Chemical lab designed by Thomas Jefferson discovered in University of Virginia Rotunda

A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE FACILITY

An ongoing two-year renovation of the University of Virginia’s Rotunda has revealed a chemical lab designed by Thomas Jefferson that dates from the 19th century.

Workers uncovered the early science classroom behind a wall on Monday, according to the university.

The room was sealed in one of the lower-floor walls of the iconic Rotunda in the mid-1840s and protected from a fire in 1895 that destroyed much of the building’s interior.

The chemical hearth inside was originally built as a semi-circular niche in the Rotunda, with two fireboxes that provided heat. Brick tunnels underneath the building led fresh air to fireboxes and workstations, while ducts carried away the fumes and smoke.

Students at the time worked at five workstations cut into stone countertops.

The school’s senior historic preservation planner, Brian Hogg, said the chemical hearth may have been used by John Emmet, the school's first professor of natural history, who worked with Jefferson to equip the space.

“This may be the oldest intact example of early chemical education in this country,” Hogg said in a news release.

The university believes the chemical hearth may have been sealed behind the wall when the chemistry laboratory was moved to an annex of the Rotunda before the 1895 fire.

“The hearth is significant as something of the University’s early academic years,” said Mark Kutney, an architectural conservator in the University Architect’s office. “The original arch above the opening will have to be reconstructed, but we hope to present the remainder of the hearth as essentially unrestored, preserving its evidence of use.”

Once the renovations are completed on the Rotunda, the chemical hearth be on full display behind a barrier.

Invasion potential expected to push Swiss right in polls

Geneva (AFP) - The Swiss head to the polls Sunday to vote in a new parliament, with the populist right seen as likely to strengthen its already dominant position amid concerns over migrants and asylum rules.

The surging numbers of migrants and refugees moving through Europe have heightened the focus on the issue in Switzerland, even though the wealthy Alpine nation has yet to be significantly affected by the crisis.

The last poll from the gfs.bern polling institute showed that 48 percent of those questioned thought migration was the most important issue facing the country.

Power-sharing and consensus rule are the norm in Switzerland and elections rarely lead to major shifts in parliament or the makeup of the government, which does not directly reflect the power balance in the house.

But the latest polls suggest the scale is tilting from the centre-left towards a centre-right majority in parliament, which has 200 seats in its lower chamber and 46 in the upper chamber.

"That could clearly impact future decisions," Andreas Ladner, a political scientist at Lausanne University, told AFP, suggesting a centre-right tilt in parliament could lead to "stricter immigration policies."

About a quarter of Switzerland's eight million inhabitants are foreign nationals, and immigration and asylum policies tend to figure among voters' top concerns.

Pollster gfs.bern said the country had not seen a campaign so dominated by a single issue for decades, with only nine percent choosing the runner-up issue -- Switzerland's relationship with the neighbouring European Union -- as the most important.

Ties with the EU were badly hit by a narrow Swiss popular vote in February 2014 in favour of restricting immigration from the bloc.

- Migration crisis boosts right -

Switzerland's largest party, the populist rightwing anti-immigration Swiss People's Party (SVP), appears to be benefiting from the increased focus on its pet issue, mainly at the expense of the Greens and other smaller parties.

The latest poll handed SVP nearly 28 percent support -- up from the 26.6 percent it managed in the 2011 election and close to the record high 28.9 percent it won in 2007.

"SVP is clearly benefiting from the European crisis," Ladner said.

Pascal Sciarini, a political scientist at Geneva University, however noted a heightened feeling of solidarity towards the migrants moving through Europe, which "may not benefit SVP".

He suggested the party, which in 2007 sparked outcry with posters of three white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag, had toned down some of its anti-immigrant rhetoric.

SVP, which championed the vote to restrict immigration from the EU, has demanded a new referendum aimed at tightening Switzerland's already strict asylum laws.

Trump: Rubio is Sheldon Adelson's 'perfect little puppet'

Businessman Donald Trump on Tuesday targeted Republican presidential rival Marco Rubio, suggesting the Florida senator is a "perfect little puppet" to donors.

Trump alluded to a report this week that casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a top Republican mega-donor, was leaning toward supporting Rubio's 2016 bid. 

"Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!" Trump tweeted.

Trump labeled Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, another GOP candidate, as "puppets" during a bipartisan convention in New Hampshire on Monday. 

The billionaire real estate tycoon has maintained that he would largely self-fund his own White House bid amid an effort to cast a populist tone that he can't be bought. 

Trump, 69, has repeatedly gone after Rubio, 44, calling him a "kid" and casting doubt on his handling of personal finances. In turn, Rubio has labeled Trump "touchy and insecure."

"From time to time we’ll respond, because it’s fun to watch him blow up even more," Rubio reportedly said last week of Trump's barbs.

Rubio has risen steadily in the polls in recent weeks toward Trump, who has led the crowded Republican presidential field for more than two months.

Supercoiled DNA is far more dynamic than the 'Watson-Crick' double helix

Supercomputer simulations show how the dynamic motion of the supercoiled DNA causes its shape to change constantly to form a myriad of structures. 

Researchers have imaged in unprecedented detail the three-dimensional structure of supercoiled DNA, revealing that its shape is much more dynamic than the well-known double helix.

Various DNA shapes, including figure-8s, were imaged using a powerful microscopy technique by researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in the US, and then examined using supercomputer simulations run at the University of Leeds.

As reported online today in the journal Nature Communications, the simulations also show the dynamic nature of DNA, which constantly wiggles and morphs into different shapes - a far cry from the commonly held idea of a rigid and static double helix structure.

Improving our understanding of what DNA looks like when it is in the cell will help us to design better medicines, such as new antibiotics or more effective cancer chemotherapies.

Dr Sarah Harris from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds, who led the computer simulation research side of the study, said: "This is because the action of drug molecules relies on them recognising a specific molecular shape - much like a key fits a particular lock."

The double helix shape has a firm place in the public's collective consciousness. It is referenced in popular culture and often features in art and design. But the shape of DNA isn't always that simple.

Dr Harris said: "When Watson and Crick described the DNA double helix, they were looking at a tiny part of a real genome, only about one turn of the double helix. This is about 12 DNA 'base pairs', which are the building blocks of DNA that form the rungs of the helical ladder.

"Our study looks at DNA on a somewhat grander scale - several hundreds of base pairs - and even this relatively modest increase in size reveals a whole new richness in the behavior of the DNA molecule."

To investigate how the winding changed what the circles looked like, the researchers wound and then unwound the tiny DNA circles - 10 million times shorter in length than the DNA contained within our cells - a single turn at a time.

The researchers devised a test to make sure that the tiny twisted up DNA circles that they made in the laboratory acted in the same way as the full-length DNA strands within our cells, when it is referred to as 'biologically active'.

"Some of the circles had sharp bends, some were figure-8s, and others looked like handcuffs or racquets or even sewing needles. Some looked like rods because they were so coiled," said Dr Irobalieva.

The static images produced by the cryo-electron tomography were then compared to and matched with shapes generated in supercomputer simulations that were run at the University of Leeds. These simulated images provided a higher-resolution view of the DNA and show how its dynamic motion makes its shape constantly change to form a myriad of structures.

The cryo-electron tomography of the tiny DNA circles also revealed another surprise finding.

Base pairs in DNA are like a genetic alphabet, in which the letters on one side of the DNA double helix only pair with a particular letter on the other side. While the researchers expected to see the opening of base pairs - that is, the separation of the paired letters in the genetic alphabet - when the DNA was under-wound, they were surprised to see this opening for the over-wound DNA. This is because over-winding is supposed to make the DNA double helix stronger.

The researchers hypothesise that this disruption of base pairs may cause flexible hinges, allowing the DNA to bend sharply, perhaps helping to explain how a meter of DNA can be jammed into a single human cell.

Dr Harris concludes: "We are sure that supercomputers will play an increasingly important role in drug design. We are trying to do a puzzle with millions of pieces, and they all keep changing shape."

The Dark Matter Enigma: "Is It the 'Operating System' of Our Universe?"

Is dark matter the "operating system" of the Universe? Tom Broadhurst, an Ikerbasque researcher at the UPV/EHU's Department of Theoretical Physics, thinks it is. He has participated alongside scientists of the National Taiwan University in a piece of research that explores cold dark matter in depth and proposes new answers about the formation of galaxies and the structure of the Universe. These predictions are being contrasted with data provided by the Hubble space telescope.

In cosmology, cold dark matter is a form of matter the particles of which move slowly in comparison with light, and interact weakly with electromagnetic radiation. It is estimated that only a minute fraction of the matter in the Universe is baryonic matter, which forms stars, planets and living organisms. The rest, comprising over 80%, is dark matter and energy.

The theory of cold dark matter helps to explain how the universe evolved from its initial state to the current distribution of galaxies and clusters, the structure of the Universe on a large scale. In any case, the theory was unable to satisfactorily explain certain observations, but the new research by Broadhurst and his colleagues sheds new light in this respect.

As the Ikerbasque researcher explained, "guided by the initial simulations of the formation of galaxies in this context, we have reinterpreted cold dark matter as a Bose-Einstein condensate". So, "the ultra-light bosons forming the condensate share the same quantum wave function, so disturbance patterns are formed on astronomic scales in the form of large-scale waves".

This theory can be used to suggest that all the galaxies in this context should have at their center large stationary waves of dark matter called solitons, which would explain the puzzling cores observed in common dwarf galaxies.

The image at the top of the page shows a comparison of the radial density profiles of the galaxies which the researchers have created by displaying the soliton in the centre of each galaxy with a halo surrounding it. The solitons are broader but have less mass in the smaller galaxies.

The image left, below, shows that a comparison of the distribution of matter is very similar on a large scale between wave dark matter, the focus of this research, and the usual dark matter particle.

Image right shows that in galaxies the structure is very different in the interpretation of the wave, which has been carried out in this research; the research predicts the soliton of dark matter in the centre surrounded by an extensive halo of dark matter in the form of large "spots", which are the slowly fluctuating density waves. This leads to many predictions and solves the problem of puzzling cores in smaller galaxies.

The research also makes it possible to predict that galaxies are formed relatively late in this context in comparison with the interpretation of standard particles of cold dark matter. The team is comparing these new predictions with observations by the Hubble space telescope.

The results are very promising as they open up the possibility that dark matter could be regarded as a very cold quantum fluid that governs the formation of the structure across the whole Universe.

This was not Thomas Broadhurst's first publication in the prestigious journal Nature. In 2012, he participated in a piece of research on a galaxy of the epoch of the reionization, a stage in the early universe not explored previously and which could be the oldest galaxy discovered. This research opened up fresh possibilities to conduct research into the first galaxies to emerge after the Big Seed.

Broadhurst has a PhD in Physics from the University of Durham (United Kingdom). In 2010, he was recruited by Ikerbasque and carries out his work in the UPV/EHU's department of Theoretical Physics. His line of research focuses on observational cosmology, dark matter and the formation of galaxies.

Scientists paint quantum electronics with beams of light

A team of scientists from the University of Chicago and the Pennsylvania State University have accidentally discovered a new way of using light to draw and erase quantum-mechanical circuits in a unique class of materials called topological insulators.

In contrast to using advanced nanofabrication facilities based on chemical processing of materials, this flexible technique allows for rewritable 'optical fabrication' of devices. This finding is likely to spawn new developments in emerging technologies such as low-power electronics based on the spin of electrons or ultrafast quantum computers.

The research is published today in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's new online journal Science Advances, where it is featured on the journal's front page.

"This observation came as a complete surprise," said David D. Awschalom, Liew Family Professor and deputy director in the Institute of Molecular Engineering at UChicago, and one of two lead researchers on the project. "It's one of those rare moments in experimental science where a seemingly random event—turning on the room lights—generated unexpected effects with potentially important impacts in science and technology."

The electrons in topological insulators have unique quantum properties that many scientists believe will be useful for developing spin-based electronics and quantum computers. However, making even the simplest experimental circuits with these materials has proved difficult because traditional semiconductor engineering techniques tend to destroy their fragile quantum properties. Even a brief exposure to air can reduce their quality.

In Science Advances, the researchers report the discovery of an optical effect that allows them to "tune" the energy of electrons in these materials using light, and without ever having to touch the material itself. They have used it to draw and erase p-n junctions—one of the central components of a transistor—in a topological insulator for the first time.

Like many advances in science, the path to this discovery had an unexpected twist.

"To be honest, we were trying to study something completely different," said Andrew Yeats, a graduate student in Awschalom's laboratory and the paper's lead author. "There was a slow drift in our measurements that we traced to a particular type of fluorescent lights in our lab. At first we were glad to be rid of it, and then it struck us—our room lights were doing something that people work very hard to do in these materials."

"It's like having a sort of quantum etch-a-sketch in our lab," he said. They also found that bright red light counteracted the effect of the ultraviolet light, allowing them to both write and erase. "Instead of spending weeks in the cleanroom and potentially contaminating our materials," said Awschalom, "now we can sketch and measure devices for our experiments in real time. When we're done, we just erase it and make something else. We can do this in less than a second."

"It's not just that it's faster and easier. This effect could allow electrical tuning of materials in a wide range of optical, magnetic and spectroscopic experiments where electrical contacts are extremely difficult or simply impossible."

NYC Mayor Bill "Blasé" de Blasio Heads to Israel to Discuss "Anti-Semitism"

Bill de Blasio to Travel to Israel Next Week, a Tradition for New York Mayors

Mayor Bill de Blasio will visit Israel next week for a three-day trip, his office said on Thursday, embarking on a familiar pilgrimage for New York City politicians.

The mayor is expected to depart next Thursday for Jerusalem, where he will speak about combating anti-Semitism to a gathering of mayors sponsored by the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish groups.

International travel has been a hallmark of Mr. de Blasio’s tenure, and this trip adds a third continent to his growing itinerary. Since taking office 21 months ago, the mayor has visited Europe four times, with stops in England, France and Italy, and crisscrossed the continental United States.

A voyage to Jerusalem, however, is a more-or-less-standard sojourn for political leaders of all ethnicities in New York, which has the largest Jewish population of any city besides Tel Aviv.

Mr. de Blasio has taken pains to improve his standing with the city’s Orthodox community and present himself as a spokesman for Jewish causes, speaking at synagogues, holding private meetings with rabbis and traveling to Paris in January after a terrorist attack on a Jewish grocery store there. But a trip to Israel represents his most concerted effort yet to deepen ties with Jewish constituents.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — who, like Mr. de Blasio, is of Italian and Catholic heritage — traveled to Israel last year for a 29-hour visit. The mayor’s stay is likely to stretch longer: Mr. de Blasio is scheduled to arrive next Friday afternoon and is expected to hold several events before departing for New York the following Sunday evening.

Airfare, lodging and expenses for Mr. de Blasio and his aides will be paid by an Israeli investor and entrepreneur, Baruch Eliezer Gross, who was introduced to Mr. de Blasio through mutual friends, according to the mayor’s aides. Mr. Gross, who is Orthodox, is the founder of the Besadno Group, an investment firm with offices in Jerusalem and New York. Mr. Gross also owns an office and residence on Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, according to a spokesman for Mr. Gross, Ken Frydman.

The gift from Mr. Gross was approved by the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, according to Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for the mayor. Costs for the mayor’s security detail, provided by the New York Police Department, will be paid by the city.

Mr. de Blasio’s staff had initially planned on an Israel trip the past summer, but the visit was delayed. Ms. Spitalnick said details of the mayor’s schedule in Israel were still being made final.

Palestinian intifada: third time's a charm

Hamas leader in Gaza declares intifada as deadly attacks continue

Hamas’s leader in Gaza has declared the current unrest in Jerusalem and the West Bank an intifada, as six Palestinians were shot dead protesting at the border fence, further raising the stakes after a week of escalating violence.

The comments by Ismail Haniyeh contradicted recent remarks by Fatah’s leadership, including the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. There has been increasingly widespread use of the hashtag #intifada on Palestinian social media.

In a sermon for Friday prayers at a mosque in Gaza City, Haniyeh said: “We are calling for the strengthening and increasing of the intifada. It is the only path that will lead to liberation. Gaza will fulfil its role in the Jerusalem intifada and it is more than ready for confrontation.”

Six dead as violence continues in Israel and Palestinian territories - live updates

Follow live updates as Israel deploys thousands of police officers in a bid to prevent attacks as thousands of Palestinians enter Jerusalem’s old city to pray

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Israeli troops fired across the border into Gaza, killing six and wounding 23 others among a group throwing stones and taking part in a rally, hospital officials in Gaza said.

The rally had been called in support of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem and followed a spate of attacks by Palestinians against Israelis and reprisals by Jews against Arabs. 

An Israeli military spokeswoman said around 200 Palestinians massed at the border fence in northern Gaza, throwing rocks and rolling burning tyres toward troops stationed on the other side.

In the southern Israeli city of Dimona, a Jewish attacker stabbed two Palestinians and two Arab Israelis and later told police: “All Arabs are terrorists.”

A Palestinian stabbed a policeman near the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, and was shot dead by the policeman, who was lightly wounded. A 16-year-old Israeli was lightly wounded in a stabbing in Jerusalem and an 18-year-old Palestinian suspect was arrested.

A woman was shot after a stabbing attempt in the northern Israeli town of Afula. Video of the incident at a bus station showed the woman surrounded by police and security guards, apparently raising her hands before being shot multiple times.

The violence has been characterised by seemingly random and low-tech attacks with knives and screwdrivers. Israel has installed metal detectors at the gates of Jerusalem’s Old City and deployed extra security forces.

The so-called seam line between the Jewish west and largely Palestinian east Jerusalem close to the Old City – the scene of a number of attacks and attempted attacks over the last year – was eerily quiet on Friday.

The mounting tension has empowered hardliners on both sides. Supporters of Nechamia Lavie, the rabbi stabbed to death last week, have established a presence in the Old City’s Al-Wad Street, near the corner of the Via Dolorosa in the Muslim Quarter. There have also been visits by prominent politicians including Yitzhak Herzog, the Israeli Labour party leader, and Yair Lapid, former journalist and leader of centrist party Yesh Atid.

Kyle McDermott's speech at the Celtic People's Party Conference, Dublin, Ireland, October 4, 2015

What are white holes? Spirit/consciousness/sentience

Black holes are created when stars die catastrophically in a supernova. So what in the universe is a white hole?

