Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Tuesday 6 January 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 05 Jan 2015 11:20 AM PST


A giant dark hole has appeared on the sun’s flaming surface, a recently-taken NASA picture has revealed. So far, scientists are stumped by why this spectacular phenomenon, known as a “coronal hole,” occurs.
“The Sun starts 2015 with an enormous coronal hole near the South Pole,” scientists of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory wrote in their blog, having posted a picture of the flaming sun with a gaping dark space in its lower part.
What modern science knows is that “coronal holes” are places where particles leave the sun’s surface at huge speeds – of up to 500 miles per hour (800 kilometers per hour). What’s still unclear is why this is happening.
The sun’s glowing comes from the “trapped” particles. The coronal holes “contain little solar material, have lower temperatures, and therefore, appear much darker.”
The first pictures of the phenomenon were taken by NASA astronauts in the early 1970s.
With no fireworks on the sun, 2015 starts with a coronal hole near the south pole.
The coronal holes on the sun’s poles may be seen for five or more years. Their shape can vary greatly, though.
It’s assumed that high-speed winds of solar particles coming out of the sun’s dark holes can cause geomagnetic storms and auroras on Earth.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which detected the latest coronal hole, participated late last year in the creation of one of the most impressive images of the sun ever. SDO’s picture was then combined with a photo of the sun’s X-ray emissions taken by NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array.
In October 2014, just before Halloween, NASA took a photo of the sun resembling a jack-o’-lantern.
The storms and flares on the surface of the sun actually gave a carved pumpkin appearance to the sun, as seen from the Earth.


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Posted: 05 Jan 2015 11:07 AM PST


Scientists have been baffled by mass deaths of seabirds, whose bodies are being found by the hundreds along the US Pacific Coast.
According to reports, hundreds of Cassin’s aucklets, a small white-bellied gray bird, have been washing up dead on beaches from British Columbia to San Luis Obispo, California, since October.
Generally during severe winter conditions, especially during large storms, seabirds die, but mass deaths on such a scale are unusual.
“To be this lengthy and geographically widespread, I think is kind of unprecedented,” said executive director of the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition Phillip Johnson. “It’s an interesting and somewhat mysterious event.”
A veterinarian for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Julia Burco, said the birds seem to have starved to death, so scientists have ruled out poisoning as a cause of death.
The reason why the seabirds cannot find food still remains a mystery.
Researchers have said the food shortage my result from an unusually successful breeding season resulting in an increase of young birds competing for nourishment.
Another possibility is that severe storms might be forcing the birds into regions which they are not familiar with or stopping them from gathering food.
They also say an increase in ocean temperatures and acidity may be killing off tiny zooplanktons, such as krill, which the birds feed on.
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Posted: 05 Jan 2015 11:00 AM PST


17-year-old girl with cancer is in an unprecedented legal battle with the state of Connecticut as the Department of Children and Families removed her from her home and forced the teen to receive chemotherapy.
The girl being identified as “Cassandra C.” in court papers was diagnosed with cancer in September, with doctors recommending she receive chemotherapy for the rare condition of Hodgkins Lymphoma. However, the teen refused treatment and her mother supported her daughter’s decision, causing Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families to step in and force the teen to receive treatment, WTIC-TV reports.
In November, the DCF successfully petitioned for an order of temporary custody of the girl and ordered her mother to cooperate with medical care administered to her daughter under DCF supervision. After two chemo treatments, Cassandra ran away from home before subsequently returning to refuse treatment altogether.
“Following a hearing at which Cassandra’s doctors testified, the trial court ordered that she be removed from her home and that she remain in DCF’s care and custody,” read court documents. “The court also authorized DCF to make all necessary medical decisions on Cassandra’s behalf.”
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Posted: 05 Jan 2015 10:36 AM PST


