Russians turn to astrology as they peer into future amid Ukraine conflict

As the country reels from a barrage of unprecedented sanctions over Ukraine, more and more Russians are turning to astrology as they peer into the future.

Agence France-Presse

Moscow

July 5, 2022

Astrologers, psychics and mediums have for years been popular in Russia. (Representational image)

Will there be nuclear war? Will Russia win the Ukraine offensive? Will my son survive?

As the Kremlin presses ahead with its military intervention in the pro-Western country, more and more Russians are turning to astrologers.

In Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg, bespectacled Elena Korolyova receives clients in her apartment, where two cats prowl between piles of books.

"People want to know what will become of Russia, cut off from the rest of world," the 63-year-old told AFP.

Astrologers, psychics and mediums have for years been popular in Russia, and particularly turbulent years have seen demand for their services increase.

As the country reels from a barrage of unprecedented sanctions over Ukraine, more and more Russians are turning to astrology as they peer into the future.

Korolyova, a grey-haired philologist by training who rose to fame in the former imperial capital through word of mouth, seeks to reassure her clients.

She predicts that Moscow will not only survive the economic storm, but also emerge victorious.

"The global cataclysm will intensify in September, but Russia will come out of it stable and prosperous," she said.

Korolyova charges 5,000 rubles ($90) per consultation and says -- without wanting to reveal any numbers -- that since President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine on February 24 requests from clients have increased.

In the first week of the conflict, the number of searches for "astrologer" more than doubled on Russia's main search engine Yandex -- from 42,900 on February 19 to 95,000 on March 5, according to the company's keyword statistics.

POLITICAL ASTROLOGY

In Moscow, another prominent astrologer, Konstantin Daragan, who made a name for himself by claiming to have predicted the coronavirus pandemic, also says Russia will win on the ground in Ukraine and in its clash with the West.

"Russia will become the centre of the world after the conflict," he said on social media recently.

Originally from Ukraine's eastern region of Donbas that the Russian army has been seeking to conquer, the aeronautical engineer turned astrologer claims to have advised ministers, bankers and even members of Ukraine's secret services in the past.

Having left for Moscow after pro-Western authorities came to power in Kyiv in 2014, he supports the Russian military intervention, even if his hometown of Lysychansk has been ravaged by fighting.

For him, too, business is booming.

His "School of Classical Astrology" doubled its student numbers since Putin launched the Ukraine intervention, now counting around 200 in Moscow.

STAR WARS

Sociologist Alexei Levinson of the independent Levada research centre said that an attempt to read the stars is a way of making sense of reality for many "confused" Russians.

"Faced with a universe that has collapsed, some prefer to take stars as guides rather than their leaders," he said.

"Astrology today is a kind of psychotherapy or new religion."

ALSO READ | US plans to expand military presence in Europe amid Russia threat

Anna Markus, one of Daragan's students in her 50s, said she looks to the stars for "logic in events on Earth".

"Russia is designated as the only culprit of the conflict, but it is obvious that a third country is the real culprit," she told AFP.

She has a star chart that she claims proves the United States is guilty.

Over the border in battered Ukraine, the stars, predictably, show the opposite.

Astrologer Vlad Ross, who is popular in Ukrainian media, says that Putin is "gravely ill" and "will not survive past March 2023".

"Saturn is the sign of Russia against Uranus, the sign of Ukraine. Our victory is imminent," assured another star Ukrainian astrologer, Angela Pearl, in a video viewed more than a million times since mid-May.

Desperate Ukrainians are turning to astrologers for a sign that their loved ones on the front will survive or if they will have to flee advancing Russian troops.

Ukrainians want to know "if nuclear war will happen, if they should leave their country, if their loved ones are in danger", astrologer Olena Umanets told AFP.

"Russia will explode in March 2023," predicted the 38-year-old former musician, who fled Ukraine for Switzerland.

Her $100 online consultation reassured one client, a 46-year-old television producer in Kyiv named Kristina, worried about her husband who is fighting on the frontline.

"My husband just called me. He thanks God for having survived the night," she wrote to her astrologer in June.

"Thank you for having encouraged me to pray for him, it relieved me to share this responsibility with the stars.

Putin says Russia just getting started in Ukraine, challenges West to meet on battlefield

The Russian President on Thursday said that they were just getting started in Ukraine and dared the West to try to defeat it on the battlefield.

Reuters

London

July 8, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with parliamentary leaders in Moscow. (Photo: Reuters)


President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia had barely got started in Ukraine and dared the West to try to defeat it on the battlefield, while insisting that Moscow was still open to the idea of peace talks.

In a hawkish speech to parliamentary leaders more than four months into the war, Putin said the prospects for any negotiation would grow dimmer the longer the conflict dragged on.

"Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. What can you say, let them try," he said.

"We have heard many times that the West wants to fight us to the last Ukrainian. This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, but it seems that everything is heading towards this."

Russia accuses the West of waging a proxy war against it by hammering its economy with sanctions and stepping up the supply of advanced weapons to Ukraine.

But while boasting that Russia was just getting into its stride, Putin also referred to the possibility of negotiations.

"Everyone should know that, by and large, we haven't started anything yet in earnest," he added. "At the same time, we don't reject peace talks. But those who reject them should know that the further it goes, the harder it will be for them to negotiate with us."

It was the first reference to diplomacy in many weeks after repeated statements from Moscow that negotiations with Kyiv had totally broken down.

Since invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian forces have captured large swathes of the country, including completing the seizure of the eastern region of Luhansk last Sunday.

