Aliens are here at last!!!

'Sirius,' Steven Greer's Film, Claims To Unveil Tiny 'Alien' Humanoid (VIDEO)

 

An upcoming documentary promises to show an alleged, tiny "alien" being that was found a few years ago in Chile's Atacama Desert. And when we say tiny, we're talking six inches from head to ET toe.

Don't be fooled by the apparent size of the creature in the picture above, as the following image shows its true 6-inch stature.

The film, called "Sirius," will also depict how readily available forms of alternative energy technology are what extraterrestrials may be using to travel here from the cosmically improbable distances between their home world and ours.
If this is all true, and that's a very big IF, it will certainly answer the ages-old question of whether or not humans are alone in the universe.
The force behind "Sirius" is Steven Greer, a former emergency medical physician. He's actively pursued avenues to get the U.S. government to reveal information about alien reality -- information that the powers-that-be have always maintained doesn't exist.
"Sirius" includes graphic footage of the supposedly humanoid entity of "unknown classification" by DNA sequencing.
A side view X-ray of the miniscule creature was also released to reveal its internal structure.

The film is Greer's latest effort to shine a light on the supposed cover-up about visitors from other planets.
In 1993, Greer created The Disclosure Project with the goal of getting the government to fess up its alleged UFO and ET knowledge as well as information about advanced energy and propulsion methods.
"What people need to understand is the secrecy around UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence really has nothing to do with ETs. It has to do with humans and the power that is resting in large corporations and financial interests that do not want you to know the truth," Greer said in a video statement.

Cocos Plate has magma layer underneath it.

The orange colored area enclosed by a dashed line denotes a 
magma layer that scientists believe is facilitating the motion of 
the Cocos plate off Nicaragua. The blue areas represent the Cocos 
plate sliding across the mantle and eventually diving beneath the 
Central American continent, while the black dots signify 
earthquake locations. 

Scientists find unexpected magma  layer helping Cocos to move

By the Scripps Institution of Oceanography news staff Scientists have found a layer of liquefied molten rock in Earth’s mantle that may be acting as a lubricant for the sliding motions of the planet’s massive tectonic plates. The discovery may carry far-reaching implications, from solving basic geological functions of the planet to a better understanding of volcanism and earthquakes. The scientists discovered the magma layer at the Middle America trench offshore Nicaragua. Using advanced seafloor electromagnetic imaging technology, the scientists imaged a 25-kilometer (15.5-mile-) thick layer of partially melted mantle rock below the edge of the Cocos plate where it moves underneath Central America. The Cocos plate and its interaction with the lighter Caribbean plate are responsible for many of Costa Rica's earthquakes. The scientists are from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego The discovery is reported in the Wednesday issue of the journal Nature by Samer Naif, Kerry Key, and Steven Constable of Scripps, and Rob Evans of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The new images of magma were captured during a 2010 expedition aboard the U.S. Navy-owned and Scripps-operated research vessel "Melville." After deploying a vast array of seafloor instruments that recorded natural electromagnetic signals to map features of the crust and mantle, the scientists realized they found magma in a surprising place. “This was completely unexpected,” said Key, an associate research geophysicist in the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps. “We went out looking to get an idea of how fluids are interacting with plate subduction, but we discovered a melt layer we weren’t expecting to find at all. It was pretty surprising.” For decades scientists have debated the forces and circumstances that allow the planet’s tectonic plates to slide across the earth’s mantle. Studies have shown that dissolved water in mantle minerals results in a more ductile mantle that would facilitate tectonic plate motions, but for many years clear images and data required to confirm or deny this idea were lacking. “Our data tell us that water can’t accommodate the features we are seeing,” said Naif, a Scripps graduate student and lead author of the paper. “The information from the new images confirms the idea that there needs to be some amount of melt in the upper mantle and that’s really what’s creating this ductile behavior for plates to slide.” The researchers say their results will help geologists better understand the structure of the tectonic plate boundary and how that impacts earthquakes and volcanism. “One of the longer-term implications of our results is that we are going to understand more about the plate boundary, which could lead to a better understanding of earthquakes,” said Key. The researchers are now seeking to find the source that supplies the magma in the newly discovered layer.

Billions of Earth-like Planets Near Earth

If ET phones home today, his long distance charge might not be as much as people believed when Steven Spielberg's classic film came out three decades ago.

