Professor Michel Mayor, the scientist who led the team that identified the first extrasolar planet in 1995, believes a planet similar in size and composition to Earth will soon be found.

Prof Mayor, of Geneva University, said that the prospect of finding a planet habitable for humans had come a step closer through rapid technological advances allowing observation of planets outside the solar system.

Addressing a Royal Society conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme, he said: “The search for twins of Earth is motivated by the ultimate prospect of finding sites with favourable conditions for the development of life. Read the full story

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. Read the full story

Of the billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, 15 percent may host “twins” of our solar system, a new study says.

While that might not sound like much, the find suggests that several hundred million star systems look a lot like the one we call home, the study authors say.

The research is based on surveys of stars with gas giant planets—similar to Jupiter and Saturn—that orbit far from their stars. Read the full story

Future humans won’t have to wait to travel to Pandora for the chance to mine unobtanium, because Neptune and Uranus may have diamond icebergs floating atop liquid diamond seas closer to home. The surprise finding comes from the first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, Discovery News reports.

Scientists zapped diamond with a laser at pressures 40 million times greater than the Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, and then slowly reduced both temperature and pressure. They eventually found that diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, and that chunks of diamond will float in the liquid diamond. Read the full story

Scientists have detected a flash of light from across the Galaxy so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The flash was brighter than anything ever detected from beyond our Solar System and lasted over a tenth of a second. NASA and European satellites and many radio telescopes detected the flash and its aftermath on December 27, 2004. Two science teams report about this event at a special press event today at NASA headquarters. A multitude of papers are planned for publication.

Read the full story

ScienceDaily (Dec. 26, 2009) — The “magnetically best shielded room on earth” has the size of an apartment block and is located on the site of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Institute Berlin. Magnetic fields such as that of the earth are kept out here as effective as nowhere else. Such ideal conditions allow to measure the tiny magnetic fields of, e.g., the human heart.

This was the motivation for the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ask PTB to jointly test a newly developed optical magnetic field sensor. It is based on a physical principle very different from SQUIDs, which are usually applied for biomagnetic field measurements. The optical sensor does not need advanced cooling and has the size of a lump of sugar. A high-quality measurement of the human heart signal was demonstrated using this optical sensor. The sensor’s suitability was thus proven for biomagnetic measurements in the picotesla range. In future magnetocardiographic measurement devices — to be used as a supplement or an alternative to the ECG — could become simpler and less expensive.

Up until now one had to cool as much as one could for biomagnetic measurements. This was necessary as SQUIDs, superconducting quantum interference devices, work optimally at -269 degrees Celsius and can only then fulfil their purpose of measuring tiny magnetic fields. SQUIDs are the best suited sensors to record the magnetic fields arising during the electrical activity of the human heart. A magnetocardiogram (MCG) can be compiled supplementing a conventional electrocardiogram (ECG). (The same applies to the magnetoencephalogram, MEG, which is a recording of the magnetic field of the brain.) Yet to use SQUIDs requires well-shielded rooms and complicated cooling systems. The latter might become obsolete in the future if the optical magnetometer developed by NIST continues to fulfil expectations.

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Bangalore: Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) are on the brink of a path-breaking discovery. They may have found signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon.

They believe so because scientific instruments on India’s first unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface, Surendra Pal, associate director, Isro Satellite Centre (Isac), said at the international radar symposium here on Friday. Read the full story

Planets circle the stars that dot the heavens.

Before 1995, we couldn’t have said that with any certainty. Now we know of more than 300 planets orbiting distant stars, and we have a fleet of telescopes looking for them. The ultimate goal is to find another Earth orbiting a star like the Sun, but the quest on the way to that Holy Grail has yielded some strange benchmarks.

Meet the planet COROT-exo-3b. It orbits a star slightly larger, hotter, and brighter than the Sun. The star is not an unusual one in any way, but the planet is definitely weird: it orbits the star in just over 4 days, which is pretty close in, though not a record breaker in and of itself. What’s bizarre is that it has about the same diameter of Jupiter, but has 21.6 times Jupiter’s mass. That makes it denser than lead.

If I could stand on the surface of this planet, I’d weigh 4200 kilograms*. That’s over 9000 pounds! Read the full story

If you’re in Chicago, then you might want to head over to the Adler planetarium today, when they unveil an enormous 2.5 billion pixel mosaic of the Galaxy! It’s composed of 800,000 separate Spitzer Space Telescope images (I mean, c’mon, holy Haleakala, eight hundred thousand images!) stitched together. The image was actually released last year, but the ginormous print version is premiering at Adler today.

The image above is one very tiny piece of the mosaic; it was originally about 6000 pixels across, and I shrunk it down by a factor of 10 to fit it here on the blog. And that is still only an eensy weensy piece of the whole thing!

