On this series Space News from the Electric Universe, we have presented
numerous recent findings that challenge the underpinnings of solar
physics and the nature of the sun and all stars. However, based on a
new scientific study, some science media are proclaiming a confirmation
of the standard solar model, which states that a thermonuclear reaction
powers the sun at its core. Wal Thornhill weighs in with the Electric
Universe perspective.
A new paper published by an MIT physicist claims to theoretically prove
that so-called "quantum entanglement" -- two particles seemingly
occupying more than one state simultaneously -- gives rise to a wormhole
that allows particles to communicate through a "gravitational tunnel".
This theory follows from a paper published earlier this year, which
suggests two black holes that become entangled and then are pulled apart
create a wormhole, connecting the black holes. The reasoning in these
papers is purely mathematical. Wal Thornhill examines this theoretical
approach.
Dr. Neil Turok, the Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics:
Theoretical
physics is at a crossroads right now...In a sense we've entered a very
deep crisis. You may have heard of some of these models...There've been
grand unified models, there've been super-symmetric models, super-string
models, loop quantum gravity models... Well, nature turns out to be
simpler than all of these models.
If you ask most theorists
working on particle physics, they're in a state of confusion. The
extensions of the standard model, like grand unified theories, they were
supposed to simplify it. But in fact they made it more complicated. The
number of parameters in the standard model is about 18. The number in
grand unified theories is typically 100. In super-symmetric theories,
the minimum is 120. And as you may have heard, string theory seems to
predict 10 to the power of 1,000 different possible laws of physics.
It's called the multiverse. It's the ultimate catastrophe: that
theoretical physics has led to this crazy situation where the physicists
are utterly confused and seem not to have any predictions at all...
Mozilla, the open-source software community responsible for the
Firefox browser, has released a new download that allows users to
identify who’s tracking their Internet movements.
Dubbed “Lightbeam,” the free Firefox extension will enable users
to see which third party companies are monitoring their online
presence, a move that Mozilla states will “illuminate the inner
workings of the web.”
“It’s a stake in the ground in terms of letting people know
the ways they are being tracked,” said Mark Surman, Mozilla’s
executive director, to the UK-based Independent. “At Mozilla,
we believe everyone should be in control of their user data and
privacy and we want people to make informed decisions about their
Web experience.”
With the download in place, Lightbeam creates a visual
representation of all the third parties that are active on the
websites you visit. Typically, that would include advertisers or
other companies looking to sell your data for marketing purposes.
Mozilla is also encouraging Lightbeam users to crowd-source their
data in order to generate “a big-picture view of how tracking
works on the Internet,” potentially singling out which companies
are the most active in their monitoring.
"The visualization grows with every site you visit and every
request made from your browser,” Mozilla said in its online
description of Lightbeam. “In addition to the graph view, you
can also see your data in a clock view to examine connections
over a 24-hour period or in a List view to drill down into
individual sites."
Considering the software’s ability to access such detailed
information, there’s already concern that the program may
jeopardize the privacy of users willing to share and upload the
data it tracks. Mozilla, however, says there’s no need to worry:
Lightbeam does not record IP addresses, and everything users
decide to share will be done anonymously. It can also be easily
uninstalled.
Mozilla has already upgraded its Firefox browser after learning
the NSA was exploiting deficiencies in the browser to uncover
people using the anonymity-protecting Tor software and gain
access to their data.
“Our focus in on building a web based on openness and
transparency,” Surman added.“Our dream is a world where
people know more about how the web works and take control of
their lives online. We need a posse of people to get involved and
make that happen.”
More than 10,000 homes are threatened by a furious Idaho wildfire,
including getaways owned by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks and Bruce
Willis, after an all-out "ground and air attack" failed to stop the
blaze spreading to more than 126,000 acres, according to latest reports
from the U.S. Forest Service. "Take your essentials, belongs and pets
and GO NOW," a news release on inciweb warned those in the path of the
lightning-sparked Beaver Creek fire. Despite an army of more than 1,200
firefighters, the blaze continues to spread across parched sagebrush,
grasslands and pine forests in the Sun Valley area. "Every fire has a
personality, and this fire has an angry personality," Beth Lund, and
incident commander with the U.S. Forest Service team managing the blaze
in central Idaho told Reuters.
