(CNN)Actor John Hurt, the gravelly voiced British actor who garnered Oscar nominations for his roles in “Midnight Express” and “The Elephant Man,” has died at the age of 77, publicist Charles McDonald said Friday.
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Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds play an enjoyably gory game of hide-and-seek with a hungry alien
The crew of a space station is picked off, one by one, by an extraterrestrial life form which seems to view the human contents of the craft as some kind of alien finger buffet. And if that premise sounds more than a little familiar, thats because Daniel Espinosas enjoyable sci-fi horror movie shares narrative DNA with everything from Tarkovskys Solaris to Danny Boyles Sunshine to, most glaringly of all, Ridley Scotts Alien. But although this is undeniably an Alien rip-off, its an Alien rip-off that announces itself with a dizzyingly audacious zero-gravity single-shot sequence in which Ryan Reynolds wrests a wounded satellite out of orbit using a rob otic grabber claw. With this stunning set piece, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey more than meets the challenge set by Emmanuel Lubezkis Oscar-winning work on Gravity.
The satellite contains Martian soil samples, within which is an inert single-celled organism: incontrovertible proof of life on Mars. In the name of scientific research (or of narrative convenience) the head researcher (British actor Ariyon Bakare) decides to jump-start the organism out of its stasis, and is rewarded by a rapidly growing glob of gelatinous malice. Aliens infamous John Hurt chest-eruption scene is matched for gruesome relish if not shock value by a sequence in which the creature force-feeds itself to a key character. Not all of the actors have enough screen time to really register, but Jake Gyllenhaal, playing a jaded medic who no longer feels he belongs on Earth, has a brooding, soulful quality; the electricity between his character and Rebecca Fergusons safety officer crackles satisfyingly.
There are some pacing issues: the obligatory despairing all is lost sequence at the end of the second act drags, and is not improved by one of the remaining survivors quoting chunks of the insipid childrens bedtime book Goodnight Moon. And the slightly predictable nature of the plotting doesnt match the inventiveness of the exuberantly grisly special effects. But the screenplays policy of exploring every possible worst-case scenario culminates in a deliciously bleak, if not entirely unexpected payoff.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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Two Harvard University scientists are suggesting that mysterious fast radio bursts, detected in faraway galaxies, may be evidence of aliens traveling through the cosmos.
FRBs are extremely bright flashes of radio waves that last for only a thousandth of a second and are detected by earthbound telescopes. Since the first one was observed 10 years ago, 17 have actually been reported, although scientists think there are thousands of them a day.
At first, Abraham Avi Loeb said, he took a conservative approach to explaining them.
It looked like the simplest explanation would be flares from stars in the Milky Way galaxy, said Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist and chair of Harvards astronomy department.
But then one of the FRBs was localized to reside in a small galaxy at a distance of about a billion light-years away, Loeb told The Huffington Post. (One light-year is about 6 trillion miles.)
Essentially, that means these FRBs are coming from the edge of the universe and must be brighter than anything else we know.
In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Lettersthis month, Loeb and Harvard physicist Manasvi Lingam say they decided to examine the possibility that fast radio bursts originate from the activity of extragalactic civilizations.
Since there are many more galaxies out there than the Milky Way, it makes sense statistically that one would detect such phenomena outside the Milky Way more often rather than inside it, Lingam told HuffPost.
While Loeb and Lingam dont claim that FRBs definitely originate from aliens, they speculate that such phenomena could be the result of other civilizations using gigantic radio transmitters to hopscotch from one galaxy to another.
An almost planet-sized, solar-powered radio transmitter could generate enough energy to propel an interstellar light sail (like the one illustrated above), they suggest. These sails, in turn,might be sufficient to push about 20 times the largest cruise ships on Earth. FRBs would be the leakage from such transmitters.
Our upper bound on the number of such civilizations is 10,000 in a typical galaxy, Lingam said. But Id like to reiterate that this is the maximal value. In all probability, the real value is likely to be much lower.
Nobody on Earth has detected any interstellar light sails yet.What large radio telescopes, like the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico or the Parkes Observatory in Australia, have picked up are very fast, bright flashes of energy.
For us to detect these bursts so many light-years away, Loeb said, theyd need a very bright source.
So what we are considering in our scenario is a very narrow beam of radiation pushing on a sail, and that requires roughly the amount of energy intercepted by the Earth [from]sunlight. Thats the kind of power you need the energy falling on the Earth from the sun, he said.
Loeb chairs the advisory committee for theStarshotproject, which seeks to send a spaceship to Alpha Centauri, a star system over four light-years from Earth. The idea would be to aim powerful laser beams from Earth at thin sails carrying more than 1,000 probes. Its not the same as the radio waves possibly used by aliens, but then humans are still taking baby steps into space.
I can imagine [aliens] doing what we are just starting to do now, Loeb said.
The Harvard scientist is well aware that talking about aliens, even hypothetically, can start some eye-rolling. But he doesnt share that bias.
We shouldnt be guided by prejudice when we think about what may be out there, said Loeb. Many people tend to think they know the truth. They think that we are special, that maybe there is nothing out there.
