Baba Vanga’s followers often refer to the mysterious woman as the Balkan Nostradamus due to her supposed prophetic powers. Baba Vanga rose to prominence in the year 2000 when she supposedly predicted the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk. Since then, Baba Vanga is said to have predicted the 9/11 terror attack, the cataclysmic 2004
Month: December 2019
Michel de Nostredame, or Nostradamus, was a 16th-century writer and apothecary believed by many to be the world’s foremost authority on prophecies. Nostradamus’ fervent followers credit the French mystic with predicting many of the world’s biggest events, penne in cryptic passages dubbed quatrains. Nostradamus is famously said to have predicted the rise of Adolf Hitler
There’s a giant contradiction in the middle of the Arizona desert: an experimental city designed for thousands that now contains only a few dozen inhabitants. For nearly five decades, a group called the Cosanti Foundation has been working to build a city that would inspire a new future of urban design. Today, the project is
Five years ago, on a remote island in Wales, University of Oxford scientist Annette L. Fayet spied a puffin doing something she had never seen before. The bird, floating on the seawater beneath a cliff, held a stick in its beak. It began to scratch its back with the stick – the puffin, as
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of populating outer space. But in the nearly 18 years since – and even as the rocket company continues to disrupt the global launch industry – the most complex life-form SpaceX has flown is a mouse. That should all change in early 2020, though, as
Astronaut Christina Koch has had quite the year. In 2019, the American engineer broke no less than two records: the first, along with friend and colleague Jessica Meir, for an all-female space walk, and the second, just days before the new year, for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. She marked her 289th continuous
A Chinese court on Monday sentenced the scientist who claimed to be behind the world’s first gene-edited babies to three years in prison for illegal medical practice, state media reported. He Jiankui, who shocked the scientific community last year by announcing the birth of twin girls whose genes had allegedly been altered to confer
Jeane Dixon was one of the best-known US self-proclaimed psychics and astrologers of the 20th century, due to her outrageous newspaper columns that encapsulated the interest of readers. Ms Dixon reportedly correctly predicted the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, writing in the May 13, 1956, issue of Parade Magazine that the 1960 presidential election would be “dominated by labour and
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. It is still unknown what exactly happened to the plane, although the official investigation concluded that its most likely final resting place is at the bottom of the southern Indian Ocean. One of
As 2019 winds to a close, the journey towards fully realised quantum computing continues: physicists have been able to demonstrate quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time. Put simply, this breakthrough means that information was passed between the chips not by physical electronic connections, but through quantum entanglement – by linking
The new year 2020 marks the end of another chapter in world history and what a year it has been. From widespread riots to the streets of Hong Kong to Brexit and terrifying wildfires in Australia, it has been one of the busiest years on record. British psychic and medium Craig Hamilton-Parker of Psychics.co.uk shared
Astronomers have been watching a nearby pulsar with a strange halo around it. That pulsar might answer a question that’s puzzled astronomers for some time. The pulsar is named Geminga, and it’s one of the nearest pulsars to Earth, about 800 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Not only is it close to Earth, but
The Mars 2020 rover, which sets off for the Red Planet next year, will not only search for traces of ancient life, but pave the way for future human missions, NASA scientists said Friday as they unveiled the vehicle. The rover has been constructed in a large, sterile room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The climate breakdown continues. Over the past year, The Conversation has covered fires in the Amazon, melting glaciers in the Andes and Greenland, record CO₂ emissions, and temperatures so hot they’re pushing the human body to its thermal limits. Even the big UN climate talks were largely disappointing. But climate researchers have not given
There’s no denying that keeping livestock has deeply benefited humanity over the millennia. But, while sheep and cows may have adapted well to farm life, there’s one animal humans like to eat that would fare poorly in farms. Octopuses, scientists have argued in a May 2019 essay, should never be farmed – not just
Our brains are capable of detecting the location of touch even when it’s not directly on the body, new research shows. An intriguing new study indicates that we can sense how an object we’re holding comes into contact with something else – almost as if it were an extension of ourselves. If you’re holding
