Alien spacecraft on the moon.

New Rocket Engine Could Reach Mars in 40 Days

Future Mars outposts or colonies may seem more distant than ever with NASA’s exploration plans in flux, but the rocket technology that could someday propel a human mission to the red planet in as little as 40 days may already exist.

A company founded by former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz has been developing a new rocket engine that draws upon electric power and magnetic fields to channel superheated plasma out the back. That stream of plasma generates steady, efficient thrust that uses low amounts of propellant and builds up speed over time.  ~space.com

The massive 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile may have changed the entire Earth’s rotation and shortened the length of days on our planet, a NASA scientist said Monday. ~news.yahoo.com

Sounds biblical…

The quake, the seventh strongest earthquake in recorded history, hit Chile Saturday and should have shortened the length of an Earth day by 1.26 milliseconds, according to research scientist Richard Gross at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis,” NASA officials said in a Monday update.

Hubble takes pictures of all sorts of weird things, but seldom does NASA refer to them in a press release as “mysterious.” The second sign of worry: The object is larger than the parameters of its own dust trail – like, you know, a spaceship. Lastly, it appears to be shaped like an “X.” Or, more ominously, like a Klingon bird of prey. Why is that?

“I wish I knew,” David Jewitt, NASA’s chief detective on the case, said Wednesday from UCLA, where he is an astronomer.

Gulp.

Before you begin your orderly descent into the bomb shelter, Jewitt does have a non-alien-invasion-related guess: He believes the object may be a comet created by the collision of two asteroids. ~thestar.com

According to ancient astronaut theories, intelligent extraterrestrial beings (called ancient astronauts or ancient aliens) have visited Earth and this contact is connected with the origins or development of human cultures, technologies, and/or religions.

Some of these theories propose that deities from most—if not all—religions are actually extraterrestrials, and their technologies were taken as evidence of their divine status.  ~en.wikipedia.org

Given the nature of many present day UFO sightings and ‘abductions’ is it reasonable to assume that the visions and sightings of angels, gods, and demons may be one in the same phenomenon?

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget, to be submitted to Congress on Monday, will propose abandoning a program to return US astronauts to the Moon, two Florida newspapers said. ~google.com

A 3-meter-tall, wind-powered musical sculpture made of galvanized steel pipes, it stands high above the English town of Burnley. The pipes swirl to form the shape of a tree bent and blown by the wind, and produce an eerie, melodious hum as the constant wind on Crown Point drifts through them. ~atlasobscura.com

Check it out: atlasobscura.com

Edmund Halley was a brilliant English astronomer whose mathematical calculations pinpointed the return of the comet that bears his name. Halley was fascinated by the earth’s magnetic field. He noticed the direction of the field varied slightly over time and the only way he could account for this was there existed not one, but several, magnetic fields. Halley came to believe that the Earth was hollow and within it was a second sphere with another field. In fact, to account for all the variations in the field, Halley finally proposed that the Earth was composed of some four spheres, each nestled inside another.

Up to 16 percent of mentally healthy children and teens may hear voices, the researchers note in the British Journal of Psychiatry. While hearing voices can signal a heightened risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders in later life, they add, the “great majority” of young people who have these experiences never become mentally ill.

To further investigate how common these “auditory vocal hallucinations” are and whether they are associated with developmental and behavioral factors, the researchers looked at 3,870 Groningen primary schoolers. All were asked whether they had heard “one or more voices that only you and no one else could hear” in the past year.  ~news.yahoo.com