Tag: science

Married mom who vanished last year could be tied to missing and dead US scientists: report

A married mom who vanished last year may be tied to a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances of US scientists and military officials with access to potentially sensitive information, according to a report.

Melissa Casias, who worked with her husband as an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory [LANL] — famous for developing nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project — has not been seen since she dropped lunch off for her daughter in New Mexico last summer.

She is one of four high-clearance people who have died or gone missing since June 2025 with connections to UFO-linked retired Air Force Gen. William McCasland, who vanished last month, according to the Daily Mail.

Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told the Mail he is now worried that she is part of an alarming pattern, as her work as an assistant at LANL may have made her a target for kidnapping.

“In a classified lab, or just a high clearance lab, they would basically be in the know on what’s going on,” Swecker, who spent 24 years with the agency, said. “And it wouldn’t be the first time their administrative assistant has been targeted.”

The FBI “can’t have these examined in isolation and compartmentalize them as individual missing person cases,” he added.

Casias and her husband both worked at LANL in New Mexico. She was last seen on camera on June 25, 2025 walking alone on a highway without her wallet, phone or keys, after telling family members she would be working from home, Dateline reported.

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What happens when you clone a mouse for 58 generations?

In 2005, a husband-and-wife team at Japan’s RIKEN institute ran an experiment with a mouse: clone it, then clone the clone, then clone that clone, and keep going. Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama and Dr. Sayaka Wakayama kept it up for 20 years — through lab moves, a 2011 earthquake, and the pandemic — requiring 30,947 individual cloning attempts to produce 58 successive generations, as summarized by Metacelsus.

Things went smoothly for a while. An interim report in 2013 showed 25 healthy generations with no decline in cloning efficiency or mouse health. But mutations were quietly accumulating. By generation 57, the mice carried over 3,400 single-base DNA changes compared to the original — a mutation rate 3.1 times higher than natural reproduction in the same mouse strain. Sexually reproducing animals can shake off harmful mutations through recombination, where chromosomes shuffle and bad copies get discarded. Clones have no such mechanism, so every error sticks.

The bigger problems were structural. Somewhere between generations 25 and 45, an entire X chromosome vanished and never came back. Chromosomal deletions, inversions, and translocations piled up alongside the point mutations. By generation 58, the cells simply wouldn’t produce viable clones anymore, and the project ended. The mice that were born at every stage lived normal lifespans — the process didn’t produce sickly animals, just increasingly fragile DNA that eventually couldn’t survive the cloning procedure itself.

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Shock New Evidence Showing No Link Between CO2 and Temperature Over Last Three Million Years Stumps Net Zero Activists

The climate science world (‘settled’ division) is in shock following the discovery in ancient ice cores that levels of carbon dioxide remained stable as the world plunged into an ice age around 2.7 million years ago. Levels of CO2 at around 250 parts per million (ppm) were said to be lower than often assumed with just a 20 ppm movement recorded for the following near three million-year period. In addition, no changes in methane levels were seen in the entire period. Massive decreases in temperature with occasional interglacial rises appear to have occurred without troubling ‘greenhouse’ gas levels, and this revelation has caused near panic in activist circles.

The assumed level three million years ago of CO2 was around 400 ppm, a convenient mark that has been used to explain the subsequent ice age and a drop to 250 ppm. Due to the recently published paper, this explanation has become more problematic and natural climate variation is correctly noted to have occurred with the temperature changes. Alas, similar explanations are mostly ignored in discussing today’s climate changes in the interests of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Some cling desperately to a dominant CO2 role, including one of the authors of the findings published in Nature. The co-author states that the results suggest even greater climate sensitivity to the warming effect of CO2. In short, there is a great deal of applying the laws of physics and chemistry to one era, but failing to extend the same courtesy to another.

The title of the paper, produced by 17 America-based scientists, was enough to set alarm bells ringing in the ‘settled’ science, Net Zero-obsessed community: ‘Broadly stable atmospheric CO2 and CH4 levels over the past three million years.’ A related paper examining ocean heat content derived from the ice core record was also published. Carrie Lear, Professor of Past Climates and Earth System Changes at Cardiff University, claimed that the papers “don’t rewrite the role of CO2, they underline how sensitive the climate system is… that is why today’s rapid  CO2 rise is so alarming”.