But their progress has been far slower than many analysts predicted, and they were beaten back in initial attempts to take the capital, Kyiv, and second city, Kharkiv.

Prospects for compromise appear remote as Ukraine, emboldened by Western support and the heavy losses it has inflicted on its opponent in terms of both men and equipment, has spoken of driving Russia out of all the territory it has seized.

Ukraine's chief negotiator, Mykhailo Podolyak, said on Twitter this week that its conditions to resume talks would include: "Ceasefire. Z-troops withdrawal. Returning of kidnapped citizens. Extradition of war criminals. Reparations mechanism. Ukraine's sovereign rights recognition."

Putin said it was obvious that Western sanctions were creating difficulties, "but not at all what the initiators of the economic blitzkrieg against Russia were counting on."

Parliamentary leaders responded to Putin's comments and one, Sergei Mironov of the A Just Russia party, encouraged him to set up a special agency to facilitate the integration of occupied Ukrainian territories into Russia - an idea that Putin promised to discuss.

Giant meat-eating dinosaur had a fancy skull and wee arms like T. rex

By Conor Feehly published about 4 hours ago

The newly described species and Tyrannosaurus were not closely related.

Meet Meraxes, a distant therapod relative of T. rex that also had a large head and undersized front limbs. (Image credit: Carlos Papolio)

A newfound species of carnivorous dinosaur had disproportionately small arms, suggesting that this particular anatomical quirk — shared by the mighty but flimsy-armed Tyrannosaurus rex — may have been more common among large predatory dinosaurs than previously thought.

The newly described species, Meraxes gigas, is named after the dragon Meraxes in the fantasy fiction series "A Song of Ice and Fire" (the inspiration for HBO's "Game of Thrones") by writer George R.R. Martin. Meraxes belonged to a group of theropods — mostly bipedal meat-eaters — known as Carcharodontosauridae, which includes other dinosaur titans such as Giganotosaurus, Mapusaurus and Carcharodontosaurus. This group lived during the Cretaceous period (about 145 million to 66 million years ago), but died out before the extinction event that killed off all the non-avian dinosaurs and marked the end of the Cretaceous. 

Meraxes had a skull that was ornately decorated with scrolls, crests and small horns. Such adornments were likely used for sexual selection. (Image credit: Jorge A. Gonzalez)

Paleontologists excavated the new M. gigas specimen, which was in excellent condition, from the Huincul Formation in northern Patagonia, Argentina. The fossils date to the early part of the Cretaceous, and are thought to be between 90 million and 100 million years old. Scientists found the bones, which included a near-complete forelimb, and parts of the skull, femur and pelvis, in a location that was rich in fossil material; four sauropod dinosaurs were also buried in the same rock layer, said Juan Canale, a researcher at the Ernesto Bachmann Paleontological Museum in Neuquén, Argentina, and lead author of a study about the dragon-named theropod. 

Canale and his colleagues dug through several tons of sandstone to reach the fossil, he told Live Science in an email. The study authors suspect that when the dinosaur died, its remains were rapidly covered by sediments carried by flowing water, which protected the body from decay. 

In life, the dinosaur would have weighed well over 4.4 tons (4 metric tons), the scientists estimated. 

Related: Massive bulldog-faced dinosaur was like a T. rex on steroids

Though Meraxes and T. rex both had wimpy-looking front limbs, they are not close relatives; instead, this trait is an example of convergent evolution — when distantly related species evolve similar features, Canale said.

The evolution of diminutive arms in these carnivorous cousins suggests that multiple lineages of large predatory theropods evolved to have reduced forelimbs to fill a specific ecological niche. 

But not all large theropods had tiny arms. Some had long forelimbs, such as the ornithomimosaur Deinocheirus and the bird-like theropod Gigantoraptor. This hints that forelimb reduction was not simply related to body size in theropods. Rather, it tracks to some other trait in large predatory theropod species — likely skull size, the study authors reported.

(opens in new tab)

So, why did some big theropods, like T. rex and Meraxes, have such small arms? One explanation could be that certain predatory functions in earlier species in the Meraxes and T. rex lineages were carried out by the arms — but in species that evolved later in the group's lineage, a large head with powerful jaws became a more effective tool for hunting prey.

Interestingly, preserved structures in Meraxes' arm bones suggest that its small arms had comparatively large muscles. Though proportionally tiny, these limbs may not have been completely useless, Canale said.

"I do not think they were useful in predation, given [that] most of the actions related to this were most likely performed by the head. I’m inclined to think that they were used in other kinds of activities, like holding the female during mating, or helping to raise the body from a prone position," Canale told Live Science.

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—Dinosaur 'reaper' with massive claws found in Japan

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—T. rex and its close relatives were warm-blooded like modern birds

And Meraxes' puny arms weren’t the only feature that caught the paleontologists' attention. The big dinosaur's skull was surprisingly ornate, decorated with crests, furrows, bumps and miniature horns. This type of ornamentation typically appears late in development, when animals become sexually mature, which hints that the elaborate ornamentation played a role in helping Meraxes find a mate. 

"Given that sexual selection is a powerful evolutionary pressure, I think the cranial ornamentations are related to some kind of display traits," Canale said. "But given that we cannot directly observe their behavior, it is impossible to be certain about this."

The findings were published July 7 in the journal Current Biology(opens in new tab). 

Activists Hijack Boris Johnson Resignation Coverage With ‘Benny Hill’ Theme, Thanks to Hugh Grant

Actor’s off-the-cuff Twitter request to “Yakety Sax” the aftermