Germany: AfD to join patriot partners in EU parliament: a "Europe of Fatherlands."

Alternative for Germany (AfD) delegates at this year's party conference voted to strengthen ties with other far-right parties in the EU.

AfD delegates voted to join a far-right coalition with hopes of more EU money and a chance to hollow out Brussels from the inside:

Members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) gathered in the eastern German city of Magdeburg Friday to begin their annual party conference, which will last until Sunday.

The party is currently polling well nationally, between 18% and 22%, as establishment parties struggle with voter resentment. The party's numbers are roughly twice what they were during 2021 federal elections. In Magdeburg, leadership implored members not to let up.

Party co-chair Tino Chrupalla said the numbers reflect a new "harmony" among leadership. "We will carry this harmony into the next election," he said, as he greeted some 600 delegates in attendance.

Chrupalla referenced upcoming state elections in Bavaria and Hesse, and voiced confidence about the broader prospect of growing political popularity, saying, "Next year we can win Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg" — all states in the east of the country where AfD has tended to perform best.

AfD leader Chrupalla: Anyone but the Greens

He told those gathered that the party must prepare itself to govern, and warned, "We shouldn't make the mistake of committing ourselves solely to a coalition with the CDU" — referring to the center-right Christian Democratic Union, which has lurched farther right in an attempt to keep its voters from fleeing to the AfD.

Chrupalla went on to profess a readiness to work with any party willing to pursue "policy in the interest of citizens." He did make one exception, however, vowing not to work with the Green Party, which is currently part of Germany's ruling coalition alongside the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Free Democrats (FDP).

Earlier in the day, DW spoke with AfD deputy co-chair Beatrix von Storch, who suggested voting for the AfD was, "very legitimate … if you're disappointed with all the other parties."

Doubling down on the concept of protest votes being cast by citizens looking to force change, von Storch said, "This is a very strong signal for the government and also for the other opposition parties, the so-called CDU, that they have to think about how to make a different politics for Germany."

"We are not only very strong in the eastern part of Germany, here we are number one in the polls," she said, "but in the whole of Federal Republic of Germany, we are number two."

AfD, looking to dismantle the EU from the inside

Another major topic on the first day of the conference was that of political participation at the EU level.

Despite the desire of some within the euroskeptic party to initiate a "DEXIT" modeled on the ill-fated UK divorce from the EU, party leadership on Friday vowed to increase its work on the European level, something that was overwhelmingly supported by the majority of those present in Magdeburg.

Delegates voted to approve leadership's intention to join the far-right ID Group (Identity and Democracy) in the EU. Individual AfD MEPs are already part of the group, which was created in 2019 and includes right-wing populists from nine EU countries, but by officially joining the ID Group, AfD stands to receive more financing from Brussels.

The AfD plans to initiate its plan by September 15, saying ID represents, "a very good platform to continue to expand networking with AfD's European sister parties." EU financing is proportional to the number of MEPs a given party has seated in Brussels and Strasbourg.

Those within the party who oppose the approach say it threatens both the AfD's independence and its credibility as an anti-EU force. Those in favor say joining the ID Group will allow far-right politicians to battle the EU from within.

The ID group, which says its focus is fighting illegal immigration, currently has 62 members. Led by Marco Zanni of Italy's far-right Lega Party, which has the most members (25), the group includes France's National Rally (RN), Austria's Freedom Party (FPÖ), Belgium's Flemish Interest (VB) and similar far-right parties from the Czech Republic, Denmark and Estonia.

Currently, AfD has nine MEPs but is looking to up that number to around 20.

'Europe, we're coming to save Germany'

Saxony-Anhalt state AfD leader Martin Richard claimed the meeting in Magdeburg would send a clear signal, one that says, "Europe, we're coming to save Germany." Like the ID Group itself, the AfD is calling for a transfer of power back to individual countries, states and municipalities, seeking what it calls a "Europe of fatherlands."

Party Co-Chair Alice Weidel said nations are the "right vessel for democracies," claiming Europe had become bloated and inefficient.

Marketing the New World Order

 

Webb Detects Water Vapor in Rocky Planet-forming Zone

Summary

The finding shows that a water reservoir is available for terrestrial planets that might be coalescing there.

Water, water, everywhere – not in drops, but as steam. Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered that thirsty planets in the PDS 70 system have access to a reservoir of water. Importantly, the water vapor was found within 100 million miles of the star – the region where terrestrial planets like Earth may be forming. (The Earth orbits 93 million miles from our Sun.)

