http://www.digitalethereal.com/spiritphotographs.html

http://www.openminds.tv/triangle-ufo-hov...idge/31091


"An Alabama witness driving along I-459 at the Morgan Road exit near Hoover reported watching a black triangle UFO hovering over a bridge, according to testimony in Case 61566 from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

The witness was driving toward Hoover at 5:55 p.m. on November 19, 2014, and had just passed the Morgan Road exit when the object was first seen.

“I see what looks like a small, two-seat airplane,” the witness stated. “I say that because it was low – tree tops – and was moving across the sky going to my right. It was not going too fast. The Bessemer airport is about 5-10 miles from where I was.”

But then the object made an unusual maneuver.

“All of a sudden this object turns upside down and goes back to the left. It stops and hovers. I was thinking – that sure don’t act or seem like a small airplane?”

The witness continued to move closer to the object.

“As I get close I see it’s a black triangle craft hovering right over a bridge along I-459. I could not believe it. Someone else had to see it. The interstate was busy – but so far no reports on the news.”

The witness drove under the object.

“As I drove up I-459 and went under the overpass/bridge, I was right under this thing. Like I said, it was a dark triangle craft hovering. It had 3-4 lights on each side. They were white, bright like a big flood light. They were blinking on and off. One side the lights would blink 1,2,3,4. Then go dark. Then the other side would blink 1,2,3,4.”

"An auction in Hong Kong has broken the world record for the most expensive lot of wine ever sold, with 114 bottles of Burgundy going for HK$12,556,250 (£1m, or $1.6m), Sotheby’s has said.

The auction house said a collection of Romanee-Conti, one of the world’s most sought after Burgundy labels, sold for the equivalent of $14,121 for each bottle or $1,700 per glass. The lot contained six bottles of each of the 19 vintages made from 1992 to 2010.

The previous record for a single lot of wine – also held by Sotheby’s – was $1.05m for 50 cases of top Bordeaux Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1982, sold in New York in 2006."====http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/...nsive-wine

Reality is weird, even when it DOES have an explanation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty-spe5kIzs

How to estimate the magnetic field of an exoplanet?

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...112014.php

RELEASE: Scientists developed a new method which allows to estimate the magnetic field of a distant exoplanet, i.e., a planet, which is located outside the Solar system and orbits a different star. Moreover, they managed to estimate the value of the magnetic moment of the planet HD 209458b.The group of scientists including one of the researchers of the Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia) published their article in the Science magazine.

In the two decades which passed since the discovery of the first planet outside the Solar system, astronomers have made a great progress in the study of these objects. While 20 years ago a big event was even the discovery of a new planet, nowadays astronomers are able to consider their moons, atmosphere and climate and other characteristics similar to the ones of the planets in the Solar system. One of the important properties of both solid and gaseous planets is their possible magnetic field and its magnitude. On the Earth it protects all the living creatures from the dangerous cosmic rays and helps animals to navigate in space.

Kristina Kislyakova of the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz together with an international group of physicists for the first time ever was able to estimate the value of the magnetic moment and the shape of the magnetosphere of the exoplanet HD 209458b. Maxim Khodachenko, a researcher at the Department of Radiation and computational methods of the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, is also one of the authors of the article. He also works at the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Planet HD 209458b (Osiris) is a hot Jupiter, approximately one third larger and lighter than Jupiter. It is a hot gaseous giant orbiting very close to the host star HD 209458. HD 209458b accomplishes one revolution around the host star for only 3.5 Earth days. It has been known to astronomers for a long time and is relatively well studied. In particular, it is the first planet where the atmosphere was detected. Therefore, for many scientists it has become a model object for the development of their hypotheses.

Scientists used the observations of the Hubble Space Telescope of the HD 209458b in the hydrogen Lyman-alpha line at the time of transit, when the planet crosses the stellar disc as seen from the Earth. At first, the scientists studied the absorption of the star radiation by the atmosphere of the planet. Afterwards they were able to estimate the shape of the gas cloud surrounding the hot Jupiter, and, based on these results, the size and the configuration of the magnetosphere.

"We modeled the formation of the cloud of hot hydrogen around the planet and showed that only one configuration, which corresponds to specific values of the magnetic moment and the parameters of the stellar wind, allowed us to reproduce the observations" - explained Kristina Kislyakova.

