A Japanese H-IIA rocket with the
NASA-Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Global Precipitation Measurement
(GPM) Core Observatory onboard blasts off from the launching pad at Tanegashima
Space Center on the Japanese southwestern island of Tanegashima, about 1,000km
(621 miles) southwest of Tokyo, in this photo taken by Kyodo early February 28,
2014. (REUTERS/Kyodo)
Tokyo (AFP) - Japan is planning to
launch a military space force by 2019 that would initially be tasked with
protecting satellites from dangerous debris orbiting the Earth, a report said.
The move is aimed at strengthening
Japan-US cooperation in space, and comes after the countries pledged to boost
joint work on monitoring space debris, Kyodo news agency said Sunday.
Japan would provide the US military
with information obtained by the force as part of the joint bid to strengthen
ties in space, the so-called "fourth battlefield", Kyodo said, citing
unnamed sources.
Japan's defence ministry is looking
at creating the new force using personnel from the Air Self-Defence Force, the
country's air force, it added.
The unit would acquire radar and
telescope facilities, jointly with the science ministry and the Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency, to run its observatory operations, Kyodo said.
Thousands of pieces of debris --
including old satellites as well as pieces of rockets and other space equipment
-- are orbiting the Earth and threaten to collide with functioning
communications and reconnaissance satellites.
Ok, folks. It looks like Obsidian & Hobobob are back at
it again. We’ll be dropping by the poetry scene to do a long-awaited double
feature at the lovely Ronnie Norpel’s Track 187 Culture Clash-Warhol Flashback
Birthday Bash!
The location will be: The West End (Bar) 955 West End
Avenue, New York, NY
The date will be: Wednesday August 6th. The Show
is from 6-9pm.
So cancel all your appointments and dates and come on over
& let us regale you one more time! We look forward to seeing you there.
What's the deal with these (pardon me, if you will) Asian airlines, theses days?
Plane crashes in Taiwan, 47 trapped, feared dead
AP
Photo: Wong Yao-wen
Rescue workers work next to the
wreckage of TransAsia Airways flight GE222 which crashed while attempting to
land in stormy weather on the Taiwanese island of Penghu, late Wednesday, July
23, 2014. A plane landing in stormy weather crashed outside an airport on a
small Taiwanese island late Wednesday, and a transport minister said dozens of
people were trapped and feared dead.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — A plane
landing in stormy weather crashed outside an airport on a small Taiwanese
island late Wednesday, and the transport minister said 47 people were trapped
and feared dead.
Another 11 people were injured when
the ATR-72 operated by Taiwan's TransAsia Airways crashed on Penghu, an island
in the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and China, Transport Minister Yeh
Kuang-shih was quoted as saying by the government's Central News Agency. The
plane was arriving from Kaohsiung, a city in southern Taiwan.
Typhoon
hits Taiwan, 47 people killed in plane crash
54 min ago Duration: 0:42 Views: 9
The twin-engine turboprop plane
crashed while making a second landing attempt with a total of 58 passengers and
crew members aboard, according to Yeh.
President Ma Ying-jeou called it
"a very sad day in the history of Taiwanese aviation" and ordered
authorities to quickly clarify the details, said a spokesman for his office, Ma
Wei-kuo, the news agency reported.
The plane crashed in the village of
Xixi outside the airport. Photos in local media showed firefighters using
flashlights to look at wreckage in the darkness, and buildings and cars damaged
by debris.
About 200 military personnel were
sent to help recover the people who were on the plane, Taiwanese Defense
Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Luo Shou-he said, according to the Central News
Agency.
The ministry said military vehicles
and ambulances were rushing people to hospitals and an air force rescue team
was on standby to transfer survivors to Taiwan's main island if needed for
treatment, the agency reported.
AP
Photo: Wong Yao-wen
Rescue workers survey the wreckage
of TransAsia Airways flight GE222 which crashed while attempting to land in
stormy weather on the Taiwanese island of Penghu, late Wednesday, July 23,
2014.
The flight left Kaohsiung at 4:53
p.m. for Magong on Penghu, according to the head of Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics
Administration, Jean Shen. The plane lost contact with the tower at 7:06 p.m.
after saying it would make a second landing attempt.
Visibility as the plane approached
was 1,600 meters (one mile), which met standards for landing, and two flights
had landed before GE222, one at 5:34 p.m. and the other at 6:57 p.m., the
aviation agency reported. Shen said the plane was 14 years old.
But the Central News Agency, citing
the county fire department, said it appeared heavy rain reduced visibility and
the pilot was forced to pull up and make the second landing attempt. The news
agency had earlier quoted a local fire chief as saying 51 people had been
killed.
Taiwan was battered by Typhoon Matmo
overnight Tuesday, and the Central Weather Bureau warned of heavy rain
Wednesday evening, even after the center of the storm had moved west to mainland
China.
