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Monumental university study: 'Fire did not bring down Tower 7 on 9/11'

Matt Agorist
The Free Thought Project
Thu, 05 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
WTC Tower 7
© TheFreeThoughtProject.comWorld Trade Center Tower 7
On September 11, 2001, at 5:20 p.m., World Trade Center Building 7 suddenly collapsed into its own footprint, falling at free fall speed for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second complete destruction. WTC 7 was not hit by a plane. After it collapsed, Americans were told that office fires caused a unique — never before seen — complete architectural failure leading to the building collapsing into its own footprint at the rate of gravity.
Despite calls for the evidence to be preserved, New York City officials had the building's debris removed and destroyed in the ensuing weeks and months, preventing a proper forensic investigation from ever taking place. Seven years later, federal investigators concluded that WTC 7 was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely as a result of normal office fires.
Naturally, skeptics have been questioning the official story for some time and after moving from the realm of conspiracy theory into the realm of science, an extensive university study has found that the official story of fire causing the collapse is simply not true.

This week, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth announced their partnership with the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in releasing a draft report of an in-depth four-year study on what actually brought down WTC 7. According to the press release, the release of the draft report begins a two-month period during which the public is invited to submit comments. The final report will be published later this year.

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Comet 2

All comets in our solar system may come from the same place

Bryce Benda
Phys.org
Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
© ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAMRosetta navigation camera image of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was taken on 7 July 2015 from a distance of 154 km from the comet centre.
All comets might share their place of birth, new research says. For the first time ever, astronomer Christian Eistrup applied chemical models to fourteen well-known comets, surprisingly finding a clear pattern. His publication has been accepted in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Comets: balls of ice or more?

Comets travel through our solar system and are composed of ice, dust, and small rock-like particles. Their nuclei can be as large as tens of kilometers across. Christian Eistrup says:
"Comets are everywhere, and sometimes with very funky orbits around the Sun. In the past, comets even have hit the Earth. We know what comets consist of and which molecules are present in them. They vary in composition, but are normally seen as just one group of icy balls. Therefore, I wanted to know whether comets are indeed one group, or whether different subsets can be made."
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Info

Lost continent buried beneath Europe uncovered by geologists

Sid Perkins
Science Mag
Fri, 06 Sep 2019 18:21 UTC
Greater Adria
© VAN HINSBERGEN ET AL., GONDWANA RESEARCH (2019)About 140 million years ago, Greater Adria—which later got shoved beneath southern Europe—was a Greenland-size landmass (submerged portions in gray-green) south of the continent.
Forget the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. Geologists have reconstructed, time slice by time slice, a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-year-long history of a vanished landmass that now lies submerged, not beneath an ocean somewhere, but largely below southern Europe.

The researchers' analysis represents "a huge amount of work," says Laurent Jolivet, a geologist at Sorbonne University in Paris who was not involved in the new study. Although the tectonic history of the landmass has been generally known for a few decades, he says, "[T]he amount of detail in the team's systematic time-lapse reconstruction is unprecedented."

The only visible remnants of the continent — known as Greater Adria — are limestones and other rocks found in the mountain ranges of southern Europe. Scientists believe these rocks started out as marine sediments and were later scraped off the landmass's surface and lifted up through the collision of tectonic plates. Yet the size, shape, and history of the original landmass — much of which lay beneath shallow tropical seas for millions of years — have been tough to reconstruct.
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Info

Another possible interstellar comet headed our way in July 2020

Bob King
Sky & Telescope
Wed, 11 Sep 2019 18:08 UTC
Astronomers have discovered a potentially interstellar comet — the second after 'Oumuamua — and it's approaching the Sun, with a perihelion in mid-2020.
Oumuamua
© Universe Today
First there was 'Oumuamua. Now we might be in store for another interstellar flyby, this time by the recently discovered comet A/2019 Q1. Gennady Borisov captured the object on August 30, 2019, at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory when it was about 5.5 astronomical units (a.u.) from the Sun. Unlike 'Oumuamua, which was discovered well after perihelion, the new comet is approaching the plane of the solar system and will reach perihelion on July 24, 2020 at a distance of 4.96 a.u., about the distance between Jupiter and the Sun.