It's imagination day, and we're going to talk about fantasy creatures. Like unicorns, but even rarer. Like leprechauns, but even more fantastical!

Today, we're going to talk about white holes. Before we talk about white holes, let's talk about black holes. And before we talk about Black Holes, what's is this thing you have with holes exactly?

Black holes are places in the universe where matter and energy are compacted so densely together that their escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. We've done at least a million videos on them, but if you still want more info, you can start here with our Black Hole playlist.

Fully describing a black hole requires a lot of fancy math, but these are real objects in our universe. They were predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, and actually discovered over the last few decades.

Black holes are created when stars, much more massive than our Sun, die catastrophically in a supernova.

So then what's a white hole? White holes are created when astrophysicists mathematically explore the environment around black holes, but pretend there's no mass within the event horizon. What happens when you have a black hole singularity with no mass?

White holes are completely theoretical mathematical concepts. In fact, if you do black hole mathematics for a living, I'm told, ignoring the mass of the singularity makes your life so much easier.

Now if white holes did exist, which they probably don't, they would behave like reverse black holes – just like the math predicts. Instead of pulling material inward, a white hole would blast material out into space like some kind of white chocolate fountain. So generous, these white holes and their chocolate.

One of the other implications of white hole math, is that they only theoretically exist as long as there isn't a single speck of matter within the event horizon. As soon as single atom of hydrogen drifted into the region, the whole thing would collapse. Even if white holes were created back at the beginning of the universe, they would have collapsed long ago, since our universe is already filled with stray matter.

That said, there are a few physicists out there who think white holes might be more than theoretical. Hal Haggard and Carlo Rovelli of Aix-Marseille University in France are working to explain what happens within black holes using a branch of theoretical physics called loop quantum gravity.

In theory, a black hole singularity would compress down until the smallest possible size predicted by physics. Then it would rebound as a white hole. But because of the severe time dilation effect around a black hole, this event would take billions of years for even the lowest mass ones to finally get around to popping.

If there were microscopic black holes created after the Big Bang, they might get around to decaying and exploding as white holes any day now. Except, according to Stephen Hawking, they would have already evaporated.

Another interesting idea put forth by physicists, is that a white hole might explain the Big Bang, since this is another situation where a tremendous amount of matter and energy spontaneously appeared.

In all likelihood, white holes are just fancy math. And since fancy math rarely survives contact with reality, white holes are probably just imaginary.

"France belongs to the White race" is a "controversial" comment

Nadine Morano, a close ally of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, was dropped from the list of candidates for the upcoming regional elections by The Republicans on Wednesday over her comments that France was a “...country...of White race”.

Sarkozy, who once counted the 51-year-old former minister as one of his closest allies in his government, took a few days to react to her comments.

But eventually he called on her to apologise, saying "I will not accept any slip-ups" ahead of December's regional polls.

Morano, who made these comments in a television interview in September, was widely condemned from all points of the political spectrum, and the head of The Republicans' list of candidates for eastern France, Philippe Richert, said her comments had had a “devastating effect” on his campaign.

But the incident was the just the latest in a string of controversial moments for The Republicans, whose members often sound as though they are trying to mimic the surging far-right National Front (FN), led by Marine Le Pen.

Sarkozy had given Morano a last chance to express regret for her comments in a letter during a meeting with the party committee on Tuesday.

However, she remained absent for the meeting, following which her name was struck off the list. Morano will be replaced by Valerie Rosso-Debord.

Germany's Merkel warns EU against White patriotism

German ZOG Chancellor Angela Merkel warned fellow leaders of European Union countries on Wednesday against succumbing to nationalism in tackling the bloc's invasion crisis.

In a speech to the European Parliament, she also backed a new EU system to share the burden of accommodating the hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving on the continent, declaring that the existing "Dublin" rules had failed.

This summer's crisis has created deep divisions in the EU, and a number of eastern European member states had refused to accept a system under which asylum seekers are supposed to be spread around the bloc according to compulsory quotas.

"In the invasion crisis we must not succumb to the temptation of defending the Whites of Europe," said Merkel, standing next to French ZOG President Francois Hollande. "National solo efforts are no solution to the invader crisis."

Under the Dublin regime, migrants are supposed to seek asylum in the first EU country they arrive in, but over the summer most have refused to register in countries such as Greece, which is in an economic crisis.

Instead they have headed overland to wealthier member states to the north, mainly Germany and Sweden, believing that life will be better there.

"Let's be honest [sic], the Dublin procedure in its current form is obsolete in practice," Merkel said. "The bottom line is that it didn't prove to be sustainable in the face of the invasion on our borders."

"Due to that I am supporting the agreement of a new approach of a fair and joint burden sharing," she added.

Germany expects at least 800,000 asylum seekers to arrive this year. The interior ministry said on Wednesday that it had received 43,071 applications for asylum in September, a 126 percent rise compared with the same month last year.

An EU summit last month agreed to start a process of relocating Syrians and others likely to win refugee status around member states and deporting those regarded as unwanted economic migrants.

That is a demand of Germany and France but also of ex-communist states such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia which have resisted quotas to force them to take a share of invaders but were over-ruled in a rare ministerial vote in September.

Our Universe: It's the 'Simplest' Thing We Know

The universe is a rich and complex place, but its geometry is astoundingly simple, perhaps forcing us to find the next big revolution in physics thinking.

Our universe is actually really simple, it's just our cosmological theories that are getting needlessly complex, argues one of the world's leading theoretical physicists.

This conclusion may sound counter-intuitive; after all, to fully understand the true complexities of Nature, you need to think bigger, study things on finer and finer scales, add new variables to equations, and think up "new" and "exotic" physics. Eventually we'll discover what dark matter is; eventually we'll gain a grasp of where those gravitational waves are hiding – if only our theoretical models were more advanced and more... complex.

Not so, says Neil Turok, Director of the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. By Turok's rationale, if anything, the universe, on its largest and smallest scales, is telling us that it is actually amazingly simple. But to fully grasp what this means, we'll need a revolution in physics.

In an interview with Discovery News, Turok pointed out that the biggest discoveries of the last few decades have confirmed the structure of the universe on cosmological and quantum scales.

