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The European discovery of Australia has officially been credited to the Dutch voyage headed by Willen Janszoon in 1606, but historians have suggested the country may already have been explored by other western Europeans.

“A kangaroo or a wallaby in a manuscript dated this early is proof that the artist of this manuscript had either been in Australia, or even more interestingly, that travellers’ reports and drawings of the interesting animals found in this new world were already available in Portugal,” Les Enluminures researcher Laura Light said.

“Portugal was extremely secretive about her trade routes during this period, explaining why their presence there wasn’t widely known.”

Peter Trickett, an award-winning historian and author of Beyond Capricorn, has long argued that a Portuguese maritime expedition first mapped the coast of Australia in 1521-22, nearly a century before the Dutch landing.

“It is not surprising at all that an image of a kangaroo would have turned up in Portugal at some point in the latter part of the 16th century. It could be that someone in the Portuguese exhibition had this manuscript in their possession,” Mr Trickett said.

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For years, astronomers have been scanning nearby asteroids, the moon, Mars, and deeper space for evidence of the building blocks of life.

Now, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that both water and organic material could actually have our planet surrounded, floating around space on ubiquitous interplanetary dust particles that constantly rain down on Earth and the other bodies in our solar system.

“It is a thrilling possibility that this influx of dust has acted as a continuous rainfall of little reaction vessels containing both the water and organics needed for the eventual origin of life on Earth and possibly Mars,” researcher and study co-author Hope Ishii of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology said in a release.

…

In the case of comets, the icy space rocks import frozen water from beyond the solar system when they come to visit, but the traces of water on interplanetary dust particles are actually a product of the solar wind that blasts them with hydrogen ions, shaking up the atoms of the silicate mineral crystals in the dust particles. This process leaves behind some oxygen to react with hydrogen and create water molecules.

“Perhaps more exciting,” Ishii said, “interplanetary dust, especially dust from primitive asteroids and comets, has long been known to carry organic carbon species that survive entering the Earth’s atmosphere, and we have now demonstrated that it also carries solar-wind-generated water. So we have shown for the first time that water and organics can be delivered together.”

(via Ingredients for life hitching ride on space dust, study says | Crave – CNET)

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From The Magical Battle of Britain

‘Operation Mistletoe’ was purportedly cooked up by James Bond creator Ian Fleming during his time in Naval Intelligence, and was intended to use Crowley’s occult powers to lure the Deputy Führer to Britain. The ritual, held in Ashdown Forest, involved a large number of sold­iers dressed in ad hoc magical robes, and either a burning dummy in Nazi uniform or a symbolic model aeroplane which flew down on a cable stretched from a church tower to a nearby tree, accompanied by considerable pyrotechnics and much ritual chanting. (In some versions of the tale, two German SS officers, codenamed ‘Kestrel’ and ‘Sea Eagle’, had been somehow duped into attending the Ashdown Forest ritual and reported back to Hess that the Order of the Golden Dawn was alive and well and waiting to take power once peace was established).

Cecil Williamson (a former intelligence officer and subsequently the first owner of the Museum of Witchcraft) also describes this ritual in what appears to be confirmatory detail, but in previous corre­spondence with Gerald Yorke (one of Crowley’s literary compilers and later the Dalai Lama’s emissary to Britain) Williamson remarks that he’d never met Crowley. Therefore, if Williamson was at Ashdown Forest then Crowleycouldn’t have been; and if Williamson was not there, how can he claim to give a firsthand account? [3] The most parsimonious answer appears to be that Williamson is regurgitating Amado’s tale as if it were his own. More tellingly, there is not a single reference to any such event in Crowley’s own volum­inous magical diaries and no independent account has ever arisen; nor can any record of soldiers being deployed be found in the National Records Office or Military archives, while the physical geography described in the tale does not fit current or past maps of the area. All in all, it’s extremely unlikely that anything like the event described ever happened, in Ashdown Forest, or anywhere else. [4]

What does appear to be true is that Ian Fleming suggested Crowley be used to question Hess about Nazi occultism follow­ing his capture. Crowley was keen to help, writing a letter to the Director of Naval Intelligence in 1941 stating that: “[I]f it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by astrology and Magick, my services might be of use to the Department in case he should not be willing to do what you wish.” [5] Crowley was ultimately not employed, his reputation (and his pro-German statements during WWI) perhaps preceding him.

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danhon:

blech:

Eyewitness in The Guardian, via mappeal:

A Royal Navy Lynx helicopter from the destroyer HMS Dragon fires infrared missile defence flares above the ship during an exercise in the eastern Mediterranean

Photograph: Dave Jenkins/MoD/PA

There’s always a terrible tension between the awful purpose of these weapons and the beauty of some of their images.

Gandalf’s Dragon fireworks have improved over the years.

Earth bound wowz

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I get these crazy ideas sometimes.

Like: what if we took this emerging tech of semiautonomous vehicles and robotic warriors and used them to deliver food across cities, and between.

To tear down the literal and metaphorical wall between civilization and the wild. A smart city that builds robot bee factories and deploys them as needed, built from discarded consumer goods.

Androids that used non-lethal weapons and calculated shows of force to let us live alongside wolves and bears, dingos and sharks, and that dinosaur your secretly genetically enhanced child built in your basement that got away.

What if the secret to avoiding the mass deaths of climate chaos was as simple as choosing hope over fear?

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