More than 10,000 homes near the towns of Hailey and Ketchum remain
threatened by the blaze, including luxury getaways owned by Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis. The fire that has been
burning for more than 12 days, scorching an area larger than the city of
Denver, has already forced 2,250 homes into a mandatory evacuation
order. Another 7,700 homes are under what is known as pre-evacuation,
giving them time to pack up essential belongings and get ready to go at a
moment's notice if the fire grows closer.
At the Sun Valley Resort, an all-season vacation getaway famed for its
world-class skiing, workers turned on water cannons usually used to make
snow to wet down a mountain whose southeastern face was the scene of a
concentrated assault by firefighters. "We've fired up the snow-making
guns," resort spokesman Jack Sibbach, told The Associated Press.
Red-flag conditions, including higher temperatures and wind gusts up to
38 miles per hour did not help firefighters tackling the blaze. And
Kevin Noth, lead meteorologist at Weather.com, said that conditions
Monday and Tuesday - including temperatures pushing into the 90s - would
continue to "hinder" firefighters. "There will be more hot and dry
weather for the region," he said. "So highs will be well into the 80s
and a few into the lower 90s.
Humidity will also be down, so it will be dry, so that will allow the
fire to grow more quickly and it won't be harder for them to contain.
There's better news coming," he added. "It looks like more clouds and
higher humidity for midweek. There might also be some thunderstorms,
which could bring some rain - but the possibility of lightning too."
Retardant was dropped Sunday on the flank of Bald Mountain - the Sun
Valley Resort's primary ski hill - to reinforce a fire line, fire
spokeswoman Shawna Hartman told KTVB. That meant the famed ski mountain
known as "Baldy" and often used in publicity photos would have a red
line of retardant visible from Ketchum. Hartman expressed cautious
optimism about their prospects for curtailing the blaze in the next
week. "Today they're very optimistic that we will reinforce those lines
in case the fire does flare up as we saw on Thursday and Friday,"
Hartman told the KTVB. -NBC
Wasn’t America supposed to be the land of the free?
The public primary school for pre-kindergartners featured in the video
below gave me chills. The brightly colored buildings belied their cold,
hard, metal feel. The front entrance is card key secured, and a thick
metal door attached to a gated metal security tunnel with a metal
walkway leads back to a hallway of numbered, metal buildings. Every
single window, including the little ones on the thick metal doors
inside, have metal gratings bolted on the outside of them.
It felt like I was walking through a prison facility.
Four-year-olds attend this campus. That means these little ones are
spending the majority of their weekdays all day long inside this place.
These kids are literally being taught from the time they are tiny that
spending one’s day in a prison-like gated metal security facility is
somehow “normal” — this prepares them to expect nothing less than total
control.
This is just one example of a public school in modern day America. The president is currently mulling around with creating a federal universal daycare as part of the public education program in this country, and there is talk of making school run all year long without a summer break…with the implementation of CCTV cameras all over campuses, biometric scanning programs to buy lunches and check out library books, and RFID chip tracker tag ID cards, it would appear our schools are becoming way too much like our prisons.
Michael Snyder
of American Dream Blog wrote about 18 examples of how life for students
who attend public schools is the equivalent of being in a prison:
In the United States today, our public schools
are not very good at educating our students, but they sure are great
training grounds for learning how to live in a Big Brother police state
control grid. Sadly, life in many U.S. public schools is now
essentially equivalent to life in U.S. prisons. Most parents don’t
realize this, but our students have very few rights when they are in
school. Our public school students are being watched, tracked,
recorded, searched and controlled like never before.
There’s
a reason Rutherford Institute founder and constitutional lawyer John
Whitehead refers to schools as one more part of America’s ever-expanding
‘electronic concentration camp‘.
Our kids are being taught that giving up privacy and basic freedom to
go about their daily lives in security lockdown while being continuously
watched, chipped, tracked, traced, and totally controlled is…normal.
