LAS VEGAS, July 13 -- Should everything go according to plan, more than half a million strangers will gather in a remote Nevada town in mid-September, united by a common goal: Raid Area 51 in the wee hours of the morning - using a strength-in-numbers approach to reveal any extraterrestrial treasures stashed within the notoriously clandestine government base. Or, put more simply, "Lets see them aliens." By Friday evening, more than 540,000 people from around the world had signed up to attend the joke Facebook event: "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," - and just as many had indicated they were "interested." Planned for September 20 in Amargosa Valley, an hour's drive away from Las Vegas, the event page is currently filled with thousands of posts theorizing the best way to break into the top-secret facility. "We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry," reads a brief description of the event, which was created by popular video game streamer SmyleeKun. "If we Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets." The latter part of the description references anime ninja Naruto Uzumaki, whose notorious head forward, arms-behind-the-back running technique has led some to believe it makes them run faster. (It doesn't). Most people discussing the raid, including various news outlets that have written about the Facebook event, recognize it's not intended to be taken seriously. But what about those who don't? It is not clear exactly how many people, if anyone, will actually show up to lead a blitzkrieg on the Nellis Air Force Base Complex, which houses the land containing Area 51. Some who've posted on the event's page in recent days have considered that possibility. "P. S. Hello US government, this is a joke, and I do not actually intend to go ahead with this plan," wrote user Jackson Barnes, following his rather descriptive proposed game plan. "I just thought it would be funny and get me some thumbsy uppies on the Internet. I'm not responsible if people decide to actually storm area 51." Speaking with The Washington Post on Friday afternoon, US Air Force spokeswoman Laura McAndrews said officials were aware of the Facebook event. When asked how authorities might respond to ardent explorers who may attempt to enter Area 51 in September, McAndrews said she could not elaborate on specific plans or security procedures at the base. She did, however, issue a warning to those itching to try their luck. "[Area 51] is an open training range for the US Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train America armed forces," McAndrews said. "The US Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets." The facility has long been a source of public intrigue, yet for decades, Americans were told Area 51 didn't exist at all. That notion was officially debunked in 2013 when the CIA confirmed its existence through documents obtained in a public records request by George Washington University. Yes, Area 51 is definitely real - and even though the report indicated it was nothing more than an aircraft-testing facility and mentioned nothing about extraterrestrial life, the revelation gave credence to conspiracy theories alleging the government uses the base to hide aliens and their spacecraft. The CIA has since published information about test flights that took place there, and the alien aspects in many of those theories have been debunked. But in 2017 the Pentagon confirmed the existence of a $22 million government program to analyze "anomalous aerospace threats" - a.k.a. UFOs - giving alien-obsessed kooks fresh fodder for their conjectures. Though the facility is not publicly accessible, the area around Area 51 is a popular tourist destination, sprinkled with alien-themed motels, museums and restaurants. (In 1996, Nevada renamed state Route 375 to "Extraterrestrial Highway") But those who venture too far into the land surrounding the base are greeted with warning signs indicating they could be fined or jailed for trespassing and taking photos. Some signs suggest those who enter could be subject to "deadly force." In 2014, a tour bus carting four passengers near Area 51 inadvertently drove through the warning signs and entered the base, Las Vegas Now reported. The truck was stopped by men in "military garb," and everyone in the vehicle was threatened with a misdemeanor conviction and $650 fine. The incident was caught on video, making it obvious the tour's passengers thought it was all part of the experience. Only the driver was charged. Of course, those who say they will participate in the September raid know their mission won't be easy. Some have offered their own plans and even schematics detailing how the group will take on the base. Author: Pete McGee
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GENEVA, July 5 -- Global temperatures could rise 1.5° C above industrial levels by as early as 2030 if current trends continue, but trees could help stem this climate crisis. A new analysis finds that adding nearly 1 billion additional hectares of forest could remove two-thirds of the roughly 300 gigatons of carbon humans have added to the atmosphere since the 1800s. “Forests represent one of our biggest natural allies against climate change,” says Laura Duncanson, a carbon storage researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park and NASA who was not involved in the research. Still, she cautions, “this is an admittedly simplified analysis of the carbon restored forests might capture, and we shouldn’t take it as gospel.” The latest report from the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changerecommended adding 1 billion