News 11/23/21 Interesting things in the news. A lot of times something interesting will only be mentioned in a very minor way or by another than regular media outlet. Because of this many people never hear about it. Such are the stories which appeared in the news I would like to mention. Incredible finds are still being made in Israel. The man was a diver and was at the beach off the coast of Carmel. Apparently, he saw some things in the water which surprised him. Nature had decided to expose long buried items like an anchor and another object which turned out to be a great prize. You could say it was the find of a lifetime. The object was a Crusader sword. It is over a meter in length and looks to be a couple of inches wide not including the hilt. The diver handed the sword over to the National Treasures Department. What a great find. Any time when something new is discovered in astronomy, it is very exciting for the astronomer. Did you ever hear about a star turning off? Don’t worry, no one has, until now. A team of astronomers from the University of Durham discovered a White Dwarf star which turns off after 30 minutes. What actually happens is the star decreases in brightness and then rapidly recovers. The White Dwarf star was taking material from a sub-star. Scientists feel this shouldn’t happen because the flow of material from the sub-star must be constant due to gravity. This means we still have that mystery. We have a second space mystery a lot closer to home. The Hubble telescope has discovered Jupiter’s moon Europa has water vapor in its atmosphere. That might be promising enough in the search for life, but there is more to the story. The water vapor only appears in one hemisphere. One would think the atmosphere surrounding a moon or any object in space would be almost identical all the way around. The pressure of this atmosphere is only one billionth that of Earth. Another mystery is why does water ice on the moon transfer to vapor when the temperature in the day is minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit. Not only that, but the ice goes from ice to vapor without melting. Just about everyone has heard of Area 51. That is the place which is supposed to be back engineering crashed UFOs. Last year there was a movement to storm the base, but not only did it lead to nothing, it was said to be a joke. Recently there has been some talk about Area 52. It is usually referred to as the Tonopah Test Range and is also in Nevada. It is being claimed Black Projects have been conducted there and some of them were moved from Area 51 to Area 52. Black Projects are secret government projects which are even hidden at times from some members of the government and have large and even unlimited budgets. Sometimes people say there are things that cause you to make a double take. That is what happened when there was a Facebook outage and Uri Geller the famous spoon bender blamed the outage on aliens. Why in the world would aliens care about Facebook? Geller fancies himself as a psychic. I think he got his wires crossed on this one. He went on to say the government was trying to come up with an explanation we would believe. Why was the Mars rover sent to a particular area on Mars to land on? NASA believes there are certain areas on Mars which might hold more fossils than others, or so they say. The last rover was sent to a dry lakebed because it was felt it was previously a lake and might have had life in it. Good idea, but a better one would have been to send it to the Cydonia region where many are sure artifacts exist from a prior civilization. There is a cave complex on Gibraltar named Gorham’s Cave Complex. A tooth from a Neanderthal child was found there years ago. Chambers have been discovered which seem to indicate Neanderthals may have used them before they disappeared altogether. It is both exciting and sad to think this might be the last place they were located. The habitation seems to indicate it dates back more than 40,000 years. Lately many articles have appeared in not so popular places trying to explain what happened to Sodom. The bible tells us Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God because of the evil ways of the people in them. Some scientists are disputing this and are claiming we got that idea from the city of Tall El-Hamman in southern Jordan. Archaeologists found evidence of an asteroid or meteorite hit which destroyed the ancient city. They say the city was hit by an air blast. That is where an object explodes over an area and doesn’t hit the ground. It is said the explosion was 1,000 times greater than the A-Bomb exploded over Hiroshima Japan. There is a scientific movement by Oregon State University and the U.S. National Science Foundation to discover the oldest ice in Antarctica. You might ask why bother? The reason they want to discover it, or at least one of the reasons is they want to compare the atmosphere of the earth then to now. To do this there will have to be drilling which goes miles deep through the ice. It will also be expensive. As of the writing of this article they have reached ice which is about 800,000 years old, but they are going deeper, much deeper. This depth means they went back 1.5 million years so far. Unexpected giant carvings have been found in northern Arabia which date back to the Stone Age. At first the carvings were thought to be about 2,000 years old, but they have been redated back to between 6,000 and 5,000 B.C. At that time, it is said the area was cooler and wetter. It makes one wonder what other sort of undiscovered monuments exist.
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