A group has been formed to study and promote a space-based sunshade to help fend off global climate change.
The idea has been discussed for years, but the Planetary Sunshade Foundation is cranking out papers that support the concept and spotlight the practicality of the approach.
A planetary sunshade, the Foundation advises, could be the best solution for solar radiation management and should be viewed as a key part of global efforts to counter ongoing climate change on Earth.
While lawmakers in Congress are working to force more transparency on UAPs, more commonly called UFOs, some of the world’s top scientists say they aren’t going to wait for the government to disclose what it knows.
A new group wants to study the phenomenon using hard data and begin outlining pathways forward to research and harness the nonhuman technology they fervently believe exists.
NewsNation has spoken to many of the members before. Those involved in the project include Christopher Mellon, a former Defense Department official; Dr. Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor who claims to have found proof of nonhuman technology at the bottom of the ocean; Leslie Kean, a journalist who helped break the David Grusch story; Grusch’s attorney Chuck McCullough, who served as inspector general for the intelligence community under the Obama administration and former Navy scientist Tom Gallaudet.
The leader of the group is Dr. Garry Nolan, a world-renowned immunologist, professor of pathology at Stanford and biotech entrepreneur who believes there is something out there and it’s not human.
“The circumstantial evidence basically has me convinced that it’s well worth my time to spend time looking at it,” he said.
Nolan’s breakthrough biotechnology gene therapy discoveries around cancer treatment are used around the world. He’s also the head of The Sol Foundation, which just announced a new initiative for UFO research and policy.
The intent behind Sol is to be a serious, well-funded, cutting-edge group performing academic research into UAPs. Nolan said the first step is identifying what questions need to be asked.
“Once we’ve put all of the data into the right categories, we say what of this meets the academic standards and criteria of excellence?” Nolan said.
Military pilots who testified before Congress said they have felt discouraged from reporting unexplained occurrences, be they alien or otherwise. Nolan says the same stigma exists in the scientific community.
“There’s plenty of people who I talk to behind the scenes, who are mainstream academics. They just don’t want to talk about it yet because they feel the stigma is still too high,” Nolan said.
Nolan said he believes researchers, not government, will have to spearhead the effort to explain UFOs in ways all of us can understand.
“There’s something they’re trying to hide,” Nolan said. “You have the people from within the government who’ve said that it’s real.”
Sarah Stewart Johnson was a college sophomore when she first stood atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano. Its dried lava surface was so different from the eroded, tree-draped mountains of her home state of Kentucky. Johnson wandered away from the other young researchers she was with and toward a distant ridge of the 13,800-foot summit. Looking down, she turned over a rock with the toe of her boot. To her surprise, a tiny fern lived underneath it, having sprouted from ash and cinder cones. “It felt like it stood for all of us, huddled under that rock, existing against the odds,” Johnson says.
Her true epiphany, though, wasn’t about the hardiness of life on Earth or the hardships of being human: It was about aliens. Even if a landscape seemed strange and harsh from a human perspective, other kinds of life might find it quite comfortable. The thought opened up the cosmic real estate, and the variety of life, she imagined might be beyond Earth’s atmosphere. “It was on that trip that the idea of looking for life in the universe began to make sense to me,” Johnson says.
Later, Johnson became a professional at looking. As an astronomy postdoc at Harvard University in the late 2000s and early 2010s she investigated how astronomers might use genetic sequencing—detecting and identifying DNA and RNA—to find evidence of aliens. Johnson found the work exciting (the future alien genome project!), but it also made her wonder: What if extraterrestrial life didn’t have DNA or RNA or other nucleic acids? What if their cells got instructions in some other biochemical way?
As an outlet for heretical thoughts like this, Johnson started writing in a style too lyrical and philosophical for scientific journals. Her typed musings would later turn into the 2020 popular science book The Sirens of Mars. Inside its pages, she probed the idea that other planets were truly other, and so their inhabitants might be very different, at a fundamental and chemical level, from anything on this world. “Even places that seem familiar—like Mars, a place that we think we know intimately—can completely throw us for a loop,” she says. “What if that’s the case for life?”
If Johnson’s musings are correct, the current focus of the hunt for aliens—searching for life as we know it—might not work for finding biology in the beyond. “There’s this old maxim that if you lose your keys at night, the first place you look is under the lamppost,” says Johnson, who is now an associate professor at Georgetown University. If you want to find life, look first at the only way you know life can exist: in places kind of like Earth, with chemistry kind of like Earthlings’.