The images are in the infrared, well outside what the eye can see. The colors represent IR light at 3.6, 8, and 24 microns (depicted in the picture as blue, green, and red). Different objects emit at different wavelengths: warm dust is red, while nebulae forming stars are yellow. The diffuse green glow seen everywhere in the image is from complex organic molecules called PAHs, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. On Earth those are created when fossil fuels are burned; in space, they are byproducts of stellar birth and death. Read the full story

Published Sunday in Nature Geoscience, the same study shows that the smaller but less stable West Antarctic icesheet is also shedding significant mass.

Scientists worry that rising global temperatures could trigger a rapid disintegration of West Antarctica, which holds enough frozen water to push up the global ocean watermark by about five metres (16 feet).

In 2007 the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) predicted sea levels would rise 18 to 59 centimetres (7.2 to 23.2 inches) by 2100, but this estimate did not factor in the potential impact of crumbling icesheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Read the full story

SOMETHING big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That’s the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called “dark flow” is a sign that other universes nestle next door.

Last year, Sasha Kashlinsky of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues identified an unusual pattern in the motion of around 800 galaxy clusters. They studied the clusters’ motion in the “afterglow” of the big bang, as measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The photons of this afterglow collide with electrons in galaxy clusters as they travel across space to the Earth, and this subtly changes the afterglow’s temperature. Read the full story

One of the best annual meteor showers will peak in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday, and for some skywatchers the show could be quite impressive.

The best seats are in Asia, but North American observers should be treated to an above average performance of the Leonid meteor shower, weather permitting. The trick for all observers is to head outside in the wee hours of the morning – between 1 a.m. and dawn – regardless where you live.

The Leonids put on a solid show every year, if skies are clear and moonlight does not interfere. This year the moon is near its new phase, and not a factor. For anyone in the Northern Hemisphere with dark skies, away from urban and suburban lighting, the show should be worth getting up early to see. Read the full story

Declaring “this is not your father’s moon,” NASA scientists said today that last month’s mission to punch a hole in the lunar surface found significant amounts of water in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole.

“The moon is alive,” declared Anthony Colaprete, the chief scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission.

According to Colaprete and other researchers, the mission measured about 25 gallons of water in the form of vapor and ice after punching a hole about 100 feet across in the surface of the moon. While that’s not enough to fill a bathtub, it could be evidence there is enough water at the poles for future astronauts to use to live off the land. And it’s far more than anyone expected following the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s, which pronounced the moon a dead, forbidding world.

“This is painting a surprising new picture of the moon,” said Greg Delory, a space scientist at UC Berkeley. Read the full story

Although no one noticed at the time, the Earth was almost hit by an asteroid last Friday.

The previously undiscovered asteroid came within 8,700 miles of Earth but astronomers noticed it only 15 hours before it made its closest approach.

Its orbit brought it 30 times nearer than the Moon, which is 250,000 miles away.

Read the full story

Vint Cerf, Google’s internet evangelist, has unveiled a new protocol intended to power an interplanetary internet.

The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites.

Cerf and his team were eventually forced to acknowledge (ACK?) that TCP simply couldn’t cut the mustard, with massive delay and data loss caused by celestial motion rendering TCP useless. Read the full story

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Nov. skywatch: Leonid meteor shower, Jupiter

November brings sky watchers a cornucopia of astronomical delights. Read the full story

By Dan Eden for viewzone.

They have always been there. People noticed them before. But no one could remember who made them — or why? Until just recently, no one even knew how many there were. Now they are everywhere — thousands — no, hundreds of thousands of them! And the story they tell is the most important story of humanity. But it’s one we might not be prepared to hear.

Something amazing has been discovered in an area of South Africa, about 150 miles inland, west of the port of Maputo. It is the remains of a huge metropolis that measures, in conservative estimates, about 1500 square miles. It’s part of an even larger community that is about 10,000 square miles and appears to have been constructed — are you ready — from 160,000 to 200,000 BCE!

The image [top of page] is a close-up view of just a few hundred meters of the landscape taken from google-earth. The region is somewhat remote and the “circles” have often been encountered by local farmers who assumed they were made by some indigenous people in the past. But, oddly, no one ever bothered to inquire about who could have made them or how old they were.

This changed when researcher and author, Michael Tellinger, teamed up with Johan Heine, a local fireman and pilot who had been looking at these ruins from his years flying over the region. Heine had the unique advantage to see the number and extent of these strange stone foundations and knew that their significance was not being appreciated.

“When Johan first introduced me to the ancient stone ruins of southern Africa, I had no idea of the incredible discoveries we would make in the year or two that followed. The photographs, artifacts and evidence we have accumulated points unquestionably to a lost and never-before-seen civilization that predates all others — not by just a few hundred years, or a few thousand years… but many thousands of years. These discoveries are so staggering that they will not be easily digested by the mainstream historical and archaeological fraternity, as we have already experienced. It will require a complete paradigm shift in how we view our human history. “ — Tellinger

Where it was found:

The area is significant for one striking thing — gold. “The thousands of ancient gold mines discovered over the past 500 years, points to a vanished civilization that lived and dug for gold in this part of the world for thousands of years,” says Tellinger. “And if this is in fact the cradle of humankind, we may be looking at the activities of the oldest civilization on Earth.”

Did gold play some role in the dense population that once lived here? The site is just about 150 miles from an excellent port where maritime trade could have helped to support such a large population. But remember — we’re talking almost 200,000 years ago!

The individual ruins [see below] mostly consist of stone circles. Most have been buried in the sand and are only observable by satellite or aircraft. Some have been exposed when the changing climate has blown the sand away, revealing the walls and foundations.

“I see myself as a fairly open-minded chap but I will admit that it took me well over a year for the penny to drop, and for me to realise that we are actually dealing with the oldest structures ever built by humans on Earth. The main reason for this is that we have been taught that nothing of significance has ever come from southern Africa. That the powerful civilizations all emerged in Sumeria and Egypt and other places. We are told that until the settlement of the BANTU people from the north, which was supposed to have started sometime in the 12th century AD, this part of the world was filled by hunter gatherers and so-called Bushmen, who did not make any major contributions in technology or civilization.” — Tellinger

A Rich and Diverse History

When explorers first encountered these ruins, they assumed that they were cattle corals made by nomadic tribes, like the Bantu people, as they moved south and settled the land from around the 13th century. There was no previous historical record of any older civilization capable of building such a densly populated community. Little effort was made to investigate the site because the scope of the ruins was not fully known.

Over the past 20 years, people like Cyril Hromnik, Richard Wade, Johan Heine and a handful of others have discovered that these stone structures are not what the seem to be. In fact these are now believed to be the remains of ancient temples and astronomical observatories of lost ancient civilizations that stretch back for many thousands of years.

These circular ruins are spread over a huge area. They can only truly be appreciated from the air or through modern sattelite images. Many of them have almost completely eroded or have been covered by the movement of soil from farming and the weather. Some have survived well enough to reveal their great size [see above] with some original walls standing almost 5 feet high and over a meter wide in places.

Looking at the entire metropolis, it becomes obvious that this was a well planned community, developed by a highly evolved civilization. The number of ancient gold mines suggests the reason for the community being in this location. We find roads — some extending a hundred miles — that connected the community and terraced agriculture, closely resembling those found in the Inca settlements in Peru.

But one question begs for an answer — how could this be achieved by humans 200,000 years ago?

How the Site was dated

Once the ruins were examined, the researchers were anxious to place the lost civilization in a historical perspective. The rocks were covered with a patina that looked very old but there were no items sufficient for carbon-14 dating. It was then that a chance discovery revealed the age of the site, and sent a chill down the spine of archaeologists and historians!

Dating the site:

Finding the remains of a large community, with as many as 200,000 people living and working together, was a major discovery in itself. But dating the site was a problem. The heavy patina on the rock walls suggested the structures were extremely old, but the science of dating patina is just being developed and is still controversial. Carbon-14 dating of such things as burnt wood introduces the possibility that the specimens could be from recent grass fires which are common in the area. The breakthrough came quite unexpectedly. As Tellinger describes it:

“Johan Heine discovered Adam’s Calendar in 2003, quite by accident. He was on route to find one of his pilots who crashed his plane on the edge of the cliff. Next to the crash site Johan noticed a very strange arrangement of large stones sticking out of the ground. While rescuing the injured pilot from about 20 metres down the side of the cliff, Johan walked over to the monoliths and immediately realised that they were aligned to the cardinal points of Earth — north, south, east and west. There were at least 3 monoliths aligned towards the sunrise, but on the west side of the aligned monoliths there was a mysterious hole in the ground — something was missing.After weeks and months of measuring and observations, Johan concluded that it was perfectly aligned with the rise and fall of the Sun. He determined the solstices and the equinoxes. But the mysterious hole in the ground remained a big puzzle. One day, while contemplating the reason for the hole, the local horse trail expert, Christo, came riding by. He quickly explained to Johan that there was a strange shaped stone which had been removed from the spot some time ago. Apparently it stood somewhere near the entrance to the nature reserve.

After an extensive search, Johan found the anthropomorphic (humanoid shape) stone. It was intact and proudly placed with a plaque stuck to it. It had been used by the Blue Swallow foundation to commemorate the opening of the Blue Swallow reserve in 1994. The irony is that it was removed from the most important ancient site found to date and mysteriously returned to the reserve — for slightly different reasons.

