“On February 11, 2016, a team of scientists announced the “discovery” of gravitational waves, or so-called ripples in space/time. Science media have proclaimed the purported discovery a confirmation of a prediction of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

“In this Space News report, physicist Wal Thornhill begins coverage of the issue with a skeptical examination of the ‘discovery’ — a skepticism thus far startlingly absent in science media.”

Watch the 14-minute talk online on YouTube.

link submitted by Robert Petrovich

Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific, controversial new research suggests—and quite possibly even racist. How did we get it so wrong?

“These are dark days for supplements. Although they are a $30-plus billion market in the United States alone, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, beta-carotene, glucosamine, chondroitin, and fish oil have now flopped in study after study.

“If there was one supplement that seemed sure to survive the rigorous tests, it was vitamin D. People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of: cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, heart attack, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and more. The vitamin is required for calcium absorption and is thus essential for bone health, but as evidence mounted that lower levels of vitamin D were associated with so many diseases, health experts began suspecting that it was involved in many other biological processes as well.

“And they believed that most of us weren’t getting enough of it. This made sense. Vitamin D is a hormone manufactured by the skin with the help of sunlight. It’s difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities through diet. When our ancestors lived outdoors in tropical regions and ran around half naked, this wasn’t a problem. We produced all the vitamin D we needed from the sun.

“But today most of us have indoor jobs, and when we do go outside, we’ve been taught to protect ourselves from dangerous UV rays, which can cause skin cancer. Sunscreen also blocks our skin from making vitamin D, but that’s OK, says the American Academy of Dermatology, which takes a zero-tolerance stance on sun exposure: “You need to protect your skin from the sun every day, even when it’s cloudy,” it advises on its website. Better to slather on sunblock, we’ve all been told, and compensate with vitamin D pills.

“Yet vitamin D supplementation has failed spectacularly in clinical trials. Five years ago, researchers were already warning that it showed zero benefit, and the evidence has only grown stronger. In November, one of the largest and most rigorous trials of the vitamin ever conducted—in which 25,871 participants received high doses for five years—found no impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke.

“How did we get it so wrong? How could people with low vitamin D levels clearly suffer higher rates of so many diseases and yet not be helped by supplementation?

“As it turns out, a rogue band of researchers has had an explanation all along. And if they’re right, it means that once again we have been epically misled.”

Read the entire article by Rowan Jacobson posted online January 10, 2019 at outsideonline.com.

link submitted by Harold Boulette

David Talbott of the Thunderbolts Project examines the protocol for cross-cultural investigation, bringing an objective standard to a field of study that scholars have long assumed to be hopelessly subjective.

Is it really possible to identify extraordinary natural events hidden within a carnival of ancient myths and symbols? His claim is that world mythology speaks for “real” history, but only in the sense that every archetype or cross-cultural theme has its referent in extraordinary natural phenomena. Events that are not occurring today were anciently interpreted through the lens of human imagination, as witnesses on earth translated intensely experienced events into the only languages available to them.

By identifying the underlying natural condition, it becomes clear that many different archetypal themes among the early cultures trace back to the same extraordinary events. The remarkable fact is that nothing in our natural experience today will account for a single archetype. And yet, the archetypes are inseparably connected to each other, constituting a substructure of human memory in ancient times. This collective memory would not be possible in the absence of the natural provocation.

Watch the talk posted online by the Thunderbolts project October 13, 2018 at YouTube.com (45:12).

link submitted by Robert Petrovich

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explains the basics of String Theory in a four-minute clip from his Floating University lecture.

Watch the entire clip posted December 7, 2011 on Youtube (4:02).

link submitted by Robert Petrovich

Frieda Nelson shared with us these links to a book and video on Inca astronomy, specifically the prophetic astronomical dates attributed to Viracocha.

PART 1

“On 15th November 1532, when the Spanish Conquistadors climbed high into the Andes on a mission to conquer the Inca people, 170 Spaniards met a force of 40,000 Incas. In the first of this two-part series, Dr William Sullivan examines why Andean civilisation could possibly have been conquered as a result of this battle and why a clash of cultural beliefs could have caused the downfall of the largest nation state to have ever existed in the western hemisphere.

“In one of the strangest events in all recorded history, Spaniards after adventure, fortune and power, to their own amazement seized this seemingly infallible empire. What the Spaniards never knew, however, and what history does not record, was that the Andean people had been aware of the imminence of this event for some 100 years through a complex and systematic charting of the stars.

“The Inca Empire at its peak was the largest kingdom on Earth. The Incas were master builders, fearsome warriors and practitioners of human sacrifice. Yet this mighty state was conquered by a small band of Spanish adventurers. 7000 men were killed and 10,000 injured. But how could the Incas let this happen? The Secret Of The Incas tells the story of one man’s search to unlock one of the world’s great mysteries. Anthropologist Bill Sullivan found the answer in the myths handed down from generation to generation of Incas and finally to Jesuit priests. The Incas were fine astrologists and believed events in the stars paralleled events on earth, only 100 years hence. During the reign of the first Inca, they foretold the end of Inca civilization in 1532 – the year the Spanish invaded. The Incas’ tragic secret was that they believed they were doomed – and that resistance was futile.”