hectares of forests to help limit global warming to 1.5° C by 2050. Ecologists Jean-Francois Bastin and Tom Crowther of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and their co-authors wanted to figure out whether today’s Earth could support that many extra trees, and where they might all go. They analyzed nearly 80,000 satellite photographs for current forest coverage. The team then categorized the planet according to 10 soil and climate characteristics. This identified areas that were more or less suitable for different types of forest. After subtracting existing forests and areas dominated by agriculture or cities, they calculated how much of the planet could sprout trees. Earth could naturally support 0.9 billion hectares of additional forest—an area the size of the United States—without impinging on existing urban or agricultural lands, the researchers report today in Science. Those added trees could sequester 205 gigatons of carbon in the coming decades, roughly five times the amount emitted globally in 2018. “This work captures the magnitude of what forests can do for us,” says ecologist Greg Asner of Arizona State University in Tempe, who was not involved in the research. “They need to play a role if humanity is going to achieve our climate mitigation goals.” Adding forests wouldn’t just sequester carbon. Forests provide a host of added benefits including enhanced biodiversity, improved water quality, and reduced erosion. Estimates of how much forest restoration on this scale would cost vary, but based on prices of about $0.30 a tree, Crowther says it could be roughly $300 billion. Exactly how much carbon future forests could store may not be crystal clear, but Duncanson says NASA has new instruments in space—like the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) aboard the International Space Station—that will use lasers to create high-resolution 3D maps of Earth’s forests from canopy to floor. These data will add much-needed precision to existing estimates of aboveground carbon storage. “With GEDI we can take this paper as a stepping stone and inform it with much more accurate carbon estimates,” Duncanson says. “There have always been large uncertainties on large-scale carbon totals, but we have richer data coming soon.” Source: Science Magazine KOROLYOV, June 25 -- The Soyuz MS-11 manned spacecraft with three crewmembers from the International Space Station (ISS) onboard has landed in Kazakhstan in 145 km to the south-east of the city of Zhezkagan, Russia's Mission Control Center said on Tuesday. "We have a landing. The spacecraft carrying Roscosmos' cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, NASA's astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian Space Agency's David Saint-Jacques has landed," the center said. The spacecraft undocked from the ISS on Tuesday at 2:25am Moscow time. Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin, US astronauts Christina Koch and Nick Hague will stay aboard the ISS to continue their mission. The next expedition to the ISS will be launched from the Baikonur spaceport on July 20 by the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft. It will deliver Russia's cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, NASA's astronaut Andrew Morgan and European Space Agency's astronaut Luca Parmitano (Italy) to the ISS. ROTERDAM, June 21 -- Theories of honesty make different predictions about the role of material incentives. Classic economic models based on rational self-interest suggest that, all else equal, honest behavior will become less common as the material incentives for dishonesty increase. Models of human behavior that incorporate altruistic or other-regarding preferences also predict dishonesty to rise with increasing incentives, as self-interest virtually always dominates concerns for the welfare of others—we care about others but not as much as we care about ourselves. As a result, self-interest will play an increasingly prominent role in behavior as the material incentives for dishonesty grow. Psychological models based on self-image maintenance predict that people will cheat for profit so long as their behavior does not require them to negatively update their self-concept. However, it is unclear ex ante whether self-image concerns will become more or less important as the incentives for dishonesty increase, and what form that relationship will take. A further complication is that most of the experimental literature on honest behavior involves modest financial stakes, has been conducted in laboratory settings (where people understand their behavior is being observed), and tends to rely on populations from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. We conducted a series of large-scale field experiments across the globe to examine how financial incentives influence rates of civic honesty. We turned in “lost” wallets and experimentally varied the amount of money left in the wallets, allowing us to determine how monetary stakes affect return rates across a broad sample of societies and institutions. Our experiments take inspiration from classic “lost letter” studies that examine behavior in naturalistic settings but also provide tighter experimental control than past studies. We visited 355 cities in 40 countries and turned in a total of 17,303 wallets. We typically targeted the five to eight largest cities in a country, with roughly 400 observations per country. Wallets were returned to one of five societal institutions: (i) banks, (ii) theaters, museums, or other cultural establishments, (iii) post offices, (iv) hotels, and (v) police stations, courts of law, or other