I think we should just observe and whenever we see something unusual, we should think, contemplate the possibility that it could be artificial. And there is nothing bad about that its a learning experience.
Indeed, its probably the essence of being a theoretical astrophysicist.
The whole principle of science is that you collect data that can falsify an idea that you have or prove it right, Loeb said.
Lingam acknowledges that their hypothesis is still a tad speculative.
We have suggested a potential means of distinguishing between natural and artificial origin of FRBs by taking a closer look at the signals, and looking for certain distinguishable patterns, he said.
But dont expect a quick answer on the aliens question. With more data expected to emerge in the coming decades, I believe that our hypothesis will be testable, Lingam said.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
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Have you ever spent a lazy day on a blanket in the middle of a summer meadow, staring up at the sky, watching the clouds drift by, and imagining them take the shapes of familiar things?
Theres even an organization, The Cloud Appreciation Society, devoted to the activity of cloud gazing. When their February 2017 cloud of the month turned out to be a flying saucer-shaped lenticular cloud, it absolutely inspired us to seek out more of these breathtaking images of clouds from around the world that have caused people to report seeing alien visitors.
The Weather Channel has even referred to lenticular clouds as Mother Natures UFOs. These altocumulus lenticularis clouds appearing to our senses as disc-shaped objects often form in mountainous regions where stable moist air flows upward and then, when it becomes colder, it descends, forming a disc-like cloud that can appear to hover in the air.
Theyre also seen in non-mountain areas, formed by the strong winds resulting from a storm front.
Weve gathered some remarkable images here that might make you think twice about whether people have been lucky enough to capture amazing UFO pictures, or the more credible explanation of lenticular clouds.
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(CNN)NASA on Thursday released pictures of Pan, one of Saturn’s many moons, and its distinctive shape is drawing comparisons to flying saucers and stuffed pasta.
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Ceres-Like Asteroid Artist’s Conception (Mark A. Garlick)
The real-life “Death Star” that astronomers recently caught in the act of destroying a planet is continuing to disintegrate nearby orbiting objects, researchers say.
This finding could shed light on how dead stars rip apart their planetary systems a phenomenon that could happen in Earth’s solar system billions of years from now, scientists added.
Recently, astronomers detected a dead star tearing apart a planetesimal a small planetary body, such as a dwarf planet, large asteroid or moon. The dead star is a white dwarfknown as WD 1145+017, which lies about 570 light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. [Planet Ripped Apart by White Dwarf? (Video)]
White dwarfs are superdense, Earth-size cores of dead stars that are left behind when stars have exhausted their fuel and slough off their outer layers. Most stars, including the sun, will become white dwarfs one day.
“Our sun will one day balloon out to become a red giant star, wiping out Mercury and Venus and maybe Earth, before it becomes a white dwarf,” said study lead author Boris Gänsicke, an astronomer at the University of Warwick in England. “By looking at this white dwarf, we get a look at what the future of the solar system might be like.”
Previous research using NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft found a planetesimal transiting, or crossing in front of, the white dwarf at a distance of about 520,000 miles (837,000 kilometers) more than twice the distance from Earth to the moon. Kepler also discovered a cometlike tail of dust trailing this object, as well as perhaps a few additional chunks orbiting the white dwarf at about the same distance, and a shroud of dust enveloping the white dwarf.
Scientists previously estimated that the amount of material seen circling the white dwarf was about equal to that contained by the 590-mile-wide dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They suggested that the white dwarf was ripping apart the planetary bodyafter it had spiraled too close to the dead star, and that the rock would be fully destroyed within about a million years.
Now Gänsicke and his colleagues find that this white dwarf system has rapidly evolved just months since its discovery.
“It’s exciting and unexpected that we can see this kind of dramatic change on human timescales,” Gänsicke told Space.com.
The astronomers used the Thai National Telescope to observe the white dwarf about seven months after previous work detected the system of rocks and dust around it.
Instead of detecting strong evidence of just one body around the white dwarf, “we identified six, but there are clearly more it could be 10, maybe 15,” Gänsicke said.
These bodies are orbiting the dead star at about the same distance as the planetesimal that previous research spotted, and are each two to four times the size of the white dwarf. The researchers suggest that these bodies are not giant, solid rocks, but instead are huge clouds of gas and dust flowing from much smaller rocks that are now disintegrating.
“The average amount of light blocked by material around the white dwarf has gone up from 1 percent or a fraction of a percent up to 10 or 11 percent,” Gänsicke said. “We interpret that as many more fragments of a planetesimal breaking apart.”
Gänsicke and his colleagues plan on researching this white dwarf system further.
“We can see how things evolve over time,” Gänsicke said. “How does the disintegration of a planetesimal work? How long does the whole thing last? Will we be able to see everything disappear in a year or two? How does the disk of dust around the star evolve? How will the metal content of the white dwarf change?”
In the future, researchers could also hunt for similar white dwarf systems elsewhere. “Maybe we can find another one or two or 10,” Gänsicke said. “If we have a sample of these systems, we can look at common properties and differences among them, to advance our knowledge about the process of planetesimal disruption as a whole. This is how science works we’ve found one piece of a puzzle, and now we want to find more.”