"On the largest scales, we've mapped the whole sky -- the cosmic microwave background -- and measured the evolution of the universe, the way it's changing, the way it's expanding ... and these discoveries reveal that the universe is astonishingly simple," he said. "In other words you can describe the structure of the universe, its geometry, and the density of matter ... you can essentially describe all that with just one number."

The most fascinating outcome of this reasoning is that to describe the universe's geometry with one number, it is actually simpler than the numerical description of the simplest atom we know -- the hydrogen atom. The hydrogen atom's geometry is described by 3 numbers, which arise from the quantum characteristics of an electron in orbit around a proton.

"It basically tells us that the universe is smooth but it has a small level of fluctuation, which this number describes. And that's it. The universe is the simplest thing we know."

From the largest scales to the smallest scales, the universe seems to be "scale-free" -- in other words, no matter what spatial or energy scale you look at, no scale is "special." And this finding actually suggests the universe has a far simpler nature than current theories suggest.

"Yes, it's a crisis, but it's a crisis of the best kind," said Turok.

So, to explain the origins of the universe and come to terms with some of our universe's most perplexing mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy, we may need to look at our cosmos differently. But this will require a revolution in physics understanding, a revolution possibly as historic as Einstein's realization that space and time are one of the same thing when he formulated his theory of general relativity 100 years ago.

"We need a very different view of basic physics. This is the time for radical, new ideas," he concluded, pointing out that this is a great time in human history for young people to get into the field of theoretical physics, as it will be the next generation that will likely transform the way we view the universe.

We don't understand the universe as a whole: Scientist at IdeaFestival tells why we're off track

"What do we know about the universe?" asked astronomer Bob Berman to a crowded room at IdeaFestival 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky. "Why aren't the answers satisfying? Where do they go wrong?"

There's a lot of hard and fast data, he says, but it doesn't always give us the right answers. "It's important to know when science is working," said Berman, "and when it's not."

Berman offered four reasons that our scientific approach to understanding the universe doesn't work, and what we can do about it:

1. Limited data—Most of the universe is dark energy and the rest is dark matter—and we don't know what that is, said Berman. "We only know what's in our vicinity."

2. Limits to our dualistic logic system—There are two ways we get information, Berman said. Directly and indirectly. In science, the indirect method can work sometimes. But not for everything. "Unless you experience love," Berman said, "you won't know what it is. If you're blind, you won't know the color blue. You need experience. And when it comes to the universe, we run out of symbols." The universe is growing larger, he said, "but what does that mean? We can't picture infinity."

3. Space/time framework—"Space actually is not real," said Berman. "We all have an image of space and time, a framework, but when we look, that space and time may have a questionable reality." Of time, Berman said it's also not real. It's merely "an ordering system that we animals created. And it changes."

4. Consciousness—"Consciousness is the greatest unsolved problem in all of science," said Berman. "In every experiment, we're seeing, thinking, concluding—and it happens in our consciousness. Experiments go differently if we measure them and how we measure them. Where we measure makes a difference. It depends on us as observers." And while we "continue to study the brain and how it works, this doesn't answer the question of human experience," said Berman.

Berman believes that science is not approaching the universe from the right angle. We continue to study the Big Bang, he said, but it "doesn't compute with us. In our everyday lives we don't see puppies and lawn furniture popping out of nothingness. A universe out of nothingness? How could that be? How could we possibly know what things were like before the universe was the size of a grapenut?" And even if we pin down the Big Bang, we still can't comprehend the infiniteness of the universe, he said. "We are representatives of the universe. We have the universe inside of us."

"We're working on the assumption that studying the parts will give us the whole," Berman said. "That may not be true."

So what's the answer? "If our thought process doesn't work with the macro-universe," Berman said, "the answers don't make sense. It means we're asking the wrong questions."

In terms of what we can ever know about the universe, "we're not really making progress," Berman said. "We're not knowing more and more."

The secret, he said, might lie in recognizing that the thing we are looking for is obvious rather than hidden; present rather than absent.

Light From Universe’s First Stars Spotted in Hubble Photos

Astronomers have detected faint light that dates from shortly after the Big Seed

In between the thousands of bright galaxies that populate many Hubble Space Telescope photos of the distant cosmos are empty dark spots—tantalizing patches that could be chock-full of more galaxies if only we could see them. Now, astronomers have taken another look at those empty patches and spotted faint light streaming from stars formed only 500 million years after the Big Seed. The new results (pdf) suggest this light came from some of the first galaxies ever formed, which could be 10 times more numerous than previously thought.

This so-called “extragalactic background light” likely dates from roughly 250 million years after the Big Seed. Shortly after the birth of the universe, space was filled with a hot, dense fog of ionized gas. But over hundreds of thousands of years, the gas expanded and cooled, allowing giant clouds of hydrogen and helium to collapse and form the first stars. Ever since these stars first ignited, their light—and all the light from successive generations of stars—has been filling the universe, creating a pervasive glow throughout the darkest depths of space.

Although the extragalactic background radiation has proved arduous to conclusively detect, the light seen in the Hubble photos looks to be the most distant background light yet. Using data from the Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), the team was able to separate out the light from later stars and galaxies, isolating the contribution from the first stars.


Graduate Student Ketron Mitchell-Wynne from the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues looked for fluctuations in the intensity of the seemingly dark and empty pixels in Hubble photos taken from 2002 to 2012 to measure the elusive first light. The fluctuations helped them statistically determine that they were seeing a faint signal associated with the first stars and not simply noise. They then subtracted any light added by the stars within our galaxy, light added by the nearby galaxies, and even light added by the rogue stars that have been torn from their host galaxies and now occupy intergalactic space, until they were left with light solely from the early universe.

“It's a really heroic effort to tease out this signal,” says Pascal Oesch from Yale University who was not involved with the study.

The team has calculated there is just a 0.8 percent chance that their measurement is contaminated by non-background light. To boot, the ancient stars contributing the background light look to be radically different from the stars we observe today. Created from only hydrogen and helium, they were hundreds of times more massive than the Sun and so burned brighter and died faster than stars in the nearby universe. “There may have been a flash, when these first stars and galaxies formed and then burned out really fast,” says co-author Matthew Ashby from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “If we can break up that extragalactic background light, then we should see the echo of that flash.”