public offices. These institutions serve as useful benchmarks because they are common across countries and typically have a public reception area where we could perform the drop-offs. Our wallets were transparent business card cases, which we used to ensure that recipients could visually inspect without having to physically open the wallet (fig. S1). Our key independent variable was whether the wallet contained money, which we randomly varied to hold either no money or US $13.45 (“NoMoney” and “Money” conditions, respectively). We used local currencies, and to ensure comparability across countries, we adjusted the amount according to each country’s purchasing power. Each wallet also contained three identical business cards, a grocery list, and a key. The business cards displayed the owner’s name and email address, and we used fictitious but commonplace male names for each country. Both the grocery list and business cards were written in the country’s local language to signal that the owner was a local resident. After walking into the building, one of our research assistants (from a pool of eleven male and two female assistants) approached an employee at the counter and said, “Hi, I found this [pointing to the wallet] on the street around the corner.” The wallet was then placed on the counter and pushed over to the employee. “Somebody must have lost it. I’m in a hurry and have to go. Can you please take care of it?” The research assistant then left the building without leaving contact details or asking for a receipt. Our key outcome measure was whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallet. We created unique email addresses for every wallet and recorded emails that were sent within 100 days of the initial drop-off. Complete methods and results, including additional robustness checks such as testing for experimenter effects, can be found in the supplementary materials. As shown in the left half of Fig. 1, our cross-country experiments return a remarkably consistent result: citizens were overwhelmingly more likely to report lost wallets with money than without. We observed this pattern for 38 out of our 40 countries, and in no country did we find a statistically significant decrease in reporting rates when the wallet contained money. On average, adding money to the wallet increased the likelihood of reporting a wallet from 40% in the NoMoney condition to 51% in the Money condition (P < 0.0001). This result holds when controlling for a number of recipient and situational characteristics (table S8). Furthermore, while rates of civic honesty vary substantially from country to country, the absolute increase in honesty across conditions was stable. As shown on the right half of Fig. 1, the average treatment effect is roughly equal in size across quartiles based on absolute response rates. MOSCOW, June 19 -- International terrorists are trying to obtain access to nuclear and biological weapons and also toxic chemicals to use them in their attacks, Russian Deputy Security Council Secretary Yuri Kokov told the tenth international meeting of high-level delegates overseeing security matters in Ufa. "A number of tendencies in the tactics of international terrorist organizations’ steps deserve special attention and analysis," Kokov said. "First of all, this concerns the continued attempts to get access to data about the manufacturing of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, their increased attention to issues related to the use of pathogenic biological agents and toxic chemicals for terrorist purposes. " "The increased use of modern high-tech technical means creates additional risks as terrorists seek to quickly acquire them and use in order to commit crimes," Kokov said. As an example, the deputy security chief cited the attacks on Russian military facilities in Syria carried out with the use of drones. This March, in order to prevent such attacks, Russia’s Aerospace Defense Forces destroyed a depot belonging to the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham terrorist group in Syria’s Idlib, which stored combat unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). According to him, terrorists have started using suicide groups consisting of members of one family with minor children to penetrate protected facilities more actively. One of the new forms of terrorist activity was an attempt to attack coastal infrastructure using saboteur swimmers, who had been trained and had skills in mining seaports and capturing civilian vessels, primarily tankers and gas carriers. MOSCOW, May 29 -- The probability that debris from an Indian satellite shot down earlier may puncture the International Space Station (ISS) has risen by 5%, Executive Director of Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos for Manned Space Programs Sergei Krikalyov said on Wednesday. "The Americans have carried out calculations on the probability of the station getting punctured because of more debris surfacing and being dispersed. There are numerical estimates raising the probability of a puncture by about 5%," Krikalyov said at a session of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Council.Senior Assistant to the Section Head at the Main Center for the Surveillance of the Space Situation Roman Fattakhov said earlier that more than 100 pieces of the debris appeared after India had tested its anti-satellite weapon, shooting down a satellite. The debris may eventually pose a threat to the ISS. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a televised address to the nation on March 27 that the country’s Air Force had successfully tested its own anti-satellite weapon, shooting down a satellite in low near-Earth orbit. As Modi noted, the tests have enabled India to join the club of the world’s space super-powers, which includes the United States, Russia and China. The interceptor missile developed by India’s Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) was launched from a testing range located on Abdul Kalam Island in the Bay of Bengal. The satellite shot down by an interceptor missile was a space vehicle produced by India domestically. TEHRAN, May 8. -- Tehran decided to partially suspend the execution of some of its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on the Iran nuclear program, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday. Rouhani said Iran stops the implementation of its commitments under two items of the JCPOA. They concern the suspension of sales of enriched uranium and heavy water that Iran has to other countries for 60 days, under Sections 26 and 36 of the deal, according to Press TV. Iran expects the other members of the deal to take measures for preserving it and fulfilling their obligations within 60 days. Rouhani said that the JCPOA does not stop its operation and Iran does not withdraw from the deal. On May 8, 2018, US President Donald Trump declared Washington’s withdrawal from the JCPOA - a deal that was inked in 2015 and restricted Tehran’s nuclear developments in exchange for the abolishment of the sanctions introduced by the UN Security Council and the unilateral restrictive measures launched by the US and the EU. In November last year the US’ sanctions against Iran’s oil sector were restored. On April 22, Trump decided not to prolong the exceptions to the oil sanctions against Iran, which renewed operation in November 2018. Then Washington introduced a ban for importing Iranian oil but allowed major importers to continue purchases during six months. LOS ANGELES, May 6 -- Fueled by its performance in the China market, Disney and Marvel's mega-blockbuster "Avengers: Endgame" became the fastest film to cross the 2-billion-U.S.-dollar mark at the worldwide box office in history, doing so in only 12 days after it was released with a global total of 2.189 billion dollars. "Avengers: Endgame" brought in 428 million dollars worldwide in its second weekend, including 145.8 million dollars from North America and 282.2 million dollars from overseas markets through Sunday. The film had already smashed box office records last weekend with a tremendous global debut of 1.209 billion dollars, setting a new high-water mark for an opening weekend, according to studio figures collected by measurement firm Comscore. Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, "Avengers: Endgame" is a superhero film based on the Marvel Comics superhero team the Avengers. It's the 22nd installment of the Marvel Universe franchise and purported to be the last with this star lineup. The film follows the surviving members of the Avengers and their allies who work to reverse the damage caused by Thanos in Infinity War. China is the film's top grossing international market. The epic finale film took in around 80 percent of the Chinese mainland May Day Holiday box office. According to the major Chinese online ticketing service Maoyan, since its debut on April 23, the film's total box office in China reached 3.88 billion yuan (576 million U.S. dollars) to date, ranking third in Chinese mainland box office history, only after the homegrown sci-fi "The Wandering Earth" and the Chinese action movie "Wolf Warrior 2." The film had broken all previous opening weekend records in China as it brought in a massive 329 million dollars over its five-day launch weekend in China, exceeding the 270 million dollars prediction by analysts. "China has embraced 'Avengers: Endgame,'" said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore, adding that "the results have been nothing short of astounding." "The film keeps on rewriting the record books around the world and of course in China where a love of cinema and the movie theater experience has made this essential movie market one of the key drivers in the film's massive and unprecedented success," he said. NEW YORK, May 4 -- The US SpaceX aerospace company has launched the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon spacecraft with the cargo for the International Space Station (ISS) crew. The launch was broadcast live on SpaceX’s website. The launch was initially scheduled for Friday morning. However, it was cancelled because of electrical equipment problems. BEIJING, May 3 -- A video shot in 2017 of Zhao Yusi, the Chinese student whose family paid US$6.5 million for her fraudulent admission to Stanford University, has gone viral on social media. In it, she claims she was accepted because of her “hard work”. In the 90-minute video, made when she was 17, Zhao offered viewers advice on getting into prestigious American universities while admitting that her “natural IQ isn’t particularly high”. “I want tell everyone that getting into Stanford isn’t just a dream. You just need to have a clear goal and work as hard as you can towards it,” she said. “Some people think, ‘Did you get into Stanford because your family is rich?’ No, the admissions officers basically do not know who you are.” Chinese family reportedly paid US$6.5 million to ‘fixer’ for admission into Stanford Zhao, known as “Molly”, said she was awarded a full grant scholarship to Stanford, whose last publicised acceptance rate from 2017 at 4.65 per cent was lower than those of Harvard and Yale, at 5.2 per cent and 6.7 per cent respectively. In comparison, the acceptance rate for Oxford and Cambridge universities is about 20 per cent. Zhao is one of the students caught up in a US college admissions scandal that resulted in 33 parents, including celebrities, investors and company executives, facing fraud charges. The fixer and the main architect of the scam, William “Rick” Singer, admitted laundering their payments through his charitable foundation to bribe university administrators and sports coaches to place students. The international scheme was revealed by the US Justice Department in March, in what is the biggest criminal case involving college admissions yet. The alleged payment by Zhao’s family was by far the largest in the case. Zhao’s mother, identified as “Mrs Zhao”, released a statement through her lawyer on Friday saying that she was “misled” into donating to Singer’s charity “which was represented to her as a substantial and legitimate non-profit foundation” funding student scholarships at Stanford. She said Singer’s university admissions consultancy “did not guarantee admission into any particular school” and that her daughter was also a “victim”. ROTTERDAM, April 23 -- Electric vehicles in Germany account for more CO2 emissions than diesel ones, according to a study by German scientists. When CO2 emissions linked to the production of batteries and the German energy mix - in which coal still plays an important role - are taken into consideration, electric vehicles emit 11% to 28% more than their diesel counterparts, according to the study, presented on Wednesday at the Ifo Institute in Munich. Mining and processing the lithium, cobalt and manganese used for batteries consume a great deal of energy. A Tesla Model 3 battery, for example, represents between 11 and 15 tonnes of CO2. Given a lifetime of 10 years and an annual travel distance of 15,000 kilometres, this translates into 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometre, scientists Christoph Buchal, Hans-Dieter Karl and Hans-Werner Sinn noted in their study. The CO2 given off to produce the electricity that powers such vehicles also needs to be factored in, they say. When all these factors are considered, each Tesla emits 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometre, which is more than a comparable diesel vehicle produced by the German company Mercedes, for example. The German researchers therefore take issue with the fact that European officials view electric vehicles as zero-emission ones. They note further that the EU target of 59 grams of CO2 per km by 2030 corresponds to a “technically unrealistic” consumption of 2.2 litres of diesel or 2.6 litres of gas per 100 kms. These new limits pressure German and other European car manufacturers into switching massively to electric vehicles whereas, the researchers feel, it would have been preferable to opt for methane engines, “whose emissions are one-third less than those of diesel motors.” Your libido fluctuates with your physical and emotional state, and the condition of your relationship. When this happens we often fret about our sexual prowess, but it is perfectly normal, and fixable. This week, we examine the issues surrounding female sexual dysfunction, which are not discussed enough and may be poorly understood, meaning many women feel unprepared and on their own when they experience it. Sexual inhibition or lack of sexual interest in women has many causes – anxiety, depression, stress, physical illness, medication, lack of sleep, relationship issues, age, hormone-based contraceptives, hormonal imbalances, a history of unfulfilling sex, past incidents of shaming about sex. Sexual functioning requires a balance between neurotransmitters and hormones. If there is even the slightest imbalance, a woman’s appetite for sex will drop. Relationship issues such as lingering anger or resentment, lack of communication, or an absence of trust can also lower sexual desire.
“Women in long-term relationships can often experience a loss of desire, as they may crave more eroticism, variety, or spark in their sex lives ... Feeling desired by one’s partner is an important turn-on for many women,” says Dr Kristin Zeising, a clinical psychologist and certified sex therapist at MindnLife, a Hong Kong-based private psychology practice. “A history of feeling shamed for sexual expression can impact desire and cause a woman to be more inhibited. Historically and culturally speaking, female sexuality is often stigmatised ... Other factors include past sexual traumas, religious upbringing, or even unsatisfactory sex, and women feel uncomfortable discussing these issues with their partner for whatever reason,” Zeising adds. Loss of interest in sex is widespread, and affects between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of women, depending on which part of the world they live in, she says. Asian and Middle Eastern women are more likely to experience a lack of sexual desire, and sexual problems such as an inability to reach orgasm, Zeising says. “Women of all ages and cultures can experience a lack of desire at some point in their lives, so it’s quite normal and common. Women aren’t meant to always want sex, in whatever context or situation. In some cases, a woman may not desire sex on a regular basis – or at all – and they are perfectly fine with that. “However, it’s when a woman is feeling like her body has changed, or when their partner desires sex more than they do, that a depleted sexual appetite becomes problematic.” Many middle-aged women are vulnerable to low sexual functioning. They find that, as they age, their hormone levels drop and their bodies may need more stimulation than they previously did. “As oestrogen levels drop, the vaginal