Source: Science Daily

New research in theoretical physics shows that black holes aren’t the ruthless killers we’ve made them out to be, but instead benign–if imperfect–hologram generators. The world could have been captured by a black hole, and we wouldn’t even notice, according to a new theoretical perspective.

This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun. Supermassive black holes are enormously dense objects buried at the hearts of galaxies. Smaller black holes also exist throughout galaxies. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Are black holes the ruthless killers we’ve made them out to be? Samir Mathur says no. According to the professor of physics at Ohio State University, the recently proposed idea that black holes have “firewalls” that destroy all they touch has a loophole.

In a paper posted online to the arXiv preprint server, Mathur takes issue with the firewall theory, and proves mathematically that black holes are not necessarily arbiters of doom.

In fact, he says the world could be captured by a black hole, and we wouldn’t even notice.

More than a decade ago, Mathur used the principles of string theory to show that black holes are actually tangled-up balls of cosmic strings. His “fuzzball theory” helped resolve certain contradictions in how physicists think of black holes.

But when a group of researchers recently tried to build on Mathur’s theory, they concluded that the surface of the fuzzball was actually a firewall.

According to the firewall theory, the surface of the fuzzball is deadly. In fact, the idea is called the firewall theory because it suggests that a very literal fiery death awaits anything that touches it.

Mathur and his team have been expanding on their fuzzball theory, too, and they’ve come to a completely different conclusion. They see black holes not as killers, but rather as benign copy machines of a sort.

They believe that when material touches the surface of a black hole, it becomes a hologram, a near-perfect copy of itself that continues to exist just as before.

“Near-perfect” is the point of contention. There is a hypothesis in physics called complementarity, which was first proposed by Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind in 1993. Complementarity requires that any such hologram created by a black hole be a perfect copy of the original.

Mathematically, physicists on both sides of this new fuzzball-firewall debate have concluded that strict complementarity is not possible. That is to say, a perfect hologram can’t form on the surface of a black hole.

Mathur and his colleagues are comfortable with the idea, because they have since developed a modified model of complementarity, in which they assume that an imperfect hologram forms. That work was done with former Ohio State postdoctoral researcher David Turton, who is now at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the CEA-Saclay research center in France.

Proponents of the firewall theory take an all-or-nothing approach to complementarity. Without perfection, they say, there can only be fiery death.

With his latest paper, Mathur counters that he and his colleagues have now proven mathematically that modified complementarity is possible.

It’s not that the firewall proponents made some kind of math error, he added. The two sides based their calculations on different assumptions, so they got different answers. One group rejects the idea of imperfection in this particular case, and the other does not.

Imperfection is common topic in cosmology. Physicist Stephen Hawking has famously said that the universe was imperfect from the very first moments of its existence. Without an imperfect scattering of the material created in the Big Bang, gravity would not have been able to draw together the atoms that make up galaxies, stars, the planets — and us.

This new dispute about firewalls and fuzzballs hinges on whether physicists can accept that black holes are imperfect, just like the rest of the universe.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect black hole, because every black hole is different,” Mathur explained.

His comment refers to the resolution of the “information paradox,” a long-running physics debate in which Hawking eventually conceded that the material that falls into a black hole isn’t destroyed, but rather becomes part of the black hole.

The black hole is permanently changed by the new addition. It’s as if, metaphorically speaking, a new gene sequence has been spliced into its DNA. That means every black hole is a unique product of the material that happens to come across it.

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE…

Article Source: Phys.org

New research shows that the close linkage between the physical properties of amino acids, the genetic code, and protein folding was likely a key factor in evolution from building blocks to organisms in Earth’s primordial soup. Credit: Gerald Prins

CLN Editors Note: Ben’s wife gave birth to a baby girl on March 22. He had previously announced he would be taking some time off after the birth. Today there is no news update, so instead we present this important S0 video on climate change and global warming.

Source: Suspicious0bservers

S0 (Ben Davidson) presents evidence that while climate change is definitely happening on Earth (and other planets in the solar system), the global warming hypothesis is wrong.  Global warming models/predictions have been an abject failure for 20 years, and yet the IPCC claims ever-higher certainty

How does this happen and what comes next?

All papers and charts in this presentation are publicly available information.

Source: Newsy Science

Transcript:
The Hubble Space Telescope is known for its dazzling images of cosmic phenomena, but it didn’t exactly start that way.

