Air Force UFO Rules Vanish After Huffington Post Inquiry

The military deleted a passage about unidentified flying objects from a 2008 Air Force personnel manual just days after The Huffington Post asked Pentagon officials about the purpose of the UFO section.

Before the recent revisions, the document — Air Force Instruction 10-206 — advised pilots, radar operators and other Air Force personnel on what to do when they encountered any unknown airborne objects. Now in the 2011 version, the reference to UFOs — which simply means “unidentified flying objects,” not necessarily spaceships with little green men — has been eliminated.

What makes this so intriguing is that the U.S. government officially stopped investigating UFOs in 1969 with the termination of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book.

The 22-year study, led by high-level military officials and academic experts, ruled that UFOs weren’t extraterrestrial visitors, nor were they technologically advanced aircraft, nor were they a threat to national security.

With that, the military essentially shut the book on flying saucer research, concluding that “nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigation by the Air Force.”

“The reason why the military is claiming they don’t investigate UFOs is because they don’t want to respond to people like you,” former Air Force Captain Robert Salas told The Huffington Post.

“They don’t want to respond to reporters or to the public as to what the heck is going on, and it’s been going on for so long. They just don’t want to have to answer that question.”

Yet more than 40 years after the close of Project Blue Book, there were still written orders on what Air Force personnel should do in the event they spotted a flying vehicle that couldn’t be identified. …

via Air Force UFO Rules Vanish After Huffington Post Inquiry.

Great, so now any country can invent a strange and possibly dangerous aircraft and pilots won’t know what to do?

Long-Married Couple Gordon Yeager And Norma Yeager Die Holding Hands

For one Iowa couple, true love lasted until the very end.

Married 72 years, Norma, 90, and Gordon Yeager, 94, died in the hospital holding hands last week, one hour apart.

The couple was hospitalized after a car accident just outside of Marshalltown, Iowa. They were given a shared room in the ICU where they held hands in adjacent beds.

At 3:38 pm last Wednesday, Gordon’s breathing stopped. Though he was no longer alive, his heart monitor continued to register a beat.

The nurse told Gordon and Norma’s son, Dennis Yeager, that the monitor was beeping “because they’re holding hands, and [Norma's heart beat] is going through them,” Dennis recalled in an interview with Des Moines’ KCCI news station. “Her heart was beating through him.”

Norma died at 4:38 pm, exactly one hour later.

Gordon and Norma’s children say they’re glad the couple passed this way. “They just loved being together,” says Dennis. “He always said, ‘I can’t go until she does because I gotta stay here for her.’ And she would say the same thing.” …

via Long-Married Couple Gordon Yeager And Norma Yeager Die Holding Hands.

New planet, the youngest ever found, is revealed by cosmic trick photography

Photograph: Kraus and IrelandA University of Hawaii astronomer has captured the first direct image of a planet forming around a star. Dubbed LkCa 15 b, it is the youngest planet ever found.

US and Australian astronomers cancel out light from solar cloud to reveal new planet LkCa 15 b forming in swirl of stardustLeft, the shining dust and gas cloud around the star LkCa 15. Right, an expanded view of the central region, showing the forming planet and the position of the central star.

The university’s Institute for Astronomy said Adam Kraus used telescopes on Mauna Kea island to find the planet. He was working with Michael Ireland from Macquarie University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

LkCa 15 b is 450 light years away from Earth and being built by dust and gas.Scientists had not been able to see such young planets before because their parent solar systems’ light outshines them.

Krause and Ireland used mirrors to cancel out the starlight and were able to see discs of dust near the planet.

The astronomers used 10-metre Keck telescopes to reveal the forming planet sitting inside a wide gap between the young parent star and the outer disc of glowing dust. …

via New planet, the youngest ever found, is revealed by cosmic trick photography | Science | guardian.co.uk.

Climate change spawns shrinking plants and animals, potential ecosystems catastrophe

Plants and animals are shrinking because of warmer temperatures and lack of water, researchers said on Monday, warning it could have profound implications for food production in years ahead.

“The worst-case scenarios … are that food crops and animals will shrink enough to have real implications for food security,” Assistant Professor David Bickford, of the National University of Singapore’s biological sciences department, said.

Bickford and colleague Jennifer Sheridan trawled through fossil records and dozens of studies which showed that many species of plants and creatures such as spiders, beetles, bees, ants and cicadas have shrunk over time in relation to climate change.

They cited an experiment showing how shoots and fruit are 3 to 17 percent smaller for every degree Celsius of warming in a variety of plants.

Each degree of warming also reduces by 0.5 to 4 percent the body size of marine invertebrates and 6 to 22 percent of fish.

“Survival of small individuals can increase with warmer temperatures, and drought conditions can lead to smaller offspring, leading to smaller average size,” they wrote in their paper which was published in the journal, Nature Climate Change, on Monday.

“Impacts could range from food resources becoming more limited (less food produced on the same amount of land) to wholesale biodiversity loss and eventual catastrophic cascades of ecosystem services,” Bickford wrote.