The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has established a research and development program, known as the Fast Lightweight Autonomy Program (FLAP) which aims to develop new types of unmanned aerial vehicles—more commonly known as drones—for urban combat operations, according to the Washington Times.
DARPA is preparing to dispense several initial $5 million contracts to companies bidding to produce the new drone models sought by the US military, which will have the ability to fly inside structures, maneuver through tight spaces, and operate autonomously from human controllers, all at speeds of up to 70 kilometers per hour. The drones are specifically designed to mimic the flight capabilities of the goshawk, a bird species. Private sector firms will begin submitting bids as early as Tuesday.
In addition to the goshawk type, the US military is already acquiring drones the size of mosquitoes as part of an Army Research Laboratory program called Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST), run as a collaboration between the Defense Department, BAE Systems, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and several major US universities. The Black Hornet Personal Reconnaissance System, a miniature rotary wing drone that takes high definition photographs and transmits footage instantaneously to its handler, has already been used by occupation forces in Afghanistan to surveil enemy positions.
“Birds of prey and flying insects exhibit the kinds of capabilities we want for small UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles]… The goal of the FLA program is to explore non-traditional perception and autonomy methods that would give small UAVs the capacity to perform in a similar way [to bird and insect species], including an ability to easily navigate tight spaces at high speed and quickly recognize if it had already been in a room before,” said FLAP top official Mark Micire.
A main priority of FLAP is to produce drones that operate without human controllers. Current drone models operated by the US military and police forces require a human operator for takeoff, flight, landing and the targeting of missiles. The new autonomous control systems sought by the Pentagon will enable a few skilled computer programmers to direct a fleet of highly agile drones.
The military’s new self-directing weapons systems will be integrated into ongoing operations by conventional US forces, according to Pentagon officials. “Urban and disaster relief operations would be obvious key beneficiaries, but applications for this technology could extend to a wide variety of missions using small and large unmanned systems linked together with manned platforms as a system of systems,” DARPA director Stefanie Tompkins said.
“By enabling unmanned systems to learn ‘muscle memory’ and perception for basic tasks like avoiding obstacles, it would relieve overload and stress on human operators so they can focus on supervising the systems and executing the larger mission,” Tompkins said.
The military is promoting the latest generation of drones as specially designed for “humanitarian” use, such as search and rescue missions to find people trapped or stranded as a result of floods, hurricanes, avalanches and earthquakes.
Nonetheless, the new high-tech drone systems will primarily be used for combat missions in urban settings, according to media reports. Given that the US military is currently engaged, deployed for or preparing for combat in more than fifty countries, the Pentagon is planning to weaponize the drones in every conceivable fashion. In December, the Obama administration launched a new escalation of its US drone war, which has already killed hundreds of innocents, including countless children.
In combination with the militarization of the police, the development of autonomous, computer-controlled weapons systems raises terrifying possibilities. Police forces inside the US already use drones for surveillance purposes. The new mini-drones now point to a nightmarish future in which “no knock” SWAT team raids are accompanied by lightning-fast killer robot aircraft, controlled by artificial intelligence.
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Posted: 05 Jan 2015 10:23 AM PST


A potentially hazardous asteroid, at least 20 times the size of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, will approach the Earth on January 26. The rock is expected to fly by at a distance of 1.2 million kilometers.
The asteroid, named 2004 BL86 by scientists, is estimated to be between 440-1,000 meters in diameter. 1.2 million kilometers is approximately three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
According to astronomers, there is no threat of the object colliding with our planet. The Goldstone Observatory, located in California’s Mojave Desert, will observe the asteroid during its approach.
2004 BL86 was discovered on January 30, 2004, by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR), responsible for the majority of asteroid discoveries from 1998 until 2005, when it was overtaken by the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS). As of mid-September 2011, LINEAR had detected some 231,082 new objects, of which at least 2,423 were near-Earth asteroids and 279 comets.
A space object is considered potentially dangerous if it crosses the Earth’s orbit at a distance of less than 0.05 AU (approximately 19.5 distances from the Earth to the Moon), and if its diameter exceeds 100-150 meters. Objects of this size are large enough to cause unprecedented destruction, or generate a mammoth tsunami in case they fall into the ocean.
When a meteorite burst above the city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013, the impact was estimated to be equivalent to 440-500 kilotons of TNT. But the Chelyabinsk meteorite was relatively small, about 17 meters in diameter. It disintegrated with a blast at an altitude of over 20 kilometers.
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Posted: 04 Jan 2015 02:22 PM PST


