Bampot

If you are going to look for intelligent life beyond Earth, there are few better candidates than the TRAPPIST-1 star system.

The study began with a few assumptions. The biggest one was to presume that if TRAPPIST-1 has an intelligent civilization it is likely spread across more than one world. Given how compact the system is, that isn’t too outlandish. Getting from one world to another wouldn’t be much more difficult than it is for us to get to the Moon. With that assumption, the team then assumed that the worlds would transmit radio messages between each other. Since the signals would need to transverse interplanetary distances, they would be the strongest and most clear technosignatures in the system. So the team focused on signals during a planet-planet occultation (PPO). That is when two planets line up from our vantage point. During a PPO any signal sent from the far planet to the closer planet would spill over and eventually reach us.

With 28 hours of observation data in hand, the team filtered out more than 11,000 candidate signals. Signals that were stronger than the expected range for natural signals. Then using computer models of the system they determined 7 possible PPO events and further narrowed things down to about 2,200 potential signals occurring during a PPO window. From there they went on to determine whether any of those signals were statistically unusual enough to suggest an intelligent origin. The answer to that was sadly no.

Alas, if there are aliens in the TRAPPIST-1 system, we haven’t found them yet. But the result shouldn’t minimize this study. It is the longest continuous survey of the system to date, which is pretty cool. And it’s kind of amazing that we’ve reached the point where we’re able to do this study. We are actively searching known exoplanets in detail.

The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee is gearing up to hold a significant hearing focused on enhancing the credibility of the Pentagon's office dedicated to investigating unidentified flying objects (UFOs). This initiative comes as part of ongoing efforts to provide transparency and build public trust in the government's approach to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

The announcement of the hearing follows closely on the heels of a recent viral video showing a “huge UFO” adorned with numerous blinking and spinning lights, captured in Choteau, Montana, located less than 100 kilometers from the Malmstrom Air Force Base, a critical nuclear missile facility. This sighting has reignited public interest and debate surrounding UFOs, making the forthcoming congressional hearing even more timely and relevant.

Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. That's equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back.

"This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total," says Martijn Oei, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar and lead author of a Nature paper reporting the findings. "The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions."

The jet megastructure, nicknamed Porphyrion after a giant in Greek mythology, dates to a time when our universe was 6.3 billion years old, or less than half its present age of 13.8 billion years. These fierce outflows—with a total power output equivalent to trillions of suns—shoot out from above and below a supermassive black hole at the heart of a remote galaxy.

Highlights

• Discovery of immunoglobulins in permafrost paleontology samples.

• Allergens (plant’s metabolites, volatile organic compounds, pollen) induced sex contact inhibition as one of factor animals extinction.

• Disruption of chemical signaling between animals as a factor in animal extinction. The influence of plants and parasites on signaling disruption between animals.

One of the possible mechanisms for the extinction of animals during climate change could be a violation of the sense of smell due to the development of allergies when the flora changes.

During the breeding season, susceptibility to odors is very important for animals. The development of allergies from plant pollen, changes in pollen's allergic toxicity, pollen's release period increasing or the emergence of a large quantity of flowering plants during climate change, could lead to decrements in sensitivity to odors in animals during the breeding season.

This may explain the extinction of animals due to a decrease in sexual intercourse. Probably these changes in allergic responses of mammoths at period of climate changes led to a decrease in the mammoth population and, as a result, to their disappearance.

A research team, including academics from the University of Warwick, has suggested that apes can understand the communicative goals behind each other's actions—a skill previously thought to be unique to humans.

Ever since Jane Goodall first observed apes gesturing to each other in the 1960s, researchers have debated how great apes like chimpanzees and gorillas communicate.

Full Paper :-

The origin of great ape gestural forms

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.13136

Two knights died during the life of Jamestown’s second church (ca.1617 to ca.1639).

One was Sir Thomas West (The Lord De La Warr), the colony’s first resident governor. He died in 1618 on the transatlantic voyage to Jamestown and was buried there. There is no archaeological or historical evidence connecting the knight’s tombstone to Sir Thomas West.

The other knight was governor Sir George Yeardley. The tombstone likely belonged to Yeardley based on a reference to it in the 1680s will of his step-grandson, Adam Thorowgood II. Thorowgood requested that his own black “marble” tombstone be engraved with the crest of Sir George Yeardley and have the same inscription found on “the broken tomb,” indicating that the stone was originally damaged in the seventeenth century as seen in the oldest photograph from 1905.

Assuming the knight’s tombstone was George Yeardley’s, then it is the oldest black “marble” tombstone in the Chesapeake Bay region, USA and may be the oldest surviving tombstone in America .

It is the only known tombstone in the English colonies with engraved monumental brass inlays.

Highlights

• Cats were tested for their body-awareness with incrementally decreasing openings

• Cats did not make a priori decisions when they approached tall, narrow openings

• However, cats hesitated to approach and enter uncomfortably short apertures

• Trial-and-error or body-awareness are both ecologically valid strategies for cats

Ecological validity ought to be considered as the gold standard in ethological research. The modular concept of self-representation in nonhuman animal species has led to several discoveries where researchers showed that particular components of representing the self can provide advantages to various animals in specific contexts (e.g., mirror self-recognition in cleaning fish; “body as an obstacle” in elephants; body size awareness in bumblebees.

The results of this study have shown that cats did not react with a priori hesitation when they approached very narrow apertures that were smaller than the cat’s corresponding chest width. Compared to dogs’ reactions, this implies that for cats, body size awareness could have smaller relevance as a mental mechanism when they solve specific aperture tasks. 

Cats are mammals with well-developed complex cognition, who have to negotiate various and often dynamic obstacles in their three-dimensional spatial environment. This strengthens the likelihood that cats should possess probably even multiple forms of body awareness (size, shape, and weight).

