Up At The Ranch And Beyond

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15 Lighthouses



No job for a social butterfly, being a lighthouse keeper is a lonely profession. You may spend days, weeks, or even months in isolation and are subjected to some pretty tough conditions. Sure, the view may be nice, but one wrong step during a bad storm, and you’re fish food.

Published 15th March 2024 (26:07)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MHc3fsqtS9U

[Bluegreen]

The EP-9 Equipment Pallet That Fell To Earth

In March, the ISS discarded a pallet of waste assuming it would dissipate, as usual, before hitting Earth.

https://twitter.com/planet4589/statu...11941922415053

As reported when it happened on March 8, most of the material from the pallet, batteries, and cargo carrier would have likely burned up as they plunged through the atmosphere. Temperatures would have reached several thousand degrees, vaporizing most of the material before it could reach the ground.

The entire pallet, including the nine disused batteries from the space station's power system, had a mass of more than 2.6 metric tons (5,800 pounds), according to NASA. Size-wise, it was about twice as tall as a standard kitchen refrigerator.

However, this pallet did not burn up in the atmosphere. Instead, it fell through the roof of Alejandro Otero's home.

In a post on X, Otero said he is waiting for communication from "the responsible agencies" to resolve the cost of damages to his home.

https://twitter.com/Alejandro0tero/s...29031493427225

If the object is owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could make a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi.

"It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States," she said. "If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused."

This could be an issue in this case. The batteries were owned by NASA, but they were attached to a pallet structure launched by Japan's space agency.

[Bluegreen]

China's Ghost Cities

The Truth Behind The Empty Megacities

Eerie. The skyscrapers are empty, the streets are without traffic, and a chilling silence emanates throughout the area. These are the scenes of China’s ghost cities.

Published 1st February 2023 (11:11)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mt-Pa5s5zZI

[Bluegreen]

Astronaut John Young: The Corned Beef and Rye Guy Who Walked On The Moon





On Mar. 23, 1964, during NASA's first crewed Gemini flight, Gemini III, pilot John Young produced a smuggled corned beef sandwich from his spacesuit pocket shortly after launch. He offered fellow astronaut Virgil "Gus" Grissom, mission commander some but soon realized it probably wasn't the best snack for the flight. The transcript from the mission:





John Young:

"Wally Schirra had a corned-beef sandwich made up at a restaurant at Cocoa Beach a couple of days before. I hid it in a pocket of my spacesuit. I had been bored by the official menus we'd practiced in training and it seemed like a fun idea at the time. I hadn't counted on the pungent odor in a closed cabin."

When the men made it back to Earth, it would be the first time NASA was given an official reprimand by Congress.





Despite being NASA's longest-serving astronaut, piloting multiple space missions, going to the Moon three times, and walking on it once, this brave individual's main claim to fame will remain this one-of-a-kind, never to be repeated event.






https://www.space.com/best-space-pranks
https://allthatsinteresting.com/gemini-3-sandwich

[Bluegreen]

Jellyfish UFO Over Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa March 11, 2024

Eyewitness:

“Object flying across the sky with very unusual shape and color. Emitted no sound or light. Object moved across the sky at a reasonable fast pace. No light or sound came from it. Looked as if it had a blue to purple hue to it and was completely silent.”

NUFORC Sighting report number 180797

Published 26th March 2024 (1:42)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lIGlMuAgEts

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The Making of a Paranormal Investigator w/ Robert Bigelow



Robert Bigelow is founder of Bigelow Aerospace as well as the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. For over twenty years he owned and conducted research at the Skinwalker Ranch. He has been a major funder of paranormal research endeavors. Here, he discusses his childhood and early life, as well as his initial research efforts regarding UFOs and paranormal manifestations.

Published 22nd June 2023 (1:12:26)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OkO3DGVQhtc

00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:56 Growing up
00:22:18 The space program
00:25:07 Private research
00:31:49 Apartment business
00:36:08 NIDS
00:47:01 Bigelow Aerospace
00:52:23 Paranormal experiences
01:08:51 Conclusion

[Bluegreen]

Researching the Afterlife w/ Robert Bigelow



Robert Bigelow is founder of Bigelow Aerospace as well as the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Here he shares his interest in establishing empirical evidence for the existence of the afterlife, and its implications.

Published 20th August 2023 (1:22:15)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hgguQup5EXw

00:00:00 Introduction
00:08:21 Scientific resistance
00:29:16 Human extinction?
00:38:04 Infinite universe
00:45:00 The God force
00:54:46 The afterlife
01:02:43 Artificial intelligence
01:13:54 Extraterrestrials
01:19:19 Conclusion

[Bluegreen]

The Next Power Source: Your Hair



Your hair may be the next great renewable power source. Scientists are diving into the idea of using hair to generate electricity. Human hair has some surprisingly strong and electrifying properties. The protein in your hair is called keratin. By harnessing the power of keratin, researchers are exploring ways to create eco-friendly batteries; even wearable electronics powered by your latest 'do. Maybe the ladies will stop shaving their legs.

Published 20th March 2024 (8:00)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=r2-AeAjJ7yA

[Bluegreen]

To the Stars by Bob Ritter (1961)

[Bluegreen]

New Atlas | Nature Photography Contest Winners

“Sea Lion in Los Islotes" by Glenn Ostle




“Monday” by Panisara Sripratoom




“The Dreamer” by Adrian Truchta




“Tangle” by Anonymous




"Stories in the Sand" by Soumya Ranjan Bhattacharyya




"Plant Life" by Miguel Jose Avalos Gonzalez Fukinagashi




"Predatore e Preda Occhi Negli Occhi" by Giulio Ilari




"Oh My Tongue!" by Ashane Marasinghe



https://newatlas.com/photography/nat...ntest-winners/

[Bluegreen]

The Night Sky

Wednesday, April 10 - Crescent Moon Joins Jupiter (after sunset) 



A pretty sight will greet skywatchers at dusk on Wednesday, April 10 when the young crescent moon will pose to the upper left of the bright planet Jupiter in the western sky. The duo, which will share the view in binoculars (orange circle), will first appear as the sky begins to darken and then shine above the rooftops until about 9:30 p.m. local time – with the pretty Pleiades star cluster aka Messier 45 sprinkled a fist’s diameter above them. Earlier, watch for Earthshine on the moon. Sometimes called the Ashen Glow or the Old Moon in the New Moon’s Arms, the phenomenon is visible within a day or two of new moon, when sunlight reflected off Earth and back toward the moon slightly brightens the unlit portion of the moon’s Earth-facing hemisphere.


Mars Passes Saturn (before sunrise) 


https://www.space.com/16149-night-sky.html

In the southeastern sky before sunrise on Wednesday, April 10, the easterly motion of reddish Mars will carry it closely past yellowish Saturn in a spectacular conjunction. The two planets, both about equally bright, will rise together around 5 a.m. local time and then climb until the morning twilight hides them. Mars and Saturn will be cozy enough to share the view in binoculars (orange circle) from April 3 to 18.


Dance of Earth and Saturn

(1:00)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0dYO3qXjn7w

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Satellite Views of Solar Eclipse 2024




A view of the moon's shadow on Earth during the April 8, 2024 solar eclipse as seen from a SpaceX Starlink satellite.




NOAA's GOES-16 weather satellite captured this view of the moon's shadow on North America during the 2024 solar eclipse.




The NOAA-20 weather satellite captured this before and after view of the moon's shadow on North America during the April 8, 2024 solar eclipse. The shadow can be seen as a black strip overlaid on a non-eclipsed view of the continent.




Astronauts on the International Space Station snapped this photo of the moon's shadow on covering portions of the Canadian provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick and the American state of Maine from its orbit 261 miles above Earth.




https://www.space.com/solar-eclipse-...w-video-photos

[Bluegreen]

The Sky Tonight

April 12 evening: Moon between Capella and Betelgeuse

On the evening of April 12, 2024, the waxing crescent moon will lie between two bright stars. The golden star is Capella in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer. And in vivid contrast to golden Capella is the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the brightest star in Orion the Hunter. You can follow them until around midnight.




April 14 and 15 evenings: Moon near the twin stars of Gemini

On the evenings of April 14 and 15, 2024, the almost first quarter moon will shine near Castor and Pollux, the twin stars of Gemini. Although they are “twin brothers,” they don’t really look alike. Pollux is a bit brighter and a golden star, while Castor shines as a white light. They’ll rise before sunset and travel across the sky’s dome before setting a few hours after midnight.



All Month


www.earthsky.org

[Bluegreen]

UFO History w/Preston Dennett

Peter and the UFOs: A True Story of Contact

Although this happened in the past, this information has only recently come to light, due to the subject's son contacting Mr Dennett.

