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Webb sheds more light on composition of planetary debris around nearby white dwarf

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have performed infrared observations of a planetary debris disk around a nearby white dwarf known as GD 362. Results of the new observations, presented October 8 on the arXiv preprint server, yield important insights into the chemical composition of this disk.

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G7 and Australia sign deal on quantum tech benchmarks

Scientists from the G7 nations and Australia signed an “unprecedented agreement” regarding quantum technology on Wednesday, France’s national metrology lab told AFP.

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The Mysterious 12,000-Year-Old Dropa Stones, Evidence Of Ancient Alien Contact?

More than 80 years ago, Chinese archaeologists discovered a cave system with chilling skeletons with elongated heads, a cosmic map, and more than 700 strange discs…

The mysterious discovery was allegedly made in 1930 when Chi Pu Tei, an archeology professor at Peking University and his students were on an expedition to explore a series of caves in the inaccessible mountains of Bayan Kara Ula, near Tibet, which were supposedly carved artificially in a system of underground tunnels and pantries.

According to these events, it is said that professor Chi Pu Tei and his students found tombs with skeletons of 1.38 m (4 ft 6 in) in height buried inside them. The skeletons would have had abnormally large heads and small, thin and fragile bodies. In addition to the skeletal remains, professor Chi Pu Tei and his students discovered countless other items.

It was suggested that these skeletal remains could have belonged to an unknown species of a mountain gorilla, but Professor Chi Pu Tei did not agree and responded: “Whoever heard about monkeys burying each other?”

There were no epitaphs in the tombs, but instead, they found more than 700 stone discs (“Dropa Stones”) with 8 cm holes in diameter at their centers.

On the walls, carvings of the rising sun, the moon, stars, the earth, mountains, and dotted lines linking the earth with the sky were found.

The discs and the cave paintings are said to date approximately 12,000 years. Their whereabouts today remains a mystery.

All of this raised a great mystery: Who were these mysterious beings? What were the enigmatic discs, and where did the star maps carved on the cave walls lead to?

Dropa Discs

Dropa What
The mysterious Dropa Discs.

Each stone disc, reportedly, would have been inscribed with two thin grooves that spiral from the edge to the central hole.

It is believed that the enigmatic Dropa Discs and other items discovered during the expedition were kept at the Peking University for 20 years.

All attempts to decipher the writing on the Dropa Discs were useless.

However, the discs were examined by Dr. Tsum Um Nui, in Beijing around 1958, who concluded that each groove consisted of a set of tiny hieroglyphs of unknown origin.

The rows were so small that a magnifying glass was necessary to see them clearly. Many of the hieroglyphics were worn out by erosion.

When Dr. Tsum allegedly deciphered the symbols, he revealed how the ancient writings tell a story of an otherworldly encounter where an ancient alien ship crash landed on Earth some 12,000 years ago.

According to Tsum Um Nui, one of the hieroglyphic lines read: “The Dropas came down from the clouds in their aircraft. Our men, women, and children hid in the caves ten times before sunrise. When at last they understood the sign language of the Dropas, they realized that the newcomers had peaceful intentions.”

Another section reads “regret” of the inhabitants of the mountain (tribe of the Ham) because the aliens had crashed their ship and could not build another to return to their planet.

Dr. Tsum reportedly published his discovery in 1962.

However, he would have been mocked to such an extent that he left China in exile moving to Japan, where he would later die.

It is said that the Beijing Pre-History Academy would never have allowed him to publish or discuss his find again.

Furthermore, due to the fact that “Tsum Um Nui” is not a real Chinese name, some critics suggest that the man never existed.

Others claim that Tsum Um Nui is a Japanese name adapted to the Chinese language. In addition to his theories about the Dropa, there is no further evidence that he ever existed.

In 1974, Ernst Wegerer, an Austrian engineer, photographed two discs that matched the descriptions of the Dropa Stones. He was on a guided tour of the Bampo Museum in Xian, when he saw the stone discs.

Disegno
One of ‘Wegener’s polaroids of two of the Dropa stones.