PDS 70 is cooler than our Sun and is estimated to be 5.4 million years old. It is home to two known gas giant planets, at least one of which is still accreting material and growing. This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disk already known to host two or more protoplanets.

Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. New insights may come from the planetary system PDS 70, located 370 light-years away. The star hosts both an inner disk and outer disk of gas and dust, separated by a 5 billion-mile-wide (8 billion kilometer) gap, and within that gap are two known gas-giant planets.

New measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) have detected water vapor in the system’s inner disk, at distances of less than 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the star – the region where rocky, terrestrial planets may be forming. This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disk already known to host two or more protoplanets.

“We’ve seen water in other disks, but not so close in and in a system where planets are currently assembling. We couldn’t make this type of measurement before Webb,” said lead author Giulia Perotti of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany.

“This discovery is extremely exciting, as it probes the region where rocky planets similar to Earth typically form,” added MPIA director Thomas Henning, a co-author on the paper. Henning is co-principal investigator of Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), which made the detection, and the principal investigator of the MINDS (MIRI Mid-Infrared Disk Survey) program that took the data.

A Steamy Environment for Forming Planets

PDS 70 is a K-type star, cooler than our Sun, and is estimated to be 5.4 million years old. This is relatively old in terms of stars with planet-forming disks, which made the discovery of water vapor surprising.

Over time, the gas and dust content of planet-forming disks declines. Either the central star’s radiation and winds blow out such material, or the dust grows into larger objects that eventually form planets. As previous studies failed to detect water in the central regions of similarly aged disks, astronomers suspected it might not survive the harsh stellar radiation, leading to a dry environment for the formation of any rocky planets.

Astronomers haven’t yet detected any planets forming within the inner disk of PDS 70. However, they do see the raw materials for building rocky worlds in the form of silicates. The detection of water vapor implies that if rocky planets are forming there, they will have water available to them from the beginning.

“We find a relatively high amount of small dust grains. Combined with our detection of water vapor, the inner disk is a very exciting place,” said co-author Rens Waters of Radboud University in The Netherlands.

What is the Water’s Origin?

The discovery raises the question of where the water came from. The MINDS team considered two different scenarios to explain their finding.

One possibility is that water molecules are forming in place, where we detect them, as hydrogen and oxygen atoms combine. A second possibility is that ice-coated dust particles are being transported from the cool outer disk to the hot inner disk, where the water ice sublimates and turns into vapor. Such a transport system would be surprising, since the dust would have to cross the large gap carved out by the two giant planets.

Another question raised by the discovery is how water could survive so close to the star, when the star’s ultraviolet light should break apart any water molecules. Most likely, surrounding material such as dust and other water molecules serves as a protective shield. As a result, the water detected in the inner disk of PDS 70 could survive destruction.

JWST Just Detected Carbon in The Cosmic Dawn… Before We Thought Carbon Was Possible

The discovery suggests the earliest galaxies formed more quickly after the Big Bang than previously thought.

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected the earliest-known carbon dust in a galaxy ever. 

Using the powerful space telescope, a team of astronomers spotted signs of the element that forms the backbone of all life in ten different galaxies that existed as early as 1 billion years after the Big Bang. 

The detection of carbon dust so soon after the Big Bang could shake up theories surrounding the chemical evolution of the universe. This is because the processes that create and disperse heavier elements like this should take longer to build up in galaxies than the age of these young galaxies at the time the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sees them.

"The surprising finding here is that we can directly see and learn about the properties of these dust grains at such an early time, and we can tell they're carbon-based," research lead author and University of Cambridge scientist Joris Witstok told Space.com. "That's quite surprising in the context of what we previously expected."

The team spotted this carbon dust in this sample of ten galaxies by examining the light spectrum from them as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). Detections like this are possible because elements absorb and emit light at characteristic wavelengths meaning they leave their "fingerprints" in light from sources such as galaxies and stars. 

The aromatic hydrocarbon dust was given away by a 'bump' in the absorption of specific ultraviolet frequencies of light. 

The question is, how did these young galaxies get enriched with carbon so quickly?

A cosmic "get rich quick" scheme?

The early universe was made up of mostly hydrogen and helium with tiny traces of some heavier elements, meaning the first stars and galaxies should have the same composition of just these light elements. 

