NASA's Kepler telescope finds 715 new planets

Image credit: ctv news

NASA's Kepler telescope finds 715 new planets outside solar system

The Associated Press 

Published Wednesday, February 26, 2014 2:39PM EST
Last Updated Wednesday, February 26, 2014 7:48PM EST

WASHINGTON -- The Earth's galaxy is looking far more crowded and hospitable. NASA on Wednesday confirmed a bonanza of 715 newly discovered planets outside the solar system.

Douglas Hudgins, NASA's exoplanet exploration program scientist, called the announcement a major step toward the planet-hunting Kepler telescope's ultimate goal: "finding Earth 2.0."

It's a big step in not just finding other Earths, but "the possibility of life elsewhere," said Lisa Kaltenegger, a Harvard and Max Planck Institute astronomer who wasn't part of the discovery team.

Scientists using the Kepler telescope pushed the number of planets discovered in the galaxy to about 1,700. Twenty years ago, astronomers had not found any planets circling stars other than the ones revolving around the sun.

"We almost doubled just today the number of planets known to humanity," NASA planetary scientist Jack Lissauer said in a teleconference.

Astronomers used a new confirmation technique to come up with the largest single announcement of a batch of exoplanets -- what planets outside our solar system are called.

Wednesday's announcements also were about implications for life behind those big numbers.

Image credit: kcra.com

All the new planets are in systems like ours where multiple planets circle a star. The 715 planets came from looking at just 305 stars. They were nearly all in size closer to Earth than gigantic Jupiter.

And four of those new exoplanets orbit their stars in "habitable zones" where it is not too hot or not too cold for liquid water which is crucial for life to exist.

The four new habitable zone planets are all at least twice as big as Earth so that makes them more likely to be gas planets instead of rocky ones like Earth -- and less likely to harbour life.

So far Kepler has found nine exoplanets in the habitable zone, NASA said. Astronomers expect to find more when they look at all four years of data collected by the now-crippled Kepler; so far they have looked at two years.

Planets in the habitable zone are likely to be farther out from their stars because it is hot close in. And planets farther out take more time orbiting, so Kepler has to wait longer to see it again.

Another of Kepler's latest discoveries indicates that "small planets are extremely common in our galaxy," said MIT astronomer Sara Seagar, who wasn't part of the discovery team. "Nature wants to make small planets."

And, in general, smaller planets are more likely to be able to harbour life than big ones, Kaltenegger said.

Source: CTV News

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Baltic Sea anomaly

baltic sea ufo anomaly update 14,000 years old

Baltic Sea anomaly

The Baltic Sea anomaly is the name given to a large 60-metre (200 ft) circular rock-like formation discovered at the bottom of the Baltic Sea by Peter Lindberg, Dennis Åsberg and their Swedish-based diving team, "Ocean X Team" on June 19, 2011. Several experts have stated that it is most likely a natural geological formation rather than an "anomalous" object.

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UFO Sightings 2013

UFO Sightings 2013

Credit: ufosightingsdaily.com

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George Clinton UFO Encounter

George Clinton UFO Encounter

George Clinton Outtake: MY Encounter with a UFO

Credit Image: funkademia.net

 Situated within an otherwise straightforward conversation with George Clinton was a story that we will never forget. In so many words, this is a direct account of his alleged encounter with a UFO, while driving with Bootsy Collins. Not one to mince words, this seemed to be no joking matter to Clinton, who noted that he went ten whole years without talking about the event subsequent to its occurrence. Whether this is a part of the grand mythos of the Dr. Funkenstein universe or a genuine moment in an already intriguing life, we will let you decide.

GC: We had just come back from Detroit and we were on our way down to Miami to go fishing, but first we had to go pick up my son in New Jersey. We got there that morning around 10 o’ clock. We came past the airport and saw a light. Neither one of us said anything, but when we got to the spot, both of us looked around. It was like a beam of light from the clouds coming straight down. Now this is daylight, so the weird thing in your mind is ‘Damn. Light in daylight’? That’s what was going on in my mind. So we drove on and forgot about it. Maybe five minutes later, two blocks ahead of us, we see the light coming through the trees. But it sparkled this time likeelectricity. As soon as it did that it hit on the same block that we were on, but on the opposite side of the street. So there was like one, then two and then the third one hit the car on the fender on thepassenger side. It looked like how when you break a thermometer, the mercury runs like oil and water. When it hit the car it splattered like lit up mercury and rolled off the side of the car.

