Information about the extraterrestrials who colonize us

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd sees ET's whenever he gets into a batch o' Granny's special brownies...

Looking for Extraterrestrial Life Just Got More Complicated
September 21, 2016 - When NASA scientists talk about finding proof of life beyond earth they often zero in on the term "biosignatures." These are the clues that can be spotted when looking at another planet that strongly suggest 'life' is happening.

Our planet is a great example, according to Victoria Meadows, an astronomer at the University of Washington who spoke with VOA. If aliens were looking at us, she says, "life would be obvious to a distant observer looking at the gases in our atmosphere..."

Hold on a minute!

But it's never that simple. Through her work at the Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL), her team has also shown that "there are a number of different possible ways that a planet, often interacting with the host star, can produce oxygen in its atmosphere without life." Her point is that as we get better and better at looking for signs of life beyond earth, we're also going to have to get better at making sure it is actually life and not some random geologic process. A new study published this week in the Journal Nature Communications offers more proof of the need to take a cautious approach.

Associate Professor Alexis Templeton and Dr. Stephen Grasby prospecting for sulfur biominerals in a yellow sulfur deposit forming on a glacier surface in the High Arctic.​

A team from the University of Colorado Boulder studying giant "mineral deposits that form on ice surfaces" in the Canadian High Arctic found "sulfur-metabolizing organisms" living on the ice. Samples of the sulfur deposits were sent back to the lab and the team looked for 'biosignatures' that could help scientists look for life on Mars or the Jovian moon Europa, or even farther out. The team found a lot of what they called "extracellular structures" in the sulfur.

But they also discovered, to their surprise, that these microstructures "are capable of self-assembling..." In other words, what they thought was definitive proof of life was a non-biological process that just looked like life. "It was very disconcerting," according to Julie Cosmidis, the lead author "...to see that the carbon-sulfur structures appear in our tests without biological activity..."

A cautionary tale

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - it's dem space aliens tryin' to talk to us...

The Real Story: Alien Sun Signals
October 27, 2016 - Researchers are noticing some odd behavior in a few Earth-like stars.

This is one of those stories we have to write from time to time. Over the past week, the internet has been alive with stories like this: "Either Stars are Strange, or There Are 234 Aliens Trying to Contact Us," and "Astronomers Detect Strange Star Signals That Are 'Probably' Aliens Making Contact." There have also been about the same number of articles telling everyone to settle down, like this one from Nature World News: "No, Space Aliens are Not Communicating Through Strange Signals From Stars." So what's the truth? The truth — as is often the case — is somewhere in between, and to get to it, VOA spoke with one of the authors of the article that is the genesis of all these headlines. So where did all this alien talk come from?

Ermanno Borra and E. Trottier from Laval University in Quebec, Canada, released a paper for peer review on October 14. The title, on its face, isn't likely to stop the presses: "Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars." To get an understanding for what that means, we asked Borra to explain. He says the whole goal of his research was to search the universe for rhythmic modulations in the light spectrum of stars. Think of these rhythmic modulations as pulses, like the boom-boom bursts of energy that come from pulsars, or as the dots and dashes of Morse code. He said they would look like "two pulses of light, separated by very short times ... 10-12 seconds." These pulses, he says, don't have to come routinely, or very often at all. The key is that the pulses "be separated by the same time." His theory is that if highly advanced civilizations wanted to talk to us, sending these kinds of timed pulses would be the way to do it.

Borra says that since it's next to impossible to look for signals coming from an individual planet, sending the signal by changing a sun's spectrum would be an easily detectable way to send an interstellar calling card. Armed with that theory, Borra and his team turned to data contained in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has been mapping the universe for over a decade. They looked for any stars that exhibited evidence of these kinds of spectral shifts. What they found — or didn't find — surprised them. Borra says they found "the spectra we predicted in only 235 stars." That's right, of the 2.5 million stars they surveyed, they found just 235 that show this kind of change in their spectrum.

Now here's where things get a bit weird. It turns out that almost exclusively, the only kinds of stars in the universe that are shifting periodically are ones similar to our good old sun, which is a G2 Yellow Dwarf. Almost all the stars Borra identified are in this comfortable F and G range. Beyond that though, the stars don't have much in common. They are scattered all over the sky, so if it is indeed aliens, it's unlikely they know each other. Borra himself isn't completely convinced that these shifts are an interstellar signal. "After thorough analysis," he says, "we concluded that it is probably a real signal, but at this stage we must be very, very careful because it’s not certain." He added that more research and better telescopes are needed to get to the real truth. "Right now," he says, "I’m basically waiting to see the reaction of the scientific community."

A second opinion

 

[BlindBoo]

Have some more of your special brownies and

 

[BlindBoo]

or




Rockstar Jimmy Hendrix's Close Encounter With An Alien Humanoid | Paranormal

 

[paulitician]

Check out Wikileaks. There's actually some pretty interesting stuff in there about UFO's and Aliens. It shows the subject being discussed between Podesta and high ranking US officials.