Join the Tom's Guide Club for quick access. By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over, have read our Privacy Policy and agree to the Terms & Conditions. Follow-up to the original 2022 James Fox film "Moment of Contact" about UFO and alien activity in Varginha, Brazil When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Below, we reveal where to watch "Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters" online and from anywhere with a VPN. "Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters" has an international digital release on Saturday, December 20 on several platforms including Amazon Prime, Plex, Roku and others.• Global stream — Amazon Prime (FREE 30-day trial)• Watch anywhere — Try NordVPN 100% risk free Fox was driven to return to the original "Moment of Contact" film by developments in the U.S. where the momentum towards some form disclosure about UFO/UAP activity has seen several senior intelligence officials acknowledge a long-running, secret UFO crash-retrieval program in a series of congressional hearings. Fox filmed the hearings and spoke to several relevant parties. There are claims concerning recovered alien craft and bodies. Back in Varginha, while Fox's team were conducting further interviews with city's former police chief and other witnesses, Dr. Italo Venturelli - head neurosurgeon from the Regional Hospital - confessed to a four-minute interaction with a captured entity. Both "Moment of Contact" films are ensuring that events alleged almost 30 years ago in this city equidistant from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are becoming accepted as one of the most famous extraterrestrial encounters of all time. Below is our full guide to how to watch "Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters" online with an Amazon Prime Video 30-day FREE trial. They'll be entitled to a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, which includes perks like free delivery, ad-free music, and access to thousands of hit films and TV shows.After this trial period ends, a subscription costs:U.S. – $14.99 per month / $139 annuallyU.K. A VPN, which lets you access your Prime Video content as if you were in your regular region of the world. Our all-time favourite is NordVPN (save up to 70% with this deal). Boasting lightning fast speeds, great features, streaming power, and class-leading security, NordVPN is our #1 VPN.✅ 3 months extra FREE!✅ 74% off usual priceUse Nord to unblock your usual streaming service and watch "Moment of Contact: New Revelations of Alien Encounters" online with our exclusive deal. We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. Bill Borrows is an award-winning journalist, feature writer and columnist (Times Magazine/ Guardian/ Telegraph/ Daily Mirror/ Mail On Sunday/ Radio Times), former editor-at-large at Loaded magazine, author (The Hurricane: The Turbulent Life and Times of Alex Higgins) and book editor. He doesn't get much free time but does admit to an addiction to true crime podcasts, following Man City home and away, and a weakness for milk chocolate cookies. You must confirm your public display name before commenting Tom's Guide is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. © Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York,
For many people, it's a mirror only when they see their own family reflected in it—an ancestor who fought in a war, survived a famine, or emigrated under duress. For others, history is a wall they can never climb. The view on the other side is fixed: the past is not what was done to them, but what their parents or grandparents did to others. When I began work on Hitler's Children, I was not looking for new evidence about what happened in the Nazi Holocaust. The bureaucratic record of the Third Reich was already vast—memos, orders, trial transcripts, camp rosters—the Germans were masters of documenting their crimes. What I wanted was something the archives could never provide: a human portrait of the children of top Nazis, the men and women who grew up in the shadow of fathers whose names had become synonyms for evil. I wanted to know: What is it like to love a parent whom the world knows as a war criminal? How do you form a sense of self when the world has already decided who you are—and it is an identity you neither chose nor can easily shed? What happens to ordinary human relationships—marriage, friendship, parenthood—when your family name carries an explosive moral charge? Some opened a crack and then slammed shut the minute I explained that I could not promise a sympathetic portrait. A few opened wide, and what came out was not a clean confession or a tidy arc toward reconciliation but something more human: ambivalence, anger, loyalty, shame, defiance, grief. What emerged was not a single “Nazi progeny” experience but a spectrum of responses to inherited guilt. Tracking down the children of the regime's inner circle required patience and a tolerance for being told no. Some had changed their surnames and slipped into anonymity. Others had moved abroad, where the name on their passport did not immediately freeze a room. Many were instantly hostile when I contacted them. I learned quickly that the children of perpetrators could be as guarded as the children of victims. I knew many of the latter intimately because I had earlier co-authored a biography of Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele. I had spent countless hours with concentration camp survivors about their experience and the trauma it had left them. When I approached the children of the perpetrators, I discovered some had been burned by journalists who came for sensational quotes and left nuance on the cuttingroom floor. Others feared the moral judgment of strangers or the social cost in their own communities if they were seen as disloyal to family. Others hoped that narrating their story aloud might lighten the