Black holes are mysterious objects – there’s a lot we don’t know about them. One longstanding question has been whether rotating black holes, which are so powerful they drag space-time along with them, could be used as an energy source.

The physicist Roger Penrose suggested that, if an object fell into a rotating black hole in such a way that it split – with one part escaping – the part that left should effectively gain energy from the black hole.

So if we sent objects or light towards a rotating black hole, we may be able to get energy back. It’s difficult to directly prove all this, however. But we have recently published our second study, in Nature Communications, experimentally verifying a more general theory behind it. This theory concerns all rotating objects that can absorb matter or radiation, and a black hole is, in essence, just a very big and effective absorber.

The idea dates back to 1971 and the Soviet physicist Yakov Zel’dovich. Generalising Penrose’s idea, he predicted something very simple. If you take a cylinder that absorbs energy from waves, and you spin it, then it should actually spend its own energy to amplify some waves (boosting their energy).

Origins of Hounds and Jackals, aka Fifty-Eight Holes, may lie in Asia rather than Egypt.

An ancient board game known as Hounds and Jackals has long been believed to have originated in Egypt. However, according to a paper published in the European Journal of Archaeology, a version of the game board found in present-day Azerbaijan might date back even earlier, suggesting that the game originated in Asia.

As previously reported, there is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum ("game of mercenaries") favored by Roman legions. A 4,000-year-old board discovered last year at an archaeological site in Oman's Qumayrah Valley might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game of Ur (or the Game of Twenty Squares), a two-player game that may have been one of the precursors to backgammon (or was replaced in popularity by backgammon). Like backgammon, it's essentially a race game in which players compete to see who can move all their pieces along the board before their opponent.

Last year, archaeologists discovered a 500-year-old game board in the ruins of Ćmielów Castle in Poland. It was a two-person strategy board game called Mill, also known as Nine Men's Morris, Merels, or "cowboy checkers" in North America. The earliest-known Mill game board was found carved into the roofing slabs of an Egyptian temple at Kurna, which likely predates the Common Era. Historians believe it was well-known to the Romans, who may have learned of the game through trade routes.

Similar boards have also been found carved into cloister seats at English cathedrals

Full Paper:-

Herding with the Hounds: The Game of Fifty-eight Holes in the Abşeron Peninsula

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-archaeology/article/herding-with-the-hounds-the-game-of-fiftyeight-holes-in-the-abseron-peninsula/3D308A06C1EED64BF5BB185B9DCCFBA1

With the help of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, an international team of researchers led by scientists in the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University has found more black holes in the early universe than has previously been reported. The new result can help scientists understand how supermassive black holes were created.

Currently, scientists do not have a complete picture of how the first black holes formed not long after the big bang. It is known that supermassive black holes, that can weigh more than a billion suns, exist at the center of several galaxies less than a billion years after the big bang.

The new observational results suggest that some black holes likely formed by the collapse of massive, pristine stars during the first billion years of cosmic time. These types of stars can only exist at very early times in the universe, because later-generation stars are polluted by the remnants of stars that have already lived and died. Other alternatives for black hole formation include collapsing gas clouds, mergers of stars in massive clusters, and "primordial" black holes that formed (by physically speculative mechanisms) in the first few seconds after the big bang. With this new information about black hole formation, more accurate models of galaxy formation can be constructed.

It would get rid of our hazardous, radioactive, and pollutive waste for good, but physics tells us it’s a losing strategy for elimination.

• With more humans than ever (over 8 billion) on Earth, the amount of waste we cumulatively produce on an annual basis continues to rise and rise: a problem that’s getting worse with time. 

• Much of that waste is hazardous, some of it is radioactive, and all of it needs to be kept out of food and water supplies. Environmentally, there’s no 100% safe place to put it. 

• Periodically, people suggest that we launch our waste into the Sun, destroying it forever while keeping Earth clean and pristine. But this is something we must never do, and physics explains why.

How should we eliminate the worst of these offensive waste products? Some have suggested burying them in a geological subduction zone, where plate tectonics would eventually carry them into Earth’s mantle. Others recommend encasing them in concrete and allowing them to gradually degrade. Still others propose burying them in a geologically stable region, where they shall remain until future humans are ready to deal with them. All of these proposed solutions have pros and cons, but are worthy of consideration.

However, what we mustn’t do is the frequently suggested:

• pack them onto a rocket,

• launch them into space,

• and set on a collision course with the Sun,

where they won’t plague Earth ever again. (Yes, if you were mining the depths of your memory, this was indeed the plot of Superman IV.)

Even if our launch failure rate were reduced to an unprecedented 1-in-1000, we’d still anticipate dozens of tons of hazardous waste winding up in our oceans and over our planet’s continents: an unacceptable catastrophe for our environment.

A massive wave of pager explosions across Lebanon and Syria around 3:30 pm local time today has killed at least eight people and injured more than 2,700, according to local officials. Many of the injured appear to be Hezbollah members, although a young girl is said to be among the dead.

The pagers in question allegedly have lithium-ion batteries, which sometimes explode after generating significant heat. The coordinated nature of the attack suggests that some kind of firmware hack or supply chain attack may have given an adversary the ability to trigger a pager explosion at the time of its choosing.

Update, 1:05pm: The WSJ quotes regional security analyst Michael Horowitz as suggesting the attack was likely caused by either 1) malware triggering the batteries to overheat/explode or 2) an actual explosive charge inserted in the devices at some point in the supply chain and then detonated remotely.

“Either way, this is a very sophisticated attack,” Horowitz told the WSJ. “Particularly if this is a physical breach, as this would mean Israel has access to the producer of those devices. This may be part of the message being sent here.”