Its first ever image, captured 25 years ago today, is decidedly less exciting. This is HD96755, a part of star cluster NGC 3532, about 1,300 light years away. It underwhelmed people back then, too.

After its launch, the Hubble Space Telescope had an attached PR campaign touting it as a scientific improvement over ground-based telescopes of the time. (Video via ESA/Hubble)

David Leckrone was Hubble’s senior project scientist until 2009. As he told Time, expectations were high. Reality was still kind of blurry. (Video via C-SPAN)

“The astronomers groaned when the media was invited. And everyone was a little perplexed and uncomfortable when the image came in because it was so out of focus. Someone said ‘Is that the way it’s supposed to look?’”

No, it wasn’t. This image came before any calibration or fine-tuning of Hubble’s instruments.

There was no post-processing, either. The images Hubble is known for go through an extensive cleanup and color-assignment process to get as good-looking as they are. (Video via the Space Telescope Science Institute)

That shot of HD96755 was what’s known as a “first light test.” It’s more to certify the cameras and mirrors are all working than to show off what they’re capable of.

Of course, it didn’t help that Hubble’s primary mirror was also flawed.

The first maintenance mission to Hubble, flown by the Space Shuttle Columbia in December 1993, delivered specialized hardware to correct the mirror and sharpen the images it captured.

Over the next months, astronomers dialed in their process and started turning out images Hubble is much better known for.

And to this day, Hubble is still at it. NASA says the telescope will keep collecting images for as long as it stays in working condition. (Video via NASA)

This video includes images from NASA and RadioFan / CC BY SA 3.0.

In just the past two months, there have been thirteen earthquakes over 6.0 on the Richter scale. Some of these quakes were incredibly intense, namely that which occurred in Nepal that ranged from magnitude 6.6-7.8. The damage was enormous and the loss of life was in the thousands.  And most recently, a magnitude 7.1-7.5 rattled the island shores of Papa New Guinea, but thankfully has not caused nearly as much damage or injury.

What I find curious about all of this recent tectonic activity is that CERN in Geneva, Switzerland (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, [French acronym]) or perhaps more commonly known in the States as The European Organization for Nuclear Research, has recently fired up its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator again, just before this unusual stretch of high-magnitude earthquakes began.

The LHC is the most powerful and largest particle accelerator on the planet and while the majority of the world of science considers it invaluable to making further discoveries about our universe, some scientists including Stephen Hawking are offering fair warning of the damage it can cause to the planet, humanity and even the time-space continuum. Read more on Hawking’s concerns about CERN here: https://rt.com/news/185876-universe-elimination-higgs-boson/

Just months after the discovery of the Higgs boson or the so-called “God Particle” in July 2012, CERN completed its first continuous run of the LHC which recorded around 5 billion collisions at an energy amount of 8 TeV (Tevatron scale). Only 400 of these collisions produced results even remotely compatible with that of the Higgs boson. (Source: https://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2012/12/first-lhc-protons-run-ends-new-milestone ).

Fast-forward to present day and they’ve nearly doubled the amount of collision energy to 13 TeV. The plan is to have the LHC do another run for 3 years continuously and this time CERN announced that their focus is to “capture dark matter” and on “the discovery of other dimensions”. While I am all for raising the awareness about our place in the universe and of course the working of quantum space dynamics to better grasp an understanding of ourselves, I feel that it should not come at the expense of Mother Earth or that we should go into this kind of science biting at our own tails.

Simply put, the Large Hadron Collider creates the biggest magnetic field on the entire planet, second to that created by the planet itself! It may seem only speculation linking the LHC to seismic activity, but we must take into consideration how magnetism on this grand of a scale affects the layers of the Earth.

Each time CERN forces a collision, the residue energy causes massive magnetic vibrations within the Earth, therefore in my opinion it would be naïve to not at least consider that this is not somehow contributing to all of the recent quakes. And these recent “coincidences” are not the first, either.  In 2010, mass LHC activity at CERN coincided with the 8.8 Chilean earthquake­, which was the 6^th worst in our history.