“We have not seen large-scale effects yet, but as temperatures change even more, these changes in body size might become much more pronounced – even having impacts for food security.” …

via Climate change spawns the incredible shrinking ant | Reuters.

Yes, the image is a Photoshop trick, but the impacts examined by Bickford and Sheridan and many other people’s concerns about the planet having less food due to climate change are real.

Christopher Columbus Caused a Mini Ice Age?

Devin Powell – By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate.

The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported.

“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” said Nevle.

Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. Such a depletion of a key greenhouse gas may have helped kick off Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages, Nevle’s team has argued.

By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 100 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas. Many of them burned trees to make room for crops, leaving behind charcoal deposits that have been found in the soils of Mexico, Nicaragua and other countries.

About 500 years ago, this charcoal accumulation plummeted as the people themselves disappeared. Smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases from Europe ultimately wiped out as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population.

Trees returned, reforesting an area at least the size of California, Nevle estimated. This new growth could have soaked up between 2 billion and 17 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air.

Ice cores from Antarctica contain air bubbles that show a drop in carbon dioxide around this time. These bubbles suggest that levels of the greenhouse gas decreased by 6 to 10 parts per million between 1525 and the early 1600s.

Reforestation fits with another clue hidden in Antarctic ice, says Nevle. As the population declined in the Americas, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere got heavier. Increasingly, molecules of the gas tended to be made of carbon-13, a naturally occurring isotope with an extra neutron. That could be because tree leaves prefer to take in gas made of carbon-12, leaving the heavier version in the air.

“There’s nothing else happening in the rest of the world at this time, in terms of human land use, that could explain this rapid carbon uptake,” says Jed Kaplan, an earth systems scientist at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne in Switzerland. …

via Columbus’ Arrival Linked To Carbon Dioxide Drop – Science News.

Quantum Levitation

Quantum Levitation – YouTube.

Dark matter gets even more mysterious

Like all galaxies, our Milky Way is home to a strange substance called dark matter. Dark matter is invisible, betraying its presence only through its gravitational pull. Without dark matter holding them together, our galaxy’s speedy stars would fly off in all directions. The nature of dark matter is a mystery — a mystery that a new study has only deepened.”After completing this study, we know less about dark matter than we did before,” said lead author Matt Walker, a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The standard cosmological model describes a universe dominated by dark energy and dark matter. Most astronomers assume that dark matter consists of “cold” i.e. slow-moving exotic particles that clump together gravitationally. Over time these dark matter clumps grow and attract normal matter, forming the galaxies we see today.

Cosmologists use powerful computers to simulate this process. Their simulations show that dark matter should be densely packed in the centers of galaxies. Instead, new measurements of two dwarf galaxies show that they contain a smooth distribution of dark matter. This suggests that the standard cosmological model may be wrong.”Our measurements contradict a basic prediction about the structure of cold dark matter in dwarf galaxies. Unless or until theorists can modify that prediction, cold dark matter is inconsistent with our observational data,” Walker stated.Dwarf galaxies are composed of up to 99 percent dark matter and only one percent normal matter like stars. This disparity makes dwarf galaxies ideal targets for astronomers seeking to understand dark matter.Walker and his co-author Jorge Peñarrubia University of Cambridge, UK analyzed the dark matter distribution in two Milky Way neighbors: the Fornax and Sculptor dwarf galaxies.

These galaxies hold one million to 10 million stars, compared to about 400 billion in our galaxy. The team measured the locations, speeds and basic chemical compositions of 1500 to 2500 stars.”Stars in a dwarf galaxy swarm like bees in a beehive instead of moving in nice, circular orbits like a spiral galaxy,” explained Peñarrubia. “That makes it much more challenging to determine the distribution of dark matter.”

Their data showed that in both cases, the dark matter is distributed uniformly over a relatively large region, several hundred light-years across. This contradicts the prediction that the density of dark matter should increase sharply toward the centers of these galaxies.”If a dwarf galaxy were a peach, the standard cosmological model says we should find a dark matter ‘pit’ at the center. Instead, the first two dwarf galaxies we studied are like pitless peaches,” said Peñarrubia.

Some have suggested that interactions between normal and dark matter could spread out the dark matter, but current simulations don’t indicate that this happens in dwarf galaxies. The new measurements imply that either normal matter affects dark matter more than expected, or dark matter isn’t “cold.” The team hopes to determine which is true by studying more dwarf galaxies, particularly galaxies with an even higher percentage of dark matter.

via CfA Press Room.

When will the 7 billionth human be born?

<img class="alignleft" title="Room for a small one, but for how much longer?(Image: Keystone/ZUMA/Rex Features)” src=”http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/mg21228344.500/mg21228344.500-1_300.jpg” alt=”Room for a small one, but for how much longer?(Image: Keystone/ZUMA/Rex Features)” />ON 31 October, a newborn baby somewhere in the world will become the 7 billionth member of the human race. Or so says the UN – alternatively, this date could be at least a year too early.

