an 83 percent survival rate, compared to 33 percent for controls.
Remarkably, the explosion persisted for more than two hours, producing a sustained fusillade of X-rays and energetic protons that ionized the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere. Shortwave radio blackouts were subsequently observed over the Pacific Ocean and especially around the Arctic Circle. This map from NOAA shows the affected geographic regions.












Comment: The New York Post takes a more ominous tone when describing rogue planets: See also: