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| 01.20.2018 | Curiosity rover spots weird tiny structures on Mars. |
| 01.12.2018 | Crucial ingredients for life found in meteorites that fell to Earth |
| 01.12.2018 | Organic molecule benzonitrile detected in space. |
| 01.06.2018 | A "jellyfish-like" object allegedly filmed hovering over a Chinese train station. |
| 01.06.2018 | Flying object seen and filmed above Rome, Italy. |
| 01.01.2018 | UFOs reported from the Valensole area, France. |
Two meteorites that separately crashed to Earth in 1998 contain ingredients for life: liquid water, and a mix of complex organic compounds such as hydrocarbons and amino acids.
The salt crystals in the meteorites carried microscopic traces of water that is believed to date back to the infancy of our solar system - about 4.5 billion years ago.
A detailed study of the chemical makeup within tiny blue and purple salt crystals sampled from these meteorites, which included results from X-ray experiments at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), also found evidence for the pair's past intermingling and likely parents. These include Ceres, a dwarf planet that is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and the asteroid Hebe, a major source of meteorites that fall on Earth.
The study was published on January 10, 2018, in the journal Science Advances.
David Kilcoyne, a scientist at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS), which provided X-rays that were used to scan the samples' organic chemical components, including carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, said that "It's like a fly in amber."
The rich deposits of organic remnants recovered from the meteorites do not provide any direct proof of life outside of Earth, but they are proof that space bodies can contain abundant organic matter also associated with liquid water, that is really crucial to the origin of life and the origin of complex organic compounds in space.
It also show a possibile way for organic matter to be passed from one host to another in space.
Queenie Chan, planetary scientist and postdoctoral research associate at The Open University in the U.K., the study's lead author, said:
"There is a great range of organic compounds within these meteorites, including a very primitive type of organics that likely represent the early solar system's organic composition."
"Combined with other evidence, the results support the idea that the organic matter originated from a water-rich, or previously water-rich parent body - an ocean world in the early solar system, possibly Ceres."
"Everything leads to the conclusion that the origin of life is really possible elsewhere."
The study: "Organic Matter in Extraterrestrial Water-Bearing Salt Crystals Indicates Ceres as an Organic-Rich Body", by Queenie H.S. Chan, Michael E. Zolensky, et al., in Science Advance, January 10, 2018.
Jan. 12, 2018.
Scientists studying a cold molecular cloud of the Taurus region with radio telescopes detected the presence of benzonitrile, an aromatic organic molecule.
Organic molecules containing a hexagonal ring of carbon atoms, known as "aromatic" molecules, are abundant throughout the Universe. This was found earlier by astronomers because these molecules emit a characteristic set of in the infrared emission features. But identifying precisely which aromatic molecules are present was so far very difficult.
Brett A. McGuire et al. took advantage of radio spectroscopy, a so-called spectral-stacking procedure, to find signatures of benzonitrile while combing through a radio survey of the Taurus Molecular Cloud 1 (TMC-1). This is the first time a specific aromatic molecule was identified in space using radio spectroscopy.
To confirm their identification, they conducted thorough laboratory experiments to accurately measure the different rotational transitions of the molecule. By comparing their experimental data to targeted observations of TMC-1 using another radio telescope, they were able to observe nine different rotational transitions of benzonitrile, solidifying the detection.
Studying the composition of organic molecules in space is key for understanding molecular complexity in protoplanetary disks surrounding young stars. The material in protplanetary disks eventually ends up in planets.
An unnamed railway worker claimed he was the lone witness on January 6, 2018, in nightitme at 08:10 p.m. of a "jellyfish-like" object or "disc" hovering above the tracks of the Dayangqi Railway Station of Daxing'Anling Prefecture in Heilongjiang province in northern China.
One version says the rail worker said he noticed an odd blink in the sky, and then went to check the surveillance camera footage where theere was flying object appearing in near a light pole and above the tracks of a railway station; the other version suggests he saw the object only on the camera video screen.
The worker said "It's not a flashlight, but it only appeared for a second and it disappeared." He released the video on "Pearl Video".
There is the definite possibility that this was only some distant light causing a camera lens reflection.
See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5254317/Flying-disk-spotted-hovering-Chinese-train-station.html
Below: an image from the video.
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A strange luminous object was seen in Rome in Italy during the night of January 6, 2018. The witnesses were on the balcony of their home when they saw a luminous object hovering a "short time" on the city to "disappear towards the horizon." The object was filmed on video.
The main witness contacted the Italian "Aliens Research Association", whose ufologist Angelo Maggioni cataloged the object as spherical, "identical to the balls observed during the summer and could therefore be part of the scouts used to study the region (although for the moment their goal is still hypothetical)".
Maggioni says that the object was in rotation, that it did not emit a sound and was surrounded "by a source of luminous energy". The duration of observation was a few minutes and the thing was observed by the three members of one family who all confirmed what happened.
He excluded the presence of a plane, and excludes "Chinese lanterns and balloons as they are not stationary in the sky." He notes that there are 15 € Chinese lanterns fitted with flashing lights in their interior but estimates - I do not agree with that - that they can remain stationary "only a few seconds". He says that their structure and the flashing and rotating lights are not compatible with the observed object.
He excluded a drone under the argument that they are not allowed to fly more than 150 meters high - which in my opinion does not allow to exclude a drone whose owner would not respect this rule or the would simply ignore.
The video - on which the object is totally blurry - is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=cpvNq2y4a2Y
A witness wrote in French on January 5, 2018 to the MUFON website he saw UFOs from the Valensole area, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department, in France, on January 4, 2018:
"I was walking back home at about six o'clock, I was walking on my way and I saw lights, but they were not making noise, so I was thinking about a plane, and then I noticed that this aircraft was flying at low altitude while it made no noise, I go home and tell my father to come outside, he also sees it and tells me it's a drone, he also tells me that he has already seen a drone pass as he was checking for an object outside, then we noticed that these lights were zigzagging, they moved quickly and silently and despite the use of binoculars they remained unobservable because they seemed hazy as if they were hiding. The range [distance] of these lights was too big to be a drone, they flashed constantly in red and blue and sometimes in white, several began to appear, coming from another place. We saw six lights appear from the same place with an interval the appearance of 10 minutes, with the same altitude and the same trajectory (rectilinear). Only the first made a circle and then disappeared. One of them remained hovering at a high altitude. Then came a moment when two were going in the same direction, my father and I took the binoculars to watch what was going to happen, once close the two craft were flashing their white lights, then one (the highest in altitude) made appear a light beam (as in the movies) similar to those of police helicopters. The device that was illuminated (we could not distinguish its shape because too far) began to return to its starting spot and disappeared meanwhile, despite the lights it was no longer seen. The beam of the first remained lit for about 3 minutes and then went off. My mother could make a video where you can see the object flashing and moving."
"What made me notice the light was the fact that it did not emit any noise despite its altitude, knowing and possessing a drone I could clearly reject this hypothesis, because of the range, the noise and its movements."
Source: http://mufoncms.com
Note: the "area of ??Valensole" is not far from Aix-en-Provence and Venelles, where maneuvers of "UFOs" were reported seen, filmed, photographed for decades, and are explained by training night flights of the Patrouille de France (the Franch Air Forces aerobatic team) from the air base of Salon-en-Provence.