To make the model more accurate, scientists accounted for many factors that define the interaction between the stellar wind and the atmosphere of the planet: so-called charge exchange between the stellar wind and the neutral atmospheric particles and their ionization, gravitational effects, pressure, radiation acceleration, and the spectral line broadening.

At present, scientists believe that the size of the atomic hydrogen envelope is defined by the interaction between the gas outflows from the planet and the incoming stellar wind protons. Similarly to the Earth, the interaction of the atmosphere with the stellar wind occurs above the magnetosphere. By knowing the parameters of an atomic hydrogen cloud, one can estimate the size of the magnetosphere by means of a specific model.

Since direct measurements of the magnetic field of exoplanets are currently impossible, the indirect methods are broadly used, for example, using the radio observations. There exist a number of attempts to detect the radio emission from the planet HD 209458b. However, because of the large distances the attempts to detect the radio emission from exoplanets have yet been unsuccessful.

"The planet's magnetosphere was relatively small beeing only 2.9 planetary radii corresponding to a magnetic moment of only 10% of the magnetic moment of Jupiter" -- explained Kislyakova, a graduate of the Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod. According to her, it is consistent with the estimates of the effectiveness of the planetary dynamo for this planet.

"This method can be used for every planet, including Earth-like planets, if there exist an extended high energetic hydrogen envelope around them" - summarized Maxim Khodachenko.

http://news.illinois.edu/news/14/1120sle...peirs.html

EXCERPT: Preschoolers of working moms get less sleep, which may explain why these children are at greater risk of becoming overweight, according to a new study by Janet Liechty, Katherine Speirs, and Chi-Fang Wu...

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...112014.php

RELEASE: As real as that daydream may seem, its path through your brain runs opposite reality.

Aiming to discern discrete neural circuits, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have tracked electrical activity in the brains of people who alternately imagined scenes or watched videos.

"A really important problem in brain research is understanding how different parts of the brain are functionally connected. What areas are interacting? What is the direction of communication?" says Barry Van Veen, a UW-Madison professor of electrical and computer engineering. "We know that the brain does not function as a set of independent areas, but as a network of specialized areas that collaborate."

Van Veen, along with Giulio Tononi, a UW-Madison psychiatry professor and neuroscientist, Daniela Dentico, a scientist at UW-Madison's Waisman Center, and collaborators from the University of Liege in Belgium, published results recently in the journal NeuroImage. Their work could lead to the development of new tools to help Tononi untangle what happens in the brain during sleep and dreaming, while Van Veen hopes to apply the study's new methods to understand how the brain uses networks to encode short-term memory.

During imagination, the researchers found an increase in the flow of information from the parietal lobe of the brain to the occipital lobe -- from a higher-order region that combines inputs from several of the senses out to a lower-order region.

In contrast, visual information taken in by the eyes tends to flow from the occipital lobe -- which makes up much of the brain's visual cortex -- "up" to the parietal lobe.

"There seems to be a lot in our brains and animal brains that is directional, that neural signals move in a particular direction, then stop, and start somewhere else," says. "I think this is really a new theme that had not been explored."

The researchers approached the study as an opportunity to test the power of electroencephalography (EEG) -- which uses sensors on the scalp to measure underlying electrical activity -- to discriminate between different parts of the brain's network.

Brains are rarely quiet, though, and EEG tends to record plenty of activity not necessarily related to a particular process researchers want to study.

To zero in on a set of target circuits, the researchers asked their subjects to watch short video clips before trying to replay the action from memory in their heads. Others were asked to imagine traveling on a magic bicycle -- focusing on the details of shapes, colors and textures -- before watching a short video of silent nature scenes.

Using an algorithm Van Veen developed to parse the detailed EEG data, the researchers were able to compile strong evidence of the directional flow of information.

"We were very interested in seeing if our signal-processing methods were sensitive enough to discriminate between these conditions," says Van Veen, whose work is supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. "These types of demonstrations are important for gaining confidence in new tools."

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NOTE: A high-resolution photo to accompany this story can be downloaded at http://news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/VanVeen.html

http://moffitt.org/home/moffitt-in-the-n...ticle-2014

RELEASE: Moffitt Cancer Center researchers are taking a unique approach to understanding and investigating cancer by utilizing evolutionary principles and computational modeling to examine the role of specific genetic mutations in the Darwinian struggle among tumor and normal cells during cancer growth.