Much of astrobiology research involves searching for chemical “biosignatures”—molecules or combinations of molecules that could indicate the presence of life. But because scientists can’t reliably say that ET life should look, chemically, like Earth life, seeking those signatures could mean we miss beings that might be staring us in the face. “How do we move beyond that?” Johnson asks. “How do we contend with the truly alien?” Scientific methods, she thought, should be more open to varieties of life based on varied biochemistry: life as we don’t know it. Or, in a new term coined here, “LAWDKI.”
Now Johnson is getting a chance to figure out how, exactly, to contend with that unknown kind of life, as the principal investigator of a new NASA-funded initiative called the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures (LAB). LAB’s research doesn’t count on ET having specific biochemistry at all, so it doesn’t look for specific biosignatures. LAB aims to find more fundamental markers of biology, such as evidence of complexity—intricately arranged molecules that are unlikely to assemble themselves without some kind of biological forcing—and disequilibrium, such as unexpected concentrations of molecules on other planets or moons. These are proxies for life as no one knows it.
Researchers in Australia are developing the world’s first supercomputer capable of simulating networks at a scale comparable to the human brain, which they say will be complete by next year.
The remarkable supercomputer, which its creators call DeepSouth, is a neuromorphic system designed to be capable of simulating the efficiency of biological processes, achieved with hardware that emulates large networks of spiking neurons at an astounding 228 trillion synaptic operations each second.
The human brain is remarkable for its efficiency. Capable of processing the equivalent of one billion-billion mathematical operations per second, known as an exaflop, each second while only using 20 watts of power, researchers have long hoped to be able to replicate the way our brains process information.
Under development by a research team at Western Sydney University, Australia, the astounding 228 trillion synaptic operations per second that DeepSouth is expected to be capable of will not only rival the capabilities of the human brain, but also pave the way toward the future creation of synthetic brains that may exceed the remarkable capabilities ours possess.
In 2001, Gina Arata was in her final semester of college, planning to apply to law school, when she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. The injury so compromised her ability to focus she struggled in a job sorting mail.
“I couldn’t remember anything,” said Arata, who lives in Modesto with her parents. “My left foot dropped, so I’d trip over things all the time. I was always in car accidents. And I had no filter—I’d get pissed off really easily.”
Her parents learned about research being conducted at Stanford Medicine and reached out; Arata was accepted as a participant. In 2018, physicians surgically implanted a device deep inside her brain, then carefully calibrated the device’s electrical activity to stimulate the networks the injury had subdued. The results of the clinical trial were published Dec. 4 in Nature Medicine.
She noticed the difference immediately. When she was asked to list items in the produce aisle of a grocery store, she could rattle off fruits and vegetables. Then a researcher turned the device off, and she couldn’t name any.
“Since the implant I haven’t had any speeding tickets,” Arata said. “I don’t trip anymore. I can remember how much money is in my bank account. I wasn’t able to read, but after the implant I bought a book, ‘Where the Crawdads Sing,’ and loved it and remembered it. And I don’t have that quick temper.”
For Arata and four others, the experimental deep-brain-stimulation device restored, to different degrees, the cognitive abilities they had lost to brain injuries years before. The new technique, developed by Stanford Medicine researchers and collaborators from other institutions, is the first to show promise against the long-lasting impairments from moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries.
It’s one of the most beautiful objects in our solar system, a shimmering sphere of pure white ice, hiding a liquid ocean within.
But despite looking nothing like our planet, Enceladus, Saturn‘s sixth-largest moon, may have something in common with Earth – the presence of life.
Scientists have discovered organic molecules in the moon’s plumes that could be supporting ‘communities’ of tiny microbes.
Researchers think these compounds could support their metabolisms or the formation of amino acids.
Experts already know that there are phosphates, methane, hydrogen and carbon dioxide on Enceladus – all potential signs of life as well.
Whether it’s eating less meat or cycling instead of driving, humans can do many things to help prevent climate change.
Unfortunately, breathing less isn’t one of them.
That might be a problem, as a new study claims the gases in air exhaled from human lungs is fueling global warming.
Methane and nitrous oxide in the air we exhale makes up to 0.1 per cent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say.
And that’s not even accounting for the gas we release from burps and farts, or emissions that come from our skin without us noticing.
The new study was led by Dr Nicholas Cowan, an atmospheric physicist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh.
‘Exhaled human breath can contain small, elevated concentrations of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), both of which contribute to global warming,’ Dr Cowan and colleagues say.
‘We would urge caution in the assumption that emissions from humans are negligible.’
As most of us remember from science classes at school, humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.