Ah, yes. Even if CO2 movements are minimal, probably within a margin of potential error, they are still responsible for large variations in temperature. The laws of climate science are ‘settled’ – if the trace atmospheric gas CO2 is rising, falling or generally stable, it is almost wholly responsible for large movements in global temperature. Under this rather shaky assumption, humans must stop burning hydrocarbons and return to a neo-Malthusian pre-industrial age.

Study lead author Julia Marks-Peterson noted: “We definitely were a bit surprised. If correct, the findings may suggest that even small changes in greenhouse gas levels could trigger major shifts in climate.” That’s a little bit of a scary thought, she added, possibly with an eye on future grant funding. “May suggest” is doing a lot of the work here, and it may also be suggested that more plausible opinions are available.

Quoted in New Scientist magazine, Tim Naish, Professor of Earth Science at Victoria University in New Zealand, said it was “way too early to thrown the baby out with the bathwater”. Perish the thought that baby should be given its marching orders, ending a science-lite 40-year demonisation of CO2 and related promotion of a hard-Left Net Zero dream.

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Mystery of five missing scientists sends chill across America. Three are dead. And one troubling link is now under scrutiny in DC

A chilling pattern has emerged after a string of US scientists died or went missing in recent months. 

Retired General William Neil McCasland, 68, and NASA aerospace engineer Monica Jacinto Reza, 60, were both major figures in the Air Force Research Laboratory. The general oversaw Reza’s work on creating a futuristic metal for rocket engines.

Within the span of eight months, both have mysteriously vanished without a trace while allegedly hiking in the Southwest United States.

McCasland’s reported ties to secret UFO programs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and Reza’s work with space-age technology used for advanced propulsion, have led many to claim without evidence that the pair are fleeing from parties that wish to silence them because of what they know.

Independent researchers and even a member of Congress fear the pattern has grown even darker after three scientists in the fields of chemical biology, nuclear fusion and astrophysics were murdered or found dead in just the last three months.

One of those renowned scientists was working on a breakthrough that could one day revolutionize science, creating an unlimited energy source that may end fossil fuel use as we know it.

Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett told the Daily Mail he saw a clear pattern in these seemingly unrelated deaths and disappearances, noting that the work several of them were doing has been linked to theories about extraterrestrial spacecraft. 

‘There have been several others throughout the country that have disappeared under suspicious circumstances,’ Burchett said. ‘I think we ought to be paying attention to it.’

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UFO ‘Gatekeeper’ General VANISHES Days After Trump’s Full Disclosure Order

President Trump’s order to release every UAP and UFO file appears to have triggered a wave of vanishings and deaths among the very insiders who guarded those secrets — and now Congress is being actively blocked from investigating.

The general is retired Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He walked out of his Albuquerque home on February 27 with only hiking boots, a wallet, and a revolver. No phone. No glasses. No trace since.

In addition, a rocket scientist tied to the General has also reportedly disappeared under similar circumstances.

Monica Jacinto Reza, 60, vanished while hiking in California’s Angeles National Forest. She co-developed Mondaloy, a patented nickel-based super-alloy for high-performance rocket engines, on a project funded and overseen by programs under McCasland’s command.

Newsmax reported Rep. Tim Burchett directly accusing intelligence agencies of obstruction: some intelligence agencies have thwarted his attempts at finding out what happened to the several prominent scientists and researchers in the U.S. who have reportedly died or gone missing over the past year.

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High-Profile Scientists Keep Winding Up Dead or Missing — GOP Rep Suggests There May Be a Conspiracy at Play

Several prominent scientists and researchers in the U.S. have reportedly died or gone missing over the past year, fueling speculation about whether some of the disappearances may have occurred under suspicious circumstances.

William Neil McCasland, a 68-year-old retired Air Force major general who had knowledge of UFOs, went missing in New Mexico on Feb. 27, NewsNation reported. Republican Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett told the Daily Mail on Sunday that he believes there may be a pattern emerging of other researchers throughout the nation similarly disappearing “under suspicious circumstances.”

“There have been several others throughout the country that have disappeared under suspicious circumstances,” Burchett told the outlet. “I think we ought to be paying attention to it.”

The congressman also indicated that “the numbers seem very high in these certain areas of research,” adding “I think we’d better be paying attention, and I don’t think we should trust our government.” He went on to claim that researchers with knowledge about UFOs are usually “very secretive about what they know.”

“Everybody’s talking about the UFO stuff,” the Tennessee Republican told the Daily Mail. “Those folks are very secretive about what they know. So I suspect very much that [McCasland] was involved in some of that.”

Burchett’s office did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

McCasland’s wife, Susan, asserted that no “foul play” was suspected in her husband’s disappearance, but added that he had left their house with just a pair of boots and his .38-caliber revolver on the day he disappeared, according to the Daily Mail.

Still, investigative journalist Ross Coulthart suggested during a Sunday appearance on “NewsNation Prime” that “foul play” may be a possibility in relation to McCasland’s disappearance.

“We have to ask, now, [about] the possibility of foul play — is there somebody who has interceded to take the general out of the picture?” Coulthart told NewsNation. “He was a man with some of the most sensitive U.S. military intelligence secrets in his head, especially particle beam technology.”

Additionally, Monica Reza went missing on June 22, 2025 while on a hike in the Angeles National Forest, per a Facebook page which describes its mission as aiming to “raising awareness and organizing volunteer efforts” to help find her. Reza previously served as a material scientist at Aerojet Rocketdyne, which notably was funded by NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory for several years, The New York Post (NY Post) reported.

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“Renewable” energy policies can’t work – because of physics

Chapter 1: The Physics That Demolishes Energy Policy, Or Why You Can’t Boil An Egg In A Swimming Pool

By Richard Lyon, 3 March 2026

On Saturday, I told you I’d written a book and promised to walk through its core arguments chapter by chapter. Some long-standing readers will recognise what follows from a post I wrote in 2024. This is the sharper, tighter version that became the book’s opening chapter – the foundation everything else rests on. If you’re new here, start here.

There is far more heat energy in a swimming pool than in a pan of boiling water. You can boil an egg in the pan. You can’t boil an egg in the pool. And if you doubled the size of the pool, you’d double the energy available – and still have a cold, raw egg.

This is not a riddle. It is the single most important concept in the energy debate, and almost nobody making energy policy understands it.

Gradient

To do useful work, energy must flow from a region of high concentration to a region of low concentration. This difference is called the energy gradient. The steeper the gradient, the more work you can extract. A shallow gradient means the energy is real but useless.

Think of a ski slope. A run that falls 1,000 feet over 1,000 feet of distance is steep enough to let gravity do the work. A ski queue that falls 10 feet over 100 feet is too shallow – you have to shuffle. Now join 100 ski queues end to end. The total height difference is 1,000 feet – the same as the ski run. But do you glide down it? No. Because the gradient hasn’t changed. It’s still a long, flat shuffle.

This is exactly what happens when you build more wind turbines. A gas flame at 1,500°C in a 15°C room is a ski run – a vast temperature difference that a power generation system can exploit. A wind turbine extracts energy from air moving at perhaps 25 miles an hour. That’s real energy, but it’s a tiny gradient – the difference between a breeze and no breeze. Build a thousand turbines and the total energy grows, but the gradient of each one hasn’t changed. You haven’t built a ski run. You’ve built a thousand ski queues.

Density

Energy gradient tells you whether a source can do work, and therefore why the sheer quantity of energy available tells you almost nothing about how much useful work you can extract from it. Energy density tells you whether you can build a civilisation on it.

Diesel contains roughly 44 megajoules per kilogram. The best lithium-ion battery manages about 1. That is a ratio of 44 to 1 – and the gap is not an engineering problem. It is a chemistry problem. Carbon-hydrogen bonds release enormous energy when broken. Shuttling lithium ions between electrodes releases much less. The periodic table is not subject to software updates.

