Bampot

The 2023 Planetary Defense Strategy focuses on six goals in total across Federal Departments and Agencies for the decade ahead:

Goal 1: Enhance NEO detection, tracking, and characterization capabilities. Early detection and tracking of a potential NEO impact threat provides the greatest leverage to adequately respond in time to prevent loss of life and damage to critical infrastructure.

Goal 2: Improve NO modeling, prediction, and information integration. Departments and Agencies will coordinate the development of validated modeling tools and simulation capabilities that aid in characterizing and mitigating NO impact risks while integrating and streamlining data flows to support effective decision-making.

Goal 3: Develop technologies for NO reconnaissance, deflection, and disruption missions. NASA will continue to lead development of technologies that could potentially be used in fast-response NEO reconnaissance missions and timely missions to deflect or disrupt hazardous NEOS.

Goal 4: Increase international cooperation on NO preparedness. The potentially cataclysmic consequences of a NEO impact, independent of national borders and geopolitical dynamics, presents special opportunity for engagement with the international community to foster cooperation in joint research and response efforts.

Goal 5: Strengthen and routinely exercise NO impact emergency procedures and action protocols. The United States will strengthen and exercise procedures and protocols for assessment of NO threats, communication-including to the public and international community-regarding threats, and response and recovery activities.

Goal 6: Improve U.S. management of planetary defense through enhanced interagency collaboration. Actions under this goal will improve ongoing coordination and implementation on projects across Federal agency boundaries.

The dream of traversing the depths of space and planting the seed of human civilization on another planet has existed for generations. For long as we’ve known that most stars in the Universe are likely to have their own system of planets, there have been those who advocated that we explore them (and even settle on them). With the dawn of the Space Age, this idea was no longer just the stuff of science fiction and became a matter of scientific study. Unfortunately, the challenges of venturing beyond Earth and reaching another star system are myriad.

When it comes down to it, there are only two ways to send crewed missions to exoplanets. The first is to develop advanced propulsion systems that can achieve relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light). The second involves building spacecraft that can sustain crews for generations – aka. a Generation Ship (or Worldship). On November 1st, 2024, Project Hyperion launched a design competition for crewed interstellar travel via generation ships that would rely on current and near-future technologies. The competition is open to the public and will award a total of $10,000 (USD) for innovative concepts.

Saber-toothed cats are iconic creatures often seen in museum dioramas, displays of fossil skeletons, and even the movie Ice Age. Now, for the first time one of these extinct predators has been spotted in the flesh. In a study published this week in Scientific Reports, researchers describe the frozen body of a saber-toothed kitten preserved for 37,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.

The carcass—containing the head, forelimbs, and front part of the animal—was discovered encased in a chunk of ice in 2020 near the Badyarikha River in northern Siberia, above the Arctic Circle. Radiocarbon dating revealed the cat—belonging to the species Homotherium latidens—lived in the late Pleistocene epoch 35,500 to 37,000 years ago.

Based on the emergence of its baby incisor teeth, researchers estimate the cub was about 3 weeks old when it died.

The search for clues after a U.S. Air Force F-16 Viper fighter brought down a still-unidentified object over Lake Huron in February 2023 did result in the recovery of debris it has been disclosed. However, it remains unclear whether or not the wreckage was from that shootdown. The new details continue to raise more questions about the downing of this and two other mystery objects that same month in American and Canadian skies, and why more information has not been made public.

Fun Facts about Teeth across the Animal Kingdom

Two competing theories about the evolutionary origins of teeth have been battling back and forth for decades, vacillating with the latest supporting discoveries in developmental biology or the fossil record. The “outside-in” hypothesis suggests that toothlike dermal scales with pulplike centers covered in hardened mineral—similar to denticles found today—gradually migrated across the body’s exterior surface over successive generations of fish before moving inward to take up residence in our ancestors’ jawbones. The “inside-out” hypothesis suggests that teeth originated internally before migrating forward in the oral cavity to become oral teeth.

An investigation of a fossilized sawtooth shark’s rostral denticles (the “teeth” on the fish’s sawlike bill) showed complex internal structures incredibly similar to those found in shark teeth. This discovery suggests that the developmental gap between dermal scales and teeth is smaller than originally thought, edging the outside-in hypothesis ahead of inside-out once more.

The Pentagon provided new details today about how its deployable, readily reconfigurable suite of sensors called GREMLIN works to help set the stage for figuring out what unidentified objects in our skies are and are not, if they appear at all.