It was 1968, and 13-year-old Carter Welles walked to school with his best friend, Jackson Groves near his home in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Jackson had just experienced a spontaneous out-of-body experience, and both boys were amazed by the event. Together they vowed to learn how to achieve astral projection. For the next two years they read everything they could find on the subject and meditated daily, but were unable to get out-of-body. Then one evening, Jackson walked home along a remote country highway outside of Toronto when a truckdriver offered him a ride. Jackson accepted. The driver introduced himself as Peter and said, “Well, Jackson, how’s it going with the astral travelling?”

Jackson was shocked because he did not know this man, and Jackson had told nobody but Carter about their attempts to have OBEs. Jackson asked Peter how he knew his name and about the OBEs, and the man just smiled and said, “Oh, you know, we’ve been keeping an eye on you guys.”

After speaking with Peter for an hour or two, Jackson was amazed. Peter showed telepathic abilities, could call forth the wind, and said he worked with extraterrestrials and had been onboard UFOs. He even offered to take Jackson onboard a craft. Jackson was too scared to accept the invitation, but he continued to meet with Peter and learn about spirituality, psychic abilities, and UFOs …

(48:37)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dlPLMwWQxDQ

[Bluegreen]

New Horizons Finds Evidence for 2nd Kuiper Belt





It excited astronomers and public worldwide when the New Horizons spacecraft encountered Pluto. This craft (the fastest one ever sent outward from Earth) launched on January 19, 2006, passed the moon’s orbit in just 9 hours, and then spent 10 years crossing the 3-billion-mile distance to Pluto. It swept past Pluto in 2015, passing within about 7,750 miles (12,500 km) of the little world and discovering, among many other things, a large, young, heart-shaped region of ice on Pluto plus mountains made of water ice.

In 2019, New Horizons swept past Arrokoth, which thereby became the farthest and most primitive object in our solar system ever to be visited by a spacecraft. On April 4, 2024, New Horizons chief scientist Alan Stern provided an update of the mission’s findings, as it continues to move outward. He said New Horizons has found evidence for a 2nd Kuiper Belt. He also said the New Horizons team is still hopeful that groundbased searches will reveal new Kuiper Belt Objects that the spacecraft might be able to explore. He reported:

"The spacecraft continues to collect round-the-clock data on our sun’s cocoon in the galaxy, called the heliosphere, and transmit that data, as well as the final data from our flyby of Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, back to Earth … The first of those was the publication of exciting new results from our onboard dust counter instrument, which you can find online. It shows that over the past few years, the instrument detected an unexpectedly high number of dust impacts."

Why is that so exciting? Because it indicates more dust at greater distances from the sun than expected, which in turn could be evidence of an extended Kuiper Belt, or even a second Kuiper Belt, lying ahead.





Bottom line: News from the Pluto spacecraft New Horizons; It is still alive and still speeding outward. The team is hopeful new spacecraft targets will be found.

Published 11th April 2024 by EarthSky.org
https://earthsky.org/space/new-horiz...d-kuiper-belt/

[Bluegreen]

Survival of the Nicest

Have we got evolution the wrong way round?





The fact that all life evolved thanks to natural selection can have depressing connotations. If ‘survival of the fittest’ is the key to evolution, are humans hardwired for conflict with one another? Not at all, says evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown in his latest book, Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life. On the contrary, he argues, many phenomena in the natural world, from certain types of predation to parasitism, rely on cooperation. Thus “we need no longer fret that human nature is sinful or fear that the milk of human kindness will run dry”.

Silvertown uses examples from genes, bacteria, fungi, plants and animals to emphasize that cooperation is ubiquitous in nature. For instance, bacteria called rhizobia thrive in the root nodules of legumes — and turn nitrogen from the air into a soluble form that the plants can use. Some beetles cooperate to bury animal corpses that would be too large for any single insect to manage alone, both reducing the risk of other animals stealing food and providing a nest for beetle families to live in.

And many bacteria indicate their presence to each other using a chemical-signalling system called quorum sensing, which is active only when members of the same species are tightly packed together. This allows each cell to adjust its gene expression in a way that benefits the individuals in the group — to release a poison to kill other species, for instance, when enough bacteria are clustered together to mount a decent attack.

Even eighteenth-century piracy, says Silvertown, is a good example of effective cooperation. Pirates worked together on their ships, and used violence more often against outsiders than as an internal mechanism for law enforcement.

