Pre-Announcement Media Coverage

[John Smith]

We are seeing so many remarkable pre-announcement pieces showing up, this is a place to post and discuss them. This one for example, is making discoveries sound 'ho hum' which a few months/years ago were heralded as amazing breakthroughs. Today for example: 

"Nearly Every Star Hosts at Least One Alien Planet"

http://news.yahoo.com/nearly-every-star-hosts-least-one-alien-plane...

When a month or so ago they were making a BIG deal about finding one planet in the sweet zone which could possibly support life, son they they say 25% of them could support life! Including mention of red dwarfs, etc. The Zeta predicted evidence continues to build up!

Here is another blog that relates, describing a wobble:

NASA Scientists "Discover" a Wobbly Planet!?

https://poleshift.ning.com/forum/topics/nasa-scientists-discover-a-...

[Starr DiGiacomo]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2634903/Have-aliens-...

Have aliens already visited Earth? Nasa book suggests that ancient rock art could have been created by extraterrestrials

• A new book details the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti)
• In it the authors discuss the methods through which we might find aliens
  
• These include searching for signs of life on planets or finding messages
  
• The book details some of the challenges ahead for making first contact
  
• But ultimately the authors say it is something that might happen one day

 

Each month a new planet is discovered that bears similarities to our own - and it is becoming increasingly apparent Earth is not unique.

So it stands to reason that of the billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone, there might be another that hosts life.

It’s a thought that is gaining more credence all the time, and now Nasa has released a fascinating book detailing how, or if, we might communicate with some of these worlds.

Scroll down to read the PDF of the book

+3

A new book made for Nasa called Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication details the methods through which we might communicate with aliens. Although this artist's illustration is a bit fanciful, the authors suggest that Earth may already have been visited

Some of the most interesting chapters tackle the issue of alien communication in the past, present and future.

In one section, for example, William Edmondson from the University of Birmingham considers the possibility that rock art on Earth is of extraterrestrial origin.

‘We can say little, if anything, about what these patterns signify, why they were cut into rocks, or who created them,’ he writes.

‘For all intents and purposes, they might have been made by aliens.’

The book is titled Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication.

THE HISTORY OF SETI

In 1959, Cornell physicists Gieuseppi Cocconi and Philip Morrison published an article discussing the potential to use microwave radio to communicate between stars.

A year later in 1960, astronomer Frank Drake conducted the first hunt for alien life with an 85-foot (25 metres) antenna in West Virgina, but after two months concedes defeat.
In the 1960s, Soviet Union performs extensive searches for ET, again with no success.

In the 1970s Nasa began to take an interest in Seti, with the chances of success seemingly growing as technology advanced.

In 1988, Nasa began sweeping surveys of the night sky for signals, but Congress terminated funding a few years later.

The independent Seti Institute, established in 1984, took over the job.

In 1992 the first planet outside the solar system is confirmed, an almost certainly uninhabitable world orbiting a pulsar.

In 2009 Nasa’s Kepler telescope launches and, over the next few years, finds hundreds of planets.

And just last month, the first planet of a similar size to Earth and at the correct distance from its parent star to host water, called Kepler 186-f, was found.

It is the most likely place that has been found that could host life as we know it.

It was edited for Nasa by Douglas Vakoch, Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the Seti Institute.

With the help of other experts he tackles a number of topics including the prospect of life on other planets and the means through which we might send or receive a message.

Vakoch begins the 330-page book by postulating how difficult it might be to make first contact.

‘If a radio signal is detected in a modern Seti experiment, we could well know that another intelligence exists, but not know what they are saying,’ he writes in the book’s introduction.

He goes on to add: ‘Even if we detect a civilisation circling one of our nearest stellar neighbours, its signals will have traversed trillions of miles, reaching Earth after travelling for years.’

But, all hope is not lost – throughout the book Vakoch and his colleagues tackle these very problems, and provide solutions that may prove invaluable in the future.

‘To move beyond the mere detection of such intelligence, and to have any realistic chance of comprehending it, we can gain much from the lessons learned by researchers facing similar challenges on Earth,’ he continues.

‘Like archaeologists who reconstruct temporally distant civilisations from fragmentary evidence, Seti researchers will be expected to reconstruct distant civilisations separated from us by vast expanses of space as well as time.

‘As we attempt to decode and interpret extraterrestrial messages, we will be required to comprehend the mindset of a species that is radically Other.’

[J Ph]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/17/area-51-exhibit-re-opens_n...

We're About To Learn A Lot More About Area 51

The exhibit features an alleged "authentic alien artifact" -- small pieces of material that came from a reported 1986 UFO crash in Russia.

Also on display are unique UFO photographs from the personal collection of Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace, that is creating the next generation of spacecraft.