The scientists detailed their findings Feb. 3 in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Artist’s Concept of HD 1885 Ab (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Eat your heart out, Tatooine: A newly discovered alien planet has not one, not two, but three suns in its sky.
While scientists know of many planets with two suns, a planet with three bright stars in its sky is much rarer. The newly found distant world, known as KELT-4Ab, orbits one star. That star in turn is orbited by a nearby pair of stars. The twin stars are close enough to the planet to appear about as bright as the full moon in the sky, new research has revealed.
In addition to providing an example of a solar system very different from Earth’s, the strange arrangement may help provide insight into how gas giants that lie close to their parent star known as “hot Jupiters” evolve. [The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)]
KELT-4Ab, which is about as massive as Jupiter, orbits the single star KELT-A once every three days. Nearby, the stars KELT-B and KELT-C orbit one another once every 30 years, and together they travel around KELT-A and its planet every 4,000 years or so.
Jason Eastman, a research associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is the lead author of a study that used the two robotic telescopes that make up the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT), located in Arizona and South Africa respectively, to identify the system that includes the single star KELT-A, the more distant pairing KELT-BC and the overheated planet.
While the composition of the planet’s atmosphere isn’t yet known, Eastman told Space.com that standing in the atmosphere above the planet (since you can’t stand on its surface), the single star would appear to be about 40 times as large as the sun appears in the sky on Earth. Each member of the binary star pair would be almost as bright as the full moon, though without a good telescope they would look like dots of light about a pinky-finger-width apart in the sky.
“Those two stars would orbit each other every about 30 years, and every 4,000 years they’d make one orbit around KELT-4A,” Eastman said.
Planets around triple stars are rare; KELT-4Ab is only the fourth known system to contain three stars. Of these, KELT-A is the brightest host star, not only because it is a hotter star than the ones in the other three systems, but also because it lies so close to Earth only 680 light-years away.
The research was published in the Astronomical Journal.
“Hot Jupiters aren’t supposed to exist. None of them,” Eastman said.
“Gaseous planets the size of Jupiter are supposed to form much farther out [from their parent star] and stay there, like our own Jupiter did,” he said. “Exactly how they got so close is an outstanding question, but one theory is that it migrates due to hot interactions with a third body in this case, the third and fourth bodies KELT-BC.”
When astronomers developed the first theories of planet formation, all they had to work with was the solar system. When the first exoplanet discoveries were gas giants that orbited their stars in a handful of days, it turned the existing theory on its head and sent scientists scrambling to understand how the newly observed systems could exist. Most scientists seem to agree that the massive worlds traveled to their current position after they finished forming, driven by companion planets, stars or other processes, Eastman said.
“The binary system KELT-4BC may be what ultimately drove the planet KELT-4Ab so close to its star,” Eastman said.
Using a survey produced by KELT, the scientists identified the potential planet KELT-4Ab, then confirmed its existence with several other instruments. Like the more well-known NASA Kepler spacecraft, KELT relies on the transit method to detect exoplanets, observing how the amount of light from a star drops as the planet passes between it and Earth.
“KELT is different in several ways [from other transit surveys],” Eastman said. “It has a smaller telescope, a larger field of view and a larger pixel scale than other mature transit surveys.”
These features deliberately bias the instrument toward brighter stars, which Eastman said allows a broader range of observations and characterizations. Among those is the ability to determine if the planet’s orbital plane appears edge-on as seen from Earth, or whether the plane is tipped, and this process allows scientists to more precisely calculate the star’s mass.
When the KELT-4 system was originally observed in 1973, it was thought to host only two stars. Not until Eastman observed the system almost 40 years later was one of the single stars resolved into two individuals.
“In all previous observations, KELT-4B and KELT-4C were blended together and looked just like one star,” Eastman said.
This is a recurring challenge for scientists observing binary systems resolving close-orbiting stars into binary pairs. Eastman said that many known planets may live in unknown triple systems. One reason the twin stars in the KELT-4 system were so easily identified as two individual stars instead of one was because of the system’s close proximity to Earth.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, currently engaged in a five-year mission, will observe the triple system in the coming years. These observations will enable a more precise measurement of the distance to KELT-4A, providing more detailed measurements of its mass and radius, which will result in more precise measurements of the mass and radius of the planet.
“But more exciting, Gaia will be able to measure the motion of the KELT-4BC binary pair around KELT-4A,” Eastman said.
Measuring the path of the pair of stars will help improve models of how they could have affected the migration of the planet, shoving it closer to its parent star. In doing so, it will help scientists understand how hot Jupiters manage to form so close to their parent stars.
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Latino, Asian and black Democratic House members are fighting Republican efforts to force the Library of Congress to use the term “illegal alien,” a phrase many consider to be pejorative and that library leaders chose to stop using.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus signed onto a letter sent Monday by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) to the House appropriations committee.
It urged the committee to remove a provision requiring the Library of Congress to use the terms “aliens” and “illegal aliens” in its subject headings.
“Terms and how they are defined by society change with time. As meanings of words evolve with the times, so should our usage of those terms,” the letter reads.
