Science & TechnologyS


Robot

Mass mind control: Human trials set to begin for brain implantation of DARPA microchips

Greg White
Glitch News
Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:00 UTC
DARPA mind control, microchipping humans
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is in the process of making a neural-coding device capable of controlling artificial limbs when seeded in the brain. The device has had success in animal studies and the first human trials are set for 2017. The Pentagon has subsidized the institution $62 million to help foster this mind-control technology. Meanwhile, the mainstream media is pushing for the micochipping of children sooner rather than later.

During a recent televised report by NBC News, the news station purported the micro-chipping of children by the state was as normal as bar codes for consumers: "When barcodes first came out in the late 1960s, people were appalled. They were wary of them and did not understand the concept. Today, it is so commonplace, we don't even notice it. A microchip would work much in the same way."

This declaration is a reflection of the mentality of the mainstream media, which sees people as objects fit for labeling rather than persons with intrinsic moral value. Although DARPA touts the brain chips as a way to protect children, in actuality, this sort of technology has more to do with control than it does public safety.

Comment: Further reading:

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Satellite

China to build secret 'orbital internet' using experimental quantum satellite network

jhamill
The Sun
Wed, 27 Jul 2016 14:37 UTC
unmanned Tiangong-1 blasts off
© PA:Press AssociationA Long March-2FT1 carrier rocket loaded with the unmanned Tiangong-1 blasts off from the launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu in 2011.
China is preparing to begin building a super-secure version of the internet that's broadcast from up in SPACE.

Beijing is set to launch the world's first "quantum satellite" which is specifically designed to test out experimental communications technology.

Experts from the People's Republic believe their work will spark a second space race as Russia, Europe and America compete to master the technology.

"Definitely, I think there will be a race," said Chaoyang Lu, a physicist from the University of Science and Technology of China.

"If the first satellite goes well, China will definitely launch more."
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Blackbox

Scientists film mysterious purple orb on ocean floor - possible new species of nudibranch

Amanda Kooser
CNET
Tue, 26 Jul 2016 13:27 UTC
purple orb
© Ocean Exploration Trust
The research vessel Nautilus is a floating laboratory equipped with cameras that can peer deep down to the ocean floor. Researchers with the Ocean Exploration Trust posted a video on Monday showing an unusual find. The Nautilus spied a small bright-purple orb underwater in the Channel Islands off the coast of California.

The main focus for the vehicle's Channel Islands mission is to study deep-sea corals, but the odd sphere attracted the scientists' attention. The video includes a soundtrack of the researchers making real-time observations as the camera sweeps along. They call it a "purple blob" and then wonder aloud "What is that?"

The researchers throw out some scientific names as possibilities before deciding to suck it up into a tube for a closer look. They wonder if it might be an egg sac or an embryo of some sort. There's a moment of suspense as a crab closes in on the orb and jars it with its leg, but the Nautilus successfully grabs the sphere using a remote-controlled suction tube.

The Nautilus website offers an update on the oddball discovery: "This unidentified purple orb stumped our scientists onboard. After sampling, it began to unfold to reveal two distinct lobes. This could possibly be a new species of nudibranch."


Comment: Purple orbs, green slime... We live in 'colorful' times.

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Cassiopaea

Triple-bubble supernova nested much like the Russian matryoshka dolls spotted

Samantha Mathewson
Space
Mon, 25 Jul 2016 07:00 UTC
Supernova
© Gabriel Pérez/SMM (IAC)This artist's representation shows a cross section of a star cluster surrounded by three concentric bubbles. The "triple bubble" was found in the galaxy M33.
A young star cluster surrounded by three concentric bubbles was recently found near the M33 galaxy, revealing a cosmic splendor that could be compared to Russian matryoshka nesting dolls.

The concentric bubbles, which comprise what researchers call a triple-bubble, are actually three supernova remnants, shells of gas and dust that form following the explosion of a star. This is the first known case of three supernova remnants nesting one inside the other, said the researchers from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), who made the discovery. The above illustration shows what a cross section of the three rings might look like if scientists could get a closer look.

