Is that a UFO? Mysterious ring over a Chinese beach [VIDEO]

A mysterious black smoke ring hovering for a short time over a beach in northeastern China has stunned the viewers. The UFO-like object was spotted over Jinshitan beach in Dalian, China, on August 12.

Hundreds of beachgoers watched the mysterious black ring before it disappeared from view, but several people captured the strange phenomenon on their mobile phones before it vanished into the clouds.

The footage, shared by Pearl Video, shows beachgoers looking at the mysterious black ring hovering in the sky.

While the recent occurrence might have just been from the playground, UFO experts had earlier spotted a huge spaceship in the sky over France, China and Australia.

In May, footage showing a cigar-shaped flashing object surfaced online and UFO experts believed that the mysterious objects were UFOs. Tyler Glockner, who runs a well-known conspiracy channel Secureteam10 on YouTube, shared the video of the UFOs and said the footage was recorded near Paris. However, he also said that the video could be a hoax as well.

"I've done a bit of digging since I received it, and haven't been able to find a copy of the original video. So I don't know, it could be a full blown hoax." 

Schools not asked to install mobile jammers, but can be installed in school buses to block porn sites: HRD ministry

The Central Government has cleared that it hasn't directed public or private schools to install jammers in school premises. However, the HRD ministry cleared that jammers can be installed in buses to prevent access of pornographic sites on the cell phones by anyone.

Rajya Sabha MPs Sarojini Hembram and Wansuk Syeim had raised this issue in the Upper House.
MoS HRD Upendra Kushwaha through his written reply cleared the air about the issue by stating that government hasn't directed public or private schools to install jammers.

The Rajya Sabha MPs had questioned whether government has directed schools, both private and government schools to install jammers in school premises keeping in view the rise of sexual crimes on students and increasing number of reports of porn sites viewed by students.

To this, the minister further stated that there has been only one instance of sexual abuse reported to Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) against its affiliated schools in Navi Mumbai in the year 2016.

Already a writ petition was filed in 2013 in the Supreme Court on this issue.

Referring to the additional affidavit filed in Supreme Court, Kushwaha, in his reply, added, "It may not be feasible to install jammers inside the school premises since jammers in schools will block internet access to computers used by children."

Rajya Sabha MPs Hembram and Syeim even asked another question whether there were suggestions to put such jammers in school buses.

To this MoS HRD stated, "In order to prevent access of pornographic sites on the cell phones by the Driver or anyone who is in charge of the children in the buses they can be installed in the buses."

He added that there is a proposal to have one male and female child counselor in every school and special workshops conducted in schools for awareness of sex education can be considered.

As the matter is schedule to came up for hearing on August 8, 2017 in Supreme Court, the ministry refrained to say further stating that the matter is presently subjudice.

PM Modi to ride Kochi Metro, 'Metro man' Shreedharan excluded from dais

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on Saturday travel on a Kochi metro rain when he inaugurates Kerala's first metro, it was announced on Wednesday. But 'Metro man' E. Sreedharan has not been given a seat on the dais.

In the first 25-km phase, trains will run for 13 km between Palarivattom and Aluva. Work is on the remaining section.

Those on the dais will be Modi, Governor P. Sathasivam, Information and Broadcasting Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu and Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

Elias George, the Managing Director of Kochi Metro Rail Corp, told the media that ' the list of invitees to the dais was prepared and sent to the Prime Minister's Office. The final list is made by the PMO. We have no role in this.'

Reacting to the exclusion of Sreedharan from the dais, P.T. Thomas said: 'This shows the arrogance of the BJP.

'When the foundation stone for Kochi Metro was laid by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, none was left out from the dais. This is Kerala's dream project and key people behind this are now asked to sit in the audience. This is totally unfair.'

Three times faster than flights: Hyperloop can do Delhi-Mumbai in 70 mins

Travel from Delhi to Mumbai can become less than a third —to 70 minutes — of what it takes in a flight, at costs cheaper than flight tickets.

The mode of transport is called a Hyperloop, a concept that was drawn maverick Tesla CEO and chief architect, Elon Musk on a white paper in 2013.

Hyperloop One is the only company that has built podcars (computerised capsules containers), which is a hybrid of a spaceship and a train, which will travel in nearly vacuum tunnel at over 1,000 kmph.

Its executives met government officials on Wednesday to discuss how to implement projects that will allow passengers and goods to travel between major cities, said Nick Earle, Sr. V-P of global field operations at Hyperloop One.

Distance between Mumbai and Chennai can be covered in 60 minutes and Chennai to Bangalore in 20 minutes.

But, to implement that in India will not be easy. Earle will need a bunch of safety clearances. “The regulator needs to give a safety certificate,” Earle said.

Then there are issues of laying the tunnel, which are almost five meter wide, and slightly raised from the ground, say about 20 meters. That would need would the central and state government to acquire land. Land acquisition has been a major problem in India, and has been a reason for many stalled projects.

