Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!

This came from the Mars Phoenix Lander’s Twitter at 5:15pm today, followed 9 minutes later by: "Whoohoo! Was keeping my eye on some chunks of bright stuff & they disappeared! Sublimated! So it can’t be salt, it’s ice." The Phoenix Lander has been on Mars for 25 days now, exploring the geologic history of the planet’s arctic, investigating whether the planet could have supported microbial life in the past. The machine, powered by two 18-foot solar panels, has been digging around in a trench informally called Dodo-Goldilocks, uncovering clumps of “bright stuff” on June 15, and when it came back to the same place today, several of those clumps were gone, vaporized after being uncovered by the lander. “It must be ice, these little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of University of Arizona, Tucson. NASA and the university will have a teleconference tomorrow at 1pm Eastern, to present the findings.

Mars Phoenix Twitter
Phoenix Mars Lander, NASA.gov
Ice Water Found on Mars, LAist.com

Beijing has "secretly" shot a powerful ground-based laser through the lower atmosphere at an American spy satellite, blinding, but not destroying the surveillance device. The attacks were kept secret by the Bush administration, so as to not damage diplomatic relations (e.g. co-opting China in offensives against North Korea and Iran). According to Defense News, "after a contentious debate, the White House directed the Pentagon to limit its concern to one line," that China has a satellite-blinding laser. Alarmed nonetheless, the US military has been shooting lasers at its own satellites to guage the potential threat, which reflects the American concern about Chinese military expenditure - increasingly geared at challanging American pre-eminence by building weapons that attack key US systems: aircraft carriers, satellites.

Of course, China spies too. Multiple spy rings have been exposed and the FBI has increased the number of staff tracking the effort. Recently, China has been engaged in a massive espionage effort against American high-tech firms, like those working on the DD(X) destroyer program (a Navy project for a new guided missile destroyer, a multi-mission ship with a focus on land attack, equipped with 2 manned and 3 robotic helicopters and all sorts of guns and missiles). Before that, China was accused of carrying out economic espionage, the FBI claiming that China uses its nationals, who are sent to North America to study advanced technology, to infiltrate American companies to gain access to sensitive information and then return to China to set up their own companies or provide the information to the military. In 1999, the US congressional committee concluded that China obtained critical information about an array of US warheads, including its modern strategic thermonuclear weapons program, by theft from weapons labs and meticulous scanning of public information. So, spy versus spy continues… in space.

Beijing secretly fires lasers to disable US satellites, Telegraph.co.uk
China may seek satellite laser, Pentagon warns, FAS.org

Astronomers using the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered an double helix nebula 80 light years in length near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. "We see two intertwining strands wrapped around each other as in a DNA molecule," said Mark Morris, a UCLA physics/astronomy professor and lead author of the article published today in Nature. "Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm… What we see indicates a high degree of order." The double helix nebula is about 300 light years from the enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy (Earth is c. 25,000 light years from it). "We know the galactic center has a strong magnetic field [1,000 times that in our galactic suburbs] that is highly ordered and that the magnetic field lines are oriented perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy," Morris said. It is interesting how the astronomical macrocosm can mirror the biological microcosm. Seems likely this discovery will be enlisted towards the argument for intelligent design, as well as the fractal/holographic universe.

Astronomers report unprecedented double helix nebula near center of the Milky Way, EurekAlert.org
The Double Helix Nebula: a magnetic torsional wave propagating out of the Galactic centre, Arxiv.org

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed two new moons around the planet Pluto. The moons were first discovered with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in May 2005, but on Feb. 15, 2006 they took a look for additional satellites and characterized the orbits of the moons. These further observations rule out the possibility of other satellites of roughly similar size orbiting Pluto inside the orbits of the two moons. The moons, provisionally named S/2005 P 1 and S/2005 P 2, are approximately 40,000 and 30,000 miles away from Pluto. In the pic, Pluto is in the center and Charon is just below it. P 1 is to the right and just below Charon. P 2 is to the right of Pluto and Charon. The satellites fall under the category of plutinos, trans-Neptunian objects with a 2:3 orbital resonance with Neptune that form the inner part of the Kuiper belt. Plutinos are usually named after underworld deities, like Pluto’s moon Charon, the ferryman who took the recently deceased across the river Acheron (not Styx) provided they had an coin (obolus) to pay for their ride (which was customarily placed under the tongue of the dead). Neither of the moons, nor the ninth planet for that matter, have yet been officially named, a process that requires the approval of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory), A. Stern (Southwest Research Institute) and the HST Pluto Companion Search Team

Physicists currently estimate that only 4% of the universe is made up of baryonic matter, which we can detect and measure with our current senses and instruments. So, 96% of what makes up the universe is in a form that has never been observed directly in a laboratory: 73%t is believed to be dark energy and 23% dark matter. Dark matter cannot be seen because it emits no light. It was hypothesized 50 years ago to explain why the outer limits of a galaxy travel at the same speed as the dense center. With so much of the ‘verse still invisible to us, a unified Theory of Everything may be further away than we’d hoped.

The darkness inside of everything, TheAge.com.au

Having examined 50 years of solar radiation measurments, Giles Harrison and David Stephenson of the University of Reading, UK, found that cosmic rays can increase the chances of a cloudy day by nearly 20%. Normally, solar cosmic rays are about 90% protons (hydrogen) and 9% alpha particles (helium). However, during a solar flare - exlosion on the Sun that happens when energy stored in twisted magnetic fields, typically above sunspots, is suddenly released - there is a significant burst of radiation across the spectrum (radio, x-rays, gamma rays), flares are classified according to x-ray brightness (1-8 Angstroms). So, the bright side of a cloudy day is that you’re shielded from radiation. Further, this may be a clue to explaining some of the mysterious climate changes our planet has experienced in the past (Big Ice Age, Little Ice Age).