The author argues against the idea that cooperation is fundamentally at odds with competition — a view that emerged as a consequence of the sociobiology movement of the 1970s, in which some biologists argued that all human behaviour is reducible to a Darwinian need to be the ‘fittest’. The reality, as Silvertown shows, is not necessarily so.





Take lichens, for instance — ‘composite organisms’ in which an alga or cyanobacterium lives within a fungus. The Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener, who discovered this relationship in the 1860s, argued that a lichen is a parasite: “Its slaves are green algals, which it has sought out or indeed caught hold of, and forced into its service.” Another way to view the relationship is that these algae and fungi are co-dependent — when they co-exist as a lichen, each grows better than it would alone. The line between parasitism and mutualism, competition and cooperation is not clear cut. It’s a matter of perspective.

Published 8th April 2024 – Book review by Jonathan R Goodman – Nature.com
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00999-5




https://global.oup.com/academic/prod...?lang=3n&cc=tz

[Bluegreen]

VOLCANIC VORTEX RINGS

Mount Etna in Italy, the crossworders' favorite, is doing something rare and beautiful. "It is blowing smoke rings," reports Marcella Giulia Pace, who photographed the phenomenon on April 6th.







"A continuous jet of rings is dancing around the craters until they dissolve into the sky--a phenomenon of extreme rarity," she said.

Mount Etna has produced vortices before, but nothing like this. In April 2024 Etna "has broken all previous records," according to Boris Behncke of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology of Catania. Tourists are flocking to the mountain to witness the display.





Related:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=poJF7fw7GFs

[Bluegreen]

Meteor Over the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium

Blink and you've missed it. Luckily, someone invented the movie camera.

The fireball was seen over Berlin, Brandenburg, Drenthe, Flevoland, Friesland, Gelderland, Groningen, Limburg, Niedersachsen, Noord-Holland, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Overijssel, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen, Utrecht, Vlaams Gewest, Zeeland and Zuid-Holland on Tuesday, April 2nd 2024.




Wijnjewoude 2-4-2024 5:35

(0:04)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ie3gUUuxlYs

AMS Event #1702-2024 Caught From Heerhugowaard NL

(0:05)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rKVVNnr8jXU

[Bluegreen]

Japanese Astronauts to Land on the Moon w/ New NASA Partnership



Lunar Cruiser

COLORADO SPRINGS — Japan will become the first nation after the United States to land an astronaut on the moon as part of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign under an agreement between the two countries announced April 10.

At an event in Washington, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Masahito Moriyama signed an agreement regarding an additional Japanese contribution to Artemis, a pressurized lunar rover called Lunar Cruiser.

NASA will deliver the rover to the moon, which the agencies said should take place ahead of the Artemis 7 mission scheduled for no earlier than 2031. NASA will also provide two seats on future Artemis lunar landing missions to astronauts from the Japanese space agency JAXA, the first agency other than NASA to secure spots on landing missions.

“The pressurized rover will be a powerful contribution to the overall Artemis architecture as Japan and the U.S. go hand in hand with international and industry partners to the lunar surface and beyond,” Hiroshi Yamakawa, president of JAXA, said in a statement. “JAXA is ready to assist MEXT and push this forward with our science and technological expertise to establish sustainable human presence on the moon.”

“America no longer will walk on the moon alone. With this new rover, we will uncover groundbreaking discoveries on the lunar surface that will benefit humanity and inspire the Artemis Generation,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.

The announcement, though, offered no details about when the Japanese astronauts would fly to the moon. “It depends,” Nelson said at an April 10 briefing when asked about schedules, noting that the two countries “announced a shared goal for a Japanese national to land on the moon on a future NASA mission assuming benchmarks are achieved.”




NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and MEXT Minister Masahito Moriyama

Published 11th April 2024 by Jeff Foust – Space News
https://spacenews.com/japanese-astro...a-partnership/

[Bluegreen]

How I Exposed Government Secrets & Went On The Run | Minutes With



Minutes With sits down with Annie Machon, a former MI5 spy and intelligence officer who acted as a whistleblower, exposing government secrets and going on the run. Annie discusses her recruitment into MI5, her postings working on international terrorism and surveillance, and the series of events that led her to decide to expose government intel.

Published 26th March 2023 (17:08)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=R76eRnLzAb8