This is why you can drive from London to Edinburgh on 50 litres of diesel, but need a battery weighing half a tonne to do it in an electric car. It’s why aviation runs on kerosene and always will. It is not a matter of waiting for better technology. It is a hard physical constraint.

Every successful energy transition in history has moved up the density ladder: wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to nuclear. Each step concentrated more energy into less mass, enabling capabilities that were physically impossible before. Railways. Aviation. The globalised supply chain. The direction has always been the same: concentration.

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Chinese scientists have turned mosquitoes into flying vaccines — that can still bite humans

Researchers from the nation that likely unleashed COVID-19 unto the world have transformed mosquitoes into flying syringes.

Some researchers, including a group at the Bill Gates Foundation-backed Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, have already attempted in recent years to fashion mosquitoes into flying vaccine delivery systems with human targets in mind.

Now, scientists at the state-controlled Chinese Academy of Sciences — an institution that has a strategic partnership with the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences — have targeted bats, purportedly designing mosquitoes to instead deliver recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus-based rabies and Nipah vaccines to the flying mammals.

Like rabies, Nipah virus is a potentially deadly virus found in animals. Whereas rabies has nearly a 100% fatality rate in humans once symptoms manifest, the estimated case fatality rate for Nipah virus ranges from 40% to 75%.

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Is ‘vibe physics’ the future?

At the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Denver, a session on “Navigating the AI revolution: future-proofing your science career” drew in a crowd of early-stage physicists searching for practical career advice. What they received was much more philosophical in nature.

Malachi Schram of the Pacific Northwest National Lab and Hilary Egan of the National Laboratory of the Rockies delivered back-to-back talks full of similar rhetoric, emphasizing the fast-paced development of AI used for specialized tasks in science, such as detecting equipment failure or identifying ways of retrofitting older buildings.

But the third speaker, Matthew Schwartz, a theoretical physicist from Harvard University, took his optimism about AI far further. In a punchy presentation, he predicted that large language models (LLMs) will surpass human intelligence in five years.

“There’s definitely exponential growth of the intellectual capacity of these [large language] models as a function of time,” Schwartz told the audience, using the number of model parameters as a proxy for intelligence. “The machines are still growing by roughly 10 times each year, and we” – he paused for dramatic effect – “are not growing much smarter.” This drew a wave of laughter from the crowd.

Unlike humans, machines can visualize higher dimensional spaces, hold far more information in memory and process more complex equations. “We are not the endpoint of intelligence. We are only the smartest things to evolve on Earth so far,” Schwartz argued. He went on to suggest that humans may simply be incapable of understanding long-standing physics problems such as a theory of everything. He compared it to cats, which he suggested will never understand chess.

If the talent of physicists exists on a bell curve, Schwartz claims we can push the bell curve higher on the talent axis: “If we use AI augmentation, we can get 10 000 Einsteins a century instead of one Einstein.”

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Scientists Just Taught Lab-Grown Brain Cells to Play Video Games — and People Are Freaked Out

Researchers say they have successfully trained living human brain cells to play the classic video game Doom, marking the latest experiment in so-called “biological computing.”

Australian biotech company Cortical Labs announced the development in a recent demonstration showing neurons grown in a laboratory interacting with the 1993 first-person shooter.

The experiment builds on earlier work from 2022, when the company revealed that clusters of human brain cells grown in a petri dish had learned to play the much simpler video game Pong.

Those early experiments involved “mini-brains” made up of roughly 800,000 to one million living human neurons.

According to the company, the cells demonstrated the ability to adapt and learn basic tasks in real time.

Now researchers say they have taken the technology further by teaching the neurons to interact with the far more complex environment of Doom, a three-dimensional game that requires movement, targeting, and exploration.

To make the system work, engineers translated the digital signals from the game into patterns of electrical stimulation that the neurons could interpret.

“So we showed that biological neurons could play the game Pong,” Cortical Labs chief scientific officer Brett Kagan explained in a video announcement.

“This was a massive milestone because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time, goal-directed learning.”

“Doom was much more complex,” he added. “It’s 3D. It has enemies. It needs to explore, its an environment, and it’s hard.”

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