Tag: science

Earth’s core has slowed so much it’s moving backward, scientists confirm. Here’s what it could mean

Deep inside Earth is a solid metal ball that rotates independently of our spinning planet, like a top whirling around inside a bigger top, shrouded in mystery.

This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves — its rotation speed and direction — has been at the center of a decades-long debate. A growing body of evidence suggests the core’s spin has changed dramatically in recent years, but scientists have remained divided over what exactly is happening — and what it means.

Part of the trouble is that Earth’s deep interior is impossible to observe or sample directly. Seismologists have gleaned information about the inner core’s motion by examining how waves from large earthquakes that ping this area behave. Variations between waves of similar strengths that passed through the core at different times enabled scientists to measure changes in the inner core’s position and calculate its spin.

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GAME-CHANGING CERN EXPERIMENTS OFFER PHYSICISTS UNPRECEDENTED NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE UNIVERSE’S MYSTERIES

Significant recent advancements spearheaded with support from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are revealing deeper insights into the fundamental nature of our universe.

The ongoing experiments at CERN aim to explore the smallest building blocks of matter and the forces governing them. Unveiling the dynamics of these forces is allowing scientists to inch toward a better fundamental understanding of the universe’s origins, structure, and behavior.

An intergovernmental organization, CERN is home to the largest and most advanced particle physics laboratory found anywhere in the world. It also houses the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometer ring comprised of superconducting magnets that researchers working at the facility use to boost the energy of particles, enabling experiments that cannot be achieved anywhere else on Earth and which reveal clues about some of the most intriguing questions physicists have about the nature of matter and energy.

In recent weeks, an ongoing series of achievements made possible by CERN has marked significant strides toward resolving these lingering questions about the cosmos. In April, researchers working at the facility announced a new milestone in measuring the electroweak mixing angle, in new findings that will further refine scientists’ understanding of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

The achievement, part of an ongoing collaboration with researchers from the University of Rochester and global members of the particle physics community, will help to shed light on the conditions that immediately followed the explosive birth of our universe and shed new insights into the lingering mysteries of particle physics.

Led by University of Rochester experimental particle physicist Arie Bodek, the work was carried out with support from Europe’s premier particle physics laboratory and the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN facility and was part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration.

A key element of the Standard Model, the electroweak mixing angle, also called the Weinberg angle, is used by physicists to describe the relative strength of the electromagnetic and weak forces, as well as how they combine to form the electroweak interaction. Measuring this is helpful in terms of understanding the universe’s fundamental forces and how they work together at extremely small scales, which scientists hope will offer deeper insights into the properties of matter and energy.

Such insights could greatly improve our understanding of the Standard Model, which describes our current best understanding of particle interactions and predicts numerous phenomena in physics and astronomy.

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Does Weed Cause Strokes and Heart Attacks?

Thirty years ago, the sociologist Craig Reinarman observed that there’s something “woven into the very fabric of American culture” that makes us susceptible to believing that a “chemical boogeyman” is to blame for “society’s ills.” He added that every moral panic about drugs since the 19th century has been fueled by “media magnification” in which the danger of a particular substance is dramatized and distorted.

Now that recreational marijuana is legal in about half of U.S. states, and more Americans are consuming weed than ever before, the chemical bogeyman is back, and he’s armed with a new paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association by researchers from Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco.

This study, which was amplified in The New York Times and The Washington Post, commits so many egregious statistical errors that it’s a poster child for junk science. The paper would be comical if it didn’t offer bad medical advice. The researchers did almost everything wrong.

Which is not to say that the authors committed fraud or misconduct. In fact, they did exactly what Ph.D. students are taught to do, what journal editors look for, what referees approve, what universities reward, and what granting agencies fund. Because the paper uses conventional methods to arrive at false conclusions, it speaks to the profound crisis in academic research.

We’ve forgotten that the point of scientific studies isn’t seeking the approval of institutions. It’s the pursuit of truth.

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WARP THEORISTS SAY WE’VE ENTERED AN EXOTIC PROPULSION SPACE RACE TO BUILD THE WORLD’S FIRST WORKING WARP DRIVE

An international team of physicists behind several revolutionary warp drive concepts, including the first to require no exotic matter, says that recent unprecedented breakthroughs in physics and propulsion have launched the world powers into a Cold War-style, 21st-century space race to build the world’s first working warp drive.

“We have a space race brewing,” said Gianni Martie, the founder of the Applied Physics (AP) think tank and co-author on a pair of forthcoming warp drive research papers, in an email to The Debrief. “There’s still a ton to discover and invent, but we have the next steps now, which we didn’t have before.”

Comprised of over 30 physicists and scientists in related disciplines, the AP team has gained a sizeable reputation in the warp theory community due to their highly regarded, peer-reviewed papers on numerous warp drive concepts. One of those concepts recently reported by The Debrief has gained significant attention, inspiring many researchers and scientists to declare the team’s “constant velocity warp drive model” as the first practical, viable warp drive concept ever proposed.

The AP team has also created the Warp Factory, a set of development and simulation tools that allow fellow researchers in this nascent field to evaluate the physics of their own models, which can greatly improve the model’s quality and viability.

In an effort to better understand the history of warp theory, the scientific viability of the most current warp drive concepts, what the media always gets wrong about this category of research, and what the next steps in this potential space race might look like, The Debrief reached out to the team at Applied Physics, resulting in an exchange that suggests the futuristic science familiar to viewers of Star Trek may be closer than we think.

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Out of Sight, ‘Dark Fungi’ Run the World from the Shadows

If you want to discover a hidden world of new life-forms, you don’t have to scour dark caves or slog through remote rainforests. Just look under your feet. When then-graduate student Anna Rosling went to northern Sweden to map the distribution of a particular root-loving fungus, she found something much more intriguing: Many of her root samples contained traces of DNA from unknown species. Weirder still, she never encountered a complete organism. When the field season ended, she had only isolated bits of raw genetic material. The fragments clearly belonged to the fungal kingdom, but they revealed little else. “I got obsessed,” recalls Rosling, now a professor of evolutionary biology at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Since then mycologists have realized that such phantoms are everywhere. Point to a patch of dirt, a body of water, even the air you’re breathing, and odds are that it is teeming with mushrooms, molds and yeasts (or their spores) that no one has ever seen. In ocean trenches, Tibetan glaciers and all habitats between, researchers are routinely detecting DNA from obscure fungi. By sequencing the snippets, they can tell they’re dealing with new species, thousands of them, that are genetically distinct from any known to science. They just can’t match that DNA to tangible organisms growing out in the world.

These slippery beings are so widespread that scientists are calling them “dark fungi.” It’s a comparison to the equally elusive dark matter and dark energy that make up 95 percent of our universe and exert tremendous influence on, well, everything. Like those invisible entities, dark fungi are hidden movers and shakers. Scientists are convinced they perform the same vital functions as known fungi, directing the flow of energy through ecosystems as they break down organic matter and recycle nutrients. Dark fungi are prime examples of what biologist E. O. Wilson called “the little things that run the world.” But their cryptic lifestyle has made it a maddening challenge for scientists trying to show how exactly they run it.

Taxonomists have described just 150,000 of the millions of fungi predicted by global biodiversity estimates, and recent discoveries suggest a huge portion of what’s left may be off-limits to routine biological investigation. “We have not even started to scratch the surface,” says Henrik Nilsson, a mycologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “I’d be willing to bet that the clear majority will be dark.” Given the central place of fungi in the web of life that sustains us, experts argue we should get a better grasp on them.

Everything we know about dark fungi comes from environmental DNA, or eDNA. That term refers to strings of base pairs—the building blocks of DNA that are constantly sloughing off all living things. Researchers can analyze these free-floating bits of double helix to determine which species have been hanging around an area without seeing them. To identify fungi specifically, scientists look to a handy genetic marker called the internal transcribed spacer (ITS), which consists of several hundred base pairs that evolve quickly and thus help distinguish between species. Although the ITS is only a tiny fraction of the genome, researchers can single it out and amplify it with the same polymerase chain reaction technology used in COVID lab tests. If an ITS sequence is different enough from all others in genetic databases, it is thought to represent a new species, whether scientists lay eyes on its physical form or not.