That's because recent data from NASA's Kepler space telescope suggests that billions of Earth-like planets are much closer than ever before imagined.

"The information we presented today will excite the general public because we now know that the nearest potentially Earth-like world is likely within 13 light years of the sun," astronomer Courtney Dressing said in an email to The Huffington Post.

"Astronomically speaking, 13 light years is practically next door."

While we don't know if intelligent life exists on any of these planets, it raises the chances of that possibility.

Watch this video about the red dwarf suns and Earth-like planets:

The scientific team studied the huge number of red dwarf stars in our galaxy -- stars that are smaller and have a longer life span than our own sun.

Just doing the math, the odds of Earth-like planets in our galaxy are, well, astronomical.

Scientists estimate 6 percent of the 75 billion red dwarf stars may have Earth-size planets orbiting them at a possible habitable distance. That works out to approximately 4.5 billion Earths out there.

"Before today, it could have been that Earth-like planets did not exist, or that they were so rare that the closest one would be beyond the reach of any telescope we might construct. Thus we would never know whether or not we were truly alone," astronomer David Charbonneau told HuffPost in an email.

Charbonneau, co-author of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics study, acknowledges the intense interest the public has in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

"I would say that the single greatest question in all of science is 'Are we alone?' The announcement today moves the ball downfield significantly toward answering this question.

"In my conversations with people around the world, I have found that this great question provides enormous perspective on our lives, in much the same way that knowing the physical size of the Universe has humbled our view of our place in the cosmos," Charbonneau said.

But even if a planet like Earth is only a stone's throw away, at 13 light years from us, how could we even see it with our current technology?

"Future missions, such as the NASA James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to Hubble) and proposed extremely large ground-based telescopes, like the Giant Magellan Telescope, will be able to probe the atmospheres of nearby habitable planets," Dressing said.

"Those missions will be able to search for biosignatures, like oxygen, and possibly lead to the first announcement of life on another world."

The results of Dressing's and Charbonneau's study will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Machine Perception Lab Shows Robotic One Year Old

Jan. 9, 2013 — The world is getting a long-awaited first glimpse at a new humanoid robot in action mimicking the expressions of a one-year-old child. The robot will be used in studies on sensory-motor and social development – how babies “learn” to control their bodies and to interact with other people.

Different faces of Diego-san: video of robo-toddler shows him demonstrating different facial expressions, using 27 moving parts in the head alone.

Diego-san’s hardware was developed by leading robot manufacturers: the head by Hanson Robotics, and the body by Japan’s Kokoro Co. The project is led by University of California, San Diego full research scientist Javier Movellan.

Movellan directs the Institute for Neural Computation's Machine Perception Laboratory, based in the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). The Diego-san project is also a joint collaboration with the Early Play and Development Laboratory of professor Dan Messinger at the University of Miami, and with professor Emo Todorov's Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington.

Movellan and his colleagues are developing the software that allows Diego-san to learn to control his body and to learn to interact with people.

"We've made good progress developing new algorithms for motor control, and they have been presented at robotics conferences, but generally on the motor-control side, we really appreciate the difficulties faced by the human brain when controlling the human body," said Movellan, reporting even more progress on the social-interaction side. "We developed machine-learning methods to analyze face-to-face interaction between mothers and infants, to extract the underlying social controller used by infants, and to port it to Diego-san. We then analyzed the resulting interaction between Diego-san and adults." Full details and results of that research are being submitted for publication in a top scientific journal.

While photos and videos of the robot have been presented at scientific conferences in robotics and in infant development, the general public is getting a first peak at Diego-san’s expressive face in action. On January 6, David Hanson (of Hanson Robotics) posted a new video on YouTube athttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=knRyDcnUc4U#!.

“This robotic baby boy was built with funding from the National Science Foundation and serves cognitive A.I. and human-robot interaction research,” wrote Hanson. “With high definition cameras in the eyes, Diego San sees people, gestures, expressions, and uses A.I. modeled on human babies, to learn from people, the way that a baby hypothetically would. The facial expressions are important to establish a relationship, and communicate intuitively to people.”

Diego-san is the next step in the development of “emotionally relevant” robotics, building on Hanson’s previous work with the Machine Perception Lab, such as the emotionally responsive Albert Einstein head (see video on Calit2 YouTube channel).

The video of the oversized android infant was picked up by the popular online technology magazine, Gizmag, with a Jan. 7 article titled “UCSD’s robot baby Diego-san appears on video for the first time,” written by Jason Falconer.

