Simulating Mars Terraforming, on Earth (VIDEO)

Michaela Musilova is looking for life — in the extreme. Her research is in extremophiles, organisms that live in extreme environments such as the glaciers of Greenland; the high, dry desert of Utah; and eventually, perhaps, on the surface of Mars or in the oceans of Europa.

VIDEO

As with many astrobiologists, this work is important if humans are to learn if other life exists in the universe.  

Michaela first came across extremophiles at University College London, where she completed a Masters of Science Planetary Science degree with First Class Honors. Fueled by her interest for these extraordinary creatures, she wrote a proposal for her master's project on the subject and received several scholarships from the university to complete it. Michaela's studies have brought her to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as an exchange student from her home country of Slovakia, and as a research fellow at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Michaela is currently working as a Ph.D. research student at the University of Bristol. 
As humans increase our awareness of how many diverse forms life does take, and at the same time improve our techniques for investigation, we grow more likely to discover life off our home planet. While telescopes analyze the light from the atmosphere of planets eclipsed by orbiting distant stars, we continue to press our fingers and tools into the soil beneath our feet to look for life which may represent what we will some day find on Mars.
To learn more about MarsCrew134, visit www.marscrew134.org.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on SPACE.com.

Largest UFO conference in the world returning to Arizona this February

The International UFO Congress, presented by Open Minds Production, is the largest annual conference on UFOs and extraterrestrial life in the world. The conference will be held at the Fort McDowell Resort and Casino in Fountain Hills, Arizona, February 12th – 16, 2014.

The event features more than 20 speakers and wide variety of exhibitors from around the country, and covers a varying degree of topics related to the UFO phenomenon including sightings, technology, government cover-ups, exopolitics, black projects, crop circles, alien visitation, space, and more.

This conference isn’t just for UFO and space enthusiasts; everyone is encouraged to come hear from these seasoned professionals on what might be one of the greatest mysteries of our time.

The diverse and still growing line-up includes Richard Hoover, a former NASA Astrobiologist, George Noory, host of the nationally syndicated radio show Coast to Coast AM, Aaron Sagers, journalist and host of the Travel Channel series Paranormal Paparazzi, as well as Dr. John Alexander, a retired colonel and non-lethal weapons specialist.

Panel presentations on Government Cover-Up , Science and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, and Alien Abduction will feature authors, researchers, experiencers and TV personalities and provide the audience a chance to interact with speakers and ask the pertinent questions.

“We’ve got a very diverse line-up this year,” conference co-organizer Maureen Elsberry says, “we’ve pulled in speakers and events that will interest the general public as well as UFO and space enthusiasts. The UFO phenomenon is considered one of the great mysteries of our time and by delving deep in the subject maybe one day we will have some answers.”

Another special event will be a night vision skywatch on Friday, February 14th, led by Ben Hansen, the lead investigator from the popular SyFy show Fact or Faked. Night Optics USA, a Bushnell company, will be providing some of their latest military-grade technology for the watch. Night Vision Ops will also have a booth in the vendor room.

The event will also feature the Meet the Speakers cocktail party, the EBE Film Festival Awards Banquet, a performance by local musicians the Austen Mack Quartet, as well as special exclusive premieres of new extraterrestrial shows from the Discovery Network.

Conference admission will be sold in packages for those many guests who make a week of the event, along with à la carte options available for those who just want to check it out for an afternoon. Arizona students will receive a 40% discount when they present a valid student ID at the door. The vendor room, film festival, and skywatch are free and open to the public.

For more information on the International UFO Congress, please visit UFOCongress.com

300,000-Year-Old Caveman 'Campfire' Found in Israel

A newly discovered hearth full of ash and charred bone in a cave in modern-day Israel hints that early humans sat around fires as early as 300,000 years ago — before Homo sapiens arose in Africa.

In and around the hearth, archaeologists say they also found bits ofstone tools that were likely used for butchering and cutting animals.

The finds could shed light on a turning point in the development ofculture "in which humans first began to regularly use fire both for cooking meat and as a focal point -- a sort of campfire -- for social gatherings," said archaeologist Ruth Shahack-Gross of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. 

The centrally located fire pit is about 6.5 feet (2 meters) in diameter at its widest point, and its ash layers suggest the hearth was used repeatedly over time, according to the study, which was detailed in the Journal of Archaeological Science on Jan. 25.

Shahack-Gross and colleagues think these features indicate the hearth may have been used by large groups of cave dwellers. What's more, its position implies some planning went into deciding where to put the fire pit, suggesting whoever built it must have had a certain level of intelligence.

Controversial cave

Qesem Cave was discovered more than a decade ago during the construction of a road some 7 miles (11 kilometers) east of Tel Aviv. At the site, excavators had previously uncovered other traces of fire (scattered deposits of ash and clumps of soil that had been heated to high temperatures) as well as the butchered bones of big game like deer, aurochs and horse left their by the prehistoric cave dwellers, possibly up to 400,000 years ago

Source: ND

River of hydrogen flowing through space observed.

Using the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomer D.J. Pisano from West Virginia University has discovered what could be a never-before-seen river of hydrogen flowing through space. This very faint, very tenuous filament of gas is streaming into the nearby galaxy NGC 6946 and may help explain how certain spiral galaxies keep up their steady pace of star formation.

"We knew that the fuel for star formation had to come from somewhere. So far, however, we've detected only about 10 percent of what would be necessary to explain what we observe in many galaxies," said Pisano. "A leading theory is that rivers of hydrogen -- known as cold flows -- may be ferrying hydrogen through intergalactic space, clandestinely fueling star formation. But this tenuous hydrogen has been simply too diffuse to detect, until now."

Spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, typically maintain a rather tranquil but steady pace of star formation. Others, like NGC 6946, which is located approximately 22 million light-years from Earth on the border of the constellations Cepheus and Cygnus, are much more active, though less-so than more extreme starburst galaxies. This raises the question of what is fueling the sustained star formation in this and similar spiral galaxies.

Earlier studies of the galactic neighborhood around NGC 6946 with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) in the Netherlands have revealed an extended halo of hydrogen (a feature commonly seen in spiral galaxies, which may be formed by hydrogen ejected from the disk of the galaxy by intense star formation and supernova explosions). A cold flow, however, would be hydrogen from a completely different source: gas from intergalactic space that has never been heated to extreme temperatures by a galaxy's star birth or supernova processes.

Using the GBT, Pisano was able to detect the glow emitted by neutral hydrogen gas connecting NGC 6946 with its cosmic neighbors. This signal was simply below the detection threshold of other telescopes. The GBT's unique capabilities, including its immense single dish, unblocked aperture, and location in the National Radio Quiet Zone, enabled it to detect this tenuous radio light.

Astronomers have long theorized that larger galaxies could receive a constant influx of cold hydrogen by siphoning it off other less-massive companions.

In looking at NGC 6946, the GBT detected just the sort of filamentary structure that would be present in a cold flow, though there is another probable explanation for what has been observed. It's also possible that sometime in the past this galaxy had a close encounter and passed by its neighbors, leaving a ribbon of neutral atomic hydrogen in its wake.

If that were the case, however, there should be a small but observable population of stars in the filaments. Further studies will help to confirm the nature of this observation and could shine light on the possible role that cold flows play in the evolution of galaxies.

These results are published in the Astronomical Journal.

The 100-meter GBT is operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and located in the National Radio Quiet Zone and the West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zone, which protect the incredibly sensitive telescope from unwanted radio interference.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

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Story Source: Science Daily

Scientists film how the brain makes memories for the first time ever.

For the first time in history, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have captured how our brain makes memories in video, watching how molecules morph into the structures that, at the end of the day, make who we are. If there's a soul, this how it gets made.

Before this, Japanese scientists observed how a thought was formed, which was an entirely different process. According to the scientists, the has been a "technological tour de force:"

These insights into the molecular basis of memory were made possible by a technological tour de force never before achieved in animals: a mouse model developed at Einstein in which molecules crucial to making memories were given fluorescent "tags" so they could be observed traveling in real time in living brain cells.

 The process, which has been documented in two Science papers, required researchers to "stimulate neurons from the mouse's hippocampus, where memories are made and stored, and then watched fluorescently glowing beta-actin mRNA molecules form in the nuclei of neurons and travel within dendrites, the neuron's branched projections."

What they have found is fascinating: "mRNA in neurons is regulated through a novel process described as "masking" and "unmasking," which allows beta-actin protein to be synthesized at specific times and places and in specific amounts."

This is precisely how scientists imagined things worked, according to Doctor Robert Singer, the research papers' senior author:

This observation that neurons selectively activate protein synthesis and then shut it off fits perfectly with how we think memories are made. Frequent stimulation of the neuron would make mRNA available in frequent, controlled bursts, causing beta-actin protein to accumulate precisely where it's needed to strengthen the synapse.

It kind of sounds like a computer storing data bits into a hard drive!

Source: SPLOID 

Google Images Reveal Triangular Moon Mystery: Could It Be An ET Colony?

Are extraterrestrials using the moon to watch us from hidden bases?

One might jump to that conclusion after looking at an image (seen above) spotted by YouTube poster wowforreeel. Using Google Moon imagery, wowforreeel scanned the far side of our celestial neighbor and reported seeing and capturing the image of what appears to be a huge V-shaped or triangular object that has two rows of seven lights.