But it's still early. Don't be surprised if these dates change as more observations come in.

What sets A/2019 Q1 apart from nearly every other comet is the eccentricity of its orbit. Eccentricity measures how much an orbit deviates from a perfect circle, which has an eccentricity of 0. Elliptical orbits, typical of planets, asteroids and comets, have eccentricities between 0 and 1. Parabolas are equal to 1, and an eccentricity greater than 1 indicates a hyperbolic orbit.
Object Orbit
© Stamcose / CC BY-SA 4.0 with additions by the authorHow flat an object's orbit is called its eccentricity. An object on a hyperbolic orbit is likely from beyond the solar system.
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Clipboard

5 Surprising scientific facts about the Earth's climate that don't make their way into alarmists' talking points

Vijay Jayaraj
Foundation For Economic freedom
Wed, 04 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
earth's climate
There are many environmental facts that run contrary to popular belief. Here are five of them.

On the weekend of August 10-11, as if in chorus, major online news websites called on people to stop consuming meat. The calls echoed a recent United Nations report that recommended doing so to fight climate change.

It surprised many, but there are other more surprising facts about climate change that are hardly published in our everyday news media.

Below are some facts — scientifically recognized and published in peer-reviewed journals — that may raise your eyebrows.

1. Climate Has Always Changed — Always

All proxy temperature data sets reveal that there have been cyclical changes in climate in the past 10,000 years. There is not a single climate scientist who denies this well-established fact. It doesn't matter what your position on the causes and magnitude and danger (or not) of current climate change is — you have to be on board on this one. Climate has always changed. And it has changed in both directions, hot and cold. Until at least the 17th century, all these changes occurred when almost all humans were hunters, gatherers, and farmers.
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Archaeology

Last day of the dinosaurs revealed in stunning glimpse of asteroid disaster


EurekAlert
Mon, 09 Sep 2019 15:59 UTC
asteroid impact
© guvendemir/iStock
When the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs slammed into the planet, the impact set wildfires, triggered tsunamis and blasted so much sulfur into the atmosphere that it blocked the sun, which caused the global cooling that ultimately doomed the dinos.

That's the scenario scientists have hypothesized. Now, a new study led by The University of Texas at Austin has confirmed it by finding hard evidence in the hundreds of feet of rocks that filled the impact crater within the first 24 hours after impact.

The evidence includes bits of charcoal, jumbles of rock brought in by the tsunami's backflow and conspicuously absent sulfur. They are all part of a rock record that offers the most detailed look yet into the aftermath of the catastrophe that ended the Age of Dinosaurs, said Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences.
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Eye 1

Show me your face: Google Nest Hub surveillance system lets you bring Big Brother home with you


RT
Tue, 10 Sep 2019 15:40 UTC
nest devices
© Reuters / Stephen Lam
Google's Nest Hub surveillance system is constantly looking for its owner's face and technically can't be shut off, raising privacy concerns and questions about data misuse by the company that brags it toes the "creepy line."

The latest "smart-home" device from Mountain View comes equipped with a constantly-scanning facial-recognition-enabled camera that can't be shut off, only 'disabled' with a switch that also (supposedly) deactivates the microphone. Just as the device is constantly listening for its "wake word," it is prepared to leap into action at the sight of its owner's visage.