In his article, Falconer writes that Diego-san is “actually much larger than a standard one year old – mainly because miniaturizing the parts would have been too costly. It stands about 4 feet 3 inches (130cm) tall and weighs 66 pounds (30kg), and its body has a total of 44 pneumatic joints. Its head alone contains about 27 moving parts.”

The robot is a product of the “Developing Social Robots” project launched in 2008. As outlined in the proposal, the goal of the project was “to make progress on computational problems that elude the most sophisticated computers and Artificial Intelligence approaches, but that infants solve seamlessly during their first year of life.”

For that reason, the robot’s sensors and actuators were built to approximate the levels of complexity of human infants, including actuators to replicate dynamics similar to those of human muscles. The technology should allow Diego-san to learn and autonomously develop sensory-motor and communicative skills typical of one-year-old infants.

"Its main goal is to try and understand the development of sensory motor intelligence from a computational point of view," explained principal investigator Movellan in a 2010 Q&A with the Japan-based PlasticPals blog. "It brings together researchers in developmental psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, computer vision and robotics. Basically we are trying to understand the computational problems that a baby’s brain faces when learning to move its own body and use it to interact with the physical and social worlds."

The researchers are interested in studying Diego-san’s interaction with the physical world via reaching, grasping, etc., and with the social world through pointing, smiling and other gestures or facial expressions.

As outlined in the original proposal to the NSF, the project is “grounded in developmental research with human infants, using motion capture and computer vision technology to characterize the statistics of early physical and social interaction. An important goal is to foster the conceptual shifts needed to rigorously think, explore, and formalize intelligent architectures that learn and develop autonomously by interaction with the physical and social worlds.”

According to UCSD's Movellan, the expression recognition technology his team developed for Diego-san has spawned a startup called Machine Perception Technologies (MPT). The company is currently looking for undergraduate interns and postgraduate programmers. "We like UCSD students because they tend to have a strong background in machine learning."

The project may also open new avenues to the computational study of infant development and potentially offer new clues for the understanding of developmental disorders such as autism and Williams syndrome.

As noted in the Gizmag article, Diego-san won’t be the only child-like robot for long. This spring Swiss researchers will demonstrate their nearly 4-foot-tall Roboy robot toddler (with a face selected via a Facebook contest!).

Scientsts use a Shortcut to get Clues from Deep Ocean

By the A.M. Costa Rica staff January 10, 2012 Out of sight of land in the Pacific another group of scientists is trying to make sense of the undersea activities in that part of the world. This is the scientific complement of the "JOIDES Resolution" research vessel, and they are taking a shortcut. The "JOIDES Resolution" is a frequent visitor to Costa Rica's Pacific ports, and has participated in a series of scientific exploration off the coast. The main area of study is the activity beneath the sea floor that can cause horizontal movements of up to 8 centimeters (a bit less than 3.5 inches) a year as the earth pushes up magma. That research relates to the forces that forced up Costa Rica's mountains, energizes its volcanoes and continues to rattle the country periodically. Unlike a lot of scientific expeditions, this one is transparent with an educational dimension, so daily activity becomes discussion topics. This expedition, No. 345, is headed by Jonathan Snow of the University of Houston, Texas, and Kathy Gillis of the University of Victoria, Canada. The drilling ship "JOIDES Resolution" is now on station above what is known as Hess Deep Rift about 2 degrees above the equator. Previous expeditions sought to sample the rock deep under the sea floor by drilling to it. But the presence of the rift, sort of an undersea canyon, provides a shortcut, the expedition explained in a recent summary. The deep cut in the ocean floor allows the crew to avoid a lot of drilling. The rock surface at the bottom of the rift is estimated to be just about a million years old, a real youngster in geological terms. And this is what the scientific crew calls a tectonic window. The rift is not far from the intersection of the Pacific, Nazca and Cocos tectonic plates. The Cocos is the one that keeps pushing under and against the lighter Caribbean plate to bring earthquakes to Costa Rica.