Exploring faster-than-light (FTL) communication, a concept rooted in science fiction has intrigued scientists and engineers for years. The proverbial little brother to FTL travel, where a spacecraft is sent at warp to a distant location, FTL communication may be a promising first step, and one theorist is shifting focus to “Hyperwaves,” a method of sending messages across vast distances faster than the speed of light.
The recent paper, partially funded by the British government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Ministry of Defence, uploaded to arXiv, “Hyperwave: Hyper-Fast Communication within General Relativity,” by Dr. Lorenzo Pieri, offers a novel approach to this challenge. It suggests using “hypertubes” – structures that can manage the distribution and configuration of negative energy – to accelerate and decelerate warp bubbles, facilitating FTL communication.
Scientists may be closing in on solving the mystery of dark matter, a hypothetical, nonluminous material that is believed to comprise a large majority of the mass in our universe, in new research that may link it to the existence of a hypothetical subatomic particle.
Among the primary questions scientists have about dark matter is what it could be made of. However, new research by an international team of astrophysicists proposes a possible candidate, meaning that this elusive cosmic material might be detectable in the form of a glow emanating from certain kinds of stars.
The research, conducted by astrophysicists at the universities of Amsterdam and Princeton, suggests that dark matter, which presently is believed to constitute around 85% of the matter in the universe, could be composed of hypothetical particles known as axions.
First proposed in the 1970s to resolve an unrelated problem involving neutrons, axions are of interest to dark matter researchers because if they possess a low mass within a certain range, they could be good candidates in the search for dark matter. Not only that, but they might help to potentially explain how and why dark matter has remained so elusive.
Axions are thought to weakly interact with known particles, which, like dark matter, makes them difficult to detect. That isn’t to say that scientists don’t have a good idea about where to look, since according to the recent findings, axions may be able to be converted into light in the presence of strong electromagnetic fields, thereby illuminating these invisible universal mysteries.
If this is correct, one of the best places to begin any search for axions—and potentially also for dark matter—is to look where the strongest magnetic fields in the universe are known to occur.
Astrophysicists are aware that regions around rotating neutron stars, otherwise known as pulsars, are prime candidates for the search. Possessing a mass comparable to our Sun, but packed into a space close to 100,000 times smaller, pulsars spin very rapidy and produce bright radio emissions along their rotational axis, thereby generating a powerful electromagnetic field.
If axions exist, then the powerful magnetic fields of pulsars make them the perfect place to search for them.
In their recent research, the international team of physicists and astronomers developed a theoretical framework that helped them understand how axions might be produced in these stellar regions, as well as how they might be converted into radio waves emitted by the rotation of pulsars.
Using computer simulations, the team was able to successfully model axion production around pulsars and predict the resulting additional radio signal that would be likely to indicate the presence of the otherwise invisible axions.
With this information, the team then used observations from 27 nearby pulsars, comparing their models to these real-life sources of cosmic radio waves. Despite their best attempts, however, the team was unable to find any conclusive evidence yet that points to the existence of the elusive axions.
A robot chemist just teamed up with an AI brain to create a trove of new materials.
Two collaborative studies from Google DeepMind and the University of California, Berkeley, describe a system that predicts the properties of new materials—including those potentially useful in batteries and solar cells—and produces them with a robotic arm.
We take everyday materials for granted: plastic cups for a holiday feast, components in our smartphones, or synthetic fibers in jackets that keep us warm when chilly winds strike.
Scientists have painstakingly discovered roughly 20,000 different types of materials that let us build anything from computer chips to puffy coats and airplane wings. Tens of thousands more potentially useful materials are in the works. Yet we’ve only scratched the surface.
The Berkeley team developed a chef-like robot that mixes and heats ingredients, automatically transforming recipes into materials. As a “taste test,” the system, dubbed the A-Lab, analyzes the chemical properties of each final product to see if it hits the mark.
Meanwhile, DeepMind’s AI dreamed up myriad recipes for the A-Lab chef to cook. It’s a hefty list. Using a popular machine learning strategy, the AI found two million chemical structures and 380,000 new stable materials—many counter to human intuition. The work is an “order-of-magnitude” expansion on the materials that we currently know, the authors wrote.
Using DeepMind’s cookbook, A-Lab ran for 17 days and synthesized 41 out of 58 target chemicals—a win that would’ve taken months, if not years, of traditional experiments.
Together, the collaboration could launch a new era of materials science. “It’s very impressive,” said Dr. Andrew Rosen at Princeton University, who was not involved in the work.
Hellbound and Down 
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