I stand behind scientific exploration and furthering our knowledge of the workings of the Universe, absolutely. In fact, I live and breathe this stuff! I am what you would call a cross between a Quantum Physics nerd and a yoga-loving Jedi in training. But the fact remains that I hold true to the feeling in my gut that it’s more than mere coincidence in the timing of these earthquakes and the recent power up of the LHC. And I just hope that our thirst for knowing how small we can go into particles, doesn’t leave us in a self-created black hole somewhere on the outer edges of space …just saying. 🙂

Check out these other related articles:

Higgs Boson Explained Via Animated Cartoon Using an Analogy

Amplituhedron: A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics

The Higgs boson ‘God Particle’ discovery explained in the context of conscious cosmology

Tamara Rant is a Co-Editor/Writer for CLN as well as a Licensed Reiki Master, heart-centered Graphic Designer and a progressive voice in social media activism & awareness. Connect with Tamara on Facebook by visiting Prana Paws/Healing Hearts Reiki or go to RantDesignMedia.com

Tamara posts new original articles to CLN every Saturday.

Source: RT.com

Reuters/Terry Virts/NASA

For the first time in 50 years, mysterious ‘X-Files’ sounds have been recorded from the edge of space. A helium balloon built by a student for a NASA project captured the eerie hisses and whistles 22 miles above the Earth’s surface.

The bizarre noises were captured using equipment designed and built by Daniel Bowman, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to LiveScience.

The instruments recorded atmospheric infrasound – sound waves at frequencies below 20 hertz. Since infrasound is below human hearing range, the noises can only be heard when the recording is sped up.

“It sounds kind of like ‘The X-Files,'” Bowman said. He added that the intensity of the sounds came as a shock, stating that he was “surprised by the sheer complexity of the signal.”

Capturing the eerie noises wasn’t exactly a simple task – it involved infrasound microphones dangling from a helium balloon which flew above the US states of New Mexico and Arizona last year. Launched on August 9, 2014, the flight was part of an annual project conducted by NASA and the Louisiana Space Consortium. Bowman’s experiment was one of 10 payloads flown as part of the High Altitude Student Platform (HASP) last year.

During its nine-hour flight, the balloon floated some 450 miles (725 km) and reached a height of more than 123,000 feet (37,500 meters). This is a distance of 62 miles (100 km) above the Earth’s surface – an area above where airplanes fly, but below the boundary which marks the top of the stratosphere. It was the first time an infrasound study has reached such heights.

The source of the noises, which were captured 22 miles above Earth, remain a mystery to scientists, though many have speculated about the cause.

Those speculations include ocean waves, gravity waves, clear air turbulence, noise from the balloon cable itself, and even a wind farm under the balloon’s path.

Read the rest of the article at rt.com….

Source: Kurz Gesagt – In a Nutshell

The universe is unbelievably big – trillions of stars and even more planets. Soo… there just has to be life out there, right? But where is it? Why don’t we see any aliens? Where are they? And more importantly, what does this tell us about our own fate in this gigantic and scary universe?

The Fermi paradox (or Fermi’s paradox) is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity’s lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations. The basic points of the argument, made by physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael H. Hart, are:

• The Sun is a typical star, and relatively young. There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older.
• With high probability, some of these stars will have Earth-like planets. Assuming the Earth is typical, some of these planets may develop intelligent life.
• Some of these civilizations may develop interstellar travel, a technology Earth is investigating even now (such as the 100 Year Starship).
• Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the galaxy can be completely colonized in a few tens of millions of years.

According to this line of thinking, the Earth should already have been colonized, or at least visited. But Fermi saw no convincing evidence of this, nor of signs of intelligence (see Empirical resolution attempts) elsewhere in our galaxy or (to the extent it would be detectable) elsewhere in the observable universe. Hence Fermi’s question, “Where is everybody?”

Source: DNews

In Star Wars, the planet Tatooine has two suns. Is a double sunset a work of fiction, or is a binary star system possible? Julia Wilde of DNews provides the answer.

Read more about binary star systems:

• We’ve Discovered a Binary Star System Whose Planet Is in Stable Orbit
• New studies give strong boost to binary-star formation theory
• Astrophile: Binary stars that form like fraternal twins
• Earthlike ‘Star Wars’ Tatooines may be common

Source: Newsy Science

NASA is putting together an unprecedented team of scientists and researchers to analyze recently found exoplanets for the potential to support life. The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS”, hopes to better understand the various components of an exoplanet, as well as how the planet stars and neighbor planets interact to support life.

Read more: NASA’s NExSS Coalition to Lead Search for Life on Distant Worlds

Source: VideoFromSpace

Today’s earthquake in Nepal is reportedly a 7.8 – 7.9 magnitude. What does that mean in actual terms? We’ve all heard earthquakes described by magnitude number, and yet most of us have a relatively vague or distorted perception of what these numbers mean in the real world. This video illustrates the variation of energy released in easy-to-understand terms.

