Moon landing anniversary: 10 reasons the Apollo landings were ‘faked’
THE TELEGRAPH
Below is a list of ten of the most popular reasons given by conspiracy theorists who believe the Apollo Moon landings that began 40 years ago were faked.
1) When the astronauts are putting up the American flag it waves. There is no wind on the Moon.
2) No stars are visible in the pictures taken by theApollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon.
3) No blast crater is visible in the pictures taken of the lunar landing module.
4) The landing module weighs 17 tons and yet sits on top of the sand making no impression. Next to it astronauts’ footprints can be seen in the sand.
5) The footprints in the fine lunar dust, with no moisture or atmosphere or strong gravity, are unexpectedly well preserved, as if made in wet sand.
6) When the landing module takes off from the Moon’s surface there is no visible flame from the rocket.
7) If you speed up the film of the astronauts walking on the Moon’s surface they look like they were filmed on Earth and slowed down.
8) The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt.
9) The rocks brought back from the Moon are identical to rocks collected by scientific expeditions to Antarctica.
10) All six Moon landings happened during the Nixon administration. No other national leader has claimed to have landed astronauts on the Moon, despite 40 years of rapid technological development.
What do you think? Were the Moon landings faked? What evidence is there to support or defend your view?
Preliminary study findings suggest Mexicans may be genetically susceptible to the H1N1 virus
World Health News
In a landmark study conducted by Mexico’s National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), researchers examined the genetic composition of 300 Mexican Mestizos – people of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry who represent more than 80 percent of Mexico’s population – from six geographically distant states in Mexico. They also looked at 30 members of Amerindian descent from the indigenous Zapotecas group in the state of Oaxaca. As they discovered, the genetic make-up of these two populations is significantly different from three other known human genetic subgroups documented through the historic International HapMap Project.
The goal of the research was to determine the “comparability of Latino genomes to others in the global search for health-related genes throughout humanity.” While their findings are preliminary, the results of the study may one day help explain why the H1N1 flu was deadlier in Mexico. Says Dr. Gerardo Jimenez-Sanchez of INMEGEN, who led the research team, “It is not possible today to say genetic variation is responsible for the unique H1N1 Influenza A mortality rate in Mexico. However, knowledge of genomic variability in the Mexican population can allow the identification of genetic variations that confer susceptibility to common diseases, including infections such as the flu.” And he adds, “It will also help develop pharmacogenomics to help produce medicines tailored to people of a specific genetic group, to the creation of drugs that are both safer and more effective.”
INMEGEN was established in 2004 under then-Health Minister Dr. Julio Frenk, who is currently the Dean of the School of Public Health at Harvard University. As Dr. Frenk notes, “This study makes clear that Latin Americans with mixed ancestry are different enough from other people worldwide that a full-scale genomic mapping project would be wise both scientifically and economically. It would allow doctors to analyze fewer genetic markers when diagnosing the risk that a patient will develop a disease that depends on complex factors.” The findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
News Release: Landmark study reveals significant genetic variation between Mexico’s population and world’s other known genetic subgroups www.sciencedaily.com May 12, 2009
Scientists see asteroid hurtle to Earth
Artist’s rendition released by NASA shows an asteroid belt in orbit around a star. Stunned astronomers watched a car-sized asteroid explode into a brilliant meteor shower as it crashed into Earth’s atmosphere, and then wandered into a Sudan desert to pick up the pieces, a study released Wednesday reported.
PARIS (AFP) – – Stunned astronomers watched a car-sized asteroid explode into a brilliant meteor shower as it crashed into Earth’s atmosphere, and then wandered into a Sudan desert to pick up the pieces, a study released Wednesday reported.
It was the first time ever that scientists recovered fragments from an asteroid detected in space, according to the study, published in the British journal Nature.
“Any number of meteorites have been observed as fireballs and smoking meteor trails as they come through the atmosphere,” said co-author Douglas Rumble, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution.
“But to actually see this object before it gets to the Earth’s atmosphere and then follow it in — that’s the unique thing.”
The drama unfolded like an overheated Hollywood script, according to a reconstruction of the event by Nature.
On October 6 last year, an amateur star gazer in Arizona submitted the coordinates of an asteroid he had spotted to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It was a routine logging, one of hundreds. But the computer system mysteriously refused additional data, recalled the Center’s director, Tim Spahr.
“As soon as I looked at it and did an orbit manually, it was clear it was going to hit Earth,” he told the journal.
The size and brightness of the asteroid — which, by this time, has been assigned the name 2008 TC3 — did not suggest danger, but Spahr followed standard safety procedure and called a NASA hotline.
He also alerted the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Steve Chesley, who did a rush calculation on the asteroid’s orbit. The program indicated a 100 percent chance of impact.
“I’d never seen that before in my life,” he said.
The program also showed that the hurtling mass of rock would hit Earth’s atmosphere — with the force of one or two kilotonnes of TNT — in less than 13 hours.
Suddenly, scientists accustomed to thinking in light years found themselves scrambling in real time to track the asteroid and figure out where its fragments might land.
Their chatter burned up the Internet and international phone lines. “IMPACT TONIGHT!!!”, wrote physicist Mark Boslough of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to colleagues, Nature reported.
Within minutes, it was determined that the asteroid would burst into pieces over the sparsely populated Nubian Desert in northern Sudan.
Tipped off by a meteorologist, a KLM passenger jet pilot flying from Johannesburg to Amsterdam spotted a brilliant flash some 1,400 kilometres distant as 2008 TC3 smashed into the atmosphere at 12,000 metres per second.
Weeks later, Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and the study’s lead author, was still waiting for the first report of a 2008 TC3 meteorite find. Nothing came.
So Jenniskens flew to Sudan in early December and teamed up with Muawia Hamid Shaddad of Khartoum University.
Together with a small regiment of students, they headed into the desert, asking local inhabitants along the way if they had seen a ball of fire in the sky.
When they zeroed in on the likely crash zone, the researchers fanned out to comb the area. In three days, they recovered 280 fragments weighing a total of several kilogrammes.
2008 TC3 falls into a category of very rare meteorites — accounting for less than one percent of objects that hit Earth — called ureilites, all of which may have come from the same parent body, Rumble said.
Being able to match spectral measurements of 2008 TC3 taken before it disintegrated with chemical analyses of the rock fragments should make it easier to recognize ureilite asteroids still in space, he noted.
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