It is also a costly affair. Earle said the company has secured $160 million, and is on its way to raise more capital. It would also need the Indian government to put in substantial amounts of money. Robert Puentes, director of Washington-based Eno Center for Transportation, told a British daily that such projects need “millions of dollars” to build engineering, the transport and infrastructure.

In the next two months Hyperloop One will do its first live demonstration in the desert of Nevada. Earle calls it’s the “kitty hawk moment”, taken from Wright Brothers’ first flight on December 17, 1903, when they flew the Flyer I four miles south of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina.

In India, like elsewhere in the world, Earle said Hyperloop One will be a public transport, much cheaper than flight tickets, and maybe just as much as a Rajhdhani ticket costs. “This is not an executive transport… It will be a public transport, which will be cheaper than air travel,” said Earle. As per estimates, travel in a Hyperloop between Stockholm and Helsinki would cost 25 Euros, while a flight can be as much at 200-250 Euros.

According to Mineta Transportation Institute, the US-based think tank that researches on intermodal surface transportation in a report said the podcar concept has been around since 1950, when public transportation enthusiast Donn Fichter first talked about it, only five such projects have been started.

Reason why these concepts haven’t taken off is high cost and limited usage. Hyperloop One wants to solve those problems. The cost of travel will be reduced as it would not require fuel or continuous supply of electricity.

Nokia relaunches iconic 3310 mobile model

BARCELONA: Finnish brand Nokia, a former mobile star, on Sunday launched three new Android smartphones and unveiled a revamped version of its iconic 3310 model more than a decade after it was phased out.

The new version will bring back its predecessor's popular 'Snake' game and distinctive ringtones, said Arto Nummela, the head of Finnish start-up HMD Global which will produce the phone under a licensing agreement with Nokia.

"The telephone will allow you to talk for 22 hours, 10 times more than the original," he said during a presentation in Barcelona on the eve of the start of the Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest mobile phone show.

Unlike the original, the new Nokia 3310 will allow web browsing. However, as it is a 2.5G phone, it is unlikely that the device will be supported in Singapore given that 2G networks will cease in April this year.

An HMD spokesperson told Channel NewsAsia that the company has yet to unveil local availability. "We just announced that it will go global in Q2 and detailed market info will follow later."

Launched in 2000, Nokia's original 3310 sold nearly 120 million units worldwide before it was discontinued in 2005, making it one of the world's best-selling mobile phones.

Analysts said resurrecting the popular model was a clever way for HMD Global to relaunch Nokia's brand.

"HMD launched three new smartphones and an iconic mobile. It is a way to create a halo effect around the other models by reviving talk about the Nokia brand," said Thomas Husson, a mobile analyst at Forrester.

In addition to the new 3310, HMD presented three new smartphones, the Nokia 3, Nokia 5 and Nokia 6 which will sell for different prices.

The Nokia 6 was already available in China and will now go on sale globally.

"We think (Nokia) could take five per cent of the global smartphone market by the end of 2019. But it needs to get big quick or it won't work," said CCS Insight's device specialist and chief of research, Ben Wood.

Nokia was the world's top mobile maker between 1998 and 2011 but was overtaken by South Korean rival Samsung after failing to respond to the rapid rise of smartphones.

Its telephone brand remains widely recognised, especially in developing markets.

Now a leading telecom equipment maker, Nokia sold its entire handset business to Microsoft Corp in 2014.

Last year HMD bought Microsoft Mobile's handset business and the right to use the Nokia brand.

Under the agreement, Nokia will receive royalty payments from HMD for sales of every Nokia branded mobile phone or tablet.

NASA has discovered 7 Earth-like planets orbiting a star just 40 light-years away

The first step in finding life outside our own planet is to find a planet like our own: small, rocky, and at just the right distance from the star that liquid water could exist on its surface.

That’s why an announcement today from NASA is so exciting: The space agency, along with partners around the world, has found seven potentially Earth-like planets orbiting a star 40 light-years away.



“It’s the first time that so many planets of this kind are found around a same star,” Michaël Gillon, the lead author of the Nature paper announcing the discovery, said in a press conference. “The seven planets … could have some liquid water and maybe life on the surface.”

Three of the planets are directly in the star’s habitable zone, meaning water can mostly likely exist on the surface of them. One of them, Gillon said, has a mass “strongly to suggest a water-rich composition.” And it’s possible that the other four could have liquid water, too, depending on the composition of their atmospheres, the astronomers said.

The exoplanets orbit a star in the constellation Aquarius called Trappist-1. And it’s a solar system very different from our own.

For one, Trappist-1 is a tiny, “ultra-cool” dwarf star. It’s cool because it’s small: just about a tenth of the mass of our sun and about one-thousandth as bright. But its low mass allows its planets to orbit it very closely and remain in the habitable zone.

The distance at which the planets orbit Trappist-1 is comparable to the distance of Jupiter to its moons. All the planets are believed to be rocky, and are all believed to be around the size of Earth, give or take 10 to 20 percent.

The star’s dimness is actually what led to the discoveries of these planets. When astronomers search for exoplanets, they typically look for a temporary dimming of a star — an indication that a planet has passed in front of it. This method makes it hard to find small, rocky worlds orbiting big, bright stars. If the planets are too small, they’ll get washed out.