weight they had carried in silence. What I heard, over time, was less a series of disconnected biographies than a set of recurring moral dilemmas. To make sense of what I was hearing, I came to think of my interviewees along four rough lines. These are not scientific categories—lives overflow categories—but they capture distinct ways the various individuals navigated the same shadow. These were the sons and daughters who saw their fathers' crimes with scorching clarity and devoted their lives to exposing them. He called his father a “spineless jerk,” wrote a book that dismantled the family mythology, and made no room for sentimentality in the face of historical fact. “You don't put love for your father above the truth,” he told me. The choice for him was not between love and hate but between complicity and moral independence. At the other end of the spectrum were those who insisted their fathers were maligned by history or punished beyond proportion. Wolf Hess defended his father, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, as a “man of peace” betrayed by political enemies and victors' justice. For Wolf, to defend his father was to defend himself from the conclusion that he was the son of a villain. The defense became a scaffold for identity, a way to live in the world without constantly negotiating contempt. Rolf Mengele—son of Dr. Josef Mengele—met his father only twice after the war. Rolf was sixteen the first time, when his father traveled from his South American hideaway for a skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps. Rolf's mother had told him his real father had died in war, and the visitor was “Uncle Fritz.” Three years later he learned that Uncle Fritz was in reality his father and he learned about his crimes. He only met him again when Rolf was 33, a visit to South America to confront him about Auschwitz. Rolf did not deny his father's atrocities; he had studied the documents as had everyone else. However, his sense of loyalty to his family had fractured the moral clarity that comes easily to people who never face the person behind the infamy. Rolf carried two incompatible truths: the father he barely knew and whom his family loved and the historical perpetrator he could not defend. Finally, there were those who took the moral debt they inherited and turned it outward—into a public ethic. Dagmar Drexel's father was not a senior Nazi official but instead one of the murderous Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads that killed more than a million civilians. She chose the path of engagement and reconciliation, visiting Israel, supporting dialogue, and insisting that her children and grandchildren be raised in the light of historical truth. People moved along the spectrum over time—hardening or softening as new documents and eyewitness accounts surfaced, as they aged, as their own children asked harder questions than journalists ever could. For outsiders, the hardest truth to grasp may be the most banal: perpetrators are still parents. Reconciling those two realities—public monstrosity and private tenderness—was the central torment for many I met. Some resolved it by letting historical fact erase the personal. Others clung to the personal, even when it meant being accused of denial. She did not deny the crimes of the regime for which he was one of its top leaders but resisted the idea that her father had been a fanatic. I came to believe that part of the work of reckoning is sometimes learning to hold both truths at once without letting either evaporate the other. Psychology offers a vocabulary for what I heard. Among the children of perpetrators, I discovered that a related but distinct process plays out. Their inheritance is not injury but stigma—the corrosive effects of shame, moral ambiguity, and the fear that others see an invisible mark. One can confess guilt and make amends. Shame, by contrast, whispers that one is something tainted. Several interviewees spoke of carrying a “name that enters the room first.” It affected romance (when to disclose the name), employment (whether a boss would know the family and decide against them), and decisions about parenthood (whether to have children at all). Some changed their names or emigrated—geographic cures for a moral biography. Others chose radical transparency—publicly condemning their fathers in books and interviews to reclaim their own moral agency. A third group practiced radical silence, hoping that if the topic never arose, the past might recede on its own. Silence, I learned, is a temporary dam. Some families preserved elaborate mythologies in which the father had resisted orders, saved a Jewish neighbor, or known nothing about the machinery of murder. At holiday meals, the past was both present and forbidden. The emotional economy of those households looked familiar to anyone who has studied families marked by addiction or scandal: unspoken rules, competing narratives, and a tacit agreement that love depended on staying within one's assigned role. Children who broke the family line—who published a denunciation or appeared in a documentary—sometimes became moral exiles among their own kin. In those moments, “intergenerational trauma” named not only what moved from parent to child but what moved from child back to parent: a judgment the older generation could not bear. Society itself became a mirror in which these children saw themselves reflected, often in distorted ways. Several spoke of the quiet pause when a teacher or colleague recognized the surname—and then the question that followed, carefully phrased to sound neutral but freighted with suspicion: “Any relation to … ?” In adulthood, some learned to bring it up first, defanging the question with a practiced sentence—“Yes, I'm his daughter; no, I do not share his politics”—and moving on before the conversation stalled. The rejectors found a kind of moral home among activists