The Nest Hub, as its name suggests, serves as a "hub" for other internet-of-things devices like thermostats, surveillance cameras, and doorbells - which also come equipped with facial recognition, in case the user misses that feeling of being constantly spied on when they finally come home after a long day of surveillance outside. It also uploads video from phone calls and camera footage accessed remotely into the cloud and provides a window into your home for anyone with access to your Google or Nest account.
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Recycle

Waste not: Research finds that "far from junk DNA," ERVs perform "critical cellular functions"


Evolution News
Mon, 09 Sep 2019 04:52 UTC
waste bin
© VanveenJF
In the past, reporting by Evolution News has documented a variety of important functions for endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) and other transposable elements and retrotransposons. These, of course, have frequently been called "junk DNA," mere evolutionary waste or flotsam, by critics of intelligent design. Evidence of this widespread function is nothing new. As a 2017 paper in Nature Reviews Genetics noted, "Transposable elements (TEs) are a prolific source of tightly regulated, biochemically active non-coding elements, such as transcription factor-binding sites and non-coding RNAs."

Now a pair of new articles in Nature Genetics acknowledge just how widespread ERV and retrotransposon functionality is. One is a research paper and the other is a summary article. The summary article opens by explicitly denying that retrotransposons are junk DNA:
Far from being junk DNA, the pervasive retrotransposons that populate the genome have a powerful capacity to influence genes and chromatin. A new study demonstrates how the transcription of one such element, HERV-H, can modify the higher-order 3D structure of chromatin during early primate development.
The summary further notes that "many ERVs have been co-opted for critical cellular functions." It reviews some of these functions:
For example, ERVs frequently act to distribute regulatory information and thus confer genes with new patterns of expression and function. Similarly, multiple ERVs have been re-purposed as novel genes themselves, including the ERV envelope-derived syntactins that drive trophoblast fusion and establish the placental fetal-maternal interface. Now, Zhang et al. have identified an additional activity of co-opted ERVs — the alteration of the genome's 3D structure itself — that may have the capacity to substantially affect gene regulation.

Comment: See also:

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Microscope 2

Nunavik Inuit genetically unique among present-day world populations, study finds

Priscilla Hwang
CBC
Mon, 09 Sep 2019 14:51 UTC
kangiqsualjjuaq
© Catou MacKinnon/CBCA file photo of the northern village of Kangiqsualujjuaq, Que. Some community members participated in a new study published Monday about the genetic architecture of Inuit in the Nunavik region.

Researchers mapped complete genetic profile of Inuit in Nunavik region for 1st time.

Researchers have found that Inuit from northern Quebec are genetically distinct from any present-day population in the world, and say studying the genes of minority Indigenous populations in Canada can help deliver better health care to these populations.

In a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers mapped the complete genetic profile of Inuit in the Nunavik region — what they claim is a first. Researchers then homed in to study the effects these genetic variants may have on disorders like brain aneurysms.

"That's the novelty of this study," said Sirui Zhou, the primary author of the study and a researcher with the Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital).
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Moon

Intact in One Piece: India loses contact with Vikram lander during historic Moon landing attempt

Meghan Bartels , Hanneke Weitering
Space
Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:00 UTC
ISRO chandrayaan2 failure
© Mirror Now
India lost contact with its Vikram lunar lander Friday (Sept. 6) during a daring attempt to make history as the first country to land near the south pole. The landing anomaly may have dashed Indian dreams of becoming just the fourth country to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the moon.

Long, tense minutes stretched out inside the mission control center for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which designed the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had arrived onsite at the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru, India, about half an hour before touchdown of the landed component, dubbed Vikram, was scheduled to take place.

That announcement came at 4:48 p.m. EDT (2048 GMT) from K. Sivan, the director of ISRO. "Vikram lander descent was as planned and normal performance was observed up to an altitude of 2.1 kilometers [1.3 miles]," Sivan said in an announcement at mission control. "Subsequently the communications from the lander to the ground station was lost. The data is being analyzed."

Comment:
Chandrayaan-2 landing: 40% lunar missions in last 60 years failed, finds Nasa report

While many countries like India, China, US, Russia, Japan and Israel have sent missions to the moon, the success rate of lunar missions is about 60 per cent, with each country getting it right only after years and years of practice.


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