The shells provide a unique opportunity to study the remains of these stellar explosions, as well as the the interstellar medium, which is the gas and dust that lies between stars, John Beckman, co-author of the new study, said in a news release. Beckman is an astrophysicist with the Spanish National Resource Council and IAC. "We can measure how much matter there is in a shell, approximately a couple of hundred times the mass of the sun in each of the shells," he said.

Using the high-resolution 2D spectrograph GHaFaS (Galaxy Halpha Fabry-Perot System), mounted on the William Herschel Telescope in Spain's Canary Islands, the researchers examined the complex structure of this triple-bubble. The work revealed that the three shells all formed chronologically in the same way, from separate supernova explosions within the same star cluster, Beckman said.
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Moon

The Moon's Imbrium Basin may have been formed by a protoplanet-sized asteroid


Phys.Org
Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:51 UTC
Imbrium Basin asteroid
© NASA/Northeast Planetary Data Center/Brown UniversityGrooves and gashes associated with the Imbrium Basin on the moon have long been puzzling. New research shows how some of these features were formed and uses them to estimate the size of the Imbrium impactor. The study suggests it was big enough to be considered a protoplanet.
Around 3.8 billion years ago, an asteroid more than 150 miles across, roughly equal to the length of New Jersey, slammed into the Moon and created the Imbrium Basin—the right eye of the fabled Man in the Moon. This new size estimate, published in the journal Nature, suggests an Imbrium impactor that was two times larger in diameter and 10 times more massive than previous estimates.

"We show that Imbrium was likely formed by an absolutely enormous object, large enough to be classified as a protoplanet," said Pete Schultz, professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University. "This is the first estimate for the Imbrium impactor's size that is based largely on the geological features we see on the Moon." Previous estimates, Schultz said, were based solely on computer models and yielded a size estimate of only about 50 miles in diameter.

These new findings help to explain some of the puzzling geological features that surround the Imbrium Basin. The work also suggests—based on the sizes of other impact basins in the Moon, Mars and Mercury—that the early solar system was likely well stocked with protoplanet-sized asteroids.
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Comet

Scientists ask: What would happen If Comet Swift-Tuttle hit Earth?

Greg Uyeno
Live Science
Thu, 21 Jul 2016 11:29 UTC
Comet Swift-Tuttle
Comet Swift-Tuttle
Shooting stars may fill you with child-like wonder, but these celestial showstoppers are also reminders that Earth is hardly alone in space, and some of those cosmic objects can be downright dangerous.

The Perseid meteor shower, which appears every year in mid-August, occurs when Earth passes through a trail of debris left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. In 1973, based on calculations about the object's orbit using limited observations, astronomer Brian Marsden at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics predicted that Comet Swift-Tuttle could collide with Earth in 2126. The catastrophic prediction was later retracted, but what would happen if Comet Swift-Tuttle smacked into our planet?

"We have to be clear that it's not going to happen," Donald Yeomans, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and author of "Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us" (Princeton University Press, 2012), told Live Science.

When Swift-Tuttle was last seen in 1992, Yeomans was among those who produced revised models for the comet's motion, making the complicated calculations to account for the gravitational effects of the sun and planets on the space rock's orbit. The 1992 sighting, along with data from 1862 and 1737, provided astronomers with enough information to rule out the possibility of a collision in 2126.

Comment: Yikes! Has Yeomens not been looking at not-so-distant history - as in the Tunguska event? Or, heck, the signs of an ever increasing and dangerous number of near earth objects to enter Earth's atmosphere, like the events of a few years ago in Chelyabinsk, Russia? There has been a huge uptick in the amounts of neo's, comets and fireballs experienced on the planet in the past few years which we've been documenting here on SOTT for quite a while now. Indeed: Something wicked this way comes.

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Sun

Sun fires off strongest solar flare of 2016

Tariq Malik
Space.com
Tue, 26 Jul 2016 07:33 UTC
Solar flare
The sun fired off its strongest solar flare of 2016 during an active weekend that saw three eruptions from the star's surface.