Credit Image: dailymail.co.uk

Now remember I said that the first one we saw was in daylight? Well, we didn’t remember this part I’m about to tell you – Bootsy or myself – for ten years. When it hit the car, I saw some headlights in back of us and the streetlights were getting darker ahead of us and we’re not seeing any cars. We were the only ones on the streets for about ten blocks. I look back behind me and the headlights that I saw before were gone. We were the only ones on the streets. It’s dark. We get about ten blocks from my house, we pull up to my apartment and just sit in the car. My daughter comes out to my car and she says ‘Why y’all look like y’all seen a ghost’? I said to her ‘Give me a kiss. I’m about to go to bed’. It took us a long time to talk about it, but about ten years later, I saw something about losing time and I remembered that five minutes before the light hit the car that the concern was daylight. We had just gotten there from an all-night session in Detroit, so it couldn’t have been but 10 o’ clock at first, but by the time we got to the house, we were dealing with 7 o’ clock at night and it didn’t occur to me until I called Bootsy. At that point, we both know that some time was missing.

By Paul Pennington

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Latest UFO Sightings Shocking NASA Best UFO's Footage

Latest UFO Sightings Shocking NASA Best UFO's Footage

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Water Could Help Make Better Batteries

Water Could Help Make Better Batteries

Images: livescience.com

Water could be the key to producing a cheaper, more environmentally friendly and less dangerous way of making the lithium-ion batteries that power so many everyday gadgets, researchers say.

Currently, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are typically found in mobile devices such as cellphones, laptops and tablet computers, and they are increasingly being used to power hybrid and electric vehicles. As their uses grow, scientists would like to manufacture the batteries in a manner that's both less expensive and more environmentally friendly.

"The application of lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles is hindered by their high cost," researcher Jianlin Li, a materials scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, told TechNewsDaily. "For example, the cost of the lithium-ion batteries in the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Colt is about $500 per kilowatt-hour, which is almost five times of the target cost — $110 per kilowatt-hour — of an electric vehicle lithium-ion battery set by the president's EV Everywhere Grand Challenge."

Currently, more than 80 percent of the costs of making lithium-ion batteries are due to materials and the processing of those materials. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are now aiming to reduce the price of both of these factors.

All batteries generate electricity by flowing electric current between two electrodes — a positively charged cathode and a negatively charged anode. Cathodes make up about 70 percent of the total cost of high-power batteries, and the organic solvent used to make the lithium ion battery cathodes, N-methylpyrrolidone or NMP, is expensive, toxic and generates flammable vapors. Making batteries with this solvent also requires expensive, explosion-proof processing equipment and costly solvent recovery and recycling systems.

Instead of using NMP, the researchers say they can replace it with a system that uses water, which is much safer, greener and at least 150 times cheaper than the organic solvent.

Replacing NMP with water is tricky because the slurries, or fluids containing the materials used to make the battery's electrodes, behaves in very different ways if water is employed. For instance, water-based slurries are typically not as good at coating the current collector, the material that gathers electric charge from the electrode.

"While it seems quite straightforward to substitute expensive and toxic NMP with water in battery manufacturing, it is very complicated and requires extensive knowledge in science and engineering to realize it," Li said.

The scientists employed a number of different tricks to get water to work. For instance, treating the current collector with electrified plasma alters its surface in ways that makes water-based slurries coat it better. Additives in the slurries also help prevent the particles from clumpingtogether.

Previous work could help scientists manufacture lithium-ion battery anodes using water. However, until now, "no one has been successful with both anodes and cathodes," Li said.

Using this method, the researchers have created a battery that features excellent performance comparable to conventional batteries. Replacing NMP with water promises to reduce the overall costs of lithium ion batteries by about one-eighth, and "the whole process is much more environmentally benign," Li said. "This allows the battery manufacturing more sustainable and affordable."

The scientists currently have a patent pending on their technology. They detailed their latest findings online May 25 in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science.

Source: livescience.com

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Unprecedented Storm

Unprecedented Storm

Haiyan brought sustained winds of 235km/h (147mph), with gusts of 275 km/h (170 mph), with waves as high as 15m (45ft), bringing up to 400mm (15.75 inches) of rain in places.  "The world has not seen a storm like this before," said Senen Mangalile, the Philippines Consul General to the UK.  Steven Godby, a disaster management expert at Nottingham Trent University, told the BBC the typhoon was "probably the most intense and strongest storm of this type to make landfall".