For a full scope video and story on the earthquake today, Saturday, April 25, 2015 in Nepal, go here.

Source: ScienceAtNASA

At the end of a day devoted to Earth (Earth Day on April 22, 2015), people can look to the heavens for a beautiful shower of Lyrid meteors.

The Lyrid Meteor shower will reach its peak late Wednesday night when as many as 20 meteors per hour are expected to whiz through the night sky.

“The Lyrids are really unpredictable,” Bill Cooke, director of NASA‘s Meteoroid Environment Office, said in a statement. “For the 2015 shower, I’m expecting 15 to 20 Lyrid meteors an hour.”

Peak meteor action should happen after 10:30 p.m. local time in the northern hemisphere, while Cooke said people in the southern hemisphere should be able to catch a glimpse after midnight local time.

All it takes to view the meteor shower is an unobstructed view of the sky away from artificial lights. NASA recommends bringing a lawn chair or blanket, laying back and enjoying the view.

For those who would rather stay indoors but still check out the view, NASA will be live streaming the Lyrids.

Source: Suspicious0bservers

Earth & Space News April 11, 2015:

• Space weather – major sunspot coming into view;
• Earthquake watch;
• Global weather;
• Illinois Tornado
• CM5, a pre-Swarm comprehensive geomagnetic field model
• Historical Magnetic Declination

Source: Suspicious0bservers

Earth & Space News April 10, 2015:

Space weather – solar wind stream triggered a magnetic storm;

Earthquake Uptick Watch – April 10-15, 2015

NASA Study Finds Small Solar Eruptions Can Have Profound Effects On Unprotected Planets

Global weather;

By Alex Newman | The New American

Government’s latest Orwellian tools to spy on citizens, known as “smart meters,” are literally blowing up and catching fire, risking lives and property to facilitate what even officials acknowledge amounts to intrusive state surveillance. In fact, your home may already have been fitted with one of the dangerous meters in recent years. The latest explosions of the controversial espionage devices, used to monitor citizens’ electricity and water usage, happened in California last week. Amid a government-caused water shortage across the state, bureaucrats are hoping to use the hazardous meters to catch citizens consuming more than their government-approved water rations. As more and more “smart” meters explode and burst into flames, though, citizens concerned about safety — not to mention privacy and liberty — are increasingly fighting back.

According to local news reports, more than 5,000 homes in Stockton, California, were left without power late last month after the smart meters on the houses exploded. “Neighbors in the South Stockton area described it as a large pop, a bomb going off, and strong enough to shake a house,” reported CBS13 on its website. Resident Brad Abernathy was quoted as saying that his neighbor’s electricity receptacles “are all blackened” from the event. Apparently the blasts and resulting damage were caused when a truck crashed into a utility pole and two wires touched, producing a power surge that blew up the unstable meters. The damage reportedly varies by house, and a spokesperson for the utility said that home appliances may have also been damaged in the surge. Electrical panels were being replaced as well.

Of course, as The New American reported just last year, Stockton’s exploding espionage devices are hardly unique to that city. In fact, all across the United States, Canada, and beyond, the deeply controversial meters for electricity have been randomly catching on fire and even exploding. The scandal became so huge that one Canadian province with exploding meters — after politicians ignored widespread citizen concerns and foisted the dangerous meters on the populace — ended up forcing authorities to start removing all of the more than 100,000 devices. They were reportedly replaced with the older analog meters that permit far less surveillance. In Oregon, after numerous reports of the meters catching on fire, officials announced that over 70,000 smart meters would be replaced. Taxpayers, of course, have been stuck with the mounting bills. With dozens of smart meters going up in flames in Pennsylvania, at least two homes there also caught on fire.

After a series of fires and explosions involving the meters last year, one of the top manufacturers of the “smart” monitoring devices, taxpayer-funded North Carolina-based Sensus, sparked even more controversy with a stunning admission. “Our experience has shown that these issues are systemic in the industry,” Sensus President Randy Bays admitted in a statement at the time, giving even more credence to the widespread safety concerns expressed by critics of the smart-meter rollout. Of course, with public outrage growing over the dangers and politicians forced to respond, Bays was trying to deflect responsibility over the fires from his firm. Still, he is hardly the first to suggest that the dangers of smart meters are, in fact, “systemic” in the industry.