The letter went on to say that “dated and dehumanizing terms such as ‘illegal alien’ and ‘alien’ have taken on a highly negative connotation and perpetuate the denigration of immigrant communities.”
This March, the Library of Congress made the decision to use the term “noncitizens” in place of “aliens” in subject headings and to replace “illegal alien” with “noncitizen” and “unauthorized immigration.” Some Republicans balked at that change.
House appropriations committee chairman Tom Graves (R-Ga.) argued that the subcommittee was not making a political statement surrounding the terminology, but rather attempting to ensure the language chosen by the Library of Congress matches that of the U.S. legal code.
Despite the Library of Congress’ decision to eliminate the language, the appropriators included a provision in the legislative branch funding proposal for the 2017 fiscal year that would force the Library of Congress to use the term.
“In the past, as society has come to understand the pain certain words can cause communities, we’ve done the right thing and eliminated those terms from our acceptable vocabulary,” Castro said in a press statement. “The Appropriations Committee should continue that progress now, not move our nation backwards and unnecessarily perpetuate a negative stigma.”
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Washington (CNN)Sen. Marco Rubio is finally admitting where the bodies are buried — the alien ones, that is.
The Florida Republican presidential candidate jokingly revealed a federal alien facility during a sit-down with The Des Moines Register editorial board on Wednesday in a moment of levity during a conversation about federal land.
“In the state of Nevada, the United States federal government owns an extensive amount of land, and some of it is legitimately in the possession of the United States,” Rubio began in seriousness.
“We have a significant testing range out there,” he added, deadpanning: “Obviously we have Area 51 where we keep the alien bodies from the — I’m just kidding, that’s not true.”
The Republican sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and is briefed on classified matters, which he is legally barred from revealing.
Rubio’s joke was not the first time aliens have come up on the 2016 trail this week alone.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton pledged to “get to the bottom” of UFOs in an interview in New Hampshire on Monday, in a tongue-in-cheek response to a question from a reporter. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and senior adviser John Podesta have also joked about aliens in the past.
Rubio brought up Area 51 unprompted during a discussion about armed men who have taken over federal land in Oregon, they say in a protest of the federal government taking over too much land.
The senator agreed that the government owns too much land, bringing up the early voting state of Nevada as an example repeatedly, but said citizens “can’t be lawless.”
He said whether or not the men are breaking the law is not up to him, but if they are, they should be prosecuted.
“That’s something that belongs to local law enforcement,” he said. “I haven’t been on the ground there, so I don’t know all the details. … If they are violating federal law, no one is above the law. And if you have violated federal law, and you’ve committed a crime, you should be arrested and you should be prosecuted for what you’ve done.”
The influential Iowa paper’s editorial board regularly sits down with the presidential field and asks them a variety of questions about their positions.
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The Very Large Telescope in Chile captured this direct image of a likely exoplanet to the upper left of the star CVSO 30 (which is the bluish-white blob at center). (ESO/Schmidt et al.)
A jaw-dropping new photo shows a probable alien planet orbiting a star that lies 1,200 light-years from Earth.
The potential planet appears as a brownish dot to the left of the bright bluish-white star CVSO 30 in the newly released image, which was captured by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile.
To appreciate just how fantastic it is to have a direct image of this candidate world, consider that CVSO 30 is about 280 times farther away from Earth than is Alpha Centauri, the star system nearest to our own. [Alien Planet Quiz: Are You an Exoplanet Expert?]
And remember also that 1 light-year is about 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). So the newly photographed world, known provisionally as CVSO 30c, is about 7 quadrillion miles (11 quadrillion km) away (in the direction of the constellation Orion, for what it’s worth).
CVSO 30c remains a candidate planet, awaiting confirmation by follow-up observations or analysis. If it does indeed exist, the planet circles the star at a whopping distance of 660 astronomical units (AU), completing one orbit every 27,000 years, researchers said. (One AU is the Earth-sun distance about 93 million miles, or 150 million km).
Astronomers spotted another planet candidate, CVSO 30b, around the same star back in 2012 via the “transit method,” which looks for the tiny brightness dips caused when orbiting planets cross their host stars’ faces.
Both potential alien worlds are gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn. But they occupy very different spaces; CVSO 30b, if it exists, completes one orbit every 11 hours and lies just 0.008 AU from the star, astronomers said.
“If it is confirmed that CVSO 30c orbits CVSO 30, this would be the first star system to host both a close-in exoplanet detected by the transit method and a far-out exoplanet detected by direct imaging,” ESO representatives wrote in a description of the new image.
“Astronomers are still exploring how such an exotic system came to form in such a short timeframe, as the star is only 2.5 million years old; it is possible that the two planets interacted at some point in the past, scattering off one another and settling in their current extreme orbits,” they added.
Direct imaging has been used to discover just a handful of alien planets to date. (Most of the 3,300-odd confirmed alien worlds have been found via the transit method, by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.) But direct imaging promises to be more productive in the near future as technology improves, and may even provide the first convincing evidence of alien life, some astronomers have said.
