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[apogee-dwell]

A city like London doesn't really offer me anything--I'm not interested in it. It's much too old. Whereas the suburbs are, comparatively speaking, new. In a way they're more dangerous places--you're not going to get mugged walking down the street, but somebody might steal your soul. I mean that literally--your will to live. Your imagination might be taken from you by some passing merchandising corporation, or what have you.

J.G. Ballard, from a 1984 interview collected in RE/Search no. 8/9

[apogee-dwell]

A skyscraper is a multiplex, archetypal symbol, rather like some vast, freestanding Tarot card. A tower conveys a meaning, yet that meaning shifts with every new deal.

From Bruce Sterling’s essay, What Skyscrapers Might Look Like in the Future. Any scenario from this essay could easily form the basis for an anthology of science fiction stories.

[apogee-dwell]

Project HARP

16-inch (410 mm) 100 caliber (40 m) gun

[apogee-dwell]

Hank Gus of the Tseshaht First Nation had heard about the "face in the rocks" years ago. A Washington State kayaker stumbled upon the face back in 2008 while paddling past Reeks Island in the Broken Group Islands. 

Gus had been searching for the carving for two years. Then, just a few weeks ago, he finally found the hidden treasure and took a cellphone video of the seven-foot-tall face carved into a cliff.

From Mystery surrounds huge face etched into cliff on remote B.C. island

This is so cool.

[apogee-dwell]

Einstein called quantum entanglement “Spooky action at a distance.” Physicists have recently been toying with the idea that quantum entanglement is the phenomenon behind wormholes. 

Now, physicists from SUNY Stony Brook and the University of Washington believe they have some evidence of this theory:

Jensen and Karch found that if one imagined entangled pairs in a universe with four dimensions, they behaved in the same way as wormholes in a universe with an extra fifth dimension. Essentially, they discovered that entanglement and wormholes may be one and the same. 

"Entangled pairs were the holographic images of a system with a wormhole," Jensen said. Independent research from theoretical physicist Julian Sonner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology supports this finding.

If this discovery checks out, it could bridge the mutual imncompatibility of general relativity and quantum field theory. 

(Image: Alan Stonebraker/American Physical Society)

[apogee-dwell]

The largest manganese nodules ever found, dredged up in an epibenthic sled in the Atlantic Ocean. From the write-up at islandcrisis.net:

The formation of nodules is a process that occurs at a slow pace and can last for millions of years. Small pieces of deep-sea bone, rock and fossils are covered with manganese hydroxide together with other metals like zinc, copper, iron and cobalt, that crystallise over and around them. Adding even one centimeter to the diameter of the nodule might take hundreds and hundreds of years. The nodules normally have an irregular shape and are flattened.

It is worth noting that manganese nodule mining is a booming business, and one that has potentially disastrous effects on ocean life. 

[apogee-dwell]

Riding Light, by Alphonse Swinehart.

From the Vimeo page:

In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

Design & Animation: Alphonse Swinehart / aswinehart.com Music: Steve Reich "Music for 18 Musicians" Performed by: Eighth Blackbird / eighthblackbird.org

[apogee-dwell]

From nasa.gov:

Beta Pictoris is the only star to date where astronomers have detected an embedded giant planet in a directly-imaged debris disk. The planet, which was discovered in 2009, goes around the star once every 18 to 20 years. This allows scientists to study in a comparably short time how a large planet distorts the massive gas and dust encircling the star. These observations should yield new insights into how planets are born around young stars.

The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk to within about 650 million miles of the star. The giant planet orbits at 900 million miles, and was directly imaged in infrared light by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope six years ago.

[apogee-dwell]

One of the 16 locations inside the Oklo uranium mine in the Central African Republic, where a naturally-occurring nuclear fission reactor was active some 1.7 billion years ago. A 2005 article in Scientific American sheds some light on how a nuclear fission reactor spontaneously came into existence. Here's how they frame the questions:

It is truly amazing that more than a dozen natural reactors spontaneously sprang into existence and that they managed to maintain a modest power output for perhaps a few hundred millennia. Why is it that these parts of the deposit did not explode and destroy themselves right after nuclear chain reactions began? What mechanism provided the necessary self-regulation? Did these reactors run steadily or in fits and starts? The solutions to these puzzles emerged slowly after initial discovery of the Oklo phenomenon. 

[apogee-dwell]

Previous studies have shown that Earth rotates around the disc-shaped Galaxy once every 250 million years. But the Earth's path around the Galaxy is wavy, with the Sun and planets weaving through the crowded disc approximately every 30 million years. Analyzing the pattern of the Earth's passes through the Galactic disc, Rampino notes that these disc passages seem to correlate with times of comet impacts and mass extinctions of life. The famous comet strike 66 million ago that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs is just one example. [...] While traveling through the disc, the dark matter concentrated there disturbs the pathways of comets typically orbiting far from the Earth in the outer Solar System, Rampino observes. This means that comets that would normally travel at great distances from the Earth instead take unusual paths, causing some of them to collide with the planet. But even more remarkably, with each dip through the disc, the dark matter can apparently accumulate within the Earth's core. Eventually, the dark matter particles annihilate each other, producing considerable heat. The heat created by the annihilation of dark matter in Earth's core could trigger events such as volcanic eruptions, mountain building, magnetic field reversals, and changes in sea level, which also show peaks every 30 million years. Rampino therefore suggests that astrophysical phenomena derived from the Earth's winding path through the Galactic disc, and the consequent accumulation of dark matter in the planet's interior, can result in dramatic changes in Earth's geological and biological activity. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-dark-mass-extinctions-geologic-upheavals.html#jCp

"Does dark matter cause mass extinctions and geologic upheavals?" from phys.org

Just FYI, Earth's last major extinction event was ~66 million years ago. 