Schoolchildren skipping class to strike, protests bringing city centres to a standstill: armed with dire warnings from scientists, people around the world dragged the climate emergency into the mainstream in 2019. Spurred on by Swedish wunderkind Greta Thunberg – virtually unknown outside of her homeland a year ago but now a global star nominated
In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside
He was not born in a manger, and there were no wise men, nor frankincense or myrrh. But the masses are still flocking to see him. Meet the Potter Park Zoo’s Christmas Eve miracle, a black rhino calf born at 5:40 am on 24 December in Lansing, Michigan. “It’s a boy!” the zoo wrote
Things are pretty dire right now. Giant swaths of my country are burning as I write this, at a scale unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Countless animals, including koalas, are perishing along with our life-supporting greenery. People are losing homes and loved ones. These catastrophes are being replicated around the globe ever more frequently, and
Skywatchers from Saudi Arabia and Oman to India and Singapore were treated to a rare ‘ring of fire’ solar eclipse Thursday. Annular eclipses occur when the Moon is not close enough to the Earth to completely obscure the Sun, leaving a thin ring of the solar disc visible. While these types of eclipses occur
Have you noticed that Orion the Hunter – one of the most iconic and familiar of the wintertime constellations – is looking a little… different as of late? The culprit is its upper shoulder star Alpha Orionis, aka Betelgeuse, which is looking markedly faint, the faintest it has been for the 21st century. When
Earlier this year, we celebrated a first in the field of quantum physics: scientists were able to ‘teleport’ a qutrit, or a piece of quantum information based on three states, opening up a whole host of new possibilities for quantum computing and communication. Up until then, quantum teleportation had only been managed with qubits, albeit
A UFO sighting in Las Vegas has confused onlookers as the bright orb moved quickly along the hillside while emitting pulsating bright white and blue lights. The man recording the video claimed that the UFO covered an estimated 50 miles in three minutes and was recorded days before Christmas on December 19. This apparent distance
Self-proclaimed alien life expert Scott Waring took to his etdatabase.com blog to speculate about the apparent B-shape spotted in a NASA Mars Curiosity Rover image. He said: “While searching through a Mars photo I found a rugged area of terrain that seemed to have been created by mining. “Then I found a huge structure along
It was found along the side of a road in a remote Australian gold rush town. In the old days, Wedderburn was a hotspot for prospectors – it occasionally still is – but nobody there had ever seen a nugget quite like this one. The Wedderburn meteorite, found just north-east of the town in
When it comes to data transfer and computing, the faster we can shift electrons and conduct electricity the better – and scientists have just been able to transport electrons at sub-femtosecond speeds (less than one quadrillionth of a second) in an experimental setup. The trick is manipulating the electrons with light waves that are
The central figure to Christianity is believed to be the incarnation of God and the awaited Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament of the Bible. According to the Church, Jesus was born in 4AD and was crucified under the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect, sometime between 30AD and 33AD, before rising again through resurrection three days later, but a discovery made in 2000 may suggest there was inspiration behind
In the pitch black waters 759 meters (2,500 feet) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, a thin, undulating arm emerges from the gloom. Suddenly, it splits, and what was a lone, curious appendage is a writhing bouquet of tentacles until, finally, an honest-to-God giant squid blooms from the darkness and attacks. Then,
Before its circuits ran cold in the shadow of a Martian dust storm, Opportunity took one long look at its surroundings and saved it for posterity. The image represents a poignant conclusion to the rover’s mission; a detailed panorama combining the most recent tracks of its marathon journey with a glimpse of the sands it
This year, I was on the judging panel for the Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistic of the Decade. Much like Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” competition, the international statistic is meant to capture the zeitgeist of this decade. The judging panel accepted nominations from the statistical community and the public at large for
US President Donald Trump is simultaneously an expert on wind power and completely baffled by it — by his own estimation, anyways. “I never understood wind,” Trump said during a speech at conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit on Saturday, according to the official White House transcript. “You know, I know windmills very
As far as hypothetical space megastructures go, the stellar engine is one of our favourites – a gigantic contraption built with the purpose of transporting our Solar System somewhere else, if we ever need to move to a different cosmic neighbourhood. Now, new research has put forward another idea for what such a radical