Melissa Melton is a co-founder of TruthstreamMedia.com, where this first appeared.
She is an experienced researcher, graphic artist and investigative
journalist with a passion for liberty and a dedication to truth. Her aim
is to expose the New World Order for what it is — a prison for the
human soul from which we must break free.
Researchers at the
University of Adelaide have discovered a novel and complex visual
circuit in a dragonfly's brain that could one day help to improve vision
systems for robots.
Dr Steven Wiederman
and Associate Professor David O'Carroll from the University's Centre for
Neuroscience Research have been studying the underlying processes of
insect vision and applying that knowledge in robotics and artificial
vision systems.
Their latest discovery, published this month in The Journal of Neuroscience,
is that the brains of dragonflies combine opposite pathways - both an
ON and OFF switch - when processing information about simple dark
objects.
"To perceive the edges of objects and changes in light or darkness, the brains of many animals, including insects, frogs, and even humans, use two independent pathways, known as ON and OFF channels," says lead author Dr Steven Wiederman.
"Most animals will use a combination of ON switches with other ON
switches in the brain, or OFF and OFF, depending on the circumstances.
But what we show occurring in the dragonfly's brain is the combination
of both OFF and ON switches. This happens in response to simple dark
objects, likely to represent potential prey to this aerial predator.
"Although we've found this new visual circuit in the dragonfly, it's
possible that many other animals could also have this circuit for
perceiving various objects," Dr Wiederman says.
The researchers were able to record their results directly from 'target-selective' neurons in dragonflies' brains. They presented the dragonflies with moving lights that changed in intensity, as well as both light and dark targets.
"We discovered that the responses to the dark targets were much
greater than we expected, and that the dragonfly's ability to respond to
a dark moving target is from the correlation of opposite contrast pathways: OFF with ON," Dr Wiederman says.
"The exact mechanisms that occur in the brain
for this to happen are of great interest in visual neurosciences
generally, as well as for solving engineering applications in target
detection and tracking. Understanding how visual systems work can have a
range of outcomes, such as in the development of neural prosthetics and
improvements in robot vision.
"A project is now underway at the University of Adelaide to translate
much of the research we've conducted into a robot, to see if it can
emulate the dragonfly's vision and movement. This project is well
underway and once complete, watching our autonomous dragonfly robot will
be very exciting," he says.
Editor's note: Lisa has hit the nail on the head. Everyone talks about gloom and doom as a form of labeling anyone who doesn't absorb the idiosyncrasy of living the gloomy life of eating synthetic chemicals, and the actual doom that results. Isn't that what this process describes? As we currently understand no one has ever been healed and these are all unnatural processes which feed the brave new world of corporatism.
RT- Researchers are fervently at work, creating more and more pills to fix a
wide variety of issues. Researchers in Florida are working on a pill
that could supposedly replace exercise; there is a pill to take so you
won't have to remember passwords in the works; there are pills that can
be taken instead of using sun screen and bug spray. We are obsessed with
taking pills. The Resident (aka Lori Harfenist) discusses.
Field trials of genetically-modified (GM) Bt eggplant, also known as Bt
talong, have officially ceased in the Philippines following a major
ruling by the nation's Court of Appeals. Representing a massive victory
for food sovereignty, the Court found that Bt talong is a monumental
threat to both environmental and human health, and has subsequently
ordered that all existing plantings of Bt talong in test fields be
immediately destroyed and blocked from further propagation.
Like
in many other nations across the globe, the biotechnology industry has
been craftily trying to sneak its genetic poisons into the Philippines
under the guise of improving crop yields, reducing chemical use, and
yada yada ad nauseum - all the typical industry propaganda and lies used
to convince the more gullible among us that GMOs are some kind of food
production miracle. But the Philippines is not buying all the hype. And
unlike the U.S., the southeast Asian country is taking a bold stand
against a technology that has never been proven safe or beneficial in
any way.
