Free Republic

Two symbols of the Cold War, nuclear explosions and U2 spy planes, combine in new storm research investigating the radioactive nature of lightning. NASA satellites that are usually pointed at the stars detected something entirely unexpected coming from the Earth; gamma radiation bursts. Now, scientists are getting to the bottom of the decades-long mystery of those readings from the 1990s. Discovering that thunderstorms were the cause of the bursts didn’t take long, but many questions remained. The scale and frequency of radioactive lightning storms were unknown. Existing satellites were designed to look for energy coming from space, not the Earth....

MOSCOW, July 22 (Reuters) - The Gamma variant of the novel coronavirus, first found in Brazil, has been detected in small quantities in Russia, the Interfax news agency cited the developer behind Russia's EpiVacCorona vaccine as saying on Thursday. Russia faces a surge in coronavirus cases that authorities have blamed on the Delta variant and the slow rate of vaccinations. On Thursday, Russia reported 24,471 new COVID-19 cases and 796 deaths related to coronavirus in the last 24 hours. EpiVacCorona, Russia's second of four vaccines to be registered, was developed by the Vector Institute in Siberia. Sputnik V is Russia's...

These ultrabright flashes have recently been tracked for days, upending ideas about the cataclysms that create them. The Cherenkov Telescope Array, currently under construction, will use a network of more than 100 ground-based telescopes such as this one to monitor the long afterglows of ultrahigh-energy gamma-ray bursts.In July 1967, at the height of the Cold War, American satellites that had been launched to look for Soviet nuclear weapons tests found something wholly unexpected. The Vela 3 and 4 satellites observed brief flashes of high-energy photons, or gamma rays, that appeared to be coming from space. Later, in a 1973...

Records recently posted online by the FBI indicate that it did little to investigate allegations from private sources connected to Republicans about a scheme in which associates of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to exploit their connection to her to profit from the turmoil in Libya in 2011. The FBI received the documents in June 2016, around the same time it launched an exhaustive, three-year investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia based, in part, on information from private sources connected to Democrats that in the main would prove to be false – the Steele dossier. ... Why...

An emerging consensus suggests the crash can explain distant gamma-ray bursts GREAT ESCAPE A bright jet of fast-moving particles fled the scene after two neutron stars collided, spewing material and potentially forming a black hole (shown in this artist’s illustration). When a pair of ultradense cores of dead stars smashed into one another, the collision shot a bright jet of charged subatomic particles through space. Astronomers thought no such jet had made it out of the wreckage of the neutron star crash, first detected in August 2017. But new observations of the crash site using a network of radio telescopes...

September 6, 2016 Former NSA officer John Schindler reports on a devastating fact NOT mentioned in the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton conducting State Department business on an unsecure homebrew email server. From the Observer: [Sidney] Blumenthal’s email read exactly like classified NSA reporting, as anybody acquainted with our SIGINT would immediately recognize. As one veteran agency official told me back in January, Blumenthal’s email was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.” Which was no coincidence, since an NSA investigation subsequently determined that Blumenthal’s Sudan assessment was derived from their reporting—in some cases verbatim. As I reported in...

The FBI examined 81 Clinton email chains, determining that they included classified information relating to the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, NSA, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency or NGA. In other words, Hillary compromised classified materials representing the full range of American espionage: human intelligence or HUMINT from CIA, signals intelligence or SIGINT from NSA, and imagery intelligence or IMINT from NGA. Of those 81 classified email chains, the FBI assessed that 37 of them included Secret information while eight included Top Secret information. Worse, seven email chains included Special Access Program or SAP information, which is tightly protected...

Gamma-Ray Bursts Limit Life in Universe by Brian Thomas, M.S. * What are the odds that life somehow self-generated? Many experiments have shown that the likelihood of just the right chemicals combining by chance in just the right proportions, orientations, and sequences to form even the simplest cell on Earth is so close to zero that some origin-of-life researchers have punted the possibility to some distant unknown planet.1 But a new study of gamma-ray burst frequency estimates has eliminated the possibility of life on other planets. Astronomers have witnessed gamma-ray bursts (GRBs)—lasting from just fractions of a millisecond to several...

A brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago—and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again, according to a new study. Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses. Such a disaster may have been responsible for the mass die-off of 70 percent of the marine creatures that thrived during the Ordovician period (488 to 443 million years ago), suggests study leader Brian Thomas, an astrophysicist at Washburn University in Kansas. The simulation also shows that a...

A massive gamma-ray burst detected last March, believed to be the brightest ever seen, turns out to have been aimed directly at the Earth. A narrow jet that drove material toward us at 99.99995 of the speed of light is revealed in the data, itself wrapped within a somewhat slower and wider jet. The best estimates are that an alignment like this occurs only once every ten years. Says Paul O’Brien (University of Leicester, and a member of the team working on the Swift satellite): “We normally detect only the wide jet of a GRB as the inner jet is...

