Russian Navy UFO records say aliens love oceans

The Russian navy has declassified its records of encounters with unidentified objects technologically surpassing anything humanity ever built, reports Svobodnaya Pressa news website.

The records dating back to soviet times were compiled by a special navy group collecting reports of unexplained incidents delivered by submarines and military ships. The group was headed by deputy Navy commander Admiral Nikolay Smirnov, and the documents reveal numerous cases of possible UFO encounters, the website says.

Vladimir Azhazha, former navy officer and a famous Russian UFO researcher, says the materials are of great value.

“Fifty percent of UFO encounters are connected with oceans. Fifteen more – with lakes. So UFOs tend to stick to the water,” he said.

On one occasion a nuclear submarine, which was on a combat mission in the Pacific Ocean, detected six unknown objects. After the crew failed to leave behind their pursuers by maneuvering, the captain ordered to surface. The objects followed suit, took to the air, and flew away.

Many mysterious events happened in the region of Bermuda Triangle, recalls retired submarine commander Rear Admiral Yury Beketov. Instruments malfunctioned with no apparent reason or detected strong interference. The former navy officer says this could be deliberate disruption by UFOs.

Read more HERE

Read more »

Aliens can't hear us, says astronomer

Human beings are making it harder for extraterrestials to pick up our broadcasts and make contact, the world's leading expert on the search for alien life warned yesterday.

At a special meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti), the US astronomer Frank Drake – who has been seeking radio signals from alien civilisations for almost 50 years – told scientists that earthlings were making it less likely they would be heard in space.

Astronomers assumed that a standard technique for any alien intelligence trying to pinpoint other civilisations in the galaxy would involve seeking signals from TV, radio and radar broadcasts, Drake told the meeting at the Royal Society in London.

Scientists on Earth have been using this method, without success so far, to find evidence of intelligent aliens. The theory is that elsewhere in the galaxy other civilisations would probably be doing the same.

An example of this interstellar eavesdropping is dramatised in the Jodie Foster film Contact. Based on a novel by the US astronomer Carl Sagan, it tells the story of an alien civilisation that makes contact after picking up TV broadcasts from Earth.

"The trouble is that we are making ourselves more and more difficult to be heard," said Dr Drake. "We are broadcasting in much more efficient ways today and are making our signals fainter and fainter."

Read more here

Read more »

Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness

PART 1: Socrates on Self Confidence



PART 2: Epicurus on Happiness



PART 3: Seneca on Anger



PART 4: Montaigne on Self-Esteem



PART 5: Schopenhauer on Love



PART 6: Nietzche on Hardship

Read more »

Philosophy, Physics, Mathematics - “Dangerous Knowledge”

Read more »

Exolanguage: do you speak alien?

THE cosmos is quiet. Eerily quiet. After decades of straining our radio ears for a whisper of civilisations beyond Earth, we have heard nothing. No reassuring message of universal peace. No helpful recipe for building faster-than-light spacecraft or for averting global catastrophes. Not even a stray interstellar advertisement.

Perhaps there's nobody out there after all. Or perhaps it's just early days in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and we're listening to the wrong star systems or at the wrong wavelengths.

There is another possibility, says Douglas Vakoch, head of the Interstellar Message Composition programme at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, which ponders the question of how we should communicate with aliens. "Maybe everyone's listening but no one is transmitting. Maybe it takes an audacious young civilisation like ours to do that."

So should we start sending messages into the void? And if so, how can we make ourselves understood to beings we know nothing about?

Read more here

Read more »

Hidden asteroids are stalking the Earth

TINY asteroid that buzzed Earth last week highlighted our planet's vulnerability to objects whose peculiar orbits put them in a game of hide-and-seek with us.

An Earth-based telescope spotted the 10-metre space rock hurtling our way just three days before a near miss on 13 January, when it flew by at just one-third of the distance to the moon (see Object headed towards Earth an asteroid, not junk). The asteroid is never expected to hit Earth and would burn up before hitting the ground in any case. But its unusual orbit (see diagram) seems ingeniously designed to evade our surveys. It is likely that a handful of objects large enough to cause harm are hiding under similar circumstances.

Large asteroids are relatively easy to spot because they reflect the most sunlight. But smaller asteroids - which can still damage Earth if they span at least 30 to 50 metres - are usually too dim for telescopes to detect except during brief close approaches to Earth. For a typical near-Earth asteroid, these occurrences are a few years or decades apart.

However, last week's unexpected visitor, called 2010 AL30, kept far enough from Earth to be invisible for more than a century. The prolonged avoidance occurred because the period of its solar orbit was 366 days - very close to Earth's year (though the close pass shifted the space rock into a 390-day orbit). Like a slightly slower race car that is periodically lapped by its competitor on a circular track, it stays far from Earth for long stretches.

"2010 AL30 may become a sort of 'poster child' for hiding asteroids," says Alan Harris of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Similar "synchronised" asteroids may be hiding with periods of very close to two, three, four years and so on, Harris says. Those with periods of about four years pose the greatest risk to Earth, because they would be in sync with both Earth and Jupiter, says Timothy Spahr of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Such asteroids would be particularly influenced by Jupiter's gravity, which could nudge them onto a collision course with Earth.

Read more here

Read more »

The viruses that kill tumours

The idea of using viruses to kill cancers goes back nearly a century. In 1912, an Italian gynaecology journal reported the case of a woman with advanced cervical cancer who, after being bitten by a dog, was vaccinated with a live but weakened strain of the rabies virus. To the doctors' surprise, her tumour shrank.

After more reports of patients' tumours regressing after viral infections or vaccinations, doctors began to take the idea seriously. From the late 1940s onwards, several trials took place in which cancer patients were injected with live viruses. A few individuals showed striking improvements, but the results were mixed overall. Doctors pinned their hopes on chemotherapy and radiotherapy instead, and by the end of 1970s the approach had largely been abandoned.
The perfect bioweapon

While viral-therapy papers gathered dust on library shelves, a revolution was under way in biology. Armed with a burgeoning understanding of how viruses infect cells and a battery of techniques for manipulating their genes, researchers realised that they no longer had to rely on the natural tendency of some viruses to home in on cancer cells.

Read more here

Read more »