Dust Cloud Circled The Entire Globe

A Japanese study using a NASA satellite found that dust clouds being generated by a huge dust storm in China’s Taklimakan desert in 2007 made more than one full circle around the globe in just 13 days.

Once the cloud reached the Pacific Ocean the second time, it descended down and deposited some of its dust into the sea, revealing how a natural phenomenon can impact the environment far away.

“Asian dust is usually deposited near the Yellow Sea, around the Japan area, while Sahara dust ends up around the Atlantic Ocean and coast of Africa,” said Itsushi Uno of Kyushu University’s Research Institute for Applied Mechanics.

“But this study shows that China dust can be deposited into the (Pacific Ocean),” he told Reuters by telephone. “Dust clouds contain 5 percent iron, that is important for the ocean.”

Scientists wrote in a paper published in Nature Geoscience that they used a NASA satellite to describe how mathematical modeling to track and measure the movement of the dust cloud, which formed after the dust storm on May 8-9 in 2007.

The desert is located in the Chinese northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Uno, who led the research, and the other scientists found that the dust clouds were lifted 5-6 miles above the earth’s surface and transported over one full circle around the earth.

“The most important achievement is that we tracked this through one full circuit round the globe, nobody has done this before. After half a circuit, usually the dust concentration gets very low and you can’t track it,” Uno told Reuters.

“This means that dust concentration, dust lifetime is very long, more than two weeks.”

via Dust Cloud Circled The Entire Globe – Science News – redOrbit.

California’s Channel Islands Hold Evidence Of Clovis-age Comets

A 17-member team has found what may be the smoking gun of a much-debated proposal that a cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago ripped through North America and drove multiple species into extinction.

In a paper appearing online ahead of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Oregon archaeologist Douglas J. Kennett and colleagues from nine institutions and three private research companies report the presence of shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds in 12,900-year-old sediments on the Northern Channel Islands off the southern California coast.

These tiny diamonds and diamond clusters were buried deeply below four meters of sediment. They date to the end of Clovis — a Paleoindian culture long thought to be North America’s first human inhabitants. The nano-sized diamonds were pulled from Arlington Canyon on the island of Santa Rosa that had once been joined with three other Northern Channel Islands in a landmass known as Santarosae.

The diamonds were found in association with soot, which forms in extremely hot fires, and they suggest associated regional wildfires, based on nearby environmental records.

Such soot and diamonds are rare in the geological record. They were found in sediment dating to massive asteroid impacts 65 million years ago in a layer widely known as the K-T Boundary. The thin layer of iridium-and-quartz-rich sediment dates to the transition of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, which mark the end of the Mesozoic Era and the beginning of the Cenozoic Era.

“The type of diamond we have found — Lonsdaleite — is a shock-synthesized mineral defined by its hexagonal crystalline structure. It forms under very high temperatures and pressures consistent with a cosmic impact,” Kennett said. “These diamonds have only been found thus far in meteorites and impact craters on Earth and appear to be the strongest indicator yet of a significant cosmic impact [during Clovis].”

via California’s Channel Islands Hold Evidence Of Clovis-age Comets.

New NASA boss: Astronauts on Mars in his lifetime

NASA’s new boss says he will be “incredibly disappointed” if people aren’t on Mars — or even beyond it — in his lifetime.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr., who’s 62, told The Associated Press that his ultimate goal isn’t just Mars — it’s anywhere far from Earth.

“I did grow up watching Buck Rogers and Buck Rogers didn’t stop at Mars,” Bolden said in one of his first interviews since taking office last Friday. “In my lifetime, I will be incredibly disappointed if we have not at least reached Mars.”

That appears to be a shift from the space policy set in motion by President George W. Bush, who proposed first returning to the moon by 2020 and then eventually going to Mars a decade or two later. Bolden didn’t rule out using the moon as a stepping stone to Mars and beyond, but he talked more about Mars than the moon.

Bolden said NASA and other federal officials had too many conflicting views on how to get to Mars, including the existing Constellation project begun under Bush. That project calls for returning to the moon first, with a moon rocket design that Bolden’s predecessor called “Apollo on steroids.”

A new independent commission is reviewing that plan and alternatives to it. Bolden said his main job over the next few months will be to champion an “agreed-upon compromise strategy to get first to Mars and then beyond. And we don’t have that yet.”

Bolden, a former astronaut, also vowed to extend the life of the international space station beyond 2016, the year the Bush administration planned to abandon it.

via New NASA boss: Astronauts on Mars in his lifetime – Yahoo! News.