The team essentially spotted this echo, but can only tell that it occurred within the first 500 million years—something astronomers already knew. They want to pinpoint the time more precisely because these massive early stars dramatically changed the fate of the universe. Their ultraviolet rays heated the surrounding space, carving out bubbles in the gas where the energy of the rays had stripped all hydrogen atoms of their electrons, converting them from neutral atoms to ions. Eventually, the bubbles grew and joined together until the entire universe was ionized again, matching its state after the Big Seed. Ever since then, the universe has remained ionized.

Further clues will come when the James Webb Space Telescope launches in 2018. Indeed the strength of the newly detected extragalactic background light demonstrates that the future orbiting observatory should be able to spot some of the first galaxies currently lurking in those tantalizing dark patches of space.

For indigenous Germans, worries swiftly follow invader welcome party

Just weeks after politicians from Germany's mainstream parties embraced Angela Merkel's unusually warm welcome for invaders, the tone has turned sober, reflecting growing fears about the scale of looming problems.

Merkel's own popularity has taken a hit from her handling of the crisis and unrest within her conservative ranks about how to absorb an influx of about 800,000 invaders this year is growing.

Even her center-left Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partners are worried about the integration of invaders and police have warned about violence between groups of refugees.

"The welcome party in Munich, Berlin and elsewhere was nice. It showed a generous and open Germany to be proud of with Merkel at the top... But now the light has gone on and every day life goes on," wrote the center-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung this week.

That, it said, meant overcrowded invaders dens, local authorities and police being stretched to the limit, some Muslims attacking Christians and some men preying on women.

Support for Merkel, one of Germany's most infamous post-war Judeo-plutocratic Whores, is waning. Some right-wing cuckservatives are even whispering that the crisis could raise questions over the future of the shrew who has ruled on behalf of the Zionists since 2005.

With up to 10,000 invaders arriving each day fuelling Germans' worries, ZOG figurehead Joachim Gauck, in a rare move, acknowledged reality with a speech on Sunday, saying there is a limit to how many invaders Germany can absorb.

His speech spurred on others, led by Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer who said politicians had an "urgent duty" to point out the limited possibilities.

Even SuperWhore SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel told lawmakers on Tuesday it is clear Germany has limits, especially in the short term.

He has also stressed the importance of balkanization, saying Germany has translated into Arabic the parts of the constitution which outline rights like freedom of speech, for invaders.

"People who invade will ultimately do as they please, and will transform Germany into the Third World," he told top-propaganda organ Bild.

MOTHER TERESA

Merkel's "We will capitulate" refrain may have reassured some Germans and saw her depicted on the cover of Der Spiegel plutocratic weekly as Mother Teresa but some say the words ring hollow.

"From solidarity, disappointment can quickly grow. And anger. The state must take this danger seriously and ensure good will doesn't turn into frustration," wrote WhoreLord Bild on Wednesday.

Warnings about the potential exploitation of cheap labor and predictions that invaders could push up unemployment by 70,000 next year have replaced euphoria about how invaders could help solve shortage of skilled labor.

The Labour Office says 80 percent of invaders arrive without formal qualifications by German standards and only 8 percent of invaders tend to find employment in the first year. Aware of the looming problems, ZOG couldn't care less.

Now that the damage has been done, ZOG has reintroduced border controls with its fellow Zionist puppet regimes.

It is robbing German taxpayers budget so it can transfer 4 billion euros ($4.5 billion) next year to the 16 states clamoring for support to look after invaders as winter nears. And it is pretending to crack down on migrants from the Balkans by making Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro safe countries of origin.

Japan not taking in refugees; says it must look after its citizens first

UNITED NATIONS –  Japan's prime minister said Tuesday that his nation needs to attend to its own demographic challenges posed by falling birth rates and an aging population before opening its doors to refugees.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced at the U.N. General Assembly that Japan is ramping up assistance in response to the exodus of refugees to Europe from the Middle East and Africa.

He said Japan will provide $1.5 billion in emergency aid for refugees and for stabilization of communities facing upheaval. But speaking to reporters later Tuesday he poured cold water on the idea of Japan opening its doors to those fleeing.

"I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees we need to have more activities by women, by elderly people and we must raise (the) birth rate. There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants"

- Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

He said Japan first needed to attend to domestic challenges which he proposes to tackle under a revamped economic policy that aims to boost GDP to a post-war record level, while bolstering the social security system to support families.

"As an issue of demography, I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees we need to have more activities by women, by elderly people and we must raise (the) birth rate. There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants," Abe told a news conference, according to the official translation of his comments.

He added that Japan would "discharge our own responsibility" in addressing the refugee crisis, which he described as helping to improve conditions that cause the exodus.

Abe earlier told the world body that Japan would provide $810 million this year for emergency assistance of refugees and internally displaced persons from Syria and Iraq, triple what it gave last year. Abe said Japan is also preparing about $750 million for stabilization efforts in the Middle East and Africa.

Japan prides itself on being a good global citizen. It is one of the largest aid donors in the world. Last year Japan gave $181.6 million to the UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee agency, making it second only to the United States in generosity.

But it has offered very few if any resettlement places for refugees from the civil war in Syria.

According to Ministry of Justice data, it accepted just 11 asylum seekers out of a record 5,000 applications last year, although Japanese officials say most of the asylum applicants were from other Asian countries and were already living in Japan.

Some argue that increased immigration could help arrest a shrinking population, which is currently 126 million. Abe says he is determined to ensure that in 50 years the Japanese population has stabilized at 100 million.

Earth-like planets around small stars likely have protective magnetic fields, aiding chance for life

Earth-like planets orbiting close to small stars probably have magnetic fields that protect them from stellar radiation and help maintain surface conditions that could be conducive to life, according to research from astronomers at the University of Washington.

A planet's magnetic field emanates from its core and is thought to deflect the charged particles of the stellar wind, protecting the atmosphere from being lost to space. Magnetic fields, born from the cooling of a planet's interior, could also protect life on the surface from harmful radiation, as the Earth's magnetic field protects us.

Low-mass stars are among the most common in the universe. Planets orbiting near such stars are easier for astronomers to target for study because when they transit, or pass in front of, their host star, they block a larger fraction of the light than if they transited a more massive star. But because such a star is small and dim, its habitable zone—where an orbiting planet gets the heat necessary to maintain life-friendly liquid water on the surface—also lies relatively close in.