The study reporting the detection of CVSO 30c which relied on observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain in addition to the Very Large Telescope (VLT) has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. You can read it online for free here: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/potw1624/potw1624a.pdf
The VLT, part of ESO’s Paranal Observatory, consists of four individual telescopes, each of which has a main mirror that’s 26.9 feet (8.2 meters) wide.
Originally published on Space.com.
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A former analyst with the US Department of Defence is on the trail of an astronomical cold case an unexplained signal that some believe could have come from extraterrestrials
Way back in 1977 something amazing happened (apart from the release of Star Wars obviously). Astronomer Jerry Ehman was using the Ohio State Universitys Big Ear radio telescope to sweep the sky for possible signals from extraterrestrial civilisations. He found something.
While pointing towards a grouping of stars called Chi Sagittarii on 15 August, he received a powerful blast of radio waves that lasted for 72 seconds. He circled it on the readout and wrote: Wow!
Analysis of the signal showed that it displayed all the hallmarks of coming from interstellar space, and it became something of a cause clbre for those involved in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The trouble is that despite numerous attempts, the signal has never been observed again and so remains unexplained. Until now perhaps, thanks to the work of Professor Antonio Paris of St Petersburg College, Florida.
Before he was an astrophysicist at the St Petersburg College, Paris was an analyst for the US Department of Defence. I have this investigative background, so I approached the Wow! signal as Im going back to the crime scene, he told me over Skype. Its a cold case, so I went to various [astronomical] databases to find culprits or suspects that were at this crime scene at the time.
He didnt find aliens but he did find two suspicious looking comets.
Known as 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, they have never been investigated before because they were only discovered in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Paris found that they were both in the vicinity of Chi Sagittarii on the day that the Wow! signal was detected.
This could be significant because comets are surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas that are millions of kilometres in diameter. The Wow! signal itself was detected by Ehman at 1420MHz, which is a radio frequency that hydrogen naturally emits. He published his idea at the beginning of this year.
But before the case can be closed, Paris must test his hypothesis and for this he needs public support.
Comet 266P/Christensen will pass the Chi Sagittarii star group again on 25 January 2017, while 335P/Gibbs will make its passage on 7 January 2018. Paris plans to observe these events to look for a recurrence of the mystery signal. But time is not on his side for using an existing radio telescope they are all booked out.
So, he has launched a crowdfunding campaign on gofundme to raise the $13,000 he needs to buy a radio telescope to make the observation. Donations are rolling in and he is already most of the way to his target.
I would like to [be fully funded] in May, order the stuff so that I can have it by October, he says. This would give him time to construct the dish, test it and prepare for the January encounter.
Although some other astronomers have voiced scepticism at his hypothesis, Paris points out that even if he turns out to be wrong, its still good science because we are learning something about comets, and he and his colleagues have a new radio telescope that they can use for further research.
Also on the plus side; if it isnt comets, SETI scientists still have their best candidate for an extraterrestrial signal.
Stuart Clark is the author of The Unknown Universe (Head of Zeus), and co-host of the podcast The Stuniverse (Bingo Productions). He is teaching the Guardian Masterclass Understand the Universe in an Evening on 23 May.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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WASHINGTON — House Republicans want the Library of Congress to keep using the term “illegal aliens,” whether it wants to or not.
The subcommittee tasked with the library’s appropriations approved a measure on Wednesday that would effectively force the library to use the term in its subject headings, even though many consider the phrase pejorative.
Decisions on bibliographic records are not typically made by politicians — especially the House Appropriations Committee, which is meant to set funding levels for the entire government. The subcommittee was, in fact, discussing a bill to fund the legislative branch. But immigration terminology took up a significant chunk of the hourlong meeting, Roll Call reported.
The measure was responding to the Library of Congress’ decision in March to stop using “illegal alien” in subject headings and replace it with “non-citizens” and “unauthorized immigration.”
That had been a victory for immigrant rights advocates, who have urged news outlets, other organizations and individuals to stop using “illegal” to describe human beings. (The Huffington Post uses the term “undocumented immigrant.”) Dartmouth College, its student organization Coalition For Immigration Reform, Equality and DREAMers (CoFIRED), and the American Library Association had publicly called for the change.
But Republicans didn’t like the Library of Congress’ decision and deemed the appropriations process the right place to overturn it. They added this language to the legislative appropriations bill: “To the extent practical, the committee instructs the library to maintain certain subject headings that reflect terminology used in Title 8 of the United States code.”
I don’t know how anyone in this room could declare that politicizing the issue. Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.)
Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga.), chairman of the subcommittee, argued during the Wednesday meeting that they were simply trying to ensure the Library of Congress matches the language of the U.S. legal code, not politicizing an issue.
“There should not be a micro-managing of terminology with the Library of Congress,” he said.
But the measure isn’t about the Library of Congress conforming its terminology with that of the entire U.S. Code — just Title 8, which deals with immigration. No one at the meeting denied that the move was related to the library’s decision on “illegal aliens.”
If Democrats don’t like the term “illegal aliens,” they should introduce bills to change the U.S. Code, Graves said.
“This is just asking the library to maintain that consistency with what is in the United States Code, and I don’t know how anyone in this room could declare that politicizing the issue,” he said.
