Science & TechnologyS


Evil Rays

Russia to track future US missiles with upgraded over-the-horizon radar

Mikhail Khodarenok
RT
Tue, 11 Dec 2018 16:36 UTC
htv-2
© DARPA Falcon ProjectHypersonic Technology Vehicle HTV-2 reentry (artist's impression)
In response to US plans to pull out of the INF Treaty and the active development of its hypersonic technology, Russia is building a network of radar stations best suited to detect missile launches from afar.

Russia is seeking to install Container-type over-the-horizon (OTH) radar stations along its borders. The move will substantially boost Moscow's capabilities to monitor airspace and detect missile launches, particularly in case of hypersonic projectiles.

Looking beyond the horizon

An OTH radar employs completely different technology, compared with conventional radar installations that only provide "line-of-sight" coverage limited to a range of dozens or hundreds of kilometers at best. OTH systems rely on radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere, Earth's top layer that is heavily ionized by space rays. Radio beams of a specific frequency projected by an OTH transmitting antenna get bounced down high up in the sky and on their way back to the ground can be reflected back by aircraft, ships or missiles. The return signal then travels back to the receiving antennas, again, via the ionosphere. This technique extends coverage to thousands of kilometers.

Russian researchers had to develop new equipment and processing algorithms to compensate for the interference caused by Sun's radiation in the ionosphere. It takes sophisticated mathematical algorithms to isolate relevant targets and, and more so to determine their velocity and direction based on the Doppler shift.
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Moon

'Faking lunar landing more complex & expensive than actually doing it': Russian scientist weighs in on US moon landing debate


RT
Tue, 11 Dec 2018 15:11 UTC
US moon landing Buzz Aldren
© @ NASAIconic photo of astronaut Buzz Aldrin taken by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission.
The head of the Russian space agency may joke about 'verifying' if the Americans landed on the moon, but there are no doubts for one Russian scientist, who weighed in on the decades-long conspiracy debate.

The claim that NASA never landed astronauts on the moon and that evidence to the contrary was fabricated is among the most pervasive in popular culture and has been a point of fierce debates.

Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's space chief, even recently joked that Russia's future lunar missions will give the country an opportunity to check whether Neil Armstrong's footprints are actually out there.

That aside, people who actually study the moon for a living believe there is no need to launch spaceships just to prove the success of the Apollo program. Fabricating a lunar landing would probably be technologically impossible and anyway economically unnecessary, told RIA Novosti Yury Kostitsyn.

Comment:

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Cow

To feed the world sustainably, repair the soil

David R. Montgomery
Scientific American
Mon, 16 Jul 2018 00:01 UTC
soil plow field
© Getty Images


A reconceived farming system can rapidly improve fertility without chemical fertilizers, and without sacrificing crop yields

New technologies and genetically modified crops are usually invoked as the key to feeding the world's growing population. But a widely overlooked opportunity lies in reversing the soil degradation that has already taken something like a third of global farmland out of production. Simple changes in conventional farming practices offer opportunities to advance humanity's most neglected natural infrastructure project - returning health to the soil that grows our food.

It is critical we do so. In 2015, a U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report concluded that ongoing soil degradation reduces global harvests by a third of a percent each year under conventional farming practices. In some parts of the U.S. I've visited, the rich black topsoil that settlers once plowed is gone, eroded away leaving farmers tilling anemic subsoil.

Comment: The health of the soil is vitally important to our health, as well as the health of the planet in its ability to support life. Our shortsightedness in farming practices and our inability to overcome the inertia and implement solutions will mean the eventual demise of our civilization (if something else doesn't kill us first).

See also:

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Brain

Emotions of workers in China are being data mined directly from their brains via sensory helmets

Meadow Clark
The Organic Prepper
Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
Chinese workers
China is deploying emotional surveillance technology that mines data from the minds of its citizens. Essentially, they're data mining by reading their brains.

The light-weight sensory helmets have been rolled out on an industrial scale. The mind data-mining and emotional surveillance programs are eerily similar to trends in the United States to monitor and probe the mental health of its citizens through facial recognition.

This past spring, Facebook landed in hot water over a data leak which felt like a major privacy violation to millions of its users.

But China was taking data mining to the next level

Around the same time, however, China quietly reported that its government is openly fishing data from workers' minds: making a Facebook leak pale in comparison.
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Satellite

NASA observational satellites provide new look at Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria

Ellen Gray
PhysOrg
Mon, 10 Dec 2018 16:26 UTC
hurricane Maria thermal image
© NOAA/NASA Goddard Rapid Response TeamOn Sept. 21, 2017, NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided this thermal image of Hurricane Maria after it moved off the coast of Puerto Rico.
When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico head-on as a Category 4 storm with winds up to 155 miles per hour in September 2017, it damaged homes, flooded towns, devastated the island's forests and caused the longest electricity black-out in U.S. history.

Two new NASA research efforts delve into Hurricane Maria's far-reaching effects on the island's forests as seen in aerial surveys and on its residents' energy and electricity access as seen in data from space. The findings, presented Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, illustrate the staggering scope of Hurricane Maria's damage to both the natural environment and communities.
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Microscope 2

Biological templating: Using a virus to speed up modern computers

Singapore University of Technology and Design
Science Daily
Mon, 10 Dec 2018 14:52 UTC
bacterias generan electricidad
In a groundbreaking study, researchers have successfully developed a method that could lead to unprecedented advances in computer speed and efficiency.