and historians. We sometimes imagine that moral burdens fade in predictable half-lives. As my interviewees aged, many reported that reckoning deepened, not because new facts appeared but because their own children asked better questions. “Grandpa couldn't have known,” a parent would say. “But he was there,” a teenager would answer. Anniversaries, documentaries, and new archival releases periodically reset the conversation. At those moments, people who had made peace with their own narrative found themselves having to make peace again, this time with an audience. The Nazi case is singular in scale and intent, but the dynamics I heard are not unique. Descendants of slave owners in the American South wrestle with family papers that list human beings as property and calculate children as “increase.” In post-apartheid South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission exposed a generation of children to testimony that shattered family legends. In Rwanda, the gacaca courts forced communities to confront the fact that génocidaires were not abstract monsters but neighbors—and often fathers. Across the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal's judgments collided with nationalist narratives passed down at kitchen tables. In all these contexts, the same questions surface: Am I responsible for the sins of my father? Can I love my parent without condoning their crimes? What do I owe to victims and their descendants? How do I build a life that is truly my own? If “intergenerational trauma” names an outcome, what are the mechanisms? When families refuse to speak, children fill the vacuum with fantasy or shame. Even a small act of decency can be inflated into an alibi. Rituals of remembrance can either widen or narrow moral imagination. Schools, museums, and media frame the past in ways that either invite reckoning or permit evasion. A curriculum that skips over the depth and breadth of atrocities—as has happened in many academic settings when it comes to the Hamas terror attack of October 7—makes it easier for descendants to imagine their relatives are free of any responsibility. Institutions can either dignify the moral labor families attempt or tempt them with a ready-made script of innocence. “Moral injury”—a term developed to describe soldiers who feel they have violated their own ethical codes—offers another lens. The second generation experiences a kind of indirect moral injury: an injury not from what they themselves did but from what knowing does to them. Knowledge damages one's relationship to a beloved parent; truth injures attachment. Others choose to know everything and live with the ache. One daughter, who had read deeply in trial transcripts, said that learning the exact logistics of a deportation under her father's authority broke something in her. “I used to think there must have been chaos,” she said. For her, the injury was precision—the bureaucratic elegance of evil. A notable fraction of those I interviewed had chosen not to become parents. The reasons varied: fear of passing on a name, a desire to end a line, uncertainty about what one could say to a child who asked, “Who was my grandfather?” One son told me that he chose not to become a father because he could not bear to pass on a story line he had never been able to fully explain. Parenthood would require mastering a story they themselves had not yet mastered. Others chose to have children precisely as a defiance of history—an insistence that a life could be built that was neither repetition nor repudiation but revision. These decisions often intersected with partners' views. Some marriages could not bear the weight of history. One woman described the look on a fiancé's face when he first grasped the details of her father's role. Interviews with perpetrators' children are not court records; they are human documents, shaped by self-protection, loyalty, and fatigue. Defensiveness, denial, and selective recall were constants. If we want to interrupt the transmission of harm—whether its currency is trauma or shame—we must map the routes it travels. That map requires both archival rigor and an ear for the ways people live with the past. The most hopeful conversations I had were with families who had made memory a practice rather than a panic. They visited sites of the crimes together. They let both inhabit the same home. In those households, the third generation seemed less haunted and more oriented—not weighed down by a surname but awake to what it should mean to carry one. A line of Dagmar Drexel stays with me: “Our generation has the obligation to confront the truth. Only then can the next one be free.” Freedom comes not from forgetting, but from telling the story in a way the young can live with. It is about the universal human challenge of living with a family legacy that collides with one's moral values. We do not inherit guilt in the legal sense. The work of a lifetime, for some, is not to step out of the shadow but to learn how to live within it without becoming it. It means loving a parent, if one can, without lying about him—and refusing to let that love dictate the terms of one's moral life. Gerald Posner is an award-winning journalist and author of thirteen books, including NYT bestsellers Why America Slept (about 9/11), God's Bankers (about the Vatican), and Pulitzer Prize finalist Case Closed (about JFK). His latest book, Pharma, critiques the pharmaceutical industry's profit-driven practices. A UC Berkeley graduate and former Wall Street litigation associate, Posner provided pro bono legal representation for Auschwitz Nazi experiment survivors before becoming a journalist. Become a paid member of Skeptic to start commenting To explore complex issues with careful analysis and help you make sense of the world. We've emailed you a magic link — click it to access your account. We've emailed you a magic link — click it to access your account.
3I/ATLAS has passed its closest point to Earth, meaning we will soon lose sight of it for good. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. We've studied its light with probes whipping around the sun and robots marooned on Mars. Countless eyes watched it make its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 19 — and yet, for all of this, the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS remains little more than a blur of gas, shrouded in mystery. Still, for all its fame, much remains unknown about it. The comet's origins, from somewhere far across our galaxy, may never be known. Its true age, size, composition, and shape are also poorly constrained. Doing so would not only help us to better understand its key characteristics but also photograph its surface and potentially collect our first-ever interstellar samples, which could help reveal how alien exoplanets form, how common our type of solar system is and maybe even help answer the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe. "We only have one shot at this object and then it's gone forever," Darryl Seligman, an astronomer at Michigan State University and the lead author of the first paper published about 3I/ATLAS, previously told Live Science. On July 1, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) revealed they had spotted a mysterious object traveling toward us from beyond Jupiter, at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h). ATLAS, which automatically scans the skies using telescopes in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa, was hunting for potential threats to Earth. Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Less than 24 hours later, NASA confirmed that the speeding blur of light was an interstellar object — an alien asteroid or comet that originated outside the solar system — and named it 3I/ATLAS. Interstellar visitors like this are exciting to astronomers because they are one of the few opportunities we have to explore neighboring star systems, which would take generations and the invention of sci-fi technology to reach aboard a spacecraft. "ISOs are relics from planetary formation, so studying these objects and comparing them to what we have closer to us [could] lead to an interesting view of how other planetary systems in the galaxy formed," Pedro Bernardinelli, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, told Live Science in an email. But our Earth-based observatories, and even orbiting spacecraft such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), can only tell us very rough information like general size, shape and composition. "Each one of these ISOs is a little piece of low-hanging fruit from a tree that can tell us a great deal about the trees growing in some other neighborhood," Wesley Fraser, an astronomer with the National Research Council Canada, previously told Live Science. But the time to catch this speeding comet is fast approaching. Because it is now too late to intercept 3I/ATLAS within the inner solar system, most researchers agree that there is now only one viable option to study this object: to chase it down as it leaves the solar system. The plan, dubbed Project Lyra, was to launch a probe in 2028 that would intercept and investigate that object, after completing an Oberth maneuver around Jupiter. For example, if Project Lyra launched a spacecraft in 2030, it would not intercept 'Oumuamua until 2052 at the earliest, Adam Hibberd, a researcher with the U.K.-based nonprofit Initiative for Interstellar Studies (I4IS) who worked on Project Lyra, told Live Science. So far, Project Lyra has not moved past the planning stage — making a 2028 launch highly unlikely — but the project could still reach 'Oumuamua if launched in 2030 or 2033, Hibberd said. Future propulsion methods, such as a solar sail, could drastically cut the travel time of missions like this from decades down to just a few years, he added. But these technologies are decades away from becoming a reality themselves. Rather we should prepare to intercept the next interesting ISO. This idea, also first proposed in 2022, has been dubbed the "hide-and-seek" approach. However, unlike Project Lyra, it is much closer to becoming a reality. The Comet Interceptor probe isn't specifically aimed at interstellar visitors. Instead, it's designed to hunt nonperiodic comets like Comet Lemmon, which has been visible in the night sky, alongside 3I/ATLAS, in recent months. These comets drift toward the sun every few hundred or thousand years and have poorly defined orbital pathways around the sun. "The whole science team is very much in agreement that if an interstellar object was to pop up, we wouldn't let that opportunity go by," Snodgrass said. That's because interstellar comets, like 3I/ATLAS, soak up more solar radiation when in the inner solar system — which, in turn, means they give off more light, gas and dust, giving us a better chance to learn about their composition. However, a hide-and-seek mission might not be able to catch all the objects we care about. For example, ESA's Comet Interceptor probe would have been unlikely to reach 3I/ATLAS, had it been in orbit when the ISO was first discovered, because the comet was too far away from us, a recent study from Snodgrass and others found. A major limitation of both the chaser and hide-and-seek missions is that ISOs travel too fast for their respective spacecraft to travel alongside, or rendezvous with, these objects. This makes it "almost impossible" for the probes to directly obtain samples from the objects' surfaces as NASA did during its OSIRIS-REx mission, which successfully landed a probe on the asteroid Bennu in 2020 and collected samples that were later returned to Earth, Hibberd said. Due to fuel limitations, it is also unlikely that these samples could be easily returned to Earth, especially during a chaser mission, he added. However, there is a third option that could yield valuable interstellar samples: the "impactor" method. Similar to NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which successfully deflected the asteroid Dimorphos after smashing into the space rock in 2022, an interceptor probe could also be sent to crash into an ISO, Hibberd suggested. While this probe would be destroyed, a second spacecraft could be deployed to analyze the debris field and potentially even collect leftover fragments of the alien object, he added. But an impactor mission would need to overcome serious technical challenges. First, ISOs travel much faster than solar system objects, like Dimorphos, meaning it's more difficult to smash them apart. As a result, most of the experts who talked to Live Science, including Hibberd, agreed that it is probably too risky to attempt an impactor mission until more research has been done on the subject. If money were no object, we could pursue all of these options. Another issue is that signals from a more distant chaser mission would take longer to send and receive, so mission operators would be unable to monitor and adjust an ISO flyby in real time or fix technical difficulties easily — a difficulty NASA faces with its distant Voyager probes, Snodgrass said. Project Lyra would likely cost the same as NASA's New Horizons mission, which flew by Pluto in 2015 and cost at least $700 million, Hibberd said. Meanwhile, ESA's Comet Interceptor mission has a budget of around $150 million, Snodgrass said. As a result, most researchers who spoke to Live Science agreed that a hide-and-seek interceptor would likely be the best way of studying an ISO up close. But if this is the method we end up using, how should we design the resulting spacecraft to maximize its chances of collecting useful data? However, the craft doesn't need to be fancy. A "fairly stripped-back" probe with a decent camera and a few spectrographs, capable of analyzing the light given off by the different gases, would be more than enough to collect sufficient data from any flyby, Snodgrass said. If the probe were intercepting a comet, and not an asteroid, it could also be fitted with a device to catch specks of dust from the comet's coma or tail during a superclose approach, just as NASA's Stardust probe did with "Comet Wild 2" in 2004. Assuming that the interceptor hasn't depleted its fuel reserves and can be returned to Earth, this may be the only reliable way of actually getting our hands on interstellar samples, Snodgrass said. And because any spacecraft is unlikely to be reusable, it may get only one shot at picking the right target. ISOs may be far more common than we realize. "There are likely thousands of other ISOs in the solar system right now," Fraser said. —'No radio astronomy from the ground would be possible anymore': Satellite mega-swarms are blinding us to the cosmos — and a critical 'inflection point' is approaching —Planet Nine: Is the search for this elusive world nearly over? But thanks to the newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is designed to spot more small and dim objects in the outer solar system, we are likely to find many more ISOs in the coming decades and, more importantly, spot them much earlier on their journey toward us, which would give us a better chance of studying them. Because comets become more active near the sun and present the most likely route for collecting interstellar samples, they would likely take priority, Snodgrass said. Harry is a U.K.-based senior staff writer at Live Science. He studied marine biology at the University of Exeter before training to become a journalist. He also writes Live Science's weekly Earth from space series. You must confirm your public display name before commenting Live Science is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.