But why are governments around the world — and especially in the United States — putting the lives and property of citizens at serious risk by imposing smart meters on the population when the dangers are already well-documented? A partial answer, at least, emerged this week in drought-stricken California. That state, as The New American reported on April 7, is facing water shortages blamed on radical Big Government policies that prevented the construction of reservoirs for decades under the guise of “environmentalism.” To deal with the self-inflicted crisis, the smart meters will be used, just as opponents warned, to monitor and control citizens’ water usage across California — a notion that was ridiculed by the establishment and its media organs as fear-mongering. Governor Jerry Brown recently issued an executive order purporting to mandate fines for citizens who use more than their “fair share” of water by, for example, watering their lawn or taking long showers. To enforce the rationing schemes, officials will be relying on data from smart meters — and they are boasting about it in public.

“It collects the data every five minutes, then after midnight, the cellphone that’s built in here comes on, makes one call, and calls it in to the database that we and the customer, through a password security system, have online access to their consumption,” Long Beach Water Department General Manager Kevin Wattier was quoted as saying after using smart meters to bust a local business that “overwatered” its lawn. “The accuracy is just incredible, because we get the data the next day.” Using data collected by the warrantless-surveillance meters, Wattier said he knew exactly when to send out his employees to gather videotaped “evidence” of the “infraction.” “We are using it specifically for an enforcement tool to go after those customers who we’ve gotten lots of complaints about,” the water boss continued, adding that smart meters would be used to target homes and businesses alike.

Of course, such lawless surveillance and control over citizens is precisely what critics of smart meters have been warning about for many years — among myriad other concerns. “Smart Meters are designed to provide government with detailed information on your energy use, your movements in your home, the way you use your personal private time, and even how many people are in your home at any given time,” explained Tom DeWeese, chief of the liberty-minded American Policy Center. “It is an unconstitutional invasion of your home by government, as set down in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

Even government bodies have acknowledged the threat to privacy posed by the meters. “If law enforcement officers obtained near-real time data on a consumer’s electricity usage from the utility company, their ability to monitor household activities would be amplified significantly,” the Congressional Research Service said in a 2012 report about the meters. “For example, by observing when occupants use the most electricity, it may be possible to discern their daily schedules.” If a criminal accessed that information — a relatively simple matter for somebody with hacking skills — they would know, for instance, what time would be best for a robbery or murder. On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), an official European Union body, has also sounded the alarm about the meters, warning in a 2012 report that they enable “massive collection of personal information” on households that is “thus far unprecedented in the energy sector.”

Explosions, fires, and the vast new opportunities for espionage, though, are hardly the only concerns surrounding the controversial devices. There are also major potential health risks, according to experts. Among the biggest health concerns (other than being burned alive) is the emission of pulsed radio-frequency (RF) radiation by the meters. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine, among others, has called for caution. “Multiple studies correlate RF exposure with diseases such as cancer, neurological disease, reproductive disorders, immune dysfunction, and electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” the Academy said on its website about the radiation emitted by smart meters and other devices with similar technology. “Genotoxic effects from RF exposure, including studies of non-thermal levels of exposure, consistently and specifically show chromosomal instability, altered gene expression, gene mutations, DNA fragmentation and DNA structural breaks.”

[Read more here]

*Originally entitled: In California, Exploding “Smart Meters” Spy on Your Water Use

Robert O’Leary, JD BARA, has had an abiding interest in alternative health products & modalities since the early 1970’s & he has seen how they have made people go from lacking health to vibrant health. He became an attorney, singer-songwriter, martial artist & father along the way and brings that experience to his practice as a BioAcoustic Soundhealth Practitioner, under the tutelage of the award-winning founder of BioAcoustic Biology, Sharry Edwards, whose Institute of BioAcoustic Biology has now been serving clients for 30 years with a non-invasive & safe integrative modality that supports the body’s ability to self-heal using the power of the human voice. Robert brings this modality to serve clients in Greater Springfield (MA), New England & “virtually” the world, with his website, www.romayasoundhealthandbeauty.com. He can also be reached at romayasoundhealthandbeauty@gmail.com

 

Source: DAHBOO77

NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan said on Tuesday that, within a decade, humanity will have found ‘strong indications’ of alien life.

“I think we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we’re going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years,” NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan said Tuesday (April 7) during a panel discussion that focused on the space agency’s efforts to search for habitable worlds and alien life.

“We know where to look. We know how to look,” Stofan added during the event, which was webcast live. “In most cases we have the technology, and we’re on a path to implementing it. And so I think we’re definitely on the road.” [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]