TransAsia Airways' general manager,
Hsu Yi-Tsung, bowed deeply before reporters and tearfully apologized for the
accident, the Central News Agency said.
Hsu said the carrier was arranging
to take the relatives of passengers on the flight to Magong on Thursday morning
and that it would spare no effort in the rescue and in handling the aftermath,
the report said.
Taiwan's last major aviation
disaster also was near Penghu. A China Airlines Boeing 747 broke apart in
midair in 2002 and crashed into the Taiwan Strait, killing all 225 people
aboard.
In October 2013, a Lao Airlines
ATR-72 crashed during a heavy storm as it approached Pakse Airport in southern
Laos, killing all 49 people on board.
Haven't posted for a while-had gotten my
laptop stolen. Not to worry! i have a new one & am ready 2 post
again! Been partying a little, on the side, too... -Obsidian
Universe Shouldn't Be Here, According to Higgs Physics
.
View photo
The BICEP2 telescope in Antarctica, seen at twilight.
The universe shouldn't exist — at least according to a new theory.
Modeling of conditions soon after the Big Bang
suggests the universe should have collapsed just microseconds after its
explosive birth, the new study suggests.
"During the early
universe, we expected cosmic inflation — this is a rapid expansion of
the universe right after the Big Bang," said study co-author Robert
Hogan, a doctoral candidate in physics at King's College in London.
"This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around, and if we shake it
too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause the
universe to collapse."
Physicists draw that conclusion from a model that accounts for the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson
particle, which is thought to explain how other particles get their
mass; faint traces of gravitational waves formed at the universe's
origin also inform the conclusion. [Doomsday: The 9 Real Ways Earth Could End]
Of course, there must be something missing from these calculations.
"We are here talking about it," Hogan told Live Science. "That means we
have to extend our theories to explain why this didn't happen."
Bang!
One possible explanation holds that during the fiery flash after the
primordial Big Bang explosion, matter raced outward at breakneck speeds
in a process known as cosmic inflation.
This bent and squeezed space-time, creating ripples known as
gravitational waves that also twisted the radiation that passed through
the universe, Hogan said.
Though those events would have occurred
13.8 billion years ago, a telescope at the South Pole known as the
Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP2)
recently detected the faint traces of cosmic inflation in the background
microwave radiation that pervades the universe: in particular,
characteristic twisted or curled waves called the B-mode pattern. (Other
scientists have already begun to question the findings, saying the
results may just be from dust in the Milky Way.)
But gravity
wasn't the only force at play in the early universe. A ubiquitous energy
field, called the Higgs field, permeates the universe and gives mass to
the particles that trudge through the field. Scientists found the
telltale sign of that field in 2012, when they discovered the Higgs
boson and then determined its mass. [6 Implications of Finding a Higgs Boson Particle]
With a greater understanding of cosmic inflation's properties and the
Higgs boson mass, Hogan and his colleague, Malcolm Fairbairn, who is
also a physicist at King's College London, tried to recreate the
conditions of cosmic inflation after the Big Bang.
What they
found was bad news for, well, everything. The newborn universe should
have experienced an intense jittering in the energy field, known as quantum fluctuation.
Those jitters, in turn, could have disrupted the Higgs field, in
essence rolling the entire system into a much lower energy state that
would make the collapse of the universe inevitable.
Missing ingredient
So if the universe shouldn't exist, why is it here?
"The generic expectation is that there must be some new physics that we
haven't put in our theories yet, because we haven't been able to
discover them," Hogan said.
One leading possibility, known as the theory of supersymmetry,
proposes that there are superpartner particles for all the currently
known particles, and perhaps more-powerful particle accelerators could
find these particles, Hogan said.
But the theory of cosmic
inflation is still speculative, and some physicists hint that what
looked like primordial gravitational waves to the BICEP2 telescope may
actually be signals from cosmic dust in the galaxy, said Sean Carroll, a
physicist at the California Institute of Technology and author of "The
Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson
Leads Us to the Edge of a New World" (Dutton Adult, 2012).
If the
details of cosmic inflation change, then Hogan and Fairbairn's model
would need to adapt as well, Carroll told Live Science. Caroll was not
involved in the study.
Interestingly, this isn't the first time that physicists have said the Higgs boson spells doom for the universe.
Others have calculated that the Higgs boson's mass would lead to a
fundamentally unstable universe that could end apocalyptically in
billions of years.
The mass of the Higgs boson, about 126 times
that of the proton, turns out to be "right on the edge," in terms of the
universe's stability, Carroll said. A little bit lighter, and the Higgs
field would be much more easily perturbed; a little heavier, and the
current Higgs field would be incredibly stable.
Hogan will present his findings Tuesday (June 24) at the Royal
Astronomical Society meeting in Portsmouth, England, and the study was
published May 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Ok, so this is what happens when you go down
south, to Bible Belt, South Carolina. & spend time with moms, going
along with her to church. What else can i tell you? -Daniel Canada aka Obsidian
That was back in February 2002. But instead of finding gold on Gowers Mountain, Snyder found a giant fossilized footprint, at least it looks like one, embedded in solid granite.
The footprint was found in what becomes a creek bed during the rainy season. It looks as though something big crossed the creek a long time ago leaving its footprint behind. What made it and when? Who knows....Granite is supposed to have formed over 1 billion years ago.
(Here's the site): http://s8int.com/phile/page56.html
I think it's about time we resurrected some of these ancient Sumerian goddesses. This here relief is one of the goddess Ninsun, the goddess of beer! That's right. And she's probably one of the oldest gods known to mankind.
This is actually a statue/art work of me, which moves and sprouts poetry from several works of poetry I wrote over the years. The incredible artwork was done by my dear friends Daniel & Magdalene from Zurich, Switzerland several years ago & displayed around the world. I thought it would be fun to resurrect this piece. -Obsidian
Ok. LISTEN UP! Being that this is Black History Month & I am an Afro-American poet/artist/whatever you want to call me, it is incumbent upon me to represent one of American history's greatest achievers of the last century. So without further ado, I present to you Matthew Henson! -Obsidian
Matthew A. Henson
Born August 8, 1866 Nanjemoy, Maryland, USA Died March 9, 1955 (aged 88) The Bronx, New York, USA
Matthew Alexander Henson (August 8, 1866 – March 9, 1955) was the first African American Arctic explorer, an associate of Robert Peary on seven voyages over a period of nearly twenty-three years. They made six voyages and spent a total of eighteen years in expeditions. Henson served as a navigator and craftsman, traded with Inuit and learned their language, and was known as Peary's "first man" for these arduous travels. During their 1909 expedition to Greenland, Henson accompanied Peary in the small party, including four Inuit men, that has been recognized as the first to reach the Geographic North Pole (although this has also been subject to dispute). Henson was invited in 1937 as a member of The Explorers Club due to his achievement and was the first African American to be accepted.
Based on research into Peary's diary and astronomical observations, Wally Herbert, a later Arctic explorer who reached the North Pole in 1969, concluded in 1989 that Peary's team had not reached the pole. This has been widely accepted, but some continue to dispute this conclusion. In the late 20th century, S. Allen Counter did research about Henson's contributions and argued for more national recognition of the explorer. By presidential order, in 1988, the remains of Henson and his wife were reinterred with a monument at Arlington National Cemetery, near that for Peary and his wife. Henson has received numerous posthumous honors since then.
Henson was born on a farm in Nanjemoy, Maryland on August 8, 1866 to sharecroppers who had been free people of color before the American Civil War.[1][2] He had an older sister S., born in 1864, and two younger sisters Eliza and S.[3] Matthew's mother died when he was two. His father Lemuel remarried to a woman named Caroline and had additional children with her, including daughters and a son.
After his father died, Matthew was sent to live with his uncle in Washington, D.C. He paid for a few years of education for the boy, and died.[1] After his uncle's death, Henson got a job as a dishwasher at "Janey's Home-Cooked Meals Cafe".
At the age of twelve, the youth made his way to Baltimore, Maryland, where he went to sea as a cabin boy on a merchant ship named Katie Hines. Captain Childs took Henson under his wing, treating him like a son and teaching him to read and write. Childs and Henson were close for a long time. Henson sailed around the world with him for the next several years. He visited places such as China, Japan, the Philippines, France, Africa, and southern Russia. He became self-taught and a skilled navigator. After Childs died about 1883, Henson worked as a seaman and then on land.
While working at a clothing store in Washington, D.C., in November 1887, Henson met Commander Robert E. Peary. Learning of Henson's sea experience, Peary recruited him as an aide for his planned voyage and surveying expedition to Nicaragua, with four other men. Peary supervised 45 engineers on the canal survey in Nicaragua. Impressed with Henson’s seamanship on that voyage, Peary recruited him as a colleague and he became "first man" in his expeditions.
After that, for more than 20 years, their expeditions were to the Arctic. Henson traded with the Inuit and mastered their language; he also developed skills in driving the dog sleds and training dog teams in the Inuit way. He was a skilled craftsman, often coming up with solutions for what they needed in the harsh Arctic conditions; they learned to build igloos out of snow, for mobile housing as they traveled. He and Peary with their teams covered thousands of miles in dog sleds and reached the "Farthest North" point of any Arctic expedition in 1906.
In 1908–1909, Peary mounted his eighth attempt to reach the North Pole. The expedition was large, as Peary planned to use his system of setting up cached supplies along the way. When he and Henson boarded his ship Roosevelt, leaving Greenland on August 18, 1909, they were accompanied by "22 Inuit men, 17 Inuit women, 10 children, 246 dogs, 70 tons (64 metric tons) of whale meat from Labrador, the meat and blubber of 50 walruses, hunting equipment, and tons of coal. In February, Henson and Peary departed their anchored ship at Ellesmere Island's Cape Sheridan, with the Inuit men and 130 dogs working to lay a trail and supplies along the route to the Pole."
Peary selected Henson and four Inuit as part of the team of six who would make the final run to the Pole. Before the goal was reached, Peary could no longer continue on foot and rode in a dog sled. Various accounts say he was ill, exhausted, or had frozen toes. He sent Henson on ahead as a scout.
In a newspaper interview, Henson later said: “I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles. We went back then and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot.”Henson proceeded to plant the American flag.
In 1912 Matthew Henson published his memoir about his arctic explorations, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. In his own account, he describes himself as a "general assistant, skilled craftsperson, interpreter [he had learned the Inuit language], and laborer." He later collaborated with Bradley Robinson on his 1947 biography, Dark Companion, which told more about his life.
Although Admiral Peary received many honors for leading the expedition to the Pole, Henson's contributions were largely ignored during the following decades. He was honored at dinners within the African-American community in 1909. He spent most of the next thirty years working on staff in the U.S. Customs House in New York, located south of the Bowling Green.
However, he was admitted as a member to the prestigious Explorers Club in New York City in 1937, and made an honorary member in 1948. In 1944 Congress awarded him and other Peary aides each with a duplicate of the silver medal given to Peary. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both honored him before he died in 1955.
Henson died in the Bronx on March 9, 1955, at the age of 88. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery and survived by his wife Lucy. After her death in 1968, she was buried with him.
Check out this site: http://news.yahoo.com/military-39-39-iron-man-39-suit-may-141715486.html
The first prototypes of a
high-tech suit of armor to give soldiers superhuman abilities could be
ready to test this summer, according to top military officials. The
suits, which have drawn comparisons to the one worn by Marvel Comics
superhero "Iron Man," could be delivered to special operations forces as
early as June.
The Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit,
or TALOS, is being developed by engineers at MIT; the U.S. Army
Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM); and researchers
at other businesses and academic institutions. Prototypes of the suit,
which is designed to provide protection from bullets and is equipped
with a variety of sensors and cameras, are being assembled and could be
ready for the military to test in June, reported Military.com.
The
TALOS technology will be rigorously tested, and military personnel hope
to have operational systems in the field by August 2018, according to
Navy Adm. William McRaven, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command. [See video of the military's futuristic TALOS suit]
"That
suit, if done correctly, will yield a revolutionary improvement in
survivability and capability for special operators," McRaven said at the
25th annual Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict conference
this week in Washington, D.C., according to Military.com.
The
suit includes features such as 360-degree cameras with built-in night
vision capabilities, sensors that can detect injuries and apply
wound-sealing foam, and bulletproof armor.
Eventually, the TALOS systems may include full-body exoskeletons complete with screens that display information about a soldier's surroundings, according to Military.com.
The U.S. Army is developing a high-tech suit for soldiers à la "Iron Man."
The technology could give
American soldiers a "huge comparative advantage over our enemies and
give our warriors the protection they need," McRaven said.
Government
agencies, corporations, universities and national laboratories are
collaborating on the TALOS project, and the military may explore ways to
distribute prize money as an incentive for others to get involved in
the program, McRaven said.
"We are already seeing astounding results of this collaboration," he added.
The
TALOS project began as a way to explore how technology can be used to
protect special operations officers better in combat zones. "With all
the advances in modern technology, I know we can do better," McRaven
said.
"And in no books were
they written so the scribes could
be smitten by the double-edge sword
protruding from my mouth now the
King of the North and the Prince of
the South speaks words unheard by
men but yet uttered by the Djinn..."
(Excerpt from poem "Foundation," by Obsidian c.1991)
Ok, folks, I've finally come to the conclusion of posting my excerpts from my book: "Hobo Handbook: Memoirs of a Homeless Poet in New York." I want to thank all of you for your encouragement and support, especially in regards to the many comments rendered in connection with it.
I'm glad you enjoyed perusing them as much a I did in creating them. Now, wish me luck as I proceed to take these excerpts to the mainstream media. Whew! I'm sweating bullets already!
-Sincerely
Daniel Canada a.k.a Obsidian with these posts.
(Here's the facebook page, for those of you who hadn't the chance to read the post-Note: these are much earlier post. So you'll have to scroll down to reach them. Good luck!):