The lines are blurring, any which way you look. Thanks to the incredible pace of scientific progress, the very definition of what it means to be ‘human’ is becoming an increasingly open question. In a world where living beings like genetically edited babies and human-animal hybrids are made to exist, the questions aren’t only
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seed bank on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, near Longyearbyen, approximately 810 miles from the North Pole. It is the brainchild of American conservationist Cary Fowler, in association with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds that are duplicate samples, or “spare” copies, of seeds held in gene banks worldwide. The
You’ve likely heard about direct-to-consumer DNA testing kits. In the past few years, at-home genetic testing has been featured in the lyrics of chart-topping songs, and has helped police solve decades-old cold cases, including identifying the Golden State Killer in California. Even if you don’t find a DNA testing kit under your own Christmas
Seven thousand years ago, long before modern industry began to heat the planet, rising seas threatened a community on the coast of Israel. The villagers needed to defend their home, so they built a wall. It failed. People abandoned the village. The Mediterranean Sea swept inland and drowned the buildings. But the sea may
If you live in Europe, Asia, Australia or Africa, you could be in for a treat – you might be in the path of the last solar eclipse of 2019. On December 26, places such as India, Singapore, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and some parts of Australia will be treated to a ‘ring of fire’
Deep within the central zone of the Milky Way, a bizarre cluster of dense gas clouds has taken the unusual form of a gigantic, cosmic candy cane. CNN reports that the observation may help scientists understand the process through which our galaxy forms stars — because the cosmic candy cane, and the clouds surrounding it,
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk welcomed the launching of Space Force, the newest US military service, with a “Star Trek”-themed tweet: “Starfleet begins.“ On Friday, President Donald Trump signed the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) a US$738 billion bipartisan defence spending bill. Part of the NDAA authorizes the Space Force as a military service under
Boeing’s new Starliner unmanned spacecraft returned to Earth on Sunday, landing in the New Mexico desert in the United States six days early after a clock problem scuppered a rendezvous with the International Space Station. NASA hailed the aborted flight as a success, despite its failure to reach the ISS on what was meant
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The official investigation concluded that this was most likely a hijack scenario and they believed the plane probably ended up in the bottom of the Indian Ocean, killing everyone on board. However, aviation
Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule launched successfully, but a mishap prevented it from docking with the ISS. The ship is undamaged and will return and land at its designated location, according to officials. This could delay the planned crewed flight of the Starliner next summer. Starliner launched successfully on Friday morning on an Atlas V
The Milky Way could be teeming with interstellar alien civilizations, according to a new study. We just don’t know about it because they haven’t paid us a visit in 10 million years. The study, published last month in The Astronomical Journal, posits that intelligent extraterrestrial life could be taking its time to explore the
On September 12 this year, Pope Francis announced his plan to launch a global education pack to “unite efforts” to combat climate change. The leader of the Vatican called on world leaders to come together on May 14, 2020, to discuss his “Laudato Si” proposal to reduce global warming. He said: “Never before has there been such
To many people around the world of various religions, God is conceived of as the supreme being, creator deity and central object of their faith. Those people often pray to their God, hoping to bring good luck or fortune and also attribute miracles to them when something seemingly unexplainable happens. Neil deGrasse Tyson says these “fascinating
A mysterious flying object can be seen moving across the sky below one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets following a recent space launch. Incredible footage of the UFO was picked up by a renowned YouTube conspiracy theorist Disclose Screen “The Grimreefar” who pointed out the strange shape of the flying object. In the footage, that
The burial chamber of Khentkaus III, a royal leader of the Old Kingdom, was discovered in the necropolis of Abusir, southwest of Cairo, some 650 feet from her husband, Pharaoh Neferefre – also known as Reneferef – in 2016. The find helped shine light on what project leader Professor Miroslav Barta called “a black patch in the history
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