He said he observed a hole in the center of each disk and hieroglyphs in grooves, partly crumbled, like a spiral. It is said that when he enquired about the discs the manager could tell him nothing, but permitted him to take one in his hand and photograph them. He claims that in his photos the hieroglyphs cannot be seen as they have been hidden by the flash from the camera and have also deteriorated. By 1994, the discs and the manager had disappeared from the museum.

Critics largely rejected the story of the Dropa discs, arguing that it was a mixture of deception and urban legend.

For example, writer David Richie mentions that these stories intrigued Gordon Chreighton, a member of the Royal Society of Anthropology and the Royal Society of Geography.

In the investigation, Chreighton considered the allegations about the Dropa “unfounded,” and detailed his findings in an article for the Flying Saucer Review.

It is not easy to find credible evidence to show that the Dropa Stones exist or have existed in the past.

Defenders of the story claim that it is the result of a social disruption caused by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a cover-up conspired by the authorities of that country.

However, this goes beyond China; since those who oppose the history of the Dropa, claim that it is a deception of Erich von Däniken.

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Calif. sheriff removed from office after corruption investigation

Sheriff Christina Corpus allegedly showed a conflict of interest in her personal relationship with a former chief of staff and retaliated against a union leader, among others

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Foldable solar sails could help with aerobraking and atmospheric reentry

Use cases for smart materials in space exploration keep cropping up everywhere. They are used in everything from antenna deployments on satellites to rover deformation and reformation.

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Framework models light-matter interactions in nonlinear optical microscopy to determine atomic structure

Materials scientists can learn a lot about a sample material by shooting lasers at it. With nonlinear optical microscopy—a specialized imaging technique that looks for a change in the color of intense laser light—researchers can collect data on how the light interacts with the sample, and through time-consuming and sometimes expensive analyses, characterize the material’s structure and other properties.

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First-ever detection of ‘heavy water’ in a planet-forming disk

The discovery of ancient water in a planet-forming disk reveals that some of the water found in comets—and maybe even Earth—is older than the disk’s star itself, offering breakthrough insights into the history of water in our solar system.

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A new attempt to explain the accelerated expansion of the universe

Why is the universe expanding at an ever-increasing rate? This is one of the most exciting yet unresolved questions in modern physics. Because it cannot be fully answered using our current physical worldview, researchers assume the existence of a mysterious “dark energy.” However, its origin remains unclear to this day.

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Team uncovers intrinsic binary fraction of blue horizontal-branch stars

A research team from the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has conducted a study on the binary fraction of blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars. Their findings, recently published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, provide the intrinsic binary fraction and reveal its relationship with metallicity, kinematics, and effective temperature.

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Are there living microbes on Mars? Check the ice, researchers say

Frozen in time, ancient microbes or their remains could be found in Martian ice deposits during future missions to the red planet. By recreating Mars-like conditions in the lab, a team of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Penn State demonstrated that fragments of the molecules that make up proteins in E. coli bacteria, if present in Mars’ permafrost and ice caps, could remain intact for over 50 million years, despite harsh and continuous exposure to cosmic radiation.

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Our team of physicists inadvertently generated the shortest X-ray pulses ever observed

X-ray beams aren’t used just by doctors to see inside your body and tell whether you have a broken bone. More powerful beams made up of very short flashes of X-rays can help scientists peer into the structure of individual atoms and molecules and differentiate types of elements.

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Amplifying collective light emission with atomic interactions

A team of physicists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Center for New Technologies at the University of Warsaw and Emory University (Atlanta, U.S.) analyzed how atoms’ mutual interactions change the way they collectively interact with light.

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Researchers pioneer fluid-based laser scanning for brain imaging

When Darwin Quiroz first started working with optics as an undergraduate, he was developing atomic magnetometers. That experience sparked a growing curiosity about how light interacts with matter, an interest that has now led him to a new technique in optical imaging.

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DHS: Cartels offering up to $50K bounties to harm or kill ICE, CBP officers

Cartels have issued bounties ranging from $2,000 to dox and surveil ICE and CBP officers to $50,000 for assassinating government officials, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said

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SpaceX veteran lays out impulse space’s roadmap for making deliveries to the moon

Impulse Space, the California-based venture founded by veteran SpaceX engineer Tom Mueller, today unveiled its proposed architecture for delivering medium-sized payloads to the moon by as early as 2028.

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