At the turn of the millennium, eDNA sequencing burst onto the scene as a new way to discover species. Scientists suddenly found themselves awash in a “flood of data,” as David Hibbett, a mycologist at Clark University, and his colleagues wrote in 2009. That influx exposed the sheer vastness of dark fungi. Today, Hibbett says, “our understanding of the richness of fungal diversity is really being enlarged with these dark organisms.”

Every year researchers stumble on some 2,000 new fungi via the standard route, spotting them in nature or under a microscope. Yet a single eDNA study can register 10 times more dark fungi than that. As often as not, the fragments are among the most abundant DNA samples in their ecosystem. “I don’t think I ever saw an environmental sequencing study with less than 30 percent unknowns,” Nilsson says, and the ratio is typically much higher. Sometimes only a minority of DNA sequences can be classified at any meaningful taxonomic level, narrowing them from a kingdom (in this case, fungi) to a phylum and then to a class, and so on down to a species.

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They Are Using Lab-Grown Human Brains Called “Organoids” To Run Computers

When I first started researching this, I could hardly believe that it was true. A company in Switzerland known as “Final Spark” has constructed a bizarre hybrid biocomputer that combines lab-grown miniature human brains with conventional electronic circuits.  This approach saves an extraordinary amount of energy compared to normal computers, but there is a big problem.  The lab-grown miniature human brains keep wearing out and dying, and so scientists have to keep growing new ones to replace them. 

Stem cells that are derived from human skin tissue are used to create the 16 spherical brain “organoids” that the system depends upon.  I realize that this sounds like something straight out of a really bad science fiction movie, but it is actually happening.

Scientists at Final Spark are calling their hybrid computer “the Neuroplatform”, and it is being reported that it only uses “a fraction of the energy required to power a traditional set up”…

Swiss tech startup FinalSpark is now selling access to biocomputers that combine up to four tiny lab-grown human brains with silicon chips.

This new bioprocessing platform, called the Neuroplatform, uses small versions of human brains to do computer work instead of silicon chips. The company says it can fit 16 of these mini-brains onto the Neuroplatform and use a fraction of the energy required to power a traditional set up.

The platform, currently adopted by nine institutions, integrates hardware, software and biology to construct a processing system that is energy-efficient and high-performing.

This “breakthrough” is being hailed as a way to save a gigantic amount of energy.

But what about the lab-grown human brains that are being enslaved to run the Neuroplatform?

Each of the 16 mini-brains is made up of approximately 10,000 living neurons, and they are kept alive by a “microfluidics system that supplies water and nutrients for the cells”…

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CERN EXPERIMENT REVEALS “SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE” PERSISTS BETWEEN TOP QUARKS

Quantum entanglement in top quarks has been demonstrated, according to physicists at CERN who say the discovery offers new insights into the behavior of fundamental particles and their interactions at distances that cannot be attained by light-speed communication.

The research, led by University of Rochester professor Regina Demina, extends the phenomenon known as “spooky action at a distance” to the heaviest particles recognized by physicists and offers important new insights into high-energy quantum mechanics.

Initially discovered almost three decades ago, top quarks are the most massive elementary particles that have been observed. The mass of these unique particles originates from their coupling to the Higgs boson, the famous particle predicted in theory regarding the unification of the weak and electromagnetic interactions. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, this coupling is the largest that occurs at the scale of the weak interactions and those above it.

In the past, quantum entanglement has been observed in stable particles, including electrons and photons. In their new research, Demina and her team demonstrate entanglement between unstable top quarks and their antimatter counterparts, revealing spin correlations that occur over distances that extend beyond the transfer of information at light speed.

The findings present new challenges to existing models and expand our understanding of particle behavior at extreme energies. 

The experiment was conducted at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) as part of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration. CERN is home to the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a device that propels high-energy particles at speeds nearing those of light across a 17-mile underground track.

Given the amount of energy required for the production of top quarks, such processes can only be achieved at facilities like CERN. The results of Demina’s recent study could help to shed some light on how long entanglement persists, as well as whether it can be extended to “daughter” particles or decay products. The research also may help determine whether entanglement between particles can be broken.