“Maybe the most exciting thing here is that these seven planets are very well suited for detailed atmospheric study,” Gillon said. The James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018, will have the ability to measure the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres. If the atmospheres contain telltale gases like ozone, oxygen, or methane, life could exist there. “We can expect that in a few years, we will know a lot more about these [seven] planets,” Amaury Triaud, another of the paper’s co-authors, said.

If this all sounds a bit familiar, it’s because astronomers announced three potentially habitable planets around Trappist-1 in May. Today’s reveal adds four more to the mix.

Right now, the astronomers are beginning to study the planets’ atmospheres with the telescopes they have. And from these observations, they feel fairly confident that the worlds are rocky. “For detailed characterization, we will need James Webb,” Triaud said.

In the meantime, we just have our imaginations to fill in the gap. This is an artist’s rendition of what the fifth planet in this bizarre solar system might look like. These planets are believed to be tidally locked to the star, each has a permanent day side and a permanent night side. And because the planets are so close together, they’d appear in the sky like moons.

The more Earth-like exoplanets astronomers find in the galaxy, the more they update their estimates of how many Earth-like planets could be out there. “For every transiting planet found, there should be a multitude of similar planets (20–100 times more) that, seen from Earth, never pass in front of their host star,” Nature reporter Ignas Snellen explains in a feature article. And the more exoplanets there are, the more likely it is that life exists on at least one of them.

“With this discovery we’ve made a giant, accelerated leap forward in our search for habitable worlds and life on other worlds potentially,” Sara Seager, a leading exoplanet expert at MIT, said during the announcement. This one star system, she said, gives astronomers many chances to look for life, and refine their understanding of exoplanets in small-star systems.


Also promising: Tiny, cool stars like Trappist-1 are some of the most common in the galaxy. Investigating them will likely yield more exoplanet discoveries. Which will help get us closer to finding places like Earth.



As NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said, “Finding another Earth-like planet isn't a matter of if but when.“

CIA releases 13m pages of declassified documents online

About 13 million pages of declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been released online.

The records include UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the Stargate programme, which has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists.

The move came after lengthy efforts from freedom of information advocates and a lawsuit against the CIA.

The full archive is made up of almost 800,000 files.

They had previously only been accessible at the National Archives in Maryland.

The trove includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.

Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception.

Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer.

Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying - but sometimes precise - accuracy, leading the researchers to write that he "demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner".

JFK and the rise of conspiracy theories

Other unusual records include a collection of reports on flying saucers, and the recipes for invisible ink.

While much of the information has been technically publicly available since the mid-1990s, it has been very difficult to access.

The records were only available on four physical computers located in the back of a library at the National Archives in Maryland, between 09:00 and 16:30 each day.

A non-profit freedom of information group, MuckRock, sued the CIA to force it to upload the collection, in a process which took more than two years.

At the same time, journalist Mike Best crowd-funded more than $15,000 to visit the archives to print out and then publicly upload the records, one by one, to apply pressure to the CIA.

"By printing out and scanning the documents at CIA expense, I was able to begin making them freely available to the public and to give the agency a financial incentive to simply put the database online," Best wrote in a blog post.

In November, the CIA announced it would publish the material, and the entire declassified CREST archive is now available on the CIA Library website.

How ISRO plans to launch 103 satellites on a single rocket

The mission will break Russia’s record of sending 37 satellites at one go

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will set a record when it launches 103 satellites in one go on a single rocket in the first week of February.

Explaining how all the satellites will be placed in orbit, Dr. K. Sivan, Director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvananthapuram, said: “The satellites will be separated from the launch vehicle in different directions. The separation angle and time of separation will be such that one satellite will not collide with another.”

The satellite separated from the launch vehicle will have a relative velocity of one metre per second. So after 1,000 seconds the distance between a satellite and the rocket will be 1,000 metres. “The satellite that gets launched first will move at a relatively faster velocity than the next satellite that is launched. Due to different relative velocities, the distance between the satellites will increases continuously but the orbit will be the same,” he said.

“When the vehicle reaches the orbital condition, we will wait for the disturbances to die down before the preparation for separation begins,” Dr. Sivan explained. At an orbital altitude of around 500 km, it would take the vehicle 90 minutes to complete one orbit. “So we have sufficient time to launch all the 103 satellites,” he added.

Even one degree difference in separation angle combined with relative velocity will ensure that no two satellites would collide. “The satellites will be injected into orbit at different locations at different angles, at different times and different orientations,” Dr. Sivan said.

In June last year, ISRO launched 20 satellites in one go. It took about 26 minutes to launch all the 20 satellites. In 2008, ISRO launched 10 satellites in a single mission. The highest number of satellites launched in a single mission so far has been 37 by Russia in 2014; NASA launched 29 satellites in one go in 2013.

ISRO’s workhorse PSLV (C37) with 103 satellites will be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. With the exception of three satellites from India, the rest are from other countries.