Cells become malignant by acquiring genetic mutations that lead to increased survival and reproduction. Many researchers in the past have viewed cancer progression as the result of unlimited accumulation of these genetic mutations. However, Moffitt researchers model cancer progression on the premise that cancer cells live in an environment that has limited resources, such as space and nutrients and, like all living organisms, must obey the laws of evolution. These laws include trade-offs between proliferation and survival.

For example, elephants use their available resources primarily to maximize survival so that they have relatively long lives and few offspring. Rabbits, on the other hand, produce many offspring but survive in the wild for less than two years. Similarly, cells that evolve to form cancers can do so by either increasing longevity or increasing the number of offspring. But like elephants and rabbits, they can only move down one evolutionary path at a time, so the mutations observed in cancer cells are limited to this evolutionary trade-off. With this in mind, cancer cells can invest available resources in maximizing their defenses against attacks by the normal tissue or accept a high rate of mortality and overcome it through very rapid proliferation. The cells cannot do both.

Moffitt researchers performed computer simulations based on these concepts. They found that the frequency with which any genetic mutation is observed depends on its ability to increase the cell’s fitness, its ability to survive and reproduce. The researchers called this process “evolutionary triage.”

“Genes that increase fitness are observed more frequently than those that do not,” explained Robert A. Gatenby, M.D., chair of the Department of Diagnostic Imaging and co-director of the Cancer Biology and Evolution Program at Moffitt. “However, the effect of any mutation on cell fitness can change drastically depending on environmental factors such as blood flow, past genetic mutations, and the properties of competing cells. Currently, cancer biologists divide mutations into ‘drivers,’ which promote tumor growth and ‘passengers,’ which have no effect on growth. In the computer simulations, it was clear that many mutations could be drivers in one environment, but passengers in another.”

Since driver mutations are common targets for cancer therapy, the scientists also simulated therapies that seek to disable driver genes. Similar to what is found in clinical settings, they observed that targeted therapies can kill the mutated cells and decrease the tumor size. However, the diversity of tumor environments produces many mutational pathways to formation of a malignant cell. As result, cancer cells that lack the driver mutation and are resistant to therapy were almost invariably present and caused the tumor to recur.

The investigators were startled to find that some genes were actually never observed to be mutated in cancers. It turned out that mutations in these genes always reduced the tumor cell’s ability to survive or reproduce. As a result, even when they occurred, evolutionary triage eliminated them because they were less fit than their competitors. According to Gatenby, “our computer simulations demonstrate an unexpected result – genes that are never observed to be mutated might actually be the best targets for therapy. This is because up or down regulation of these genes unconditionally reduces cell fitness.”

The researchers showed that targeting genes that are never mutated, particularly when followed by treatment that targeted cancer driver mutations, was a highly effective treatment strategy. The final question was: “Do ‘never mutations’ exist in human cancer?” Fortunately, large databases that list all of the mutations in clinical cancers have been developed by the National Cancer Institute. With the help of Mohammad Fallahi-Sichani, Ph.D., a bioinformatics expert from the Scripps Research Institute, 1,100 genes that are never mutated in human cancers were identified. The research group, which included Moffitt Physicist Jessica Cunningham and Joel S. Brown, an evolutionary biologist at University of Illinois, is now working with John Cleveland, Ph.D., associate center director of Basic Science at Moffitt, to investigate the possibility of targeting “never” genes for therapy.

This study was published in the Nov. 19 issue of Nature Communications, and was funded by the National Cancer Institute through a Physical Sciences in Oncology Centers (PS-OC) grant (U54CA143970-01) and provocative question grant (R01CA170595). The PS-OC is a network of 12 centers throughout the United States, including Moffitt, that brings together cancer researchers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and engineers to investigate unsolved problems in cancer through alternative perspectives. The PS-OC grant was awarded to the Moffitt researchers based on their proposed innovative studies to analyze the evolutionary dynamics of cancer through computational models.

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About Moffitt Cancer Center:
Located in Tampa, Moffitt is one of only 41 National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers, a distinction that recognizes Moffitt’s excellence in research, its contributions to clinical trials, prevention and cancer control. Moffitt is the top-ranked cancer hospital in the Southeast and has been listed in U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Hospitals” for cancer since 1999. With more than 4,500 employees, Moffitt has an economic impact on Florida of nearly $1.6 billion. For more information, visit MOFFITT.org, and follow the Moffitt momentum on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.