Behind the UN’s patina of certainty may lie outdated and unreliable census data. The suspicion is that millions of births and deaths have not been counted and there is huge uncertainty about the rate at which women are giving birth.

The precise “day of 7 billion” may not matter much. But the inaccuracies make it harder to answer a more important question: is human population set to peak within the next few decades or will it carry on growing beyond that?

Wolfgang Lutz of the Vienna Institute of Demography says the UN is “under political pressure to disregard uncertainty and name a date” for 7 billion. But he and colleague Sergei Scherbov estimate that the world probably won’t reach 7 billion until early in 2013, though it could be as late as 2020. …

via When will the 7 billionth human be born? – environment – 14 October 2011 – New Scientist.

Was ‘first photographed UFO’ a comet that nearly hit the earth in 1883?

Mexican astronomer José Banilla took the image, which appears to show something passing in front of the sun, on August 12 1883.

When it was released publicly in 1886 in the magazine L’Astronomie it was dubbed the first photo of a UFO – a series of 447 objects that looked ‘misty’ and ‘left behind a similar misty trace.’

A new study by the Univeridad Nacional Autónoma de México now suggests that it was a comet in the process of breaking up.

‘Our working hypothesis is that what Bonilla observed in 1883 was a highly fragmented comet, in an approach almost flush to the Earth’s surface,’ writes Hector Javier Durand Manterola, the lead author of the report.

‘Using the results reported by Bonilla, we can estimate the distance at which the objects approach to the Earth’s surface.

‘According to our calculations, the distance at which the objects passed over was between 538 km and 8,062 km, – and the width of the objects was between 46 m and 795m’

The mass of the original comet could have been up to eight times the mass of Halley’s comet.

If the photograph did show a comet in such close proximity to the Earth, it should have resulted in a meteor shower. Bonilla’s photograph was taken just before the annual Perseid meteor shower (pictured) – but 1883′s shower was no brighter than usual …

Using the time that it took the object to cross the sun combined with the location of Bonilla’s observatory, the report calculated that the object would be at most 8,000km away, and possibly much less.

‘The only bodies in the Solar System which are surrounded by a bright mistiness are the comets, so it is appropriate to suppose that the objects seen by Bonilla were small comets,’ said the scientists.

And as well as being shockingly close to earth, the scientists believe that the comet could have had the same mass as the object that wiped out the dinosaurs – eight times the mass of Halley’s comet. …

via Was ‘first photographed UFO’ a comet that nearly hit the earth in 1883? | Mail Online.

Sleights of hand, sleights of mind

… “In principle, neuroscience and magic have little in common,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, director of the Visual Neuroscience Laboratory at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. “In fact, they are hugely complementary and magicians have a lot to offer us. They can manipulate the attention and consciousness of spectators so much better than we do in the lab.” A few years ago, Martinez-Conde and her husband Stephen Macknik decided to investigate exactly how magicians fool the brain so adeptly. In doing so, they founded the exciting new discipline they refer to as ‘neuromagic,’ which aims to “pop the hood on your brain as you are suckered in by sleights of hand.” …

Magicians have a repertoire of perhaps several dozen techniques which they use to deceive spectators and enhance perception of their tricks. One of these is ‘misdirection,’ which exploits inattentional blindness and change blindness, two phenomena that psychologists have studied intensively in recent years.

Studies of inattentional blindness show that focused attention can make us oblivious to sights that would otherwise be glaringly obvious, while studies of change blindness show that dramatic changes in a scene can go unnoticed if they occur during a brief interruption, even when we look directly at the scene.

Magicians take advantage of this to manipulate their spectators’ attentional spotlight. They know, for example, that the eyes give off important social cues, and that people have a natural impulse to pay attention to the objects that others are attending to. They exploit this ‘joint attention’ by using their eye movements to divert the audience’s attention away from the ‘method’ – the secret action behind the trick – and towards the magical effect.

They also know that the sudden appearance of a new and unusual object will immediately draw the audience’s attention. Hence, producing a flying dove gives them an opportunity to perform other hidden manoeuvres.

These cognitive illusions are used together with optical illusions that exploit the properties of light; visual illusions that exploit how the brain interprets images; memory illusions that exploit the reconstructive nature of our recollections; special effects such as explosions; and various gimmicks, including secret devices and mechanical artifacts. …

“Instead of isolating the specific variables and using one effect, magicians lump everything together, putting illusions on top of illusions,” says Martinez-Conde. The magic show is a form of ‘mental jujitsu’ that bombards the senses, overloading the brain with multiple tasks that cannot be processed simultaneously. “It’s a super-stimulus and we really are defenceless. It’s virtually impossible for spectators to penetrate these layers and get at the method of the trick.” …

Read the rest here: Sleights of hand, sleights of mind | Mo Costandi | Neurophilosophy blog | Science | guardian.co.uk.