According to the non-profit advocacy group Greenpeace,
which has been working on behalf of humanity to stem the tide of GMO
onslaught all around the world, the Court recently issued a "Write of
Kalikasan," which basically means that all field trials of Bt eggplant
in the Philippines must stop. The Court also ordered that the
biotechnology aggressors "permanently cease and desist" from conducting
further trials, as well as "protect, preserve, rehabilitate and restore"
all the land they have destroyed in the process.
"The field trials of Bt talong
involve the willful and deliberate alteration of the genetic traits of a
living element of the ecosystem and the relationship of living
organisms that depend on each other for their survival," states the
ruling. "Consequently, the field trials ... could not be declared by
this Court as safe [for] human health and our ecology, [since they are] an alteration of an otherwise natural state of affairs in our ecology."
Philippines
light years ahead of US in adopting precautionary principle, protecting
its people and food supply from corporate takeover
Everything about
this common-sense decision by the Filipino justice system makes perfect
sense - GMOs definitively spread their poisonous traits throughout the
entire ecosystem, contaminating other crops along the way, and thus have
no place in agriculture, period. But sadly, such common sense no longer
exists in the U.S., where corporate greed and fundamental corruption
have essentially placed profits before people in every aspect of life.
"We
commend the Court of Appeals for living up to its
constitutionally-mandated role as protector of constitutional rights,"
said Greenpeace
Southeast Asia Sustainable Agriculture Campaigner Daniel Ocampo about
the Philippines rejecting GMOs. "This landmark decision reflects that
there are indeed flaws and lapses in the current regulatory process for
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) such as Bt eggplant which exposes our environment and health to unknown long-term consequences and does not establish their safety in any way."
Meanwhile,
millions of acres of uncontested GMO crops in the U.S. continue to
ravage both human and environmental health while the hordes of mindless
puppets in the U.S. Congress ignore the issue or even pretend that GMOs
are not an issue. But this new American pastime of greed and denial
about reality will not last forever, as nature will eventually catch up
and extinguish this agricultural scourge with "superweeds," "superbugs,"
and disease - that is if the American people do not take action first
to forcibly cleanse their nation of GMOs. The question is, what will it
take for the people to wake up and take action?
Walmart continually asks Americans to consider what’s more important: justice for its workers or low prices for its customers?
This month, the nation’s largest retailer faces more accusations of
illegally threatening and retaliating against employees with the release
of a new report entitled: “Fighting For a Voice: Walmart Workers Speak Out Despite Systemic Labor Abuse.”
The 27-page report, released by the labor rights group American Rights at Work,
describes the “fear-based” strategies Walmart uses to curb worker
organizing, along with its ruthless targeting of employees who associate
with the OUR Walmart employee rights group.
More than 150 allegations of workers’ rights violations are detailed
in the report, many of which occurred around or after the Black Friday
strikes of 2012 that brought national attention to the plight of Walmart
workers. (Undeterred, OUR Walmart plans more strikes beginning this week. Striking for better working conditions is protected under labor law.)
While Walmart’s tactics are not new to the company, this report may
be the first opportunity for some outsiders to get a near-comprehensive
take on how the company tyrannizes its employees.
Some of the more shocking employee intimidation incidents described
in the report include a form of sexual harassment and threats of
violence:
A Walmart manager in Kentucky continually harassed employee James
Vetato after hearing him talk about workers coming together to improve
working conditions. This harassment included the manager making sexual
comments regarding Vetato’s teenage daughter. The manager said he would
stop harassing Vetato if he made his daughter have sex with the manager.
A California Walmart manager shouted threats at workers returning from a strike, saying he was going to “shoot” the activists.
A manager in another store ignored an OUR Walmart member who reported that other employees were threatening her with violence.
The report also documents a laundry list of other intimidation
tactics and suspect firings directed at those involved in protected OUR
Walmart organizing activities:
A Texas Walmart employee who was planning to participate in an
upcoming strike was accused of stealing from the store, even though she
had a receipt for her purchase. Another employee who witnessed this
encounter felt intimidated and decided not to strike.