Same-name couple to wed after Facebook meeting

This October, Kelly Hildebrandt will vow to share her life with a man who already shares her name.

This is no joke. Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, 20, and Kelly Carl Hildebrandt, 24, expect just over 100 guests at a ceremony at the Lighthouse Point Yacht & Racquet Club in South Florida, where they will become husband and wife.

“He is just everything that I’ve ever looked for,” she said in an interview. “There’s always been certain qualities that a guy has to have. And he has all the ones I could think of — and more.”

Their modern romance was a match made in cyberspace. She was curious and bored one night last year, so she plugged her name into the popular social networking Web site Facebook just to see if anyone shared it.

At the time, Kelly Hildebrandt, of Lubbock, Texas, was the only match.

So she sent him a message.

“She said ‘Hi. We had the same name. Thought it was cool,’” Kelly Carl Hildebrandt said. “I thought she was pretty cute.”

But there were also concerns.

“I thought, man, we’ve got to be related or something,” he said.

For the next three months the two exchanged e-mails. Before he knew it, occasional phone calls turned into daily chats, sometimes lasting hours. He visited her in Florida after a few months and “fell head over heels.”

“I thought it was fun,” he said of that first online encounter. “I had no idea that it would lead to this.”

via Same-name couple to wed after Facebook meeting – Yahoo! News.

Ah, love.

How Stanley Kubrick Faked the Apollo Moon Landings

Someone mentioned Kubrick in connection with the Apollo landings and while checking out that idea I found this article.

This strange idea  from Jay Weidner says that Kennedy’s secret goal in having us land on the moon was to force German UFO technology we’d acquired after the war out into the open.

Sounds far fetched, but I’m a big fan of hearing (but not believing without sufficient proof) all possibilities when there seem to be only two sides to an issue. In that spirit, here, for your entertainment, is an angle you may not have considered:

“There are great ideas, undiscovered breakthroughs available, to those who can remove one of truths protective layers” -Neil Armstrong, ‘First Man on the Moon’. July 20 th 1994

It has now been forty years since the fabled moon landings by NASA and the Apollo gang. When it comes to the subject of the moon landings, people tend to fall into two belief groups. The first group, by far the bigger of the two groups, accepts the fact that NASA successfully landed on the moon six times and that 12 human beings have actually walked on the surface of the moon. The second group, though far smaller, is more vocal about their beliefs. This group says that we never went to the moon and that the entire thing was faked.

This essay presents a third position on this issue. This third point of view falls somewhere between these two assertions. This third position postulates that humans did go to the moon but what we saw on TV and in photographs was completely faked.

Furthermore this third position reveals that the great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick is the genius who directed the hoaxed landings.

…

Soon after seeing the flying saucer technology, JFK made his famous speech asking NASA to land a man on the moon before the decade was out. Many insiders believed that this was a ploy by JFK to get NASA, and the secret government, to release their saucer technologies. Since it was obvious to everyone that standard rocket technology could not get man to the moon and back, JFK may have thought that NASA would be forced to release the knowledge of the technology behind the flying saucers in order to fulfill his vision and get to the moon by the end of the 1960’s. JFK’s ploy was therefore intended to free this advanced technology from the insidious hands of the shadow government.

After the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, NASA began a new plan that would solve the problem that JFK initiated. This new plan would allow NASA, and the shadow government, to keep the saucer technology secret and to still make it look like standard rocketry had taken man to the moon and back.

Someone high up in the shadow government decided to fake the entire moon landings in order to conceal the United States’ extremely new and advanced Nazi technology both from us, the citizens and our enemies.

In some ways NASA’s position on this was understandable. We were in the middle of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Did we really want to show the Russians what we had?…

In early 1964 Stanley Kubrick had just finished his black satire Dr Strangelove and was looking to do a science fiction film.

While directing Dr. Strangelove Kubrick had asked the US Air Force for permission to film one of their B-52 bombers for the movie. The Pentagon turned him down.

The movie, Dr. Strangelove, was about a flight squadron that had been ordered to fly to Russia and drop nuclear bombs on that country. The Pentagon read Kubrick’s script and rejected his request to actually film the inside, and outside, of a B-52.

The reason for this rejection was that Kubrick’s film was clearly a satire on the military and US nuclear policy. The Pentagon did not want to assist Kubrick in this satirical undertaking.