The uptick in solar activity occurred overnight on Friday and Saturday (July 22 and 23) when the sun unleashed three relatively moderate solar flares, all of which were captured on video by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. While all three were somewhat minor, they are the first substantial solar events in months, NASA officials said in a statement.

The first solar flare registered as an M5.0 sun storm and peaked Friday night at 10:11 p.m. EDT (0211 July 23 GMT). It was followed by a second, more-intense flare, which peaked as an M7.5-class solar storm on Saturday at 1:16 a.m. EDT (0516 GMT). A third, M5.5-class flare peaked 15 minutes later, at 1:31 a.m. EDT (0531 GMT).

A closeup of the M7.6-class solar flare that erupted from the sun on July 23, 2016 as seen by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.Credit: NASA

The M7.5 flare was the strongest sun storm of 2016, according to Spaceweather.com, a website that tracks space-weather events. But it was still nowhere near the most powerful types of flares the sun can unleash.

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Info

Gene-editing trial on humans to begin in China

John Raphael
Nature World News
Mon, 25 Jul 2016 04:48 UTC
Gene Editing
© Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesChinese researchers to perform first ever human trial of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique to fight non-small lung cancer.
A team of Chinese researchers from Sichuan University's West China Hospital is preparing for the first ever trial of CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique on humans next month after receiving ethical approval from the hospital's review board last July 6.

"I hope we are the first," said Lu You, an oncologist at the West Chine Hospital and leader of the trial, in a report from Nature. "And more importantly, I hope we can get positive data from the trial."

Researchers from the United States are also planning to perform the very first CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing on humans to fight against melanoma, sarcoma and myeloid cancers. They have received the green light from the US National Institute of Health but still waiting the approval from the US Food and Drugs Administration and a university review board.

The Chinese team is planning to use the gene-editing tool to patients with metastatic non-small lung cancer that have failed results in chemotherapy, radiation therapy and other treatments.
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Mars

Surprising mineral formation found by Curiosity Rover in Martian crater - 'last mineral we expected to see'


Yahoo News
Mon, 13 Jun 2016 15:30 UTC
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tridymite meteors mars lightning
© Fred KruijenA common form of Tridymite, ultra thin colorless tabulars (pictured), a kind of crystal that only forms on Earth as a result of extremely hot, silcic volcanoes
Using the Curiosity Rover, the scientists detected a mineral called tridymite that, until now, they thought could only be created in extremely hot temperatures.

The discovery of this tridymite might rewrite the history of the planet, suggesting that it might once have been hotter than we previously thought, and home to monstrous volcanoes.

The scientists found the tridymite with a special instrument on the rover that shoots x-rays at material to identify the crystal structure of minerals.

"It was the last mineral we expected to see," said Richard Morris, NASA planetary scientist and lead author of this study. "If this stands test of time it has a lot of implications for how Mars evolved. We may have to rethink a few things."

On Earth, tridymite is formed at extremely high temperatures in an explosive process called silicic volcanism. Mt. St. Helens, known for having the deadliest volcanic event in American history, is an example of a silicic volcano.

Comment: The Thunderbolts Project has an interesting commentary on this discovery.



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Radar

Most accurate map of the human cortex unveiled

Tim Newman
Medical News Today
Sat, 23 Jul 2016 07:57 UTC
brain map
© Matthew Glasser, Ph.D., David Van Essen, Ph.D., Washington UniversityA map showing some of the 180 cortical regions.

The most complete map of the cerebral cortex ever to be charted has been unveiled this week in Nature. No less than 97, distinct, previously undescribed regions have been found.

The cerebral cortex - the outer portion of the mammalian brain - is a 2-4-millimeter thick layer of gray matter.

This densely folded formation of cells is heavily involved in a number of tasks, including attention, memory, perception, consciousness, awareness, thought, and language.

Over the last century, neuroscientists have divided the cortex into ever smaller sections of discrete functionality.

Although the brain is known to function, very much, as a whole, dividing it into bite size chunks helps understand how it can create such complex activity.

Below is a short video, produced by Nature, which briefly explains the new findings:


Comment: Related articles:

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