After participating in the Black Friday strike, Lisa Lopez, a
Walmart employee in Florida, was repeatedly called to the manager’s
office and cited for “transgressions” that included cutting her finger
(Walmart called it “recklessness”) and, another time, for wearing
earrings.
Cindy Lee was told by a Missouri Walmart manager to get some rest at
home when she was sick. Then, the manager fired her for “walking off
the job.”
Angela Williamson, an employee of a Florida Walmart, was terminated
for being absent while she was hospitalized for a severe kidney
infection.
OUR Walmart leader Gerardo Paladan was injured on the job at a
Walmart in Washington State after management refused his requests to fix
broken equipment. When managers still ignored him even after the
accident, Paladan and 21 co-workers signed a petition asking the store
to make employee safety a priority. In response, a manager told Paladan
not to “mouth off” and threatened him with extra work and further
discipline.
Associates in Missouri, Illinois, and California said managers tried
to socially isolate OUR Walmart members by ordering other employees not
to interact with them.
Employees have suffered reduction in working hours (cuts as drastic
as 30 to 12 hours per week) after participating in OUR Walmart
activities.
In addition to firing or threatening employees involved in
organizing, the report states that Walmart has surveilled and questioned
OUR Walmart members, even though it is unlawful to do so:
Employees of multiple California Walmarts reported that managers
followed OUR Walmart organizers when they entered stores and kept track
of which workers talked with them.
Also in California, employees reported that a manager stood by the
time clock and recorded the names of everyone wearing OUR Walmart
bracelets imprinted with the word “respect.”
Other incidents involve managers interrogating employees about their
activities, using threatening language like “we have you on tape” and
demanding to know which employees are OUR Walmart members.
The company has such a well-documented history of firing,
surveilling, harassing and interrogating employees for organizing
activities that the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel had
described Walmart’s tactics as a “pattern of illegal conduct”
likely encouraged by company headquarters. The NLRB filed nearly 100
complaints against the retail giant in just one five-year span from 1998
to 2003.
As if employee silencing wasn’t enough, Walmart is seeking to
eliminate public protests as well. The company has filed lawsuits
seeking to curb freedom of speech and assembly by having Walmart stores
and surrounding property declared off-limits to critics.
Meanwhile, non-employees have a lot to be mad about, too, given that
tax dollars fund the mega-corporation’s struggling employees:
Walmart’s employees also are top recipients of Medicaid.
As many as 80 percent of Walmart employees depend on food stamps.
Meanwhile the Walton family, heirs to Walmart, are collectively
worth more than $100 billion, making them the wealthiest family in the
world.
Do you think Walmart should increase employee wages and benefits – or
should Walmart treat its employees however it chooses as long as it
keeps prices low?
South Florida is under attack,
and the non-native species threatening to wreak havoc seems innocent
enough: It's not the giant Burmese pythons that made a home in the
Everglades in 2000, nor a ravenous, land-walking fish like the Asian
carp that have been eating through waterways farther up north.
No, this foreign invader is a snail.
But what a snail it is. The giant African land snail "can grow as big as a rat and gnaw through stucco and plaster," says Reuters' Barbara Liston.
Since the monstrous mollusks were first noticed in the Miami-Dade
County area in September 2011, researchers and vigilant homeowners have
caught at least 117,000 of them, or about 1,000 a week. And "residents
will soon likely begin encountering them more often, crunching them
underfoot as the snails emerge from underground hibernation at the start
of the state's rainy season in just seven weeks."
Just how big and bad are these slow-moving menaces? "The largest stretch 8 inches," says Zack Peterson in the Ocala StarBanner.
"The oldest live nine years. The busiest lay up to 1,200 eggs" a year.
They eat at least 500 species of plants, plus the stucco and plaster
that provide calcium for their shells. And if that's not disturbing
enough, the snails "even carry a parasitic nematode that can lead to
meningitis in humans" - though no cases of the pathogen, rat lungworm,
have been found among humans in the U.S. yet. (Watch raw footage of the
snails below.)
They sound like "monsters from hell sent to punish us," or at least Florida, says Michael Ballaban at Jalopnik.