Undaunted by the rejection, Kubrick used various special effects to create the B-52 in flight. When viewing Dr. Strangelove today, these special effects look quaint and old fashioned, but in 1963 they looked very good. It is possible that someone in NASA saw what Kubrick had done in Dr. Strangelove and, admiring his artfulness, designated Kubrick as the person best qualified to direct the Apollo Moon landing. If he could do that well on a limited budget – what could he do on an unlimited budget?…

In the end, it looks like Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings in return for two things. The first was a virtually unlimited budget to make his ultimate science fiction film: 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the second was that he would be able to make any film he wanted, with no oversight from anyone, for the rest of his life.

Except for his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick got what he wanted. …

What is Front Screen Projection?

Kubrick did not invent the process but there is no doubt that he perfected it. Front Screen Projection is a cinematic device that allows scenes to be projected behind the actors so that it appears, in the camera, as if the actors are moving around on the set provided by the Front Screen Projection.

The process came into fruition when the 3M company invented a material called Scotchlite. This was a screen material that was made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny glass beads each about .4mm wide. These beads were highly reflective. In the Front Screen Projection process the Scotchlite screen would be placed at the back of the soundstage. The plane of the camera lens and the Scotchlite screen had to be exactly 90 degrees apart. A projector would project the scene onto the Scotchlite screen through a mirror and the light would go through a beam splitter, which would pass the light into the camera. An actor would stand in front of the Scotchlite screen and he would appear to be ‘inside’ the projection.

… Today Hollywood magicians use green screens and computers for special effects and so Front Screen Projection has gone the way of the Adding Machine and the Model T, but for its time, especially in the 1960’s, nothing worked better than Front Screen Projection for the realistic look that would be needed both for the ape-men scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the faked Apollo landings.

In this still taken from an early scene in 2001 you can see the seams in the blue sky if you look closely.

…Next is the same image as above only I have processed it through a graphic program. In this processing I have increased the gamma and increased the contrast.

Now we can clearly see the ’seams’ and the ’stitching’ of the Scotchlite Front Projection screen in the sky.

To get the perspective correct one has to realize that the Scotchlite screen is right behind the rocky outcropping set, which was built on the soundstage.

The lines on the screen are the flaws in the Scotchlite screen. These flaws in the screen give the sky give a peculiar ‘geometry’ when the image is properly processed to reveal the Front Projection Scotchlite Screen.

To sum it up, the idea is that Kubrick in making 2001 used this technique. The part in front of the white photoshopped line is in the studio, and the part behind the line is a backdrop which could be real footage, a painting, a model, or whatever.

And next, the story shows where the line supposedly is in the Apollo footage Kubrick supposedly created:

That astronaut is driving the lunar rover parallel to the screen and the rover is only three or four feet away from the Scotchlite. Please note how the tire treads just lead to nowhere. Actually they are going to the edge of the set.

via Jay Weidner.

Perhaps we went to the moon, but used the secret UFO technology to get there. Or… perhaps this entire story is itself disinformation to get foreign governments to believe we have secret UFO technology.

Will we ever know for sure, or will we always wonder?

Strange New Air Force Facility Energizes Ionosphere, Conspiracy

Along with some of the other Adventures Unlimited Press books, I skimmed one about HAARP. For the amount of money being spent, you’d expect it to have some practical value. What can it really do… besides put small amounts of energy into the upper atmosphere for research purposes? The HAARP web site says:

HAARP stands for The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. The goal of this program is to further advance our knowledge of the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere which can affect our military and civilian communication and navigation systems. The HAARP program operates a world-class ionospheric research facility located in Gakona, Alaska.

Wired has this interesting story:

Source: Darpa Budget Estimates

Todd Pedersen had to hustle—the sky was scheduled to start glowing soon, and he didn’t want to miss it. It was just before sunset, a cold February evening in deep-woods Alaska, and the broad-shouldered US Air Force physicist was scrambling across the snow in his orange down parka and fur-lined bomber hat. Grabbing cables and electronics, he rushed to assemble a jury-rigged telescope atop a crude wooden platform.

