News 6 March 2023 There are a few different things I would like to discuss today. The first has to do with ice. Scientists made a rather unlikely discovery. They discovered a new type of ice. It is very rare on earth, but the most commonly found in space. It is less dense than ordinary ice because its molecules are scattered and not in formation like ordinary ice. It is being called an amorphous ice. It is the closest thing to ordinary water. Don’t be looking for it at your local supermarket, to get that way it takes extreme cold down to -200 degrees Centigrade. The Brazilians have a problem. What do you do with an old aircraft carrier which is not wanted anymore? If someone wants one you sell it to them, but if it is too old or in bad condition it may not be wanted by anyone. What do you do then? You usually sell if for scrap. The Brazilians wanted to do this with the carrier but when it was on its way to Europe and supposed to get to Turkey, the Turks declared it an environmental hazard and refused to accept it. The carrier is the Sao Paulo. What are the Brazilians going to do? They are going to let their navy sink the carrier. This idea is not going well with the Environment Minister Marina Silva who wants to prevent it, but the navy says they have no choice because the carrier is taking on water and is already in danger of sinking. Alert: The Brazilians have now sunk the carrier. It is always interesting when a new material is developed and as strange as this sounds, metal has been used to make a new elastic material. The material was created using liquid metal and this material has some incredible properties, such as being impervious to gases and liquids, which will make it very sturdy. Why is this important, because true elasticity always was a trade off in this area. There should be a lot of uses for this stuff, maybe even in more comfortable spacesuits, and lab protection garments. Astronomers are excited about seeing a white dwarf star which was bending light around it. It excited them because it was bending light from another star which made that star seem to change its position in space. The only other time this has been seen involved our sun. The earliest brain ever found in an animal with a backbone has been found in a fish fossil dating back 319 million years. Very few brains survive the ravages of time. The next thing I want to talk about I think most people including me, would find terrifying. A 12 year old boy came home sick and fell into a coma. The boy grew into a young man, but was still in the coma. Twelve years later he woke up. Here is the really terrifying part of the true story, he said he knew everything which was going on during the time he was in the coma. Imagine laying in a bed, not being able to move or cry out, yet you realized everything which was happening? It is just too hard to imagine. When you hear the word mummy, what country do you think about? Probably Egypt or even Peru, right? After all it seems the oldest mummies come from Egypt and date back about 5,500 years that we know about. That was until now. When scientists reexamined some skeletons they found in Portugal, they realized the bodies had been mummified. The amazing part of this is the skeletons were over 8,000 years old, which you can see is far older than the age of the oldest Egyptian mummy. There is a difference however and it is the Egyptian mummies were far better preserved. Some scientists are exploring the use of anti-matter to propel a rocket. While this would be faster than what we have now, and is being pushed by some, for true exploration of deep space unless we can reach many times the speed of light, or increase all our longevity to thousands of years, we will be limited to exploring our solar system only. Some scientists say using anti-matter for propulsion will give us a percentage of the speed of light. It takes over four hours for the light from the sun to reach the planet Neptune, but it takes 4.3 light years to reach the closest solar system, so you can see to get to our closest neighboring solar system would be out of the question if we were even traveling at 10 percent light speed. I love it when ancient artifacts are found. Sometimes we can learn amazing things from them, or about them. When we think of swords where do we think the best ones were made? I personally believe the most incredible ones were made in Japan. A 1,600 year old sword and mirror were discovered in Japan. The sword is huge and made of iron and measures 7.5 feet long, can you imagine swinging this monster. This is why it is believed it was only used in rituals. The sword was found in a tomb from the fourth century. The mirror was decorated with magical creatures. I guess a mirror in those days would have been seen as magical. There is a theory about the sword which is it was made so large to protect the dead person it was buried with. A material has been found by Brown University researchers which has the highest melting point of any material in the world. It is made with hafnium, nitrogen and carbon and has a melting point of 7,460 degrees Fahrenheit. There is a cave in Spain which used to be the home of some Neanderthals. Those are the types of humans we shared the planet with at one time and which seem to have been much smarter than we were giving them credit for. In this cave archaeologists found a collection of animal skulls. It is suspected they might have been trophies or used in religious rights. The search for alien life goes on, only this time it has been infused with artificial intelligence which has found what is called technosignatures which were hidden in radio signals. It is thought these signals could be extraterrestrials communicating with each other. I believe we are going to be disappointed and I will tell you why, but first I would love for this discovery to be accurate. I do not believe any aliens would use a slow radio signal to communicate from world to world or even ship to ship. If someone wanted to communicate with a spacecraft orbiting our nearby sun, it would take over 8 minutes just one way, you can imagine how long it would take even to send a radio signal to some of the planets in our solar system.
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