Watch Part 1 of 2 on Youtube (49:03)

See William Sullivan’s book The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time (1997) on Amazon.

link submitted by Frieda Nelson

The first ever picture of a black hole: It’s surrounded by a halo of bright gas PHOTO CREDIT: EHT

Apr 10, 2019

Holes in space and time?

“We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.”
— Hannes Alfvén

Consensus astronomers believe that gamma-rays, X-rays and radio waves are created by gravity and acceleration in space. Dusty clouds of hydrogen gas are supposed to reach temperatures in the millions of Kelvin, causing gas and dust to glow brightly and emit radiation. In that view, the most powerful radiation sources are those that achieve the greatest gravitational force.

Cygnus A is one of the first radio sources that revealed “jets and lobes” accelerating out of its nucleus. They are thought to result from material falling into a central black hole, where it is torn apart. Subatomic “debris” is then propelled out of the galactic core by some means not understood in consensus circles. It is suggested that spinning magnetic fields surround black holes, but the theory cannot be tested.

Among the many difficulties faced by mainstream astrophysicists is how magnetic fields can align and compress particle emissions into jets that maintain coherency. Radio jets from some galaxies reach out for over one million light years before they “disperse” into vast clouds of radio emitting particles, larger than their galactic sources.

Recently, the astronomical community announced their first “image of a black Hole”. Researchers from the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, and the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM), using the The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured what they believe is an image of a black hole. What is that visual evidence?

Read the entire article by Stephen Smith posted online April 10, 2019 at thunderbolts.info.

In the following interview recorded on April 8, 2019, physicist Wal Thornhill discusses why the recent so-called “first picture of a black hole” actually affirms the plasma cosmology hypothesis that the object at a galactic core is not a black hole at all but an ultra-high density energy storage phenomena called a Plasmoid.

Watch the video interview online at Youtube.com (15:33).

links submitted by Robert Petrovich

“The connection of the mind to the body is an arena of constantly growing scientific investigation. To an unprecedented degree, mainstream medicine today acknowledges that the mind has a profound effect on one’s physical well-being. The mind affects matter, whether it’s the so-called placebo effect or the increasingly evident physical impact of emotional stress.

“A remarkable scientist who has explored the mind/body connection is Dawson Church, the author of the recent book Mind to Matter, which suggests vast, untapped abilities of the mind to affect healing. In part one of this two-part presentation, we asked Dawson to begin with an introduction to his earlier book, The Genie in Your Genes.”

Watch the entire presentation posted online March 16, 2019 at thunderbolts.com (20:14)

link submitted by Robert Petrovich

The first ever picture of a black hole: It’s surrounded by a halo of bright gas PHOTO CREDIT: EHT

Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy.

It measures 40 billion km across – three million times the size of the Earth – and has been described by scientists as “a monster”.

The black hole is 500 million trillion km away and was photographed by a network of eight telescopes across the world.

Details have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of eight linked telescopes.

Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told BBC News that the black hole was found in a galaxy called M87.

“What we see is larger than the size of our entire Solar System,” he said.

“It has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. And it is one of the heaviest black holes that we think exists. It is an absolute monster, the heavyweight champion of black holes in the Universe.”

Read the entire article by BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh posted online April 10, 2019 at bbc.com and watch the video.

link submitted by Frieda Nelson

PHOTO CREDIT: NASA/SDO

• Climate change and global warming are among the greatest challenges mankind has faced up until now.
• Researchers at Harvard have put forward a new solution — they want to reflect some of the sun’s heat back out to space.
• The process is referred to as “solar geoengineering” or “solar geotechnics”.

Read the entire article posted March 21, 2019 online at businessinsider.com.

link submitted by Jim Elliott

The Sun in reverse light. PHOTO CREDIT: Alan Friedman.

Jan 18, 2019

The Sun is not a ball of (con)fusion.

“’In a low density plasma, localized space charge regions may build up large potential drops over distances of the order of some tens of the Debye lengths. Such regions have been called electric double layers. An electric double layer is the simplest space charge distribution that gives a potential drop in the layer and a vanishing electric field on each side of the layer. In the laboratory, double layers have been studied for half a century, but their importance in cosmic plasmas has not been generally recognized.’” (Hannes Alfvén).

“Electric Sun theory proposes that the Sun is a positively charged electrode in a vast galactic circuit. The Sun’s negative pole is the heliosphere, billions of kilometers away, which acts like a “virtual cathode”. Double layers, so often mentioned in these pages, isolate the Sun from the Interstellar Medium (ISM).”

Read the entire article by Stephen Smith posted online January 18, 2019 at thunderbolts.info.

link submitted by Robert Petrovich