At first glance, it certainly appears a bit too symmetrical for a natural object. SomeInternet sites have speculated that this might be either an alien spaceship, a base used by aliens from which to study Earth, or that it could even be a top secret moonbase created by humans.

The unusual object -- photographed by NASA's Clementine spacecraft, launched in 1994 -- measures approximately 500 feet x 420 feet, and is located near the region known as Mare Moscoviense. Using the actual Google Moon coordinates of the object -- 22º42'38.46"N and 142º34'44.52"E -- Huffington Post checked it out for ourselves. Once we arrived at the exact location, we decided to spread out and see if there were any other similar objects nearby.

Here's what we found:

In the image above, at the far left is the original object that can be seen in the Mare Moscoviense region on the far side of the moon. It's the same object shown in the composite image at the top of this story.

The other objects here were found by HuffPost while maneuvering around the moon's surface with the Google Moon viewer. While not as perfectly symmetrical as the original object's seven lights, these others are, nonetheless, as intriguing to look at.

So, what exactly are we seeing here?

"I would suspect, from looking at it that [the original] object is a stitching artifact from Google Moon," said Marc Dantonio, chief photo and video analyst for theMutual UFO Network.

"A stitching artifact is a photographic anomaly that occurs due to the process by which many photos are aligned and put together to make a large photo mosaic. Google Moon, Google Earth, Google Mars, as well as Google Sky, for that matter, are all composed of tens of thousands of images that are aligned as best as possible with each other and draped over a spherical 'planet,' be it Earth or the moon, for instance," Dantonio told HuffPost via email.

Dantonio owns a special effects company that often creates imagery and models for the U.S. military forces. He explained how the Google Moon software "must make choices as to how it will deal with different lighting, angle and exposure. Further, sometimes the imagery are taken with entirely different spacecraft, and the images have to be scaled or mathematically projected to match the imagery not easily attainable from other sources."

He concludes that artifacts often result when the software can't perfectly match the image.

Watch this video posted by wowforreeel, using Google Moon:

Source: Huff Post

Message decoded, again: 3,000-year-old text may prove biblical tale of King Solomon.

A few characters scratched into the side of an ancient earthenware jug have archaeologists scrambling for their dictionaries -- and wondering if it corroborates the Bible's stories of King Solomon.

The Ophel inscription -- 3,000-year-old characters found in Israel in July -- is the earliest alphabetical written text ever found in Jerusalem. It proves the real basis behind the parables and stories in the world’s most famous book, said Gershon Galil, a professor of ancient history and biblical studies at the University of Haifa.

"We are dealing here with real kings, and the kingdom of David and Solomon was a real fact," Galil told FoxNews.com, in a phone call from Israel.

But the world's leading archaeologists are still hotly debating the meaning of the inscription. Gershon offers what he calls the "only reasonable translation," noting at the same time that the very existence of the text is as important as its meaning.

"The most important thing this tells us is that somebody during this time knew how to write something," he said.

Three letters of the inscription are incomplete, and Galil translates them to read, "yah-yin chah-lak," which is Hebrew for "inferior wine." The first half of the text indicates the twentieth or thirtieth year of Solomon's reign -- making the entire inscription a label of sorts for the jug's contents.

He explains that the text must be written in an early form of southern Hebrew because it is the only language of the time to use two yods(Hebrew letters) to spell the word wine. Galil also suggests that the "inferior wine" was probably given to laborers who were helping to build the burgeoning city of Jerusalem.

If Hebrew as a written language did exist during the time of the inscription, it places the ancient Israelites in Jerusalem earlier than previously believed, under a time the Bible indicates was King Solomon's rule.

According to Galil's understanding of the text, the writing ability demonstrated by the inscription proves the existence of a fully functioning administration that collected taxes, prepared storage jars and performed other duties as early as the second half of the 10th century BC.

"The Bible claims that Solomon built the temple and that he was the man that enlarged the city," explained Galil. Outside of biblical texts, there has not been any evidence that Solomon in the mid-10th century ordered the building of the First Temple, the ancient Israelites' place of worship where the Dome of the Rock currently stands.

Some suggest Judean King Hezekiah actually built the temple in Solomon's name. Galil scoffed at the suggestion.

"If Obama were to achieve something, he would not claim that Bush did it. It's not in human nature! Solomon built the temple, not Hezekiah."

"Even if my reading is not the right one, the fact that somebody knew how to write [in Hebrew] during this time, shows that somebody could have easily written a book a little while later like [the Old Testament's] book of Samuel and Judges."

Galil hopes that in years to come, more evidence will be found to support the Kingdoms of Solomon and David.

"The evidence that we have today and each year we have so much more that David and Solomon were real and important kings and not just tales of the Bible," he said.

Source: Fox News