The Gralien Report

Easy now, don’t panic. R2D2 and C-3P0 aren’t turning hostile and attacking Verizon phone users. However, in a strange bit of information coming to light regarding the phone company’s new Droid cellphones, a bug recently discovered in the phone has been mistaken for what Charlie Sorrels at the WIRED Blog calls “a secret, silent, over the air invasion by Verizon’s software update police.”

Image by Polimerek

“When a problem with the Droid’s autofocus mysteriously disappeared overnight, paranoid Droid owners assumed that a secret update had been sent over the air to fix it,” Sorrels writes. “This would be rather creepy. It is also wrong. In a comment on an Engadget story about the mystery fix, Android developer Dan Morrill explained what had happened, and the truth is rather stranger than the fiction.” And what was Morrel’s excuse? He says there’s a rounding-error bug in the camera driver’s autofocus routine, apparently controlled via timestamp, that is making the autofocus function on the phone’s camera to malfunction on a 24.5-day cycle. “It’ll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again,” Morrel explained. “(November) 17th is the start of a new ‘works correctly’ cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works.”

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Recently during a press briefing regarding the Large Hadron Collider beneath Geneva, Sergio Bertolucci, a physics theorist and Director of Research and Scientific Computing at CERN told reporters, “Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it.” What “door” does Bertolucci refer to? Believe it or not, he is actually referencing a potential rift in space-time that could result from experimentation with the LHC, and warns that unspecified “somethings” could indeed interact with this realm as a result of experiments with the massive machine.

“We’re hoping to see supersymmetry and extra dimensions,” said Bertolucci, who also postulates that, though the discovery would be ground-breaking, the event he warns of would be rather small, if noticeable. “Of course, after this tiny moment the door would again shut, bringing us back to our ‘normal’ four dimensional world … It would be a major leap in our vision of Nature, although of no practical use (for the time being, at least). And of course, no risk to the stability of our world.”

That’s reassuring… until Mothman comes through the dimensional doorway with a legion of Mothmen to take over Earth in the name of King Hybreed Manthuzlar IIV. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Last week I discussed the discovery of a gigantic cosmic “ribbon” observed by NASA scientists, indicative of a magnetic  “heliosphere.” This, in essence, is a gigantic magnetic bubble that fills the sky, emitting no light and having remained invisible until only recently. The “ribbon” has caused quite a stir, since theories as to what causes the strange manifestation vary greatly.

However, at the website Thunderbolts.info, Wallace Thornhill and David Talbott propose a radical theory that the universe is actually electric in nature, and that present theories that look to gravity for answers, quite simply, don’t carry much weight. For Thornhill, the appearance of this cosmic ribbon is only further proof that Earth’s Sun is indeed an electric body.

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Ever wish you could read somebody’s mind? Better yet, ever think it would be nifty (or terrifying, on the other hand) to be able to both read and receive telepathic communication, directly via “brain to brain” interface? Now, science has helped bring us one step closer to doing so in a practical way that incorporates binary coding and existing EEG technology.

True, this isn’t exactly “new” technology (for instance, DARPA ihas planned to use this sort of technology to aid in developing prosthetic limbs that are movable in response to to neural commands). However, in this next step in utilizing mechanical benefits from the technology’s practical application, Dr. Christopher James at the University of Southampton has used BCI (brain-computer interface) to illustrate how people can communicate with what he dubs “true brain-to-brain interfacing.”

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I’ve spent the majority of the last week out of town participating in a documentary shoot with the National Geographic company (from which updates will be added here soon), so unfortunately a good bit of the news I’d normally be getting to here at the Gralien Report has eluded me. However, one of my News Correspondents, Jim, sent this along today, courtesy of NASA:

For years, researchers have known that the solar system is surrounded by a vast bubble of magnetism. Called the “heliosphere,” it springs from the sun and extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto, providing a first line of defense against cosmic rays and interstellar clouds that try to enter our local space. Although the heliosphere is huge and literally fills the sky, it emits no light and no one has actually seen it.

Until now.

NASA’s IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere and the results have taken researchers by surprise. The maps are bisected by a bright, winding ribbon of unknown origin (see image above).

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It has remained chief among religious relics that the likes of the Catholic Church and secret societies have touted for years as proof of the existence of Jesus. Now, Italian scientist Luigi Garlaschelli claims he has created a copy of the famous “Shroud of Turin” by wrapping a custom-made specially woven cloth over one of his students, painting it with red ochre pigment (iron oxide), baking it in an oven for several hours, and washing it. According to CNN News Garlaschelli’s results appear to mimick like the cloth that many Christians believe to be the actual burial shroud of Jesus.

“What you have now is a very fuzzy, dusty and weak image,” he said. “Then for the sake of completeness I have added the bloodstains, the burns, the scorching because there was a fire in 1532,” Garlaschelli says of his creation. Citing an interest in mysteries of history and the world, he took initiative to try and replicate the shroud years ago, until he finally happened upon this process. Now he says a similar shroud lookalike could be produced in as little as a week. Garlaschelli is also famous for the alleged debunking of myths such as Will-o’-the-Wisp, Kirlian photography and martial artists claiming to produce “touchless knockouts”.