A spokesman for Graves argued that the Library of Congress had announced its decision without a public comment period to avoid giving Congress or Americans a say in the matter and that the Appropriations Committee therefore had to stop it.
The Library of Congress did not respond to a request for comment, nor did CoFIRED. The American Library Association declined to comment until the bill language was posted.
They didn’t land here on a spaceship and most people, if you met them in a grocery or something, they wouldn’t describe those who came here illegally as aliens. Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.)
Democratic members of the subcommittee asked Graves and other Republicans to reconsider including the provision and let Congress debate the Library of Congress’ subject headings elsewhere.
“Are we going to do this every time the Library of Congress is petitioned for these little business kind of decisions?” Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.) asked.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said she hoped they could “make a decision not to be the word police in the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee.” She was the only subcommittee member to vote against the bill.
A better place to debate the terminology, she and other Democrats argued, would be in Congress as a whole. Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.), who is not on the subcommittee, introduced a bill this month to require the Library of Congress to use the term “illegal aliens.”
Republicans at the subcommittee meeting maintained that the appropriations bill was the best venue for hashing out the issue. Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.) said that to stop using the term “illegal” entirely “would be a compromise in principle.”
But he suggested that “illegal immigrant” might be an acceptable compromise.
“I don’t see them as aliens,” Rigell said. “You know, the idea that we update language, that just makes sense to me. They didn’t land here on a spaceship and most people, if you met them in a grocery or something, they wouldn’t describe those who came here illegally as aliens.”
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
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Its a shame the veteran British film-maker has blocked Neill Blomkamps plan to resurrect Ellen Ripley (again) in favour of a tedious-sounding Prometheus sequel
Let me paint for you, just for a moment, a nightmarish scenario to compare with the hellish visions seen in HR Gigers Necronom IV, the Swiss surrealist painters inspiration for his later work on the hideous xenomorphs in 1979s Alien.
Imagine for a moment that George Lucas, not long after Disney hired JJ Abrams to direct the first new Star Wars movie in more than a decade perhaps even after the release of that first teaser trailer for The Force Awakens, which sent everyone into apoplexies of expectation found something in the small print that allowed him to change his mind about handing over the long-running space saga to a bunch of newbies.
Phones suddenly buzz in Tinseltown, frowns are seen erupting on the foreheads of Mouse House lawyers, and within days the creator of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader announces that the whole darn $4.05bn sale of Lucasfilm to Disney is off. Instead, Star Wars fans can look forward to a Lucas-scripted spin-off about Jar Jar Binks ongoing political battle with the Trade Federation.
Fortunately for Star Wars fans, gorgeous George remains locked out of the Jedi braintrust. But a similar dynamic of huge anticipation followed by crushing disappointment has been playing out for real among Alien acolytes over the past year or so. Ridley Scotts middling Prometheus may not have been the Phantom Menace of Alien prequels, but compared with Neill Blomkamps uber fan-friendly pitch for a belated sequel to 1986s Aliens starring Sigourney Weaver and Michael I wanna introduce you to a very personal friend of mine Biehn, it might as well have been.
Blomkamps Alien concept was very nearly the Deadpool of sci-fi movies, resurrected by 20th Century Fox from Hollywood development hell after the film-maker began posting concept art for an abandoned film featuring Weaver as Ripley, Biehn as Corporal Dwayne Hicks, and an all-new take on Gigers famous xenomorphs on Instagram. The internet went into predictable meltdown and the District 9 director dramatically announced in February last year that the studio had given him permission to move ahead.
Then Scott, like some terrifying party-pooping alien critter bursting out of funs chest cavity, stepped in to make it clear that his own Alien movie, a sequel to Prometheus now titled Alien: Covenant, must take priority. So instead of a Weaver-led movie from one of Hollywoods most promising young science fiction film-makers aimed at restoring the saga to its pre-Alien 3 glory, we face the prospect of another portentous pseudo-origin story about mankinds connections to the xenomorphs and their utterly tedious extra-terrestrial Engineer creators. Or if things go really badly, another three movies on said subject matter.
Ridley asked Neill not to make our Alien til after Prometheus 2, confirms Weaver in new comments published by Indiewire. He wanted his movie to shoot and be released first. But [our Alien film is] an amazing script, and Neill and I are really excited about doing it … Its just going to take a little bit longer to get out to you, but itll be worth the wait.
So why is Blomkamps movie a more attractive prospect than Scotts, especially when the veteran British film-maker kicked off the entire slasher-in-space subgenre with 1979s searingly superb Alien? The answer lies in Weavers return and the pitching of the new movie at the point just before the long-running sci-fi saga began to haemorrhage all credibility.
In the real world, David Finchers Alien 3 by no means a terrible film, yet hardly one which makes any real argument for its own existence debuted in 1992, followed by the ersatz afterthought of Jean-Pierre Jeunets Alien Resurrection (complete with clone Ripley and her half-xenomorph child) in 1997. Lets not even mention the two execrable Alien vs Predator spin-offs.