Palmer personally selected Bigelow's UFO images to include in the Area 51 exhibit.

"What's remarkable about them is that they were original negatives -- not prints -- they were negatives that we made prints from, so we know they were not doctored, they're all pre-Photoshop. These are photographic images of UFOs from around the world, going back to the 1940s up through the 70s. In some of the images, you can see that they may be confused with some naturally occurring phenomena, but there are others that are clearly not."

[Ecosikh]

there has been a re-screening of a science programme called horizon which was screened on BBC 4 yesterday - it talked at length about pole shift, changes in magnetosphere and how often his has happened. they are still sticking to the "100's of years" lie - despite the programme clearly showing that this has not taken thousands of years. the only problems cited related to animal movements, nothing about melting ice caps etc etc

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0148vph

[lonne rey]

Countdown to ‘Chaos’: Diplomat Predicts How Many Days We Have Left Before Climate Disaster

In two languages, French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius started the countdown Tuesday to climate change disaster, speaking in Washington before a meeting with American counterpart Secretary of State John Kerry.

“We have 500 days to avoid the climate chaos,” Fabius said in French.

Speaking then in English, Fabius touched on Iran, Syria, and Ukraine, but then quickly returned to climate change.

“And very important issues, issue of climate change, climate chaos,” the foreign minister said. “And we have – as I said, we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.

source

[sourabh kale]

May 9, 2014
Researchers Suggest A Violent Event Flipped The Moon
While we tend to think of the moon as a static world - there are signs that the Moon used to be an active planet - with signs of volcanoes and indications of a magnetic field frozen in rocks.Impact craters that flooded with molten rock are also indications of active periods on the Moon.A new study now suggests that the residual magnetic fields hint towards a violent event which flipped the Moon on its side, writes website Ars Technica.The study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Evidence suggests that the Moon was formed when a Mars-sized body collided with the early Earth - leaving both in a molten state.The Moon would have then been left with a sufficiently molten core giving it the ability to have generated a magnetic field for hundreds of millions of years.According to Ars Technica, remnants of the magnetic field would have remained trapped in rocks.A team of Japanese researchers has now analyzed magnetic data from two lunar orbiters, the Lunar Prospector and Kaguya, writes Ars Technica.Both orbited the Moon at low altitudes, under 25 miles (under 40km), and tracked the Moon's magnetic fields.After eliminating areas displaying complexmagnetic anomalies, the team focused on data from 57 different sites on the Moon.They used the readings to calculate the orientation of the Moon's magnetic field atvarious points in its history.While many of the data points clustered atthe current pole, a second set clustered somewhere between 45 and 60 degrees away from the pole.Earth also experiences some degree of ‘polar wander' - but the pole has made a gradual track as Earth's angular momentum shifted.The scientists found that the moon shifted on its axis suddenly - as there are no indications of gradual track between the two locations.As the authors note, "A change in the apparent pole position corresponds to a reorientation of the lunar surface with respect to the rotation axis," writes Ars Technica.The authors suggest a number of events could have been the cause, including significant meteor impacts, internal instabilities, and the gravitational disturbances caused by migrations of the Solar System's gas giants, writes Ars Technica.This isn't the first indication that the Moon may have shifted its orientation.Earlier research has also examined the distribution of craters on the Moon's surface - which would ordinarily be biasedtoward a greater number of craters on theMoon's far side.Instead, it has led some researchers to suggest that the near and far side of the Moon shifted positions sometime in the distance past.While researchers believe the event occurred - methods to track the shift have not been precise enough to indicate when the event took place.
http://www.designntrend.com/articles/13747/20140509/researchers-sug...
http://nvonews.com/scientists-believe-violent-event-flipped-the-moon/
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/6797/20140511/ancient-impact-flip...

[sourabh kale]