US sanctions against North Korea is an attempt to create friction within the North Korean establishment but the move will not succeed, according to an analyst in Belgrade, Serbia.
Joaquin Flores, geostrategist and director at Center for Syncretic Studies, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Sunday.
The Obama administration imposed new sanctions on North Korea on Friday, two weeks after blaming the country for hacking into Sony Pictures Entertainment in November.
In a statement published by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Sunday, a spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry dismissed the US claims that Pyongyang was behind the cyber attack and accused the US of “groundlessly” stirring up hostility towards Asian nation.
Flores said Sony Pictures Entertainment’s involvement in the production of the anti-Korea film “The Interview” — which depicts the fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — shows “the bellicosity of the US establishment.”
“[I]t seems increasingly clear that North Korea was not involved in this [cyber attack] at all,” he added. “Not only has North Korea denied involvement but no evidence has been presented to the US public or international community at large.”
In an executive order, President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on top North Korean officials and defense-related organizations. White House officials termed the embargo the “first aspect” of the president’s promised “proportional” retaliation against North Korea.
Flores said that Obama’s “reasoning was bizarre and the sanctions were really merely symbolic.”
“In what can only be described in psychology as classical projection – where one projects their own motives and actions onto another – the US has declared that North Korea is acting in an irresponsible manner and is engaging in a some form of economic war of attrition against the US; and we are to believe this based upon the North Korea-Sony scandal – and this is quite strange,” he added.
“Now the scope of sanctions is also not really significant because the sanctions are aimed at individuals who happened to hold positions within several state-run companies, even though nominally the sanctions are aimed at companies themselves and so my thinking is that at the very most this is an attempt to create some tensions between trusted members of the North Korean establishment internally, but I don’t think that will succeed,” Flores emphasized.
He added that “the sanctions are not likely to produce any friction within the North Korean establishment,” because “US exports to North Korea are between one and two million a year which is really not significant,” while “Korea’s main trade partners are China and Russia and this will not change.”
“It is the US which is cutting itself off from the world and is acting in an increasingly strange and reactive way,” Flores concluded.
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Posted: 04 Jan 2015 12:05 PM PST


The German government insists it wants Greece to stay in the eurozone and isn’t drafting any contingency plans in case of ‘Grexit’. This shows Germany is adamant about keeping Greece under the domination of the ‘troika’, journalist Ernst Wolff told RT.
“The goal of the German government, the European Union and even the government in Athens itself is to keep Greece in the euro zone,” German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said in an interview on Sunday.
“There were no, and there are no, other plans to the contrary,” he added, without directly refuting Der Spiegel’s report that a common belief in the German government was that the eurozone is stable enough to cope with potential Greece exit.
“That’s why we can’t be blackmailed and why we expect the Greece government, no matter who leads it, to abide by the agreements made with the EU,” Gabriel added, echoing an earlier statement by a high-ranking member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, Michael Fuchs.
However, Berlin’s own statements and actions could be considered an act of political blackmail, journalist and author Ernst Wolff told RT.
RT: Do you think Germany is serious about ‘Grexit’, or is it just political manipulation?
Ernst Wolff: Well, to me it’s just political manipulation. I think they are just threatening the Greek people, actually they are telling the Greek people to vote for a party that will not leave the euro.
See, Greece is not a country like Germany, France or Italy at the moment – Greece has been put under forced administration of the troika that is the ECB, the EU and the IMF. And all Germany wants is to keep Greece under the domination of this organization. The Greek government can vary – the politics of the Greek government are really determined by the troika. And the German government wants this to keep going.
RT: Some economists have already called the potential Greece exit ‘Lehman Brothers squared’. So, what will happen if Greece does follow through?
EW: You see, the Greek government debt is at 175 percent right now, runs up to €330 billion. And a lot of debt nowadays is ensured in the derivative markets. So if Greece actually leaves the euro that would mean that a lot of credit default swaps would come due. And that could actually bring down the euro, and could also bring down the whole financial system, worldwide. So I don’t think that is really an option.
I think this maneuver by the German government is just a threat to the Greek working people, because they have been paying for the mistakes made by the finance industry. Look at the situation in Greece nowadays. The social systems have been devastated, the old system has been taken down, unemployment is at 26 percent, youth unemployment is at almost 60 percent. The social situation in Greece is terrible – and what Germany wants is to implement even further austerity measures. And they know that the Greek people are fed up with this, they don’t want any more of this. So the German government is telling Greek voters: “Do not vote for a party that is against our domination.”
RT: Could ditching the euro actually solve any of Greece’s economic problems?
EW: I don’t think so, no, that won’t change anything. And I don’t even think that Syriza has a solution for these problems, because on the one hand they say they are going to stop with austerity measures, but on the other hand they say that they will continue with the euro. I don’t see how this can happen.
RT: If they were still to do it, do you think it could inspire other countries to follow?
EW: I think if one country would exit from the euro that would cause some kind of domino effect on other countries. But actually I do not think that it is possible, because of all the derivatives that would come due.
RT: Do you think that Germany might allow Greece to renegotiate the international bailout deal?
EW: They will have to do that, they will have to renegotiate. What they are going for now is for the Greek voters to elect the government that would be totally compliant with the demands of Germany and the EU and also of the IMF, because don’t forget that a lot of Greek debt is also in American banks.
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Posted: 04 Jan 2015 11:57 AM PST
A submarine of the Chinese navy’s North Sea Fleet prepares to dive into the sea.
A Chinese submarine has conducted its first deep dive in the Indian Ocean in search of various kinds of metals, including gold, in a four-month-long mission.
The submersible vessel called Jiaolong carried out its first dive on Friday to collect samples of hydrothermal fluid and sulfide, a kind of seabed deposit containing copper, zinc and precious metals such as gold and silver.
Samples of rocks, sediment and water will also be gathered from the ocean floor during the expedition.
The project enables researchers to see active hydrothermal vent and polymetallic sulfide in seabed and examine the environment in selected sites, the mission’s top scientist, Tao Chunhui, said.
The data will play a significant role in China’s future research on polymetallic sulfide, Tao added.
Last year, Jiaolong conducted a 52-day scientific journey in the northwest Pacific Ocean until August. During the mission, it collected 116 biological samples, 22 rock samples, 100 kilograms of cobalt-rich crust and 24 100 kilograms of polymetallic crust samples, as well as 1,232 liters of water from the ocean.
China has also tested a remote-controlled underwater vehicle, Longzhu.
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Posted: 04 Jan 2015 11:44 AM PST