Presently, it is believed that the universe was in an entangled state following its initial fast expansion stage. The revelation of entanglement in top quarks may help scientists like Demina better understand what factors may have contributed to the quantum connection in our world becoming diminished over time, ultimately leading to the state in which our reality exists today.

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Scientist wants to implant prisoners with ‘memories’ of their crimes that show the victim’s perspective

A scientist has unveiled a concept for a prison of the future that he has claimed would fast-track a criminal’s release to minutes, instead of years or decades.

Called Cognify, the design would implant synthetic memories of a person’s crime into their brain, but showing their victim’s perspective. 

The system could feature a VR-like device that displays AI-generated footage of the offence, coupled with a brain implant that induces emotional states like remorse or regret – feelings some individuals may not produce on their own.

The concept, developed by Hashem Al-Ghaili, would ensure the long-term effects of the therapy session by making the memories permanent.

There are more than 1.7 million people currently incarcerated in the US.

While officials have long said prison deters offenders from future crimes, more than 100 studies in 2021 found that it does not prevent people from reoffending.

With this in mind, Al-Ghaili is looking towards the future with a prison he claims will help criminals learn from their past.

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Group of scientists and researchers seeks access to Vatican archives on the UFO phenomenon

A group of scientists and researchers are seeking access to the Vatican’s Apostolic Archives to uncover information about UFOs and the paranormal, believing there may be traces among the 50 miles of shelves that contain everything from handwritten papal notes to presidential missives.

The decades-long effort gained momentum in 2023 following congressional testimony by former U.S. intelligence official David Grusch alleging the Vatican’s involvement in an international cover-up of alien secrets.

Grusch claimed that Pope Pius XII “back-channeled” information to the United States about a crashed UFO recovered by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

“I don’t know where [Grusch] got this information,” Marco Grilli, the mayor’s secretary for archives, told Catholic News Service on June 11.

Grilli said the archives received emails asking about the veracity of Grusch’s claims, but compared them to requests to read personal letters from Pontius Pilate or the Virgin Mary.

“You can laugh at that,” he said.

However, discoveries like those reported in Diana Walsh Pasulka’s 2019 book “American Cosmic” suggest to UFO enthusiasts that the archives contain more than meets the eye.

Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, said the archives are full of reports of paranormal events, such as nuns witnessing orbs entering their cells, flying houses and other aerial phenomena.

She argues that these events can be better understood as UFO-type occurrences rather than miracles as Catholics traditionally understand them.

“The historical record is full of these types of events,” she told CNS on May 30; “people in the Vatican don’t even know where to look; It’s in their basements.”

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Experimental biosynthetic food to replace natural food is happening, now!

A comprehensive presentation by Kate Mason at the recent 100-year Biodynamic Conference in Australia cast light on the true extent of biotechnology experimentation currently underway and also on the techniques being used to deceive the public about its intent and scope.

For one hour at a staccato pace, Mason flashed document after document on the screen detailing the involvement of national and international government and corporate interests determined to alter the nature and content of our food supply. If you can manage it, it is a truly frightening watch. It spoke volumes about the need for the International Genetic Charter.

Wildly imaginative biotech projects are being sold to governments by corporations under the cloak of a glossy facade of virtue signalling using deceptive buzzwords like sustainable development, regenerative agriculture, increased resilience, climate-smart mitigation, crop surveillance, strategic development, the food and agribusiness green revolution, transforming and future-proofing the food system, zero hunger, innovation, the fourth industrial revolution, increasing consistency, nurturing the planet and feeding the world. Whew!!!

Biosynthetic food products are even being falsely promoted as more nutritious than organic food. None of this is backed by sound science. Although most, if not all, of these projects are doomed to fail and will ultimately disappear off the menu, along the way our taxes are being diverted to pay the handsome salaries of biotechnology schemers hungry for profit and fame and boost corporate profits. More importantly, the experimentation will leave a toxic legacy of persistent genetic pollution which will continue to undermine plant health and human longevity through the generations.

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