"We've seen storms like this perhaps on rare occasions that have had that kind of intensity out at sea but for it to come ashore with that kind of strength is almost unprecedented," Dr Godby said.  American military aircraft and ships are being deployed to provide help. US President Barack Obama has issued a message saying he was "deeply saddened by the loss of life and extensive damage".

Three days after Typhoon Haiyan hit, aerial photos are revealing a scene of apocalyptic devastation along a swathe of the central Philippines.

(more)

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UFO sightings off South African coastline

UFO sightings off South African coastline

Credit Image: latest-ufo-sightings.net

UFO sightings off South African coastline soar in February

The founder of UFO Research of South Africa says reports of unidentified flying objects off theSouth African coast near Cape Town rose dramatically during the week of Feb. 21-27.

Many of the sightings can be explained away by meteor showers, said Gert Jordaan, who tracks such reports on his UFO Research website, The Telegraph reported. But many cannot.

“Though meteors do glow orange, some of the sightings reported radical change in direction and speed,” he said in The Telegraph. “Some objects even remained stationary for five minutes or so. There might be some UFO phenomena occurring in areas around Cape Town.”

Mr. Jordaan suggested the UFOs could be due to “some top-secret aircraft” tests — or life forms from other planets are tracking Earthlings.

“The second possibility is that life from another planet is surveying ours for making contact and offering knowledge,” he said in The Telegraph.

Source: washingtontimes.com

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COMPUTER SMARTER THAN A HUMAN

COMPUTER SMARTER THAN A HUMAN

AMERICAN ACTORS GARY LOCKWOOD AND KEIR DULLEA IN A SCENE FROM '2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.' (TRASCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES)

Amid all the phantasmagoric special effects and puzzling symbolism of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film '2001: A Space Odyssey,' the one detail that sticks in everyone's memory is the HAL 9000 computer that ran most of the spaceship Discovery One's operations. Not only did HAL speak and possess a humanlike personality, but it actually was superior to humans, because it never made mistakes.

But when the year 2001 actually rolled around, what inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil calls 'strong AI' -- that is, a machine that possesses self-awareness and is equal or superior to humans in intellectual ability -- was still closer to science fiction than reality.

That's with a few caveats. In 2011, the supercomputer Watson went head-to-head with 'Jeopardy!' contestants and won mightily. However, just because a computer can answer questions -- and Watson is a very sophisticated 'question-answering machine' -- it doesn't necessarily mean it's smarter than a human [source: Markoff].

In a 2005 essay, Kurzweil, who estimates that a computer would need to be capable of performing 10 quadrillion calculations per second to match all the regions of the human brain, predicted that threshold would be reached by 2020 [source: Kurzweil]. (Watson uses 80 trillion operations per second, the slowpoke [source: Deedrick].)

Others, such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, have expressed doubts about whether machines ever will be able to even approximate human intelligence. He noted that neuroscientists still don't really know enough about the brain yet to hope to duplicate it. 'You can't create an artificial intelligence,' Allen insisted in a 2012 Forbes interview, 'unless you know how the real thing works.'

BY ROBERT LAMB, PATRICK J. KIGER AND KATE KERSHNER

Source: www.geniusstuff.com

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Strange Case of the Michigan Flying Wing UFO

Strange Case of the Michigan Flying Wing UFO

 As we passed the ‘airplane’ in slow-motion stop and go traffic, I noticed it was NOT an airplane, and why would it be one anyway? as there is not enough length to the fields there to land a real airplane.

I have driven past this area literally millions of times since I was 5-years-old, and I am now 53. The ‘airplane’ turned out to be a wing-shaped UFO about 100 feet across. I pointed it out to my wife, and remarked that it was not an airplane, but an honest-to goodness-real UFO.

She looked at it, and said: “That’s a cell phone tower.” I said it is not, as I know everything in existence all along both sides of the freeway, having driven on it for so long, and she proceeded to argue with me that it “… couldn’t be a UFO, it has to be this or that, but not a UFO.”

It was like she could not physically ‘see’ the UFO, like her mind was being blocked by something. Why else would she suggest it being a cell phone tower when it obviously was lying on the ground, and it was all lit up, and it was shaped like a giant flying wing, just like that experimental one the Nazis built during WW-II, a precursor to the Stealth designs.

I had a very good, leisurely, long look at it, and I know what I saw. But it gets even weirder from there.

We finally arrived at the site of the accident that caused us to do the stop and go thing for over two hours, when it would normally take 45 minutes to drive to that spot. We were crawling along at 5 to 10 miles per hour when we arrived at the ‘accident site.’  read more

Source : About UFOs

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