Our Sun Has a Sister
May 8 2014
The ancient Egyptians called it Ra. The ancient Greeks called it Helios. The ancient Mayans called itKinich Ahau. The ancient Germans called it Sól. Our longest-standing and most deeply held myths have so often revolved around the sun in large part because we humans have revolved around the sun. That distant sphere of glowing gas has been, to us fragile creatures, warmth and light and life itself. It has, we now know, been the center of everything we've known. No wonder we've assumed it was divine. Which makesnews just coming out of the University of Texas at Austin—soon to be reported inThe Astrophysical Journal—particularly monumental. Our familiar star, it turnsout, is not unique. Our sun has a sibling—a sister-star that almost certainly originated from the same cloud of gas and dust as our own shining orb. That sibling? A star with the deceptivelydull name of HD 162826. Said star is 15percent more massive than our sun, and located 110 light-years away from us (in the constellation Hercules, whichis, appropriately, un-dully named). We can't see the sun's sister unaided, but even a set of low-power binoculars revealsHD 162826 to human eyes. It's situated near (well, relatively near) the bright star of Vega.McDonald ObservatoryThe discovery was made by team of researchers led by the UT astronomer Ivan Ramirez, with help from several groups around the world. ​Using a combination of chemical analysis (high-resolution spectroscopy) and information about the stars' orbits (their "dynamics"), the team created a list of solar-sibling candidates that included 30 stars. Using information provided by telescopes at both the McDonald Observatory in Texas and the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, they narrowed the field. In the end, there was one that matched our sun.It was "lucky coincidence," Ramirez says, thatHD 162826 emerged as our sun's sibling. As it turns out, HD 162826has, for the past 15 years, been a subject of study by the McDonald Observatory Planet Search team. Studies conducted by that team, together with calculations provided by the University of New South Wales, mean that we already know a little bit about the our sibling-sun's solar system. It doesn't seem to have any"hot Jupiters," for example (massive planets that orbit close to the star itself). It also doesn't seem to have an analog to Jupiter itself.It may, though, have other, terrestrial planets. And "there is a chance," Ramirez says—"small, but not zero"—that those planets could harbor life.In their earliest days within their birth cluster,he explains,collisions could have knocked chunks off of planets, and these fragments could have travelled between solar systems, and perhaps even may have been responsible for bringing primitive life to Earth. Or, fragments from Earth could have transported life to planets orbiting solar siblings."So it could be argued," Ramirez continued, "that solar siblings are key candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life."And if so: There are lots of candidates.HD 162826 may be the first solar sibling we know of, but it is, Ramirez thinks, not alone in that. That long-ago cloud of gas and dust kept busy."The idea is that the Sun was born in a cluster with a thousand or a hundred thousand stars," Ramirez says. And that cluster, which formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, has long ago broken up, with member stars situating themselves into their own orbits around the galactic center—which in turn scattered them across the Milky Way as it exists today. "A few,like HD 162826, are still nearby," Ramirez says. "Others are much farther afield."
http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/our-sun-has-a-s...
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/05/09/solar-siblings-astronomer...

[Tracie Crespo]

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/american-doomsday-white-...

American Doomsday: White House Warns of Climate Catastrophes

By  Matthew DeLuca

Scorching temperatures, flooded cities, and changes in the growing season are just some of the hard realities of a changing climate that are beginning to hit Americans directly, says a new White House report.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the White House report released on Tuesday says.

The third National Climate Assessment, the result of four years of research by hundreds of leading scientists and experts, draws a dire picture of a future in which human activity has contributed directly to massive changes in weather. A 1,300-page draft version of the National Climate Assessment was issued last year.

“Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington State, and maple syrup producers in Vermont are all observing climate-related changes that are outside of experience," they wrote in the report.

"This National Climate Assessment concludes that the evidence of human-induced climate change continues to strengthen and that impacts are increasing across the country."

The changes could help fuel wildfires across the Southwest, lead to lengthened growing season in the Midwest, and cause heat waves and coastal flooding in the Northeast, according to the report. Glaciers will shrink in Alaska even as drought leads to “increased competition for scarce water resources for people and ecosystems,” the report warns.

“This National Climate Assessment concludes that the evidence of human-induced climate change continues to strengthen and that impacts are increasing across the country,” the report states.

Researchers underscored the high temperatures experienced in recent years by Americans, including 2012, which was the hottest year the continental United States has yet had on record, according to the report. The report projects that temperatures will rise a further 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in coming decades.

And in scenarios reminiscent of Hurricane Sandy, heavy rain storms stand to slam America's transportation networks, flooding tunnels, washing across rail lines and overwhelming drainage systems for streets and tunnels.

“Americans are noticing changes all around them,” the researchers wrote in the report. “Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer.”

The report drew a direct connection between human activities and the uptick in global temperatures over the past five decades, leading to erratic weather experienced across the country. Extreme weather events that have changed over that period include heatwaves that have swept the West while similar bursts of cold weather have become less frequent.

"Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington State, and maple syrup producers in Vermont are all observing climate-related changes that are outside of experience."

“Natural drivers of climate cannot explain the recent observed warming,” the report states. “Over the last five decades, natural factors (solar forcing and volcanoes) alone would actually have led to a slight cooling.”

The report comes after a series of other high-profile warnings on the pace and effects of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is releasing a series of global assessments. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society have all issued their own reports or begun educational campaigns.

The White House’s report presents “actionable science” on how to deal with climate change and its effects, John Podesta, a counselor to President Obama, told NBC News’ Chuck Todd on Tuesday. The peer-reviewed report is the most comprehensive yet produced on the effects of climate change in the U.S., Podesta said.

