News 16 April 2021
There has been a lot of interesting news lately that never hits the popular media. It is on many different subjects, so here goes.
A scientist seems to be very worried. He was examining the plants found beneath the ice in Greenland. He had thought they were a lot more ancient than the data he found. Apparently, the ancient plants were only about a million years old. This sent a shiver down his spine. Many of us would wonder why. The reason he became very worried was the fact the plants were only about a million years old and this meant all the ice in Greenland had disappeared in a hot spell. A million years isn’t much on a planet which is said to be 4.5 billion years old. He knew the ice was melting at a rapid rate today and we could be heading for the disappearance of the ice. Remember there was no industry back then and the ice still melted. This proves in my mind the heating of the planet is not all from man, but man may be helping it along.
Blue Origin is one of the new aerospace companies. The company was started by Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world and head of Amazon. An announcement was made stating the company would introduce a type of artificial gravity into one of their flights. It is nothing like what we see in those science fiction movies. Blue Origin is going to simulate moon gravity on some rockets which are much nearer to earth. The suborbital craft known by the name of New Shepard will act like a centrifuge while in earth orbit. This will introduce some gravity, about 1/6 that of earth into experiments performed there. The gravity will last for about two minutes. Let’s hope this is the start of putting artificial gravity on other spacecraft and for the duration of time needed. Artificial gravity would solve a lot of problems for astronauts on the space station.
The Artemis program which just received a commitment by President Biden to get astronauts to the moon is being investigated. It is about seven years behind schedule and the cost overruns are staggering and yet bonuses were given to some of the aerospace companies working on it. SpaceX is making the program look like an incredible waste of money since they are also working on an even bigger rocket without government funding. This is giving some lawmakers second thoughts about the program, and rightfully so. We have to stop awarding incompetency.
There is a new system being considered for lunar mining. Scientists are thinking about shooting arks of electricity across the surface of the moon. It is said this would allow for mining metals and water at the same time. Another of the things this would allow for is the creation of rocket fuel. This type of mining is called Ablative Arc Mining. The nuts and bolts of the procedure have not been fully explained yet.
Why did UFO sightings in New York in 2020 double from 2019? There could be a lot of different reasons. One could be more people feel comfortable reporting a UFO sighting. Another could be there are more UFOs in the sky over that state. It could also be more advanced planes are being mistaken for UFOs. Lastly maybe more people are looking for them.
Many of us remember John McAfee. He is the founder of the famous anti-virus software. It used to be one of the most popular software bundles. Lately a lot of strange stories came out about him. One was he disappeared. He has been arrested and charged with cryptocurrency crimes. Along with McAfee, his executive advisor on his team has also been charged. The schemes he is being charged with have names. They are called scalping and pump-and-dump. The feds say he bought cryptocurrency altcoins at low market prices and planned to make false endorsements about them, selling them at higher prices to his hundreds of thousands of followers.
Sometimes we get surprised by ancient construction, especially the type we still use today. I am talking about sea walls. We see them in a lot of different places and some are constantly being kept up so as not to let the ocean break through. Archaeologists got a surprise when they found ancient sea walls. The surprise was the oldest was from 9,000 years ago. We had no idea people were building sea walls that far back in time in the Neolithic Era. The same is true for ancient dams, though they are no where as old as the ancient sea walls. The Quatinah Barrage also known as Lake Homs Dam in Syria was built about 1319 B.C.
Scientists have determined that some of the human body parts we have today will disappear due to evolution. Body hair is said to be one of them. Scientists are saying body hair no longer has a use for humans and will be gone in the future. Males have no use for nipples and they have been tagged by scientists as obsolete and on the list to disappear, because what isn’t used on humans and animals eventually is gone. Some people are able to flap their ears. This is done by controlling the movement of their ear muscles. I have bad news for them, scientists claim these muscles will disappear because we don’t need them. Humans used to balance more on the middle of their feet, but this has changed. Because of the change the pinky toe is not important and according to scientists it will shrink and maybe disappear. Many other parts are also slated for oblivion. Let’s hope we don’t lose any of the ones which are important to us.
Remember what the death star from Star Wars looked like? It turns out there is a double for it and it is orbiting around the planet Saturn. It is one of Saturn’s moons named Mimas. Don’t worry, it is a natural body, if it was artificial, we might have something to worry about.
Some scientists are now saying it can be possible to travel faster than the speed of light using a new type of warp drive. This is all theoretical right now because we don’t have the technology to build the drive, but they believe we will be able to do it some day in the future. We definitely need to be able to travel much faster even for travel through our solar system, never mind going to other star systems. Maybe we will make a breakthrough sooner than we think.