… As darkness closed in, Pedersen tried to get the second imager working—with no luck—and the first one began snapping pictures. A few minutes before seven, throbbing arcs of green and red light began to form on his monitor, eventually coalescing into an egg shape. Other shards of light shimmered, gathered into a jagged ring, and spun around the oval center. “This is really good stuff,” Pedersen cooed. This wasn’t just another aurora borealis triggered by solar winds; this one Pedersen made himself. He did it with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (Haarp): a $250 million facility with a 30-acre array of antennas capable of spewing 3.6 megawatts of energy into the mysterious plasma of the ionosphere. …

When Begich was 13, a Cessna carrying his father, a Congressional representative, disappeared. Neither the plane nor its passengers were ever recovered. Over the years, Begich became obsessed with uncovering mysteries. Between gigs as a gemologist, miner, school supervisor, and Chickaloon tribal administrator, he regularly lectured on government mind-control technology. So you can imagine his reaction when he began looking into Haarp: the weather-control patents, the Pentagon proposals for long-range spying, the oil company schemes. Senator Stevens had even suggested that the ionosphere could end our dependency on fossil fuels. “At any time over Fairbanks,” Stevens said on the Senate floor, “there is more energy than there is in the entire United States.” Begich had hit the conspiracy jackpot.

In 1995, he self-published a book, Angels Don’t Play This HAARP. It sold 100,000 copies. He started giving speeches on Haarp’s dangers everywhere, from UFO conventions to the European Parliament. Marvel Comics, Tom Clancy, and, of course, The X-Files made the facility an ominous feature of their narratives. A Russian military journal warned that blasting the ionosphere would trigger a cascade of electrons that could flip Earth’s magnetic poles. “Simply speaking, the planet will ‘capsize,’” it warned. The European Parliament held hearings about Haarp; so did the Alaska state legislature.

Begich told his audiences that Haarp was a high-powered weapon prototype. Forget spying underground with low-frequency waves—Haarp was so strong it could trigger earthquakes. And by dumping all those radio waves into the ionosphere, Haarp could turn a miles-wide portion of the upper atmosphere into a giant lens. “The result will be an absolutely catastrophic release of pure energy,” he wrote. “The sky would literally appear to burn.”

The military’s response only amped up the conspiracists. When program managers swore that the facility would “never be used for military functions,” Begich would trot out military reports touting satellite-blinding research plans or then-secretary of defense William Cohen’s suggestion that “electromagnetic waves” could alter the climate and control earthquakes and volcanoes remotely. …

Communication
Haarp can bounce signals off the ionosphere with wavelengths long enough to penetrate deep into the ocean and communicate with submarines.

Protection
Researchers are testing whether ionospheric waves could nudge H-bomb-generated electrons out of the magnetosphere, shielding orbiting satellites.

Atmospheric Research
At about 125 miles up, Haarp’s waves can energize free electrons, which collide with neutral atoms to produce a glow like the aurora borealis.

Surveillance
How low-frequency waves are absorbed and reflected by the earth can reveal what’s underneath—including hidden bunkers.

via Strange New Air Force Facility Energizes Ionosphere, Fans Conspiracy Flames.

‘Spy scandal’ hits Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank has confirmed it faces a possible criminal investigation into spying allegations.

Germany’s largest lender is accused of spying on two board members it suspected of leaking sensitive details, as well as one critical shareholder.

State prosecutors are now trying to establish whether to launch a formal criminal investigation.  …

via BBC NEWS | Business | ‘Spy scandal’ hits Deutsche Bank.

The Deutsche Bank Building at 130 Liberty Street in New York City, United States, adjacent to the World Trade Center (WTC), opened in 1974 as Bankers Trust Plaza. The building was acquired by Deutsche Bank when it acquired Bankers Trust in 1998. The Deutsche Bank Building was heavily damaged in the September 11, 2001 attacks after being blasted by the avalanche of debris, ash, dust and smoke that spread from WTC. The building has been in ruins ever since. According to the update published by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, its deconstruction is still ongoing as of May 6th, 2009.^[1] World Trade Center Tower 5 will eventually replace the building following the deconstruction, expanding the ground space on which the World Trade Center stands, as this land was not part of the original World Trade Center. – wikipedia

Students embed stem cells in sutures to enhance healing

Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering students have demonstrated a practical way to embed a patient’s own adult stem cells in the surgical thread that doctors use to repair serious orthopedic injuries such as ruptured tendons. The goal, the students said, is to enhance healing and reduce the likelihood of re-injury without changing the surgical procedure itself.

The project team — 10 undergraduates sponsored by Bioactive Surgical Inc., a Maryland medical technology company — won first place in the recent Design Day 2009 competition conducted by the university’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. In collaboration with orthopedic physicians, the students have begun testing the stem cell–bearing sutures in an animal model, paving the way for possible human trials within about five years.

The students believe this technology has great promise for the treatment of debilitating tendon, ligament and muscle injuries, often sports-related, that affect thousands of young and middle-aged adults annually. “Using sutures that carry stems cells to the injury site would not change the way surgeons repair the injury,” said Matt Rubashkin, the student team leader, “but we believe the stem cells will significantly speed up and improve the healing process. And because the stem cells will come from the patient, there should be no rejection problems.”