In an opposing viewpoint expressed by Barrie Schwortz at the website Shroud.com, it appears that Garlaschelli may not be the first to claim iron oxide as a source for the mysterious images on the shroud. “It is apparent immediately that (Garlaschelli) knows very little about the actual Shroud of Turin,” Schwortz sasy. “He is not the first to suggest that the Shroud image was produced by red ochre pigment (iron oxide). In fact, he is at least the fourth to have proposed this theory in the last 30 years. Of course, this issue was anticipated by the STURP team in 1978 and a number of highly sensitive tests were performed that determined there was not enough iron oxide on the Shroud to be visible without a microscope. Iron oxide does not constitute the image on the Shroud. They also determined the image areas of the Shroud contain no more iron oxide than the non-image areas. It is more or less evenly distributed across the entire cloth.”

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According to conventional physics, electrons flowing through metals like iron, nickel, and other potentially magnetic materials act in a manner similar to “little bar magnets.” In essence, once electrons are introduced to extremely low temperatures, they begin to align themselves, pointing in the same direction within large “domains” in crystalline matter. What conventional physics can’t explain is exactly why the electrons align themselves.

Now, according to a new study performed by So Gyu-Boong Jo, Wolfgang Ketterle, and several of their colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, an ultra-cold gas has been observed self-magnetizing in a similar way, according to a team of atomic physicists. What this shows us is: the “messy physics” observed in solids can be modeled with the observation of pristine gases, the researchers say. This fascinating study poses the question: is it possible to magnetize a gas?

Though some in the scientific community are saying the new study’s observations are still questionable, the answer as to why electrons may behave in this manner was already proposed eighty years ago by British theorist E. C. Stoner. Using the the Pauli exclusion principle as a model (stating that no two identical fermions (electrons in this case) may occupy the same quantum state simultaneously) Stoner supposed that if the electrons repel each other with enough force, they could lower their total energy by aligning. Gas could become agitated by the flipping of select electrons, increasing its kinetic energy. Since Pauli’s exclusion principle says no two aligned electrons could be in the same place at the same time, electrons would avoid each other, according to Stoner, further reducing energy loss between electrons in close quarters.

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After spending the weekend in Bristol, Virginia, I now wish I had kept my eyes on the skyline a bit more. Within the last 24 hours, NASA has announced the successful launch of a rocket in Virginia as part of an experiment to gather data on clouds higher in Earth’s atmosphere. However, the blast may also be what prompted dozens of calls to area TV and radio stations to report seeing “strange lights” in the sky.

The Black Brant XII was launched on Saturday evening, according to NASA officials. Around the same time of the launch, people in the Northeast portion of the state began calling local television stations to report seeing lights in the sky, although reports of the sightings range from places as far away as Boston.

LEADING A DOUBLE LIFE: Of course, around the time of the launch, I had taken enough time off from professional ufology to perform at the Bristol Rhythm and Roots Festival (indeed, I’ve been known to pick a mean flat-top guitar when Bluegrass is in season). It was lovely weather, and a lively crowd! Still, I would have loved to have seen NASA’s Black Brant light up the skies. Were any Gralien Report readers present in Northern Virginia at the time of the launch, and furthermore, I wonder if anyone witnessed the “strange lights” that caused speculation among so many?

While visiting some out-of-town friends a few months back, I had a really great discussion with my friend Rob involving the future of cyborg technology. The gist of the conversation dealt with two main points: 1) that cyborg technology is already here, and 2) that it isn’t as bad as some people would imagine. If anything, practical application of cyborg technology might be quite useful.

The first example Rob gave had to do with cell phones. “Just look how people act when the get all the way to work or school and realize they forgot to bring their phones with them. That alone shows you how dependent we are on little devices we carry around with us,” Rob explained. Indeed, this seems to be very much the case. People rely on cell phones for much more than just making calls; text messaging, with the popularity of social networking sites like Twitter, may be steadily wrestling the use of the phone calls away from cell phones as a primary means of communication.

Rob and I aren’t the only ones comparing cell phone use to the beginnings of cyborg integration. “As we advance, we will surely become more like cyborgs,” says Joshua P. Warren in his new book The Secret Wisdom of Kukulkan, “blurring the line between the current concept of man and machine. It’s already happening. How often do you see someone with a tiny cell phone/computer practically glued to their ear? In the future, we will be a combination of organic and inorganic.” However, our dependence on phones, according to some, isn’t necessarily a good thing. “Because of our technology dependency on cell phones, we don’t know anyone’s phone number,” writes Sharalyn Hartwell at the Examiner. “Think about it, when was the last time you actually dialed a phone number, rather than just hit send on a name in your address book?”

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The mystery deepens… now, in addition to the abduction of Google’s second letter “o”, crop circles have become the primary image at the popular search engine’s main page. Similar to the “abducted ‘o’ scenario”, clicking the modified logo merely takes users to a Google search for the relevant term (which is “crop circle” in this instance). First they were abducted, and now Google appears to be seeing circles: what is behind Google’s fascination with the unexplained?

The first major search item in the Google search is the Wikipedia entry for “Crop Circle” (although Josh Williams with the Washington UFO Examiner wrote late last night–9:57 PM on September 14th, to be exact–that some Pacific rim countries were the ones showing the new logo. This limited reporting of the appearance of the logo, of course, was likley due to information streaming in as Google was still in the process of erecting the image on all relevant servers in the correct countries… and since bloggers like Williams were posting the news as it happened). The Wikipedia entry on the subject includes the following interesting information:

“According to material published by Nancy Talbott’s “BLT Research Team”, anomalies found at some circle sites in England and the US are consistent with them having been created when localized columns of ionized air (dubbed plasma vortices/vortexes) form over standing crops. Talbott claims minuscule spheres of magnetic iron have also been found, distributed either around the perimeter of the circle or linearly, and that this suggests a very complex delivery system.”

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