Hurricane season finally ending, but next year could be bad, too By JOHN PAIN Associated Press Writer November 29. 2005 4:27PM The busiest and costliest Atlantic hurricane season on record officially - and mercifully - draws to a close Wednesday, with hundreds of thousands of Americans still dealing with the devastation wrought by Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Despite the end of the June 1-to-Nov. 30 season, hurricanes could still form over the next few months. In fact, a tropical storm took shape in the Atlantic on Tuesday. But no hurricane has been known to hit the United States between December...

The latest projected path of newly formed Tropical Storm Gamma has the system hitting the Southwest Florida coast sometime Monday.Gamma formed off the coast of Central America and tropical storm warnings were issued for the entire coast of Belize and the Bay Islands of Honduras. Mexico issued a tropical storm watch for the eastern Yucatan Peninsula, which was hit hard in October by Hurricane Wilma. The long-term track from the National Hurricane Center indicated that Gamma may take a track similar to Wilma's and head northeast toward the Florida Peninsula. Wilma tore across the southern portion of the state on...

000 WONT41 KNHC 181400 DSAAT SPECIAL TROPICAL DISTURBANCE STATEMENT NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL 900 AM EST FRI NOV 18 2005 SATELLITE IMAGERY INDICATES THAT SHOWER ACTIVITY ASSOCIATED WITH THE REMAINS OF TROPICAL DEPRESSION TWENTY-SEVEN HAS BECOME BETTER ORGANIZED NEAR THE NORTHERN COAST OF HONDURAS. IF CURRENT TRENDS CONTINUE...A TROPICAL DEPRESSION OR TROPICAL STORM COULD FORM LATER TODAY. IF ADVISORIES ARE RE-INITIATED...WATCHES AND WARNINGS MAY BE REQUIRED FOR PORTIONS OF THE NORTHWESTERN CARIBBEAN COAST AND THE ADJACENT ISLANDS...AND INTERESTS IN THIS AREA SHOULD MONITOR THE PROGRESS OF THIS SYSTEM. EVEN IF NO ADDITIONAL DEVELOPMENT OCCURS...HEAVY RAINS WILL BE...

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - Hal O. Anger, a pioneer of nuclear medicine who is credited with inventing the gamma camera, has died. He was 85. Anger died at his Berkeley home on Oct. 31. Called a "quiet genius" whose "instruments are still in common use today, diagnosing cancer, metabolic disorders and heart disease" by the Society of Nuclear Medicine, Anger developed his most noted invention in 1957, employing gamma radiation to depict metabolic processes within a living body. Born May 24, 1920, in Denver, Anger cultivated an interest in electronics as a boy growing up in Long Beach, where he...

A huge blast of radiation from an exploding star might have been behind one of the Earth's worst mass extinctions, some 450m years ago. In the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists argue that a gamma ray burst, the most powerful explosion that occurs in the universe, was responsible for the Ordovican mass extinction in which 60% of all marine invertebrates died. Gamma ray bursts are thought to be caused either when two neutron stars collide or when giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives. For around 10 seconds, intense pulses of energy...

Summary - (Jul 29, 2004) NASA's Swift satellite is due to arrive at Florida's Cape Canaveral today, to prepare for its launch in October. Named after the fast-moving bird, Swift will track down the fastest and most powerful known explosions in the Universe: gamma ray bursts. Swift has one instrument to detect bursts in the sky, and then it can swing around two high-resolution telescopes in less than a minute for a closer look. It'll also inform the astronomical community of a blast so that anyone watching the sky can tune in as well and watch the explosion unfold....

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 April 3 A Mystery In Gamma Rays Credit: N. Gehrels, D. Macomb, D. Bertsch, D. Thompson, R. Hartman (GSFC), EGRET, NASA Explanation: Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light, packing a million or more times the energy of visible light photons. If you could see gamma rays, the familiar skyscape of steady stars would be replaced by some of the most bizarre objects known to...

An exotic kind of nuclear explosive being developed by the US Department of Defense could blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons. The work has also raised fears that weapons based on this technology could trigger the next arms race. The explosive works by stimulating the release of energy from the nuclei of certain elements but does not involve nuclear fission or fusion. The energy, emitted as gamma radiation, is thousands of times greater than that from conventional chemical explosives. The technology has already been included in the Department of Defense's Militarily Critical Technologies List, which says: "Such...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 March 6 N49's Cosmic Blast Credit: Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA), Y. Chu (UIUC) et al., NASA Explanation: Scattered debris from a cosmic supernova explosion lights up the sky in this gorgeous composited image based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Cataloged as N49, these glowing filaments of shocked gas span about 30 light-years in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Light from the...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - A new satellite could offer more information into the gamma ray bursts that occurred billions of years ago. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory discovered the strange phenomenon 30 years ago, but much about it - such as why they happen - remains mysterious. In May 2004, when a new satellite called SWIFT launches, they might finally be able to unravel some of the mysteries about gamma ray bursts. "We've had to create an explanation to fit what we're seeing, rather than understanding what gamma ray bursts are by predicting them," said Ed Fenimore, a Los...