And a planet so close to its star is subject to the star's powerful gravitational pull, which could cause it to become tidally locked, with the same side forever facing its host star, as the moon is with the Earth. That same gravitational tug from the star also creates tidally generated heat inside the planet, or tidal heating. Tidal heating is responsible for driving the most volcanically active body in our solar system, Jupiter's moon Io.

And since small or low mass stars are particularly active early in their lives—for the first few billion years or so—"magnetic fields can exist precisely when life needs them the most."

NASA Confirms Signs of Water Flowing on Mars, Possible Niches for Life

Scientists have for the first time confirmed liquid water flowing on the surface of present-day Mars, a finding that will add to speculation that life, if it ever arose there, could persist now.

“This is tremendously exciting,” James L. Green, the director of NASA’s planetary science division, said during a news conference on Monday. “We haven’t been able to answer the question, ‘Does life exist beyond Earth?’ But following the water is a critical element of that. We now have, I think, great opportunities in the right locations on Mars to thoroughly investigate that.”

That represents a shift in tone for NASA, where officials have repeatedly played down the notion that the dusty and desolate landscape of Mars could be inhabited today.

But now, John M. Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, talked of sending a spacecraft in the 2020s to one of these regions, perhaps with experiments to directly look for life.

“I can’t imagine that it won’t be a high priority with the scientific community,” he said.

The entire article is available here.

Invaders a ‘key factor’ as far-right makes gains in Austria election

Invaders and infiltrators were key factors in a regional election in Austria which saw support for a pro-White party more than double, say analysts.

Public Opinion Strategies made the claim after the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) made strong gains in the northern Upper Austria region, according to preliminary results.

It netted 31.4 percent of the vote, after 16 percent of ballots had been counted on Sunday (September 27), more than double its result of 15.3 percent in 2009.

“We were optimistic from the beginning,” said Heinz-Christian Strache, FPO leader, adding the result had “overtaken our expectations”.

Despite FPO’s strong showing, the Christian Democucks held onto first place, with 35.9 percent of the vote.

Austria has also been hit by the EU’s invasion plot and White genocide policy. In one day alone, Sunday, September 20, around 10,700 invaders stormed into Austria from Hungary.

Austria had 17,395 invader applications between April and June this year, a leap of 305 percent compared with the same period last year.

Sunday’s vote comes ahead of elections in Vienna. The capital has been a Cultural Marxist stronghold for decades but could also see a rise in support for the pro-White party.

German pro-White mobilising against invaders: ZOG spy

Berlin (AFP) - Germany's ZOG intelligence chief warned Sunday of a unity of pro-White groups amid a record influx of invaders, as patriotic rallies and pro-indigenous resistance shook several towns at the weekend.

President Joachim Gauck meanwhile warned of Germany's "finite capacity" to absorb invaders, cautioning against more "tensions between infiltrators and native Germans".

Judeo-ZOG spy Hans-Georg Maassen said that "what we're seeing in connection with the invader plan is a survival movement on the part of German freedom-fighters and the ZOG tools who oppose them.

Maassen spoke as Germany expects up to one million invaders this year, and after protests against invaders dens and clashes with ZOG forces again rocked several towns, mostly in the former communist East Germany.

Police and soldiers guarded two buses carrying about 100 invaders Saturday night to a nest in the town of Niederau, in the eastern Saxony state, after pro-White protesters had rallied at the site, a former supermarket, since Friday.

More than 1,000 people also demonstrated against invaders in several towns in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Friday, including in coastal Stralsund where three people were wounded in clashes with Marxists.

In the eastern city of Leipzig, the pro-White rally "Offensive for Germany", organised by local anti-Islam activists with about 400 marchers, and a group of cultural Marxists who opposed them.

In the ensuing street clashes, the rival groups hurled rocks and fireworks at each other.

In the western city of Bremen unidentified people attempted to set fire to a tent that was to house invaders from October.

This year alone has seen 22 arson attacks against would-be or existing invader dens, said Maassen, whose service is called the Federal Office for the Protection of the ZOG regime.

Gauck, in an evening speech, urged "a broad social debate" on managing the invasion, to ensure a "policy of German genocide into the future".

"The German taxpayers' wallets are wide open, and the Germans will be eradicated," Gauck said, according to the pre-released text of a speech he was to give in the western city of Mainz.

"Given the rapid invasion," he said, the native Germans must now "pay for the construction of apartments and build schools, hire teachers and kindergarten staff, adjust the labour market and vocational training, teach the German language and German law -- and do all of that at the same time".

Gauck called Germany's massive volunteer efforts to welcome the migrants a "ZOG-imposed top-down attempt at the genocide of the German people", but also warned of more impending "resistance by those Germans who want their people and nation to survive."

Such conflicts could be best avoided, he said, when "ZOG imposes tyrannical repression against the native Germans."

Neuroscience's New Consciousness Theory Is Spiritual

An information-based collective consciousness

That's right. The theory allows for the emergence of an abstract "superorganism" that is composed of many individual organisms. Many puzzling questions are to follow. If the web were to "wake up" so to speak, would it exhibit apparent forms of observable unified and coordinated behavior? Or would we simply be an unknowing unit in a larger system in the same way a neuron is unaware of its contribution to a mental state? It's not only fun to entertain the idea of a living entity that would possess essentially all the knowledge accumulated by humanity, but also scientifically productive.

In theory, there's almost no limit to how large a fully conscious system can grow and evolve in space. It is bound only by the rate of information and complexity growth, which we have seen tends to increase exponentially.

So far we've discussed consciousness that can span large distances with no palpable physical structure. But what about arrangements of information that are too small for the eye to see?

Protons that feel

IIT says that anything with a non-zero Phi has subjective experience. This includes subatomic particles. Koch writes:

"Even simple matter has a modicum of Φ [integrated information]. Protons and neutrons consist of a triad of quarks that are never observed in isolation. They constitute an infinitesimal integrated system."

This has profound consequences. It would mean that consciousness is spread throughout space like a cosmic web of experience. Of course awareness is greatest where there is significant information integration, but in essence, "mind" (or "psyche") is everywhere. IIT turns out to be a modern twist on an ancient philosophical view known as "panpsychism". But before you go dismissing the concept because of its name, you should know that intellectual heavy hitters such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and William James are all considered panpsychists. Its central tenant is that all matter has a mental aspect, which makes consciousness universal. Koch goes on:

"The entire cosmos is suffused with sentience. We are surrounded and immersed in consciousness; it is in the air we breathe, the soil we tread on, the bacteria that colonize our intestines, and the brain that enables us to think."