Some climate experts who spoke to NBC News in advance of the report’s release highlighted the need for quick action to mitigate the effects of climate change.

“While President Obama has taken some important steps to address climate change at home, his administration is undermining that progress by ignoring the huge amounts of carbon pollution that would accompany the fossil fuel industry’s plan to export coal, liquefied natural gas and oil abroad,” said Gabe Wisniewski, Greenpeace USA's climate and energy campaign director, in an email. “Climate change is a global crisis which will only be made worse by extracting and exporting fossil fuels, whether it’s fracked gas from Appalachia, coal strip-mined from Montana, or oil drilled from the Arctic.”

[Corey Young]

Prehistoric hunting structures found under Lake Huron

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/prehistoric-hunting-structures-found-unde...

Archaeologists have discovered sophisticated prehistoric stone walls deep beneath the surface of Lake Huron that give the clearest portrait yet of the mysterious people who lived in the Great Lakes region at the end of the Ice Age.

"It's just way more complex than anything we've seen before," said John O'Shea, a University of Michigan archeologist who published his findings Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Since 2008, O'Shea and his colleagues have been investigating an underwater ridge in Lake Huron that runs roughly between Alpena, Mich., and Point Clark, Ont. As the glaciers were beating their final retreat about 9,000 years ago, water in the lake was about 100 metres below today's level and the Alpena-Amberley Ridge was exposed.

......

In 37 metres of water, just over 50 kilometres from shore, O'Shea was looking at two stone lines forming a lane about 30 metres long and eight metres wide which ended in a corral-type structure. It had hunting blinds built into the sides as well as other lanes and structures.

This definitely is yet another 'primer' for the people to expect an announcement....more proof of massive and sudden changes to peoples far more advanced then we thought at the time!!!

[John Smith]

Descriptive of features of Planet X

Astronomers Have Discovered A Star That's As Cold As Ice

"Because they are so much smaller and cooler than stars, brown dwarfs appear red and faint. But astronomer Kevin Luhman noticed that WISE J085510.83-071442.5 was very red and very faint...partly because it is small...

"It may well be that instead of being a brown dwarf, this object may in reality be one of the half dozen or so mysterious rogue planets..., "

http://io9.com/astronomers-have-discovered-a-star-thats-as-cold-as-...

[sourabh kale]

University of Washington launches effort to prepare Northwest region for 9.0 magnitude quake - 314 years since the last one
April 25, 2014
SEATTLE -- Scientists fully expect that the coast of Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and part of northern California to see a magnitude nine subduction zone earthquake again.It's been 314 years since the last one in January of the year 1700. Scientists know of this quake because of written reports from Japan that recorded a tsunami. The reports of a giant wave also correlate with rings in old trees killed when marsh land along the Washington coast dropped several feet, allowing sea water to envelope their roots.This week, scientists with the University of Washington gathered 55 experts from around the region. Their goal: to step up efforts to prepare for the next magnitude nine earthquake in the Northwest and the ensuing recovery."That's the critical part. To be prepared and then to bounce back." said John Vidale,Washington state's seismologist and head of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. Vidale moderated the event.MORE:Quake off Vancouver Island a wake-up call for the NorthwestThe project is called M9, as in magnitude 9.But the lessons learned from it could be applied to any major natural disaster in Washington, a state that's currently recovering from the landslide near Oso on March 22 that killed at least 41 people.In addition to earthquake scientists, M9 participants included structural engineers, transportation experts, representatives from the insurance industry, social scientists, oceanographers, tsunami specialists and emergency managers.The plan is to update the science to better prepare everything from skyscrapers to bridges to people in their own homes for when a mega-quake hits."People may not be preparing themselves adequately for the kind of disaster that's going to happen," said Ann Bostrom with the U.W. Evans School of Public Affairs. Butshe added that the big quake is just one scenario that threatens people and homeowners."I do think about insurance, about the preparations people can do. I think about the mental preparations people have to doin order to plan for all kinds of hazards, and what we can do in our risk communications projects to help people do that," Bostrom said.Interdisciplinary efforts have happened before, at meetings and conferences. But this time it's a bigger commitment to work together: a three year, $4 million project financed by a grant from the National Science Foundation.The risk from violent shaking and a tsunami is not just confined to coastal communities. The Seattle area is also considered at an elevated risk. The city andsome of the surrounding area sits on a basin of softer soil and rock surrounded byharder materials. That could trap earthquake waves and cause them to resonate for a longer period of time, creating more damage.An area of further study is how those earthquake waves, particularly ones of certain frequencies will effect tall downtown buildings.
http://www.krem.com/news/northwest-news/256793561.html