NASA’s Opportunity rover has been exploring Mars for more than 10 years now, but the space agency says the robot is experiencing memory and data loss which they hope an upcoming hack will solve.
NASA recently described Opportunity’s problems as “persistent computer resets and ‘amnesia’ events,” specifically pointing to issues that are occurring when the robot tries to save data on its flash memory storage system. As a result, the robot has resorted to saving data by bypassing its flash memory and storing it on its random-access memory, RAM.
“The mission can continue without storing data to flash memory, and instead store data in volatile RAM,” said Project Manager John Callas at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California in a statement. “While we’re operating Opportunity in that mode, we are also working on an approach to make the flash memory usable again.”


The Opportunity team thinks an age-related fault is primarily affecting the flash memory of one of the robot’s seven memory banks. While the mission can continue, the team’s plan is to make the flash memory usable again by tricking the six-wheeled, 400lb rover into thinking it has six memory banks instead of seven.
“So now we’re having these events we call ‘amnesia,’” Callas explained to Discovery News. “Which is the rover trying to use the flash memory, but it wasn’t able to, so instead it uses the RAM… it stores telemetry data in that volatile memory, but when the rover goes to sleep and wakes up again, all [the data] is gone. So that’s why we call it amnesia – it forgets what it has done.”
NASA says the memory issue is causing the rover to reset itself, and in some cases it stops communicating with mission control altogether.
“It’s like you have an aging parent, that is otherwise in good health – maybe they go for a little jog every day, play tennis each day – but you never know, they could have a massive stroke right in the middle of the night,” John Callas added to Discovery News. “So we’re always cautious that something could happen.”


In an attempt to solve the problem, the NASA team is attempting to “hack” the rover’s software so that it ignores the faulty part of its flash memory and instead writes, permanently, to the healthy hardware.
The process will take a couple of weeks, but Callas said the rover is aging and it could be nearing the end of its life.


NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Project landed twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity on Mars in early 2004 for missions planned to last three months, but both rovers kept going far beyond their expiration dates. Spirit worked for six years and Opportunity is still active a decade later. The rover has covered 26 miles (41.8km) of Mars’ surface and sent back vital intelligence on the planet’s ecology, including data about ancient wet environments. The project is one element of NASA’s preparations for a human mission to the planet in the 2030s.


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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 09:45