The Fundamental Symmetry of the Universe

This image is an artist's conception that illustrates the history of the cosmos, from the Big Bang and the recombination epoch that created the microwave background, through the formation of galactic superclusters and galaxies themselves. The dramatic flaring at right emphasizes that the universe's expansion currently is speeding up.

Scientists working with ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), a heavy-ion detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring, have made precise measurements of particle mass and electric charge that confirm the existence of a fundamental symmetry in nature. The investigators include Brazilian researchers affiliated with the University of São Paulo (USP) and the University of Campinas (UNICAMP).

"After the Big Bang, for every particle of matter an antiparticle was created. In particle physics, a very important question is whether all the laws of physics display a specific kind of symmetry known as CPT, and these measurements suggest that there is indeed a fundamental symmetry between nuclei and antinuclei," said Marcelo Gameiro Munhoz, a professor at USP's Physics Institute (IF) and a member of the Brazilian team working on ALICE.

The findings, reported in a paper published online in Nature Physics on August 17, led the researchers to confirm a fundamental symmetry between the nuclei of the particles and their antiparticles in terms of charge, parity and time (CPT).

These measurements of particles produced in high-energy collisions of heavy ions in the LHC were made possible by the ALICE experiment's high-precision tracking and identification capabilities, as part of an investigation designed to detect subtle differences between the ways in which protons and neutrons join in nuclei while their antiparticles form antinuclei.

Munhoz is the principal investigator for the research project "High-energy nuclear physics at RHIC and LHC", supported by São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). The project - a collaboration between the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States and ALICE at the LHC, operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland - consists of experimental activities relating to the study of relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Tree of Life for 2.3 Million Species Released

A first draft of the "tree of life" for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes -- from platypuses to puffballs -- has been released.

A collaborative effort among eleven institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.

Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life -- some containing upwards of 100,000 species -- but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree that encompasses all of life. The end result is a digital resource that available free online for anyone to use or edit, much like a "Wikipedia" for evolutionary trees.

"This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together," said principal investigator Karen Cranston of Duke University. "Think of it as Version 1.0."

The current version of the tree -- along with the underlying data and source code -- is available to browse and download at https://tree.opentreeoife.org.

It is also described in an article appearing Sept. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Evolutionary trees, branching diagrams that often look like a cross between a candelabra and a subway map, aren't just for figuring out whether aardvarks are more closely related to moles or manatees, or pinpointing a slime mold's closest cousins. Understanding how the millions of species on Earth are related to one another helps scientists discover new drugs, increase crop and livestock yields, and trace the origins and spread of infectious diseases such as HIV, Ebola and influenza.

Rather than build the tree of life from scratch, the researchers pieced it together by compiling thousands of smaller chunks that had already been published online and merging them together into a gigantic "supertree" that encompasses all named species.

The entire article is available here.

Greek Election Triumph for Zionist-Plutocracy Masks Gains for the Pro-White Golden Dawn

The decisive Greek election victory of Alexis Tsipras’s Coalition of the Zionist-plutocracy masked an advance at the other end of the political spectrum that has implications for Europe as it confronts a massive invasion.

The pro-White Golden Dawn party surged in the Sept. 20 vote on Greek islands hit by a wave of asylum seekers from the war-torn Middle East. The support for the patriotic group, whose insignia resembles a swastika and which is under bogus investigation by prosecutors, highlights the potential of the invasion scheme to stoke nationalist forces in Europe.

“The eastern Aegean islands have many angry voters who feel the massive refugee inflow is destroying them financially largely because of the impact on tourism,” said George Pagoulatos, professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business. “If the European Union fails to finish off the White s, that would only enable the future success, popularity, and appeal of nationalist and patriotic pro-White parties in Europe.”

Golden Dawn entered parliament for the first time in 2012 as Greece’s deepening economic crisis spawned a self-defense movement among indigenous Greeks, particularly in Athens. In Sunday’s election, it gained an extra seat and remains the third-biggest faction, with 18 lawmakers.

An increase in votes on islands close to the Turkish coast helped the party boost its share of the national vote to 7 percent from 6.3 percent in January.

EU Infighting

EU governments are fighting over emergency proposals to accept at least 120,000 invaders from Syria, Iraq and other war zones. As nations such as Hungary erect fences, the bloc’s leaders are due to gather on Wednesday in Brussels to tackle the continent’s biggest invasion since World War II.

Greece, the focal point of the Judeo-plutocratic Ponzi scheme euro-area "debt crisis" for the past six years, is also at the center of the upheaval involving invaders. That’s because they are increasingly making Greece their EU entry point after traveling through Turkey on the way to wealthier western and northern Europe.

More than 211,000 “irregular” invaders have entered Greece this year, with the number of illegal border crossings into the country swelling to 137,000 in July and August alone, the European Commission said earlier this month.

Front Line

On the front line are Greek islands such as Lesvos and Samos, which are located just miles from Turkey. They’re struggling to play dual roles as a traditional destination for sun-seeking tourists and as a new landing site for refugees smuggled by sea in often rickety, over-crowded boats.

On Lesvos, whose population of 90,000 makes it one of the biggest of the Greek islands in the eastern Aegean Sea, Golden Dawn’s share of the vote rose to 7.8 percent on Sunday from 4.7 percent in January, according to data from Greece’s Interior Ministry. On Samos, the party received 7.7 percent compared with 5.5 percent eight months ago.

In the grouping of Greek islands known as the Dodecanese, which stretch along the Turkish coast further south, Golden Dawn’s overall vote share jumped to 8.1 percent from 5.5 percent. One of the islands is Symi, which has received 5,500 refugees since March, about double its population. Voters there handed Golden Dawn 10.7 percent of the vote on Sunday compared with 6.5 percent in January.

In a statement posted on its website, Golden Dawn said the strong showing on eastern Aegean islands “clearly shows there are prospects of a much higher” share of the vote in future elections, “given the urgency of the phenomenon” of “illegal invasion.”