Conventional models of the universe's chemical evolution suggest that heavy elements like carbon and oxygen are forged in the nuclear furnaces at the heart of stars. When the first stars ran out of the fuel for nuclear fusion and reached the end of their lives, they exploded in supernovas dispersing the material they had forged through the cosmos. This stellar matter is integrated into interstellar dust. 

When dense patches of this dust collapse, this material becomes the building blocks of the next generation of stars, which are thus richer in heavy elements and sit in similarly enriched galaxies. 

This is challenged by the findings reached by Witstok and colleagues as some of the galaxies they saw PAH dust in are estimated to be somewhere in the region of 10 million years old. That implies there must be a creation and dispersal method for carbon that works on a relatively short time scale.

The findings exemplify the kind of science that wouldn't have been possible before the JWST, which began observing the universe and delivering data and images in July 2022. 

The team's research was published on July 19 in the journal Nature. 

When treason prospers

The vote [by the U.S. House of Representatives] was 412-9-1 to endorse the symbolic measure, which says Israel “is not a racist or apartheid state,” rejects antisemitism and xenophobia in all forms and declares that the U.S. “will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel.” 

‘Mindblowing’: how James Webb telescope’s snapshots of infant universe transformed astronomy

 

It took a remarkably long time for the light emitted by a group of ancient galaxies to reach the James Webb space telescope last year. Astronomers have calculated that the photons were in transit for more than 13bn years – almost the entire history of the cosmos – before they reached the orbiting observatory.

The results are scientifically dramatic and have revealed that the universe was already deep into the process of star formation only a short time after its big bang birth – although the photographs themselves are scarcely stunning in appearance: a handful of smudges, a couple of glowing spheres and an image that has been described as a glowing dog bone.

The world of astronomy has been dazzled, nevertheless. Among the objects caught in the telescope’s giant mirror is one that turns out to be the oldest known galaxy in the universe. The prosaically named JADES-GS-z13-0 appears as it did a mere 320m years after the big bang, long before the creation of our own planet. It also turns out to be tiny compared with our own galaxy, yet it was clearly creating new stars at a rate comparable to the Milky Way.

Intriguingly, this stellar fecundity is shared by several other ancient galaxies photographed by the James Webb telescope (JWST). These snapshots of the infant universe show that the first stars and galaxies had already formed and were evolving much earlier than most scientists had expected.

“These galaxies are very, very young yet they have already become hotbeds for star formation. It’s remarkable,” said Prof Brant Robertson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This enthusiasm was shared by Kevin Hainline, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “We have observed the earliest galaxies in the universe and it has been thrilling,” he told the Observer. “It has opened an entirely new chapter in the history of astronomy. It is telling us the universe was dynamic from the beginning.”

The £6.8bn James Webb telescope – the most ambitious, costly robot probe ever built – was launched on Christmas Day 2021, and took six months to position itself in deep space while its 18 hexagons of gold-coated beryllium mirror were unfurled and slotted together like a blooming flower to create a huge 6.5-metre (21ft) mirror. Then, exactly a year ago, the James Webb began taking its first images of the cosmos.

The completion of its first year of operations was celebrated last week by Nasa who built the observatory with European and Canadian space agency collaboration. The US space agency released images which depicted stars in our own galaxy that were coalescing out of clouds of interstellar dust. Given that it had taken more than 30 years to design and build the James Webb telescope – which endured major delays and threats of cancellation throughout its history – the anniversary was always going to be marked as an occasion that mixed relief with spectacle.

And the photographs of the Rho Ophiuchi star field are certainly stunning. However, the far more muted images of JADES-GS-z13-0 and its ancient partner galaxies are causing real excitement among cosmologists and astrophysicists.

More than any other set of observations, they underline the true potential of the James Webb telescope, it is argued.

“What is so surprising is the detail of the early universe that it has revealed,” said Sandro Taccella, a Cambridge University astrophysicist. “Theory predicted that very complex cosmological processes would be occurring at this time, though I did not expect to be able to observe them. However, the telescope takes such magnificently sharp images, we can actually see this complexity in operation. It was surprising – and very gratifying.”

In the first moments after the big bang, the universe was extremely hot and dense. As it cooled, protons and neutrons combined to form atomic nuclei which – after a few hundred thousand years – trapped electrons to create the first atoms. These coalesced into clouds of gas from which the first stars emerged hundreds of millions of years later.

However, another type of matter also emerged from the big bang, one that accounts for a very large fraction of all the mass in the universe. This is called dark matter and is only known through its gravitational effects – which were considerable, it transpires. “Dark matter assembled first after the big bang and began creating halos of unseen material which then attracted hydrogen and helium atoms to create gas clouds from which stars and galaxies eventually formed,” said Taccella.

“If it hadn’t been for dark matter, stars and galaxies would not have appeared until much later in the universe’s history. Now we have the James Webb, we can study how that happened in detail and hopefully get a better understanding of the role of dark matter in shaping the cosmos.”

The fact that dark matter played a key role in greatly speeding up the formation of the first stars and galaxies is highlighted through the photographs taken of ancient galaxies that include JADES-GS-z13-0. “It is already a complex structure, and that is mindblowing,” said Hainline. “We can see that it is a growing galaxy and that is a really beautiful thing.”

Only a handful of ancient galaxies had been discovered before the launch of the James Webb telescope. Using the observatory, the project known as JADES – the JSWT Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey – has identified a total of 717 such objects in less than a year.

“The really interesting question is what then happened to these galaxies,” added Robertson. “It is clear that they did not stay that way for the next 13bn years, but merged with other galaxies over time. That is how gravity works its wonders. It pulled them together so that they became bigger and bigger galaxies. And that is what you see in our own Milky Way today.

“We can actually see the remnants of other galaxies that were pulled in and accreted into our own galaxy. The images from the James Webb are showing us how that process began.”

“It is already a complex structure, and that is mind-blowing,” said Hainline. “We can see that it is a growing galaxy and that is a really beautiful thing.”

 

New 3D Visualization Highlights 5,000 Galaxies Revealed by Webb in CEERS Survey

Summary

Data shows Webb’s ability to image and identify thousands of galaxies at once.

The Space Telescope Science Institute’s Office of Public Outreach has released a new scientific visualization of data from the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science) Survey. The video represents Webb’s exploration of the region known as the Extended Groth Strip, revealing many galaxies that have never been seen before. It displays a wealth of galaxies across the universe and concludes on Maisie’s Galaxy, which resides 13.4 billion light-years away from Earth.

This video, a scientific visualization of the galaxies captured as a part of the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science) Survey, showcases a large undertaking by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. It flies by thousands of galaxies, starting with those nearby and ending with less-developed galaxies in the very distant universe, including one never seen before Webb. 

The area highlighted in this visualization is a small part of the Extended Groth Strip, a region between the Ursa Major and Boötes constellations originally observed by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2004 and 2005. While this vast region contains about 100,000 galaxies, the visualization focuses on approximately 5,000 – with the nearest and more complex galaxies, shown in the beginning, located within a few billion light-years of Earth. As the visualization proceeds, showing galaxies farther away from Earth, we see different stages of the universe’s history and evolution.

The visualization’s farthest galaxy, known as Maisie’s Galaxy, is a target of great interest to astronomers. It formed about 390 million years after the big bang, or about 13.4 billion years ago. It’s not only one of the first bright, extremely distant galaxies found by Webb, but it’s also an example of an early galaxy that only Webb could see. This is because Webb’s instruments can capture the light from these early galaxies, which has been shifted to infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe. 

“This observatory just opens up this entire period of time for us to study,” said Rebecca Larson of the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, one of the survey’s investigators. “We couldn’t study galaxies like Maisie’s before because we couldn’t see them. Now, not only are we able to find them in our images, we’re able to find out what they’re made of and if they differ from the galaxies that we see close by.”

Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas at Austin, principal investigator of the CEERS program, continued, “This observation exceeded our expectations. The sheer number of galaxies that we’re finding in the early universe is at the upper end of all predictions.” The observatory’s ability to conduct surveys like these provides a demonstration of Webb’s instruments for astronomers to reference for future observations.

This visualization not only shows just how far Webb can observe, but also how much it builds off the accomplishments of Hubble. In many cases, Hubble’s observations, along with Webb’s data from the CEERS Survey, enabled researchers to determine which galaxies were truly far away – the early-universe galaxies of interest – and which were nearby, but so dusty that their visible light was obscured. 

With these observations, the next goal for researchers is to learn about the formation of stars in these early galaxies.

“We’re used to thinking of galaxies as smoothly growing,” Finkelstein remarked. “But maybe these stars are forming like firecrackers. Are these galaxies forming more stars than expected? Are the stars they’re making more massive than we expect? These data have given us the information to ask these questions. Now, we need more data to get those answers.”

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Bonus Video:

Webb Celebrates First Year of Science with Close-up on Birth of Sun-like Stars

The Webb Space Telescope is marking one year of cosmic photographs with one of its best yet: the dramatic close-up of dozens of stars at the moment of birth.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The Webb Space Telescope is marking one year of cosmic photographs with one of its best yet: the dramatic close-up of dozens of stars at the moment of birth.

NASA unveiled the latest snapshot Wednesday, revealing 50 baby stars in a cloud complex 390 light-years away. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).

The region is relatively small and quiet yet full of illuminated gases, jets of hydrogen and even dense cocoons of dust with the delicate beginnings of even more stars.

All of the young stars appear to be no bigger than our sun. Scientists said the breathtaking shot provides the best clarity yet of this brief phase of a star’s life.

“It’s like a glimpse of what our own system would have looked like billions of years ago when it was forming,” NASA program scientist Eric Smith told The Associated Press.

Smith pointed out that the starlight visible in the image actually left there 390 years ago. On Earth in 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei went on trial in Rome for saying that the Earth revolved around the sun. The Vatican in 1992 acknowledged Galileo was wronged.

This cloud complex, known as Rho Ophiuchi, is the closest star-forming region to Earth and is found in the sky near the border of the constellations Ophiuchus and Scorpius, the serpent-bearer and scorpion. With no stars in the foreground of the photo, NASA noted, the details stand out all the more. Some of the stars display shadows indicating possible planets in the making, according to NASA.

It “presents star birth as an impressionistic masterpiece,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a tweet.

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"It doesn't refute Big Bang cosmology or say we have to start from scratch. But what it does say is, we do have to learn new ways of getting stars and galaxies to assemble very quickly after the Big Bang, within a couple of hundred million years."

Electric Fields are Pivotal in Encoding Memories

Summary: Our brains have been likened to an orchestra, with neurons as musicians creating a symphony of thought and memory.

A recent study reveals the conductor behind this symphony: electric fields. These fields are generated by the combined electrical activity of neurons, orchestrating them into functional networks.

This research shines a light on the brain’s complex inner workings and could impact the future of brain-computer interfaces.

Key Facts:

1. Electric fields generated by the collective electrical activity of neurons coordinate information across key brain regions.
2. This process is made possible by a mechanism called “ephaptic coupling,” which can influence the spiking of neurons and, thus, their signaling to other neurons.
3. Findings could improve our ability to read information from the brain and have implications for the design of brain-controlled prosthetics.

The “circuit” metaphor of the brain is as indisputable as it is familiar: Neurons forge direct physical connections to create functional networks, for instance to store memories or produce thoughts.

But the metaphor is also incomplete. What drives these circuits and networks to come together? New evidence suggests that at least some of this coordination comes from electric fields.

The new study in Cerebral Cortex shows that as animals played working memory games, the information about what they were remembering was coordinated across two key brain regions by the electric field that emerged from the underlying electrical activity of all participating neurons.

The field, in turn, appeared to drive the neural activity, or the fluctuations of voltage apparent across the cells’ membranes.

If the neurons are musicians in an orchestra, the brain regions are their sections, and the memory is the music they produce, the study’s authors said, then the electric field is the conductor.

The physical mechanism by which this prevailing electric field influences the membrane voltage of constituent neurons is called “ephaptic coupling.”  Those membrane voltages are fundamental to brain activity.

When they cross a threshold, neurons “spike,” sending an electrical transmission that signals other neurons across connections called synapses. But any amount of electrical activity could contribute to a prevailing electric field which also influences the spiking, said study senior author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

“Many cortical neurons spend a lot of time wavering on verge of spiking” Miller said. “Changes in their surrounding electric field can push them one way or another.  It’s hard to imagine evolution not exploiting that.”

In particular, the new study showed that the electric fields drove the electrical activity of networks of neurons to produce a shared representation of the information stored in working memory, said lead author Dimitris Pinotsis, Associate Professor at City—University of London and a research affiliate in the Picower Institute.

He noted that the findings could improve the ability of scientists and engineers to read information from the brain, which could help in the design of brain-controlled prosthetics for people with paralysis.

“Using the theory of complex systems and mathematical pen and paper calculations, we predicted that the brain’s electric fields guide neurons to produce memories,” Pinotsis said.

“Our experimental data and statistical analyses support this prediction. This is an example of how mathematics and physics shed light on the brain’s fields and how they can yield insights for building brain-computer interface (BCI) devices.”

• Entire article available here.