The corporate sponsor, Bioactive Surgical, developed the patent-pending concept for a new way to embed stem cells in sutures during the surgical process. The company then enlisted the student team to assemble and test a prototype to demonstrate that the concept was sound. The undergraduates performed this work during the yearlong Design Team course, required by the school’s Biomedical Engineering Department.

The undergraduate team located a machine that could weave surgical thread in a way that would ensure the most effective delivery and long-term survival of the stem cells. The team conducted some aspects of the animal testing, although orthopedic physicians performed the surgical procedures. The students also prepared grant applications, seeking funding for additional testing of the technology, in collaboration with Bioactive Surgical.

via Students embed stem cells in sutures to enhance healing.

Clinton says 9/11 ringleaders are in Pakistan

U.S. officials “firmly believe” that al-Qaida leaders who planned and carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are hiding in Pakistan near its border with Afghanistan, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.

At a news conference concluding three days of meetings, Clinton said Washington has told the Pakistani government what it believes about the location of al-Qaida leaders on its soil.

“With respect to the location of those who were part of the planning and execution of the attack of 9/11 against our country, we firmly believe that a significant number of them are in the border area of Pakistan,” she said when asked about the U.S. view.

“We are actively looking for additional information that would lead us to them,” she added.

The Pakistani government denies that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his senior lieutenants are hiding on its territory.

Bin Laden is believed to have fled into Pakistan from Afghanistan weeks after the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks.

via Clinton says 9/11 ringleaders are in Pakistan – Yahoo! News.

True, I read they made one of the 9/11 planners a mayor of a town.

Who Owns the Moon?

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts stepped onto the moon and planted an American flag—not to claim the moon but simply to commemorate the U.S. role in the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Forty years after Apollo 11, a Nevada entrepreneur says he owns the moon and that he’s interim president of the first known galactic government.

Dennis Hope, head of the Lunar Embassy Corporation, has sold real estate on the moon and other planets to about 3.7 million people so far.

As his customer base grew, he said, buyers wanted assurances that their property rights would be protected.

So Hope started his own government in 2004, which has a ratified constitution, a congress, a unit of currency—even a patent office.

“We’re now a fully realized sovereign nation,” Hope said.

The trouble is that, legally, nobody can own the moon or anything else in space, for that matter, said Tanja Masson-Zwaan, president of the International Institute of Space Law, based in the Netherlands.

“What Lunar Embassy is doing does not give people buying pieces of paper the right to ownership of the moon,” she said. …

The controversy began in 1980, when Hope registered his claim to the moon with the United Nations. The claim went unanswered, so he figured his rights were secured.

To date his company has sold more than 2,500,000 1-acre (0.4-hectare) plots of lunar land, which Hope says are rich in an isotope of helium that has an earthly price tag of about U.S. $125,000 an ounce.

Today a deed for a plot, printed with the buyer’s name, is selling online for $22.49, plus tax.

Legal experts counter that the UN didn’t answer because it didn’t have to: The moon is unclaimable under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which has so far been ratified by 100 UN member countries, including the United States.

Hope, however, said there’s a loophole.

The treaty prohibits countries from claiming property in space, but “I filed my claim of ownership as an individual.”

The fact that he’s now claiming his Galactic Government has legal authority over the moon might seem problematic. But Hope said that the fledgling regime isn’t a member of the UN and so doesn’t have to abide by its laws.

Regardless of his current stance, Hope’s original claim to the moon is simply not legal, the space-law institute’s Masson-Zwaan asserts.

The UN treaty does apply to governments and their private citizens, which invalidates Hope’s claim to the moon and other celestial bodies, she said.

But that shouldn’t disappoint any prospective moon millionaires.

You don’t need to own a place to make money on it, Masson-Zwaan said. But you do need a clear legal framework for doing business on the property—something the moon currently lacks….

Recently, Hope said, he’s been sending letters on behalf of his government asking other countries not to trespass on the moon without a license.

He’s also battling the International Monetary Fund for official recognition of his government’s currency, called the delta.

“The position of the Galactic Government is that we’re not trying to distance ourselves from other governments. We just want recognition so we can work together,” Hope said.

“We’re not hostile, not angry—we just want to be accepted.”

via APOLLO 11 AT 40: Who Owns the Moon?.

We can no more own the Earth than a flea can own a dog.