But in Blomkamps wonderful new fantasy timeline, these movies never happened. With the slate miraculously wiped clean (no one knows quite how, and the film-maker himself partially backtracked on his own promise at one point), Ripley and Hicks can set off for new adventures after destroying the xenomorph-infested planetoid at the end of James Camerons Aliens (it was, after all, the only way to be sure). There might even have been space to bring back poor little Newt, the tough little orphan girl who many fans never forgave Fincher for killing off at the start of Alien 3.
In the grand pantheon of great Ripley moments, almost all emanate from the first two Alien films. The warrant officers beautifully bleak sign-off after destroying the final xenomorph in Alien; her sweary mecha-suited battle with the giant queen in Aliens. These are performances unparalled across three famous genres: action, horror and science fiction.
Meanwhile, Alien Covenant will offer us a film set on a mysterious planet (possibly the Engineers home world), where Michael Fassbenders David the android has been kicking his heels for 10 years waiting for a new human crew, led by Katherine Waterston, to turn up. There will be xenomorphs this time, but you get the impression Scott only agreed to include the monstrous beasties as a result of the popularity surrounding Blomkamps concept. As recently as 2014, he was still indicating that Gigers creations were gone forever.
Star Wars began to get back on track when it brought back centrepiece figures from the hugely popular original trilogy to inject The Force Awakens with some much-needed authenticity. Now its time for Alien to follow suit.
If the saga has any hope of getting back to its own 70s and 80s high point, it surely needs to bring the original all-action Hollywood scream queen along for the ride. Then fire up the afterburners and nuke the rotting corpse of Alien: Covenant from space.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us
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Venus image from NASAs Magellan probe Venus Global GIS Mapping Application (usgs.gov)
Space might very well be considered the final frontier, but according to alien hunters, intelligent life on Venus includes cities for its inhabitants.
A 20-minute Spanish-language video posted to YouTube by mundodesconocido magnifies and examines images of the planet taken by NASAs Magellan probe.
The video applies 3D modeling to some of the images. In a post accompanying the video, mundodesconocido says the images reveal huge cities, artificial structures and all kinds of elements that seem to obey constructions appear intelligent effected [sic] by some kind of alien race that inhabited or colonized the second planet in our solar system.
Magellan launched on May 4, 1989 and began orbiting Venus on August 10, 1990. The spacecraft was sent to study the face of the planet and to model its interior.
Despite being referred to as the Earths twin and sister planet NASA describes Venus as an Earth-sized planet with no evidence of Earth-like plate tectonics. Magellan also revealed that at least 85 percent of Venus surface is covered with volcanoes. The planet has a surface temperature of 864 degrees.
NASA lost contact with Magellan on October 13, 1994.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Astronomers searching for life beyond our solar system may need to look no farther than a little, feeble nearby star.
A Belgian-led team reported Monday that it’s discovered three Earth-sized planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star less than 40 light-years away. It’s the first time planets have been found around this type of star and it opens up new, rich territory in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Because this star is so close and so faint, astronomers can study the atmospheres of these three temperate exoplanets and, eventually, hunt for signs of possible life. They’re already making atmospheric observations, in fact, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope will join in next week.
Altogether, it’s a “winning combination” for seeking chemical traces of life outside our solar system, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Julien de Wit, a co-author of the study, released by the journal Nature.
The star in question named Trappist-1 after the Belgian telescope in Chile that made the discovery is barely the size of Jupiter and located in the constellation Aquarius.
Other exoplanet searches have targeted bigger, brighter stars more like our sun, but the starlight in these cases can be so bright that it washes out the signatures of planets. By comparison, cool dwarf stars that emit infrared light, like Trappist-1, make it easier to spot potential worlds.
University of Liege astronomers in Belgium lead study authors Michael Gillon and Emmanuel Jehin built the Trappist telescope to observe 60 of the nearest ultra-cool dwarf stars. The risky effort paid off, de Wit noted in an email.
“Systems around these tiny stars are the only places where we can detect life on an Earth-sized exoplanet with our current technology,” Gillon said in a statement. “So if we want to find life elsewhere in the universe, this is where we should start to look.”
The two inner exoplanets take between 1.5 and 2.4 days to orbit the Trappist-1 star. The precise orbit time of the third planet is not known, but it falls somewhere between 4.5 days and 73 days. That puts the planets 20 times to 100 times closer to their star than Earth is to our sun, Gillon noted. The setup is more similar in scale to Jupiter’s moons than to our solar system, he added.
Although the two innermost planets are very close to the star, it showers them with only a few times the amount of energy that Earth receives from our own sun. The third exoplanet farther out may receive significantly less of such radiation than Earth does.
The astronomers speculate the two inner exoplanets may have pockets where life may exist, while the third exoplanet actually might fall within the habitable zone real estate located at just the right distance from a star in order to harbor water and, possibly, life.
Spitzer and Hubble should answer whether the exoplanets have large and clear atmospheres, according to de Wit. They also might be able to detect water and methane, if molecules are present.
Future observatories, including NASA’s James Web Space Telescope set to launch in 2018, should unearth even more details.