tissue thins and dries out, and this can make sex painful enough to put women off the act altogether,” Zeising says. “For many women, the reduction of oestrogen alone explains a nosedive in libido. But other aspects of menopause may also leave them feeling unsexy and not desiring sex, like mood swings, hot flushes, weight gain, and anxiety about ageing.” When that happens, she says, women should talk to a gynaecologist about medication and other solutions to make sex more comfortable. Zeising says feeling positive about ageing and about a partner tends to outweigh the physiological effects of declining hormone levels. Seven steps to stimulate your sex life: ● Schedule sex; create a space to allow sex regularly and build up the anticipation: ● Re-frame how you think about sex to reduce anxiety; ● View sex as a team sport by emphasizing mutual pleasure over performance; ● Tell your partner what you like and what you need from them; ● Give yourself permission to reap pleasure from the act of sex; ● Focus on the emotional pleasure and satisfaction gained from sex with your partner; ● Use your imagination; map out a sexual fantasy to share with your partner. LOS ANGELES, April 15 -- The plan is for the Stratolaunch plane to eventually act as a flying launch pad for satellites, which could potentially be a less expensive way to send objects into space than rockets. The test The twin-fuselage plane has six engines and was made from two used Boeing jetliners. It flew over the Mojave desert in California for two and a half hours during its maiden flight on Saturday April 13. It flew at a maximum speed of about 189 miles per hour at about 15,000 feet above the ground, according to Stratolaunch. The vital statistic The plane’s 385 foot (117 meter) wingspan is wider than a football field, making it the longest in the world. You can watch a clip of the flight here. The grand plan: Eventually, the hope is that the plane will be able to fly about two or three times higher than commercial jets, before it releases satellites into orbit. Stratolaunch believes this will be more efficient than the usual approach of launching rockets from the ground. NEW YORK, April 10 -- For the first time ever, humanity can gaze at an actual photograph of a supermassive black hole. It’s an achievement that’s taken supercomputers, eight telescopes stationed around the world, hundreds of researchers, and vast amounts of data. The results from this project, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), were announced today at joint press conferences streamed around the world. “Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the Universe,” Sheperd Doleman, the Project Director of the Event Horizon Telescope said at a press conference today before unveiling the image. The picture shows the black hole at the center of the huge galaxy Messier 87 (M87), located 53 million light years away from Earth. The black hole in this galaxy has a mass that the Event Horizon Telescope researchers estimate at six billion times more massive than our Sun. In addition to being gargantuan, M87’s black hole was already intriguing to researchers. In some early pictures of the galaxy, they notices a massive jet of plasma streaming out from its center. Scientists think that the jet is made of material that never quite made it into the event horizon of the black hole. Instead, the movement of M87’s black hole (which researchers believe is spinning rapidly) accelerated the plasma and sent it shooting out into the universe, a beacon to distant astronomers. The Event Horizon Telescope is not a single, traditional telescope, but rather refers to a group of eight radio telescopes stationed on five continents, which all observed the same areas of space over the course of one week in April 2017. According to the Event Horizon Telescope, a conventional telescope would have to be approximately the size of Earth in order to take this particular snapshot of the black hole at the center of M87. “This is a picture you would have seen if you had eyes as big as the Earth and were observing in radio,” Dimitrios Psaltis, an Event Horizon Telescope project scientist at the University of Arizona said. Individually, none of the telescopes measured up, but by coordinating their efforts, the researchers were able to zero in M87, collecting massive amounts of data in the process. OSLO, April 4 -- The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) is misleading the public by suggesting that global warming and its impacts are accelerating. In fact, since 2016 global average temperature has continued to decline. That’s according to Norwegian Professor Ole Humlum whose annual review of the world’s climate is published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Last week, the WMO issued its own review of the climate, which insinuated that global warming was worsening. However, Professor Humlum points out that the data tells a very different story: “Reading the WMO report, you would think that global warming was getting worse. But in fact, it is carefully worded to give a false impression. The data are far more suggestive of an improvement than deterioration.” And the lack of anything to be alarmed about is clear across a range of measures, says Professor Humlum: “After the warm year of 2016, temperatures last year continued to fall back to levels of the so-called warming “pause” of 2000-2015. There is no sign of any acceleration in global temperature, hurricanes or sea-level rise. These empirical observations show no sign of acceleration whatsoever.” Professor Humlum’s key findings:
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