Expedition, No. 345 photo  Scientist examine rock core from Hess Deep The summary of Expedition No. 345 describes its goal this way: "The objective of this project is to sample for the first time, primitive magmatic rocks of the lower crust in the oceanic Pacific. These samples will help scientists seek to understand the manufacturing process of the oceanic crust at a fast-spreading rift, but also to document the effect of cooling the young crust by seawater, and thus the importance of chemical exchanges between the crust and the ocean. They control the chemical evolution of the oceanic crust before recycling into the mantle via subduction zones, and play a fundamental role in geochemical cycles across the globe." As magma is pushed to the surface, it cools into basalt and an igneous rock called gabbro, said the summary. A previous expedition obtained samples of gabbro from a deep drilling also off the isthmus in the Pacific. A member of the expedition, Jean-Luc Berenguer, reported via the "JOIDES Resolution" Web site this week that the drilling team had brought up core samples of rock from the Hess Deep, which is about 5,000 meters (about 16,400 feet) down. In fact, the scientists have been demonstrating the force of the water by lowering polystyrene objects, which are compressed into a much smaller size in the deep ocean. This is mostly as demonstrations to schoolchildren who are viewing the work electronically.

Saturn’s shadow slices the rings

There is a whole lot of awesome in a picture of Saturn and its rings just released from the Cassini spacecraft. Check this out:

Mmmmm, ringalicious.

Cassini was about 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn when it took this picture, so we’re seeing a decently wide-angle view. At the time, the spacecraft was below the plane of the rings, looking north (up, if you like). The Sun is off mostly to the left and up a bit.

The first cool thing is obviously the shadow of the planet itself cast on the rings. It cuts across like a black scythe! As I looked at the picture my eyes and brain kept trying to fill in the missing arc of rings, which was amplified by a slight afterimage as my eyes moved around. It’s a difficult illusion to ignore.

Second, I love how you can see all the different rings in the picture, including the thin, lumpy F-ringoutside the main band. The big gap is called the Cassini Division; it’s not really an empty space since there are many faint thin rings inside it. They’re just hard to see here. The Cassini Division is fairly easy to spot even through a small telescope, looking from Earth like someone took a knife to the rings and sliced them.

Third, you can see the tiny moons Janus (below the rings on the left) and Epimetheus (above the rings on the left) as well. I wonder how hard it is to get a picture like this without seeing any moons in it? Saturn has quite the fleet of them.

Fourth, look to the left, just where the inner arc of the rings cuts across Saturn. You can see the planet right through the rings! The rings aren’t solid; they’re composed of gazillions of particles of nearly pure water ice. There are spaces between the particles, so we can partially see through them, like looking through a screened window.

Fifth, and perhaps most cool of all: the part of Saturn we’re seeing here is the night side, entirely unlit by the Sun. The bottom (southern) part of Saturn is only noticeable by its absence! But what’s that glow in the north?

That, my friends, is ringshine! Although this part of Saturn is in nighttime, the Sun is still shining on the rings (wherever you don’t see Saturn’s shadow across them). The ring particles are very bright and shiny. They reflect the sunlight, which then illuminates the northern hemisphere of Saturn. The southern half is still dark because the ice particles tend to reflect light back up, like a mirror. Since the Sun is coming from the north, that’s the way the light gets reflected. I’ll note that most of the light gets reflected away from Saturn, to the upper right in this picture, but enough is reflected back to make the cloud tops glow softly.

This happens on Earth too, when sunlight reflects off the Earth and illuminates the dark part of the Moon. This is called Earthshine, also poetically called "the old Moon in the new Moon’s arms." It’s quite lovely.

And it’s science! Which is lovely, too.

"Wind Map" brings U.S. Wind Patterns to Life

The Huffington Post  |  By Craig Kanalley 

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GET GREEN ALERTS:

A pair of Google employees have teamed up to provide a powerful animation of wind patterns in the United States in near real-time.

Wind appears like rivers or streams flowing across the country. The map really needs to be seen firsthand for the full experience (video preview above, click here for full/updated version). On the website, you can zoom in and out on the map, and you can look at previous days' wind patterns in a gallery.

The project was created by Google's Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg,according to Mashable, which adds that the duo is currently looking for international data sources for a global version.

According to LinkedIn, Viégas and Wattenberg are research scientists and co-leaders of Google's "Big Picture" data visualization group in Cambridge, Mass.

One goal of the wind map, which updates every hour, seems to be raising awareness and support for wind energy. The website hosting the map notes:

An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.

The site includes links to the Wikipedia pages for wind and wind power for more information.

In related news, last week the Obama administration released new wind farm guidelines. On Wednesday, Major League Baseball's Cleveland Indians installed a wind turbine in their stadium.

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