In its annual report released on Thursday, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) shared a graphic that gives us our best look yet at what its GREMLIN system is. It was developed by Georgia Tech Research Institute specifically to help gather data about so-called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. That’s the DoD’s new parlance for what used to be called UFOs.

Last year the British spotter group UFO Identified documented 395 UK sightings - and you can see what UFO encounters have been reported where you live using our interactive map.

An international team of researchers has achieved an unprecedented milestone: the creation of mouse stem cells capable of generating a fully developed mouse using genetic tools from a unicellular organism, with which we share a common ancestor that predates animals.

In an experiment that sounds like science fiction, Dr. Alex de Mendoza of Queen Mary University of London collaborated with researchers from The University of Hong Kong to use a gene found in choanoflagellates, a single-celled organism related to animals, to create stem cells which they then used to give rise to a living, breathing mouse.

We use two paleoecological records from the Bass Strait islands to identify the initiation of anthropogenic landscape transformation associated with ancestral Palawa/Pakana land use. People were living on the Tasmanian/Lutruwitan peninsula by ~41.6 ka using fire to penetrate and manipulate forests, an approach possibly used in the first migrations across the last glacial landscape of Sahul.

Climate would have modulated Aboriginal landscape burning during the late Pleistocene, with people burning wet forested/wooded landscapes with high-intensity fires to promote open landscapes , and burned already open dry vegetation types with low-intensity fires to maintain desired conditions. The former likely resulted in high vegetation turnover with the decline in fire-intolerant plants, while the latter favored fire-adapted plants with low turnover. It is possible that Aboriginal people were able to modify and use wet forest communities, including rainforests, much more in the past than presently thought , creating community composition and/or structure very different from today’s wet forest communities.

A University of South Florida professor found the first-ever physical evidence of hallucinogens in an Egyptian mug, validating written records and centuries-old myths of ancient Egyptian rituals and practices. Through advanced chemical analyses, Davide Tanasi examined one of the world's few remaining Egyptian Bes mugs.

Such mugs, including the one donated to the Tampa Museum of Art in 1984, are decorated with the head of Bes, an ancient Egyptian god or guardian demon worshiped for protection, fertility, medicinal healing and magical purification.

With a pulverized sample from scraping the inner walls of the vase, the team combined numerous analytical techniques for the first time to uncover what the mug last held.

The new tactic was successful and revealed the vase had a cocktail of psychedelic drugs, bodily fluids and alcohol—a combination that Tanasi believes was used in a magical ritual reenacting an Egyptian myth, likely for fertility. The concoction was flavored with honey, sesame seeds, pine nuts, licorice and grapes, which were commonly used to make the beverage look like blood.

"This research teaches us about magic rituals in the Greco-Roman period in Egypt," Van Oppen said. "Egyptologists believe that people visited the so-called Bes Chambers at Saqqara when they wished to confirm a successful pregnancy because pregnancies in the ancient world were fraught with dangers.

"So, this combination of ingredients may have been used in a dream-vision inducing magic ritual within the context of this dangerous period of childbirth."

Source:

Multianalytical investigation reveals psychotropic substances in a ptolemaic Egyptian vase

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-78721-8

In the Cornish moorlands of southwest England lies a mysterious mound of stone and turf. Now covered with grass, the site was previously thought to be a medieval livestock pen built around 1000 C.E. Now, researchers have concluded the construction is actually 4,000 years older—dating to at least 3000 B.C.E., during the Neolithic period.

Known as King Arthur’s Hall, the unique site is located in Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. It’s about 160 feet long and 70 feet wide, and its walls are made of 56 earth-covered stones, which once stood upright. Now, they are all leaning, lying flat or buried.

“There isn’t another one of these anywhere,”

In early October, The Swan auction house in Tetsworth, Oxfordshire, listed several lots of human remains for sale, including skulls from west Africa and shrunken heads from South America.

They were withdrawn within a couple of days after objections were raised by representatives of the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford and indigenous activists.

The remains included examples from the Naga people of India, the Ekoi people of present-day Nigeria and Cameroon, and other groups in the Solomon Islands, Benin, Congo, Nigeria, Amazonia and Papua New Guinea.

While the UK’s museums and education institutions increasingly have professional guidelines about the respectful treatment of human remains, those in private collections do not have any protection. Although it is difficult to legislate how people care for private collections, this case raises the question of whether human remains should still be allowed to be bought and sold at all.