Through this study, researchers Desmond Loke, Griffin Clausen, Jacqueline Ohmura, Tow-Chong Chong, and Angela Belcher have successfully developed a 'biological templating' method to engineer a better type of memory using a virus.

The researchers come from a collaboration of institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). The study was published online in the ACS Applied Nano Materials peer-reviewed journal on November 20, 2018.

The study explains that a key way in which faster computers can be achieved is through the reduction of the millisecond time delays that usually come from the transfer and storage of information between a traditional random access memory (RAM) chip -- which is fast but expensive and volatile -- meaning it needs power supply to retain information -- and hard drive -- which is nonvolatile but relatively slow.

Comment: Evidently biology is much more sophisticated and efficient than any invention by man: Also check out: The Truth Perspective: Are Cells the Intelligent Designers? Why Creationists and Darwinists Are Both Wrong

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Die

China's Golem babies, the agenda behind it and its implications

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook
Mon, 10 Dec 2018 01:20 UTC
gene-editing
The shocking news that a team of scientists working in China have managed to gene-edit the DNA of recently-born human twins to allegedly make them genetically immune to a HIV infection is more than bizarre and irresponsible. It suggests that certain researchers are making dangerous experiments to create ultimately the eugenics master dream-custom-designed humans. I call them Golem babies because when technology begins cutting and splicing the human DNA without certitude that the result will be stable or healthy to the human species it is not healthy.

In medieval and ancient Jewish folklore a Golem is a being that is magically created entirely from inanimate matter such as mud. Golems have no soul. Similarly, the China experiment that claims the "first successful genetically modified humans," when we go behind the surface stories, is alarming in the extreme.

HIV Immune?

First of all the public story retailed by Chinese media and by the researcher, Chinese Professor He Jiankui, a Stanford University post-doctoral research graduate, doesn't ring honest. He, who is professor at Southern University of Science and Technology, claimed at a Human Genome Editing conference in Hong Kong on November 28, and on YouTube, that he had successfully modified two embryos produced from the sperm of an HIV-positive donor and implanted them in a healthy mother, who gave birth to twin girls earlier this month. He used the most common "gene-editing" tool, CRISPR-cas9, to deactivate a gene called CCR5 that acts as a 'doorway' to allow the HIV virus to enter a cell. He basically claimed to have created the world's first gene-edited humans, and announced that a second woman was pregnant with another of his gene-edited embryos.

Comment: Bingo. Most if not all of these scientists quite simply don't know what genies they're letting out of the lab bottle. And one thing's for certain, whatever we read about here is likely only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

See also: The CRISPR baby scandal gets worse by the day and The Health & Wellness Show: News of the Weird: Vaccinated Transgender GMO Babies Drink Glyphosate And Go To Jail For Scientific Discoveries

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Beaker

Narnia author, C.S. Lewis warned about genetically edited babies 74 years ago

Meadow Clark
Natural Blaze
Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:00 UTC
Baby
C.S. Lewis, beloved author of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe had an important warning about genetically edited babies...and he said it 74 years ago - in 1944.

The Internet is enraptured that science may have crossed yet another threshold: another gene-edited baby greets the world.

The first genetically edited babies have already have been born.

Yet many scientists are condemning the news that a Chinese scientist recently used CRISPR gene-editing technology on twin girl embryos to prevent them from potentially contracting HIV and AIDS viruses. Believe it or not, many countries including China and the United States do not allow genetic editing on babies because it could pass on untold consequences through the genetic line.

Of course, there have been exceptions.

Comment: See also:

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Cow Skull

Prehistoric Arctic burial pit containing 13 species of animals baffles scientists


Siberian Times
Wed, 12 Sep 2018 12:00 UTC
Prehistoric Arctic burial pit
© Pavel KosintsevMany of the bones were adults: this is where the animals died.
Almost 1,300 bones of 13 species of mammals unearthed at new site on Gydan peninsula aged between 10,000 and 50,000 years old.

Judging by the bones, the animals came to this remote Arctic site give birth - and also to die.

This was a prehistoric maternity hospital and necropolis for mammals that included the extinct mammoth and cave lion, along with species of horse, musk ox, bison and reindeer.

Found here too were the bones of an ancient hare, a wolf, a polar fox, a brown bear, and rodents.

And not only mammals. There were many bird bones too.

Many of the bones were adults: this is where the animals died.

Comment: Research of similar pits and caves from all over the globe show that the bones have suffered the kind of damage that can only be associated with a cataclysmic event:

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Life Preserver

Paul Stamets' epiphany that mushrooms could help save the world's bees

Evan Bush
The Seattle Times
Sat, 06 Oct 2018 14:59 UTC
mushrooms
Paul Stamets, a renowned expert on mushrooms, nurtures fungi near his home in Shelton, Washington
The epiphany that mushrooms could help save the world's ailing bee colonies struck Paul Stamets while he was in bed.

"I love waking dreams," he said. "It's a time when you're just coming back into consciousness."

Years ago, in 1984, Stamets had noticed a "continuous convoy of bees" traveling from a patch of mushrooms he was growing and his beehives. The bees actually moved wood chips to access his mushroom's mycelium, the branching fibers of fungus that look like cobwebs.

"I could see them sipping on the droplets oozing from the mycelium," he said. They were after its sugar, he thought.

Comment: Read more about Magic Mycellum: The healing power of mushrooms

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