Gillon and his colleagues identified the three exoplanets by observing regular dips in the infrared signals emanating from the Trappist-1 star, some 36 light-years away. A single light-year represents about 6 trillion miles.
The astronomers conducted the survey last year using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, or Trappist. It’s considered a prototype for a more expansive European project that will widen the search for potentially habitable worlds to 500 ultra-cool stars. This upcoming project is dubbed Speculoos short for Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-Cool Stars.
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Three potentially habitable Earth-size planets have been discovered orbiting a dim, cold nearby star that is barely larger than Jupiter, researchers say.
“These kinds of tiny, cold stars may be the places we should first look for life elsewhere in the universe, because they may be the only places where we can detect life on distant Earth-sized planets with our current technology,” study lead author Michaël Gillon, an astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium, told Space.com.
Astronomers focused on a star originally named 2MASS J23062928-0502285 that was discovered using TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope), a telescope in Chile. This dim cold red star, now known as TRAPPIST-1, is located in the constellation of Aquarius about 39 light-years from Earth. In comparison, Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, is about 4.3 light-years from Earth. [Watch: See how the 3 TRAPPIST-1 Planets Might Support Life]
TRAPPIST-1 is 2,000 times less bright than the sun, a bit less than half as warm as the sun, about one-twelfth the sun’s mass, and less than one-eighth the sun’s width, making it only slightly larger in diameter than Jupiter. TRAPPIST-1 is a type of star known as an ultracool dwarf that is very common in the Milky Way, making up about 15 percent of the stars near the sun.
Scientists spotted the three planets by observing TRAPPIST-1 dimming at regular intervals as the worlds crossed in front of it. This is the first time that distant planets, called exoplanets, have been found around an ultracool dwarf, the researchers said.
“So far, the existence of such ‘red worlds’ orbiting ultracool dwarf stars was purely theoretical, but now we have not just one lonely planet around such a faint red star, but a complete system of three planets,” study co-author Emmanuël Jehin, an astronomer at the University of Liège, said in a statement.
These three planets are each only about 10 percent larger in diameter than Earth. “The kind of planets we’ve found are very exciting from the perspective of searching for life in the universe beyond Earth,” study co-author Adam Burgasser at the University of California, San Diego, said in a statement.
The two innermost planets are about 60 to 90 times closer to their star than the Earth to the sun, with orbits only 1.5 and 2.4 days long, respectively. The orbit of the third planet is currently less certain, ranging between 4.5 and 73 days long. The small size of the star and its planets’ orbits means “the structure of this planetary system is much more similar in scale to the system of Jupiter’s moons than to that of the solar system,” Gillon said in the statement.
Although all three planets orbit very near their star, the inner two planets receive only four times and two times, respectively, the amount of radiation that Earth receives, since their star is much fainter than the sun. The third outer planet probably receives less radiation than Earth does, the researchers said.
Given how close TRAPPIST-1’s trio of planets are to its star, the researchers suggest TRAPPIST-1’s gravitational pull likely forced these worlds to become “tidally locked” to it. When a planet is tidally locked to its star, it will always show the same side to its star, just as the moon always shows the same face to Earth. This causes those worlds to each have one permanent dayside and one permanent nightside.
The third of TRAPPIST-1’s planets, the one farthest from the star, may lie within the star’s habitable zone the area around a star where planets have surfaces warm enough to have liquid water, a key ingredient to life as it is known on Earth. The two planets closest to TRAPPIST-1 may have daysides that are too hot and nightsides that are too cold to host any kind of life as it is known on Earth, but the researchers suggest that the borders of the planets’ day- and nightsides may be sweet spots temperate enough for life.
For the most part, exoplanet-hunting missions have focused on finding systems around sun-like stars emitting visible light, but these stars can be so bright, they can drown out key features of their planets, the researchers said. In contrast, cold dwarf stars emit mostly infrared light, and are so faint they would not overwhelm details of their planets. TRAPPIST was designed to look for planets around 60 nearby ultracool dwarfs. [7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets]
“The detection of these planets [around TRAPPIST-1] should intensify the search for more systems around ultracool dwarfs,” Gillon said. “Exciting scientific adventures are now beginning.”
Since the planets around TRAPPIST-1 are relatively nearby, scientists can in principle analyze the compositions of their atmospheres, “and further down the road, which is within our generation, assess if they are actually inhabited,” study co-author Julien de Wit, a planetary scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement. “All of these things are achievable, and within reach now. This is a jackpot for the field.”
The masses of these worlds remain unknown, but future research can pinpoint how much each of these planets gravitationally pulls at its siblings when they get close to each other, Gillon said. The strength of each planet’s gravitational pull will help scientists deduce its mass, which in turn will help them estimate the planets’ densities and, thus, compositions, he added.
“We can tell if the planets are probably rocky, or rich in ice like the moons of Jupiter, or rich in metal like Mercury,” Gillon said.
The researchers noted that the Hubble Space Telescope and the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope could help analyze the atmospheres of those planets for molecules linked with life, such as water, carbon dioxide and ozone.
“Now we have to investigate if they’re habitable,” de Wit said in the statement.
The scientists detailed their findings online May 2 in the journal Nature.
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