“When an elected official's words and actions make a segment of the community feel unsafe and abandoned by their government, that official can no longer effectively serve,” the group said in a statement. “For these reasons, Mayor Eduardo Martinez must resign,” the statement continued. “No community should be led by someone whose conduct contributes to fear, division, and exclusion. This is a stark example of where toxic social media, unchecked rhetoric, and the constant demonization of Israel and Jews can lead—and why it must be confronted.” Elected in 2022, he has been a longtime and vocal critic of Israel. Following the attack in Sydney that left 15 killed and dozens injured, Martinez reposted several antisemitic sentiments and conspiracy theories on his Linkedin page. Another post shared by Martinez compared the Bondi celebration with hypothetical Hanukkah displays at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, writing that both should be seen as “performative assertions of dominance.” The post continued: “Hanukkah, traditionally a time of personal and private reflection, has in recent years been appropriated by Jewish Zionist organisations and weaponised as a political tool.” In his repost, Martinez commented, “What are your thoughts?” Martinez appeared to issue an apology for the post about Israel on Wednesday, as a backlash grew. “I want to apologize for sharing my previous posts without thinking. “As I've said many times before, we should not conflate Zionism with Judaism. They are not statements from my office or the city of Richmond. Following the attack on Sunday, the online antisemitism watchdog Cyberwell said that it had seen a “surge of hatred and incitement” on social media. Australian officials said the two attackers were motivated by “Islamic State ideology.” “We are also seeing a dangerous denial narrative online that blames the Jewish community itself, falsely labeling the attack a ‘false flag' or ‘Mossad' operation, orchestrated to divide Australians,” said CyberWell founder and CEO Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor in a statement. “If Palestine were a schoolyard playground, I would be a Palestinian, and that part of me that couldn't endure the abuse anymore would be Hamas,” Martinez said at the time. We hope Mayor Martinez will reconsider his hurtful words, which have absolutely no place in public discourse.” Before 2025 ends, help JTA's independent, award-winning newsroom document Jewish history in real-time.
A new high-power laser system will soon be sent to sea for its first tests under maritime conditions. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Japan has deployed a system that fires laser beams with 100 kilowatts of energy — powerful enough to disable small drones. It is a fiber laser, meaning the beam is generated by light being amplified and focused as it travels through a solid-state optical fiber doped with rare earth elements. Engineers designed this system specifically to shoot down drones, mortar rounds and other lightweight airborne threats. On Dec. 2, Japan's Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA) confirmed in a statement that the laser system was installed on the JS Asuka test ship after arriving at one of Japan Marine United's shipyards. The system will soon be sent to sea for its first trials under real maritime conditions. The laser weapon has been in development since 2018, and a prototype was confirmed to have been delivered to ATLA by the manufacturer, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, in February 2023. Officials delivered a briefing upon its docking, saying that "provided sufficient power, the system can continue to engage targets without running out of ammunition," according to The Asia Live. They added that it boasts "unlimited magazine depth," so the only limitation on its use is the amount of electricity available, and that its cost-per-shot is substantially lower than conventional air-defense systems. They also confirmed that the weapon was successful against mortar rounds and unmanned aerial vehicles in ground-based tests earlier this year. ATLA's next goal is to carry out successful sea trials, where the laser will face tougher conditions like wind and moisture. It will have to keep its aim steady on a pitching deck while handling atmospheric scattering and reflections. Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. But there are more roadblocks for laser weapons like Japan's to overcome before they can reach the battlefield. Directed‑energy systems — those that damage targets with highly-focused energy instead of a solid projectile — often need lots of time to recharge between shots and demand substantial cooling and electrical power. According to The Asia Live, ATLA officials said that operational deployment is still years away, but this set of trials will help them evaluate whether an even more powerful laser could be used to intercept missiles in the future. —Lasers powered by sunlight could beam energy through space to support interplanetary missions —DARPA smashes wireless power record, beaming energy more than 5 miles away — and uses it to make popcorn Nevertheless, the only publicly scheduled deployment of a sea-based laser system is on vessels equipped with "Aegis" — an advanced naval defense platform ordered by Japan's Ministry of Defense, according to Naval News. Fiona cut her teeth writing human interest stories for global news outlets at the press agency SWNS. She has a Master's degree in Chemistry, an NCTJ Diploma and a cocker spaniel named Sully, who she lives with in Bristol, UK. Live Science is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.
Saturn's largest moon Titan has 'slushy tunnels' beneath its surface that could potentially harbour alien life, a new study shows. Scientists at NASA and the University of Washington have analysed data captured by the Cassini space probe, which completed more than 100 targeted flybys of Titan. What's more, it means Titan may not have a waterworld–style liquid ocean under its frozen surface as previously thought. 'Instead of an open ocean like we have here on Earth, we're probably looking at something more like Arctic sea ice or aquifers,' said study author Professor Baptiste Journaux at the University of Washington. Around 3,200 miles in diameter, Titan is described by NASA as an icy world whose surface is completely obscured by a golden hazy atmosphere. As Titan circled Saturn in an elliptical (not perfectly circular) orbit, the moon was observed changing shape depending on where it was in relation to Saturn. In 2008, researchers proposed that Titan must possess a huge ocean beneath the surface to allow such significant 'stretching and smushing'. 'The deformation we detected during the initial analysis of the Cassini mission data could have been compatible with a global ocean,' Professor Journaux said. 'But now we know that isn't the full story.' For the study, scientists performed a reanalysis of radiation data acquired by Cassini using improved modern techniques. Interestingly, they found that Titan's shape–shifting or 'flexing' occurs about 15 hours after the peak of Saturn's gravitational pull. Essentially, the amount of energy lost, or dissipated, in Titan was 'very strong' and much greater than would be observed if Titan were to have a global liquid ocean. 'That was the smoking gun indicating that Titan's interior is different from what was inferred from previous analyses,' said study author Flavio Petricca at NASA. According to the study, Titan's frozen exterior hides more ice giving away to pockets of meltwater (water formed by the melting of snow and ice) near a rocky core. The model they propose in their paper, published in Nature, features more slush and quite a bit less liquid water on Titan than previously thought. Analyses indicate that the pockets of freshwater on Titan could reach 68°F (20°C) – which is the optimal temperature for life on Earth to thrive. Any available nutrients would be more concentrated in a small volume of water, compared to an open ocean, which could facilitate the growth of simple organisms. More could be revealed about the moon's habitability after NASA's upcoming Dragonfly mission to Titan launches in July 2028. In 2019, Cassini data revealed that a lake on Titan is rich with methane and 300 feet deep. In that time, it discovered six more moons around Saturn, three-dimensional structures towering above Saturn's rings, and a giant storm that raged across the planet for nearly a year. On 13 December 2004 it made its first flyby of Saturn's moons Titan and Dione. There it discovered eerie hydrocarbon lakes made from ethane and methane. In December 2011, Cassini obtained the highest resolution images of Saturn's moon Enceladus. In July of that year Cassini captured a black-lit Saturn to examine the rings in fine detail and also captured an image of Earth. In April of this year it completed its closest flyby of Titan and started its Grande Finale orbit which finished on September 15. 'The mission has changed the way we think of where life may have developed beyond our Earth,' said Andrew Coates, head of the Planetary Science Group at Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London. 'As well as Mars, outer planet moons like Enceladus, Europa and even Titan are now top contenders for life elsewhere,' he added.
It's unlikely that that's really the primary intent behind Callum McCartney's Playback, but it's definitely a possible take away. Despite the extreme premise, there is a lot of feeling and depth to this familial drama that asks the question: what if your abusive dad died, but didn't leave? Antwerp Mansion has made its 2025-26 debut, taking on the guise of a well-worn family home left to siblings Sara (Hattie Wood), Maddy (Theodore Anderson-Lincoln), and Robin (Fred Potts). Sara, the oldest, more responsible – and more on edge – is struggling to manage her younger brother Robin's more laissez-faire, almost unstable personality in the wake of their father's recent death, and tensions only rise with Maddy's arrival after years of fractious absence. Throughout it all, some version of their father, ghostly or zombie-like (Paddy Stockwell), lingers in an old armchair. The credit must go to designer Benedict Zephyr and the production team for making Stockwell particularly ghoulish: though it would be hard to pass him off as a man old enough to be anybody's father, his strange youth adds a wistful element to the way his children must see him. Finding an old cassette and tape player, the siblings are forced to relieve their early childhoods as they hear their dad's old superhero games he used to play with them (replayed to great effect in a gloomy, smoke-filled Antwerp). In a series of stilted, fraught conversations between family members, we see the picture of this family's dysfunction come to life. Sara, forced into a lifelong habit of responsibility and duty, can't bear seeing Maddy – outspoken and obviously braver – back at home after she escaped for so long, but she's also growing tired of taking care of Robin, and resents the chance he's had that she never got while Maddy is free to encourage him. The ghost of their father is able to find fault in all of them, dogging their footsteps and taking a moment to berate each child in turn. Hattie Wood as Sara was also a particular highlight. It is a stellar performance made doubly impressive by Wood's late arrival to the Playback team, among whom she seems to have fitted in seamlessly. All in all, UMDS‘ Playback was a well formed and cohesive production, with co-directors Scarlett Bartman and Roisin Harder carefully distilling the familiar horror of familial conflict into a tightly dynamic piece of narrative theatre.
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Fleets of drones and suspected UFOs have been spotted hovering over a Wyoming power plant for more than a year, while a local sheriff's department is still searching for clues. Officials with the Sweetwater County Sheriff's Office recorded scores of beaming, drone-like objects circling around the Red Desert and Jim Bridger Power Plant in Rock Springs over the last 13 months — though they didn't specify how many, the Cowboy State Daily reported. The law enforcement outpost's exhaustive efforts to get to the truth haven't yielded any results, even after Grossnickle enlisted help from Wyoming US Rep. Harriet Hageman — who Mower claimed saw the formation during a trip to the power plant. Hageman could not be reached for comment. We've done everything we can to figure out what they are, and nobody wants to give us any answers,” Mower said, according to the outlet. Now, though, Mower said that people seem to have accepted it as “the new normal.” “It's like this phenomenon that continues to happen, but it's not causing any, you know, issues that we have to deal with — other than the presence of them,” he told the outlet. Meanwhile, Niobrara County Sheriff Randy Starkey told the Cowboy State Daily that residents of his community also reported mystery drone sightings over Lance Creek — more than 300 miles from the Jim Bridger Power Plant — starting in late October 2024 and ending in early March. Starkey said he's “just glad they're gone,” according to the outlet. Drone sightings captured the nation's attention last year when they were causing hysteria in sightings over New Jersey. Just days into his second term, President Trump had to clarify that the drones were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to quell worries that they posed a national security threat. In October, though, an anonymous source with an unnamed military contractor told The Post that their company was responsible for the hysteria.
Fleets of drones and suspected UFOs have been spotted hovering over a Wyoming power plant for more than a year, while a local sheriff's department is still searching for clues. Officials with the Sweetwater County Sheriff's Office recorded scores of beaming, drone-like objects circling around the Red Desert and Jim Bridger Power Plant in Rock Springs over the last 13 months — though they didn't specify how many, the Cowboy State Daily reported. The law enforcement outpost's exhaustive efforts to get to the truth haven't yielded any results, even after Grossnickle enlisted help from Wyoming US Rep. Harriet Hageman — who Mower claimed saw the formation during a trip to the power plant. Hageman could not be reached for comment. Now, though, Mower said that people seem to have accepted it as “the new normal.” “It's like this phenomenon that continues to happen, but it's not causing any, you know, issues that we have to deal with — other than the presence of them,” he told the outlet. Meanwhile, Niobrara County Sheriff Randy Starkey told the Cowboy State Daily that residents of his community also reported mystery drone sightings over Lance Creek — more than 300 miles from the Jim Bridger Power Plant — starting in late October 2024 and ending in early March. Starkey said he's “just glad they're gone,” according to the outlet. Drone sightings captured the nation's attention last year when they were causing hysteria in sightings over New Jersey. Just days into his second term, President Trump had to clarify that the drones were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to quell worries that they posed a national security threat. In October, though, an anonymous source with an unnamed military contractor told The Post that their company was responsible for the hysteria.