[apogee-dwell]

Remains of a shrine located in Gegharot, Armenia, dating from the 13th century BCE that archaeologists think was used for predicting the future. The site may be part of the late Kura-Araxes culture. From the write-up of the discovery on livescience.com:

The fortress at Gegharot is one of several strongholds built at around this time in Armenia. "Evidence to date suggests that this coordinated process of fortress construction was part of the emergence of a single polity that built and occupied multiple sites in the region," write [Adam] Smith and [Jeffrey] Leon. 

Smith believes that Gegharot would have been used as an occult center for the rulers. "I would think that this is probably a cult center largely specializing in servicing the emerging rulers from the ruling class," he told Live Science in an interview.

Smith and Leon think they have found evidence of three ways these shrines were used to predict the future: one is to roll the burnt animal knucklebones; the second is through some sort of lithomancy using smooth colorful stones. And the third is just plum weird:

At one shrine, on the fortress' east citadel, the archaeologists found an installation used to grind flour. Smith and Leon think that this flour could have been used to predict the future in a practice called aleuromancy. [...] Stamp seals found at the shrine would have allowed people to punch a variety of shapes into dough. "One possibility (admittedly among many others) is that the stamps marked the dough that was then used for aleuromancy."

[apogee-dwell]

A dim red dwarf and its brown-dwarf companion likely grazed the outer edges of the solar system 70,000 years ago in what scientists say was the closest encounter ever between our sun and another star. [...] At its closest point, Scholz's star would have been a 10th-magnitude star — 50 times too faint to be seen with the naked eye. However, brief flares on the star could have lit it up thousands of times brighter, making it potentially visible to early mankind for a few minutes or hours at a time, the researchers explained.

space.com

Entirely coincidentally, this event seems to have occurred at approximately the same point in human history as the emergence of behavioral modernity. Is that Thus Spake Zarathustra I hear?

[apogee-dwell]

Image of a radio burst observed at the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. Astrophysicist Duncan Lorimer found it in archival data from 2007. It was a massive 30-jansky burst lasting 5 milliseconds and coming from a place in the sky within 3° of the Small Magellanic Cloud. It has since achieved a certain measure of fame, and has become known as the Lorimer Burst. 

Similar radio bursts -- called Fast Radio Bursts --- have since been observed, and their source is something of a mystery. Astrophysicists estimate the source of the bursts to be an area no more than a few hundred kilometers in area and extraordinarily high in energy, especially so if the source is outside the Milky Way as seems likely.

Last May, scientists using multiple telescopes observed a Fast Radio Burst in real time -- until recently they had all been found retrospectively in archival data. Here's a tantalizing quote from the space.com write-up:

Although the source of these bursts remains a mystery, scientists say it must be huge, cataclysmic and up to 5 billion light-years away. This study sheds light on their exact origins, noting that a top contender is a flare from a magnetar, a neutron star with a magnetic field a million billion times more powerful than Earth's.

For my money, this is one of the most fascinating mysteries in astrophysics rights now.

[apogee-dwell]

Pseudoscience Sunday: The Solar Warden

There are, and have been for some time, claims by UFO disclosure supporters that there is in existence a fleet or fleets of human spaceships charged with monitoring alien traffic throughout our solar system and even defending our solar system in the event of an extraterrestrial attack.

Perhaps this is science fiction or the result of an overactive imagination. But some have said they’ve seen evidence of this alleged project, commonly called “Solar Warden.”

(Source: "The Solar Warden Covert Space Project: Fact or Science Fiction?" from Epoch Times)

In 2002 British hacker Gary McKinnon lodged the term "Solar Warden" firmly in the public consciousness (or at least the consciousness of the UFO conspiracy-o-sphere) when he claimed to have seen a reference to a top-secret space program of this name among document he recovered from hacked US government computers.

While there is plenty here to get the eyes rolling, it is worth noting that the US government does in fact allocate billions of dollars per year to top secret aeronautical programs via the so-called Black Budget. 

The best non-conspiracy theorist to read on this topic is Trevor Paglen, whose book Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World provides a fascinating exploration of this important but under-covered topic.

(Image: alleged "Black Knight" satellite)

[apogee-dwell]

Evgeny Kazantsev (Russia) - Past in the Future

Russian digital artist / graphic designer Evgeny Kazantsev creates a series of digital art titled Past in the Future. The task was to show how the real locations and objects of our time will develop and integrate into the world of future. © All images courtesy of the artist

[more Evgeny Kazantsev]

[apogee-dwell]

[apogee-dwell]

A yellow silica glass that is found in the Sahara desert--and which was used in a brooch found in King Tutankhamun's tomb, may contain microscopic traces of a comet nucleus that hit Earth 28 million years ago. This would be the first time evidence of a comet nucleus has been found on Earth. Researchers have named the yellow glass  "Hypatia" after 4th century mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, and describe it as follows:

“We propose that the Hypatia stone is a remnant of a cometary nucleus fragment that impacted after incorporating gases from the atmosphere,” the researchers write in the introduction to the published findings. “Its co-occurrence with Libyan Desert Glass suggests that this fragment could have been part of a bolide that broke up and exploded in the airburst that formed the Glass. Its extraordinary preservation would be due to its shock-transformation into a weathering-resistant assemblage.”

(Quotes in The Epoch Times)

Of the glass itself, the write-up in Popular Archeology describes its formation thus:

The silica glass was originally formed 28 million years ago, when an ancient comet entered the earth's atmosphere and exploded over Egypt, heating up the sand beneath it to a temperature of about 2,000 degrees Celsius and resulting in the formation of a huge amount of the yellow silica glass, which lies scattered over a 6,000 square kilometer area in the Sahara.