But "perhaps the worst part of the invading monster snails is that if
you hit one on the highway their shells are hard enough to cause a
blowout." They can also turn deadly when a lawnmower hits one, flinging
the shell out at high velocity. And then there's the slime trails they
leave everywhere. "It becomes a slick mess," Denise Feiber, a
spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer
Services, tells Reuters.
This isn't Florida's first battle with the giant African land snail. The
Sunshine State won the last war - in the 1960s, after a boy brought
three snails home from Hawaii - but it wasn't cheap or easy. Those three
snails turned to 17,000 in seven years, and beating them took 10 years
and $1 million. "Feiber said she doesn't want this eradication project
to last that long," reports the StarBanner's Peterson. So last week, her department held a strategy roundtable with experts from across the U.S. and Canada.
How did this invasion start? "One possibility being examined is
a Miami Santeria group, a religion with West African and Caribbean
roots, which was found in 2010 to be using the large snails in its
rituals," says Retuers' Liston.
Or somebody could have brought them in as pets, like in 1966. Or it
could have just been an accident, like this decidedly unsavory
possibility:
"If you got a ham sandwich in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic, or an
orange, and you didn't eat it all and you bring it back into the States
and then you discard it, at some point, things can emerge from those
products," Feiber said. [Reuters]
Miami-Dade is ground zero, but "unfortunately, the invasion is not limited to Florida," says Josh Mogerman in the Chicagoist.
These "ticking environmental time bombs" have been found in upper
Midwestern schools, pet shops, and even one private breeder's operation.
And it would only take one escaped or released snail to spark a new
infestation, Feiber tells Reuters:
They're huge, they move around, they look like they're looking at you...
communicating with you, and people enjoy them for that.... But they
don't realize the devastation they can create if they are released into
the environment where they don't have any natural enemies and they
thrive. [Reuters]
Ever can’t help but think you’re surrounded by idiots? A leading
scientist at Stanford University thinks he has the answer, and the bad
news is things aren’t likely to get any better.
Dr. Gerald Crabtree, a geneticist at Stanford, has published a study
that he conducted to try and identify the progression of modern man’s
intelligence. As it turns out, however, Dr. Crabtree’s research led him
to believe that the collective mind of mankind has been on more or a
less a downhill trajectory for quite some time.
According to his
research, published in two parts starting with last year’s ‘Our fragile
intellect. Part I,’ Dr. Crabtree thinks unavoidable changes in the
genetic make-up coupled with modern technological advances has left
humans, well, kind of stupid. He has recently published his follow-up
analysis, and in it explains that of the roughly 5,000 genes he
considered the basis for human intelligence, a number of mutations over
the years has forced modern man to be only a portion as bright as his
ancestors.
“New developments in genetics, anthropology and
neurobiology predict that a very large number of genes underlie our
intellectual and emotional abilities, making these abilities genetically
surprisingly fragile,” he writes in part one of his research.
“Analysis of human mutation rates and the number of genes required for
human intellectual and emotional fitness indicates that we are almost
certainly losing these abilities,” he adds in his latest report.
From
there, the doctor goes on to explain that general mutations over the
last few thousand years have left mankind increasingly unable to cope
with certain situations that perhaps our ancestors would be more adapted
to.
“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of
1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the
brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and
companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas, and a
clear-sighted view of important issues. Furthermore, I would guess that
he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and
colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of
Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2000–6000 years ago. The
basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics,
anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our
intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly
fragile.”
According to the doctor, humans were at their most intelligent when “every individual was exposed to nature’s raw selective mechanisms on a daily basis.”
Under those conditions, adaption, he argued, was much more of a matter
than fight or flight. Rather, says the scientists, it was a sink or swim
situation for generations upon generations.
"We, as a species, are surprisingly intellectually fragile and perhaps reached a peak 2,000 to 6,000 years ago," he writes. "If
selection is only slightly relaxed, one would still conclude that
nearly all of us are compromised compared to our ancient ancestors of
3,000 to 6,000 years ago.” That doesn’t mean it’s all downhill, though. Dr. Crabtree says, “although
our genomes are fragile, our society is robust almost entirely by
virtue of education, which allow strengths to be rapidly distributed to
all members."
"We have a long time to solve it. People 300 years ago had no idea where we'd be scientifically now," he says. "We'll be able to deal with this problem with a range of humane and ethical solutions."
A newly discovered star has astonished a team of scientists. They say
that nothing at this moment can explain what is happening. The star is
called a "pulsar," which is a star that appears to pulse rapidly with
intense radio wave emissions. However, this pulsar switches
unpredictably between radio and x-ray emissions, leaving astronomers
openly baffled.
Combination of data from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and
observations by amateur astronomers has produced one of the best images
yet of nearby spiral galaxy Messier 106.
Located a little over 20 million light-years away, practically a
neighbor by cosmic standards, Messier 106 is one of the brightest and
nearest spiral galaxies to our own.
Despite its appearance, which looks much like countless other
galaxies, Messier 106 hides a number of secrets. Thanks to the new
image, they are revealed as never before.
At its heart, as in most spiral galaxies, is a supermassive black
hole, but this one is particularly active. Unlike the black hole at the
center of the Milky Way, which pulls in wisps of gas only occasionally,
Messier 106’s black hole is actively gobbling up material.
As the gas spirals towards the black hole, it heats up and emits
powerful radiation. Part of the emission from the center of Messier 106
is produced by a process that is somewhat similar to that in a laser —
although here the process produces bright microwave radiation.
As well as this microwave emission from Messier 106’s heart, the
galaxy has another startling feature — instead of two spiral arms, it
appears to have four.
Although the second pair of arms can be seen in visible light images
as ghostly wisps of gas, as in this image, they are even more prominent
in observations made outside of the visible spectrum, such as those
using X-ray or radio waves.
Unlike the normal arms, these two extra arms are made up of hot gas
rather than stars, and their origin remained unexplained until recently.
Astronomers think that these, like the microwave emission from the
galactic center, are caused by the black hole at Messier 106’s heart,
and so are a totally different phenomenon from the galaxy’s normal,
star-filled arms.
The extra arms appear to be an indirect result of jets of material
produced by the violent churning of matter around the black hole. As
these jets travel through the galactic matter they disrupt and heat up
the surrounding gas, which in turn excites the denser gas in the
galactic plane and causes it to glow brightly.
This denser gas closer to the center of the galaxy is tightly-bound,
and so the arms appear to be straight. However, the looser disc gas
further out is blown above or below the disc in the opposite direction
from the jet, so that the gas curves out of the disc — producing the
arching red arms.
Comet explosions did not end the prehistoric human culture, known as
Clovis, which existed in North America 13,000 years ago, according to a
new research.
Researchers from Royal Holloway University, together with Sandia
National Laboratories and 13 other universities across the United States
and Europe, have found evidence that rebuts the belief that a large
impact or airburst caused a significant and abrupt change to the Earth’s
climate and terminated the Clovis culture. They argue that other
explanations must be found for the apparent disappearance.
Clovis is the name archaeologists have given to the earliest
well-established human culture in the North American continent. It is
named after the town in New Mexico, where distinct stone tools were
found in the 1920s and 1930s.
Researchers argue that no appropriately sized impact craters from
that time period have been discovered, and no shocked material or any
other features of impact have been found in sediments. They also found
that samples presented in support of the impact hypothesis were
contaminated with modern material and that no physics model can support
the theory.
“The theory has reached zombie status. Whenever we are able to show
flaws and think it is dead, it reappears with new, equally
unsatisfactory, arguments,” said Professor Andrew Scott from the
Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway.
“Hopefully new versions of the theory will be more carefully examined before they are published,” Scott added.
The research was published in the journal Geophysical Monograph Series.
With
rapidly rising global temperatures come seasonal changes. As spring
comes earlier for some plant species, there are ripple effects
throughout the food web. Regina Brinker explains how phenology, or the
natural cycles of plants and animals, can be affected by these changes.
Lesson by Regina Brinker, animation by The Leading Sheep Studios.