The exact location of the calendar is listed on www.makomati.com. The first calculations of the age of the calendar were made based on the rise of Orion, a constellation known for its three bright stars forming the “belt” of the mythical hunter.

The Earth wobbles on its axis and so the stars and constellations change their angle of presentation in the night sky on a cyclical basis. This rotation, called the precession completes a cycle about every 26,000 years. By determining when the three stars of Orion’s belt were positioned flat (horizontal) against the horizon, we can estimate the time when the three stones in the calendar were in alignment with these conspicuous stars.

The first rough calculation was at least 25,000 years ago. But new and more precise measurements kept increasing the age. The next calculation was presented by a master archaeoastronomer who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of ridicule by the academic fraternity. His calculation was also based on the rise of Orion and suggested an age of at least 75,000 years. The most recent and most acurate calculation, done in June 2009, suggests an age of at least 160,000 years, based on the rise of Orion — flat on the horizon — but also on the erosion of dolerite stones found at the site.

Some pieces of the marker stones had been broken off and sat on the ground, exposed to natural erosion. When the pieces were put back together about 3 cm of stone had already been worn away. These calculation helped assess the age of the site by calculating the erosion rate of the dolerite.

Who made the metropolis? Why?

It would seem that humans have always valued gold. It is even mentioned in the Bible, describing the Garden of Eden’s rivers:Genesis 2:11 — The name of the first [river] is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.

South Africa is known as the largest gold producing country of the world. The largest gold producing area of the world is Witwatersrand, the same region where the ancient metropolis is found. In fact nearby Johannesburg, one of the best known cities of South Africa, is also named “Egoli” which means the city of gold.

It seems highly probable that the ancient metropolis was established because of its proximity to the largest supply of gold on the planet. But why would ancient people work so hard to mine gold? You can’t eat it. It’s too soft to use for tool making. It isn’t really useful for anything except ornaments and its physical beauty is on a par with other metals like copper or silver. Exactly why was gold so important to early homo sapiens?

To explore the answer we need to look at the period of history in question — 160,000 to 200,000 years BCE — and learn what was happening on planet Earth.

What were humans like 160,000 years ago?Modern humans, homo sapiens, can trace our ancestry back through time to a point where our species evolved from other, more primitive, hominids. Scientists do not understand why this new type of human suddenly appeared, or how the change happened, but we can trace our genes back to a single female that is known as “Mitochondrial Eve”.

Mitochondrial Eve (mt-mrca) [Right: An artist's rendition] is the name given by researchers to the woman who is defined as the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for all currently living humans. Passed down from mother to offspring, all mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in every living person is derived from this one female individual. Mitochondrial Eve is the female counterpart of Y-chromosomal Adam, the patrilineal most recent common ancestor, although they lived at different times.

Mitochondrial Eve is believed to have lived between 150,000 to 250,000 years BP, probably in East Africa, in the region of Tanzania and areas to the immediate south and west. Scientists speculate that she lived in a population of between perhaps 4000 to 5000 females capable of producing offspring at any given time. If other females had offspring with the evolutionary changes to their DNA we have no record of their survival. It appears that we are all descendants of this one human female.

Mitochondrial Eve would have been roughly contemporary with humans whose fossils have been found in Ethiopia near the Omo River and at Hertho. Mitochondrial Eve lived significantly earlier than the out of Africa migration which might have occurred some 60,000 to 95,000 years ago.

[right] The region in Africa where one can find the greatest level of mitochondrial diversity (green) and the region anthropologists postulated the most ancient division in the human population began to occur (light brown). The ancient metropolis in located in this latter (brown) region which also corresponds to the estimated age when the genetic changes suddenly happened.

Could this be a coincidence?

Ancient Sumerian history describes the ancient metropolis and its inhabitants!I’ll be honest with you. This next part of the story is difficult to write. It’s so shocking that the average person will not want to believe it. If you are like me, you’ll want to do the research yourself, then allow some time for the facts to settle in your mind.

We are often made to believe that the Egyptians — the Pharoahs and pyramids — are where our known history begins. The oldest dynasties go back some 3200 years BP. That’s a long time ago. But the Sumerian civilization, in what is now Iraq, is much older. What’s more, we have translated many of their history tablets, written in cuneiform and earlier scripts so we know a lot about their history and legends.

The seal image [above] depicts the legend of the “Great Flood” which consumed mankind. Many Sumerian legends are strikingly similar to Genesis. Like Genesis, the Sumerian legend, Atrahasis, tells the story of the creation of modern humans — not by a loving God — but by beings from another planet who needed “slave workers” to help them mine gold on their extra-planetary expedition!

Read More:

http://www.viewzone.com/adamscalendar33.html