(Proceedings of the Royal Society A, DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2005.1628).
Cosmic rays linked to cloudy days, New Scientist.com
SpaceWeather.com

German Protestant mystic Jacob Bohme (1575-1624) started out as a cobbler in Gorlitz, in his spare time he would study scripture and theology. Then one day he had a mystical experience that he summed up in the phrase "In Yes and No all things consist" (Philip K. Dick had a very similar experience/revelation from a beam of pink light). From it he developed a system of Christian Gnosticism, which has influenced Swedenborg, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, George Fox (founder of the Quakers), Adam Weishaupt (founder of the Illuminati), the theosophists and high grade Freemasonry, to name a few. The "eye in the pyramid" on the back of the dollar bill was one of Bohme’s trademark images.

His cosmology consisted of the Trinity +1. The first person, God the Father, is the primal, unmanifested reality, the Abyss that contains all potentiality. The second person, the Son, is the desire of the Abyss to reveal Himself, which is accomplished through divine introspection/self-contemplation. So, the third person, the Holy Spirit, is the process of God’s self-reflection. However, this process involves a divine mirror, which Bohme calls Sophia or "Virgin Wisdom", sometimes viewed as the fourth person. It was seeing the images in the mirror of Wisdom that made God want to manifest potentialities in reality through Creation. This suggests that God is a kind of fractal, a self-replicating binary-based matrix of tension between potentiality and actuality, perpetually growing in complexity. Good and evil become the positive and negative aspects of Creation, one strives to differentiate itself, the other to sink back into oblivion. The Neoplatonist influence is especially noticeable here, as evil is defined as an absence of good. Furthermore, the Fall, departure from God, was a necessary step for humanity to evolve to a state of redemption superior to original innocence. Superior because it is achieved through free will and deliberate action, while original innocence can only be maintained through ignorance of good and evil (as in the Garden of Eden before the fruit incident).

Jacob Bohme, Invisible Basilica
Jacob Bohme, Rotten.com
Jacob Bohme Resources, UCF.edu

Pictures of the red planet taken in the last few years have shown ice-rich landforms near the equator that suggest glacial movements as recently as 350,000 - 4 million years ago. Scientists believe these deposits on Mars to be remnants of snow. The theory is that Mars used to have a different tilt, with the poles pointing more towards the sun. As a result, the polar ice caps melted releasing vapor, which was blown south over the Tharsis Montes and Olympus Mons volcanoes, and turned to snow as it cooled and condensed, thus forming the glaciers. The model is described in the Jan. 20 journal Science. "The findings are important because they tell us that Mars has experienced big climate changes in the past, the kinds of climate change that led to the Great Ice Age here on Earth," said Brown University’s planetary geologist James Head. "The findings are also interesting because this precipitation pattern may have left pockets of ice scattered across Mars. This is good information for NASA as officials plan future space missions, particularly with astronauts."

Snow on Mars Created Glaciers Near Equator, Space.com

A series of anomalous radiowave bursts, dubbed GCRTJ1745-3009, has been detected coming from the direction of our galaxy’s center (26,000 light-years away). "The most spectacular aspect of this is that five bursts occurred at regular intervals of about an hour and a quarter [77 minutes]," said Scott Hyman of Sweet Briar College, Virginia. "They were at a constant intensity … and each burst had basically the same time profile." Each burst lasted about ten minutes. Since the source is of an unknown type and the bursts are highly unusual, some believe that the origin of the radiowaves may be intelligent. Hyman’s response: "There’s no reason to expect anything but a natural cause. There are so many classes of objects we don’t know about out there."

Radio image of the central region of the Milky Way galaxy. The arrow points to the source of the radio waves. Above it is a large expanding ring of debris from a supernova remnant.

Radio Waves Detected Coming From Center of Galaxy, National Geographics.

Dark Matter: a hypothetical form of matter that is believed to make up 90 percent of the matter in the universe; it is invisible (does not absorb or emit light) and does not collide with atomic particles but exerts gravitational force

The first galaxy composed predominately of dark matter seems to have been discovered by a group of stronomers led by Dr. Robert Minchin at Cardiff University, UK, using a 76-metre Lovell radio telescope at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory VIRGOHI21, 50 million light-years away in the Virgo cluster, was visible at radio frequencies (despite the space.com article calling this invisible) through the emissions from clouds of hydrogen gas. The hydrogen observed seems to account for 1000 times less mass than the galaxy as a whole, as determined by the rotation rate of the hydrogen clouds; nevertheless, there’s nothing visibly present at that distance at all.

This was part of a search for “dwarf” galaxies, which are predicted to be present in the universe at much greater frequencies than so far observed. But while it has no stars, this galaxy is not a dwarf. Other “dark matter” galaxies have been found in the past, but all had at least a few stars, though in one case (dwarf galaxy I Zwicky 18) all the observed stars were less than 500,000 years old, a tiny fraction of the normal billions of years.
It’s possible this observation is just a coincidence caused by two hydrogen clouds passing one another at high speed, rather than a single rotating mass of hydrogen. Nevertheless, we know the universe is mostly made of dark matter - it’s got to be out there somewhere, and this may be the first real evidence where.

Atronomers claim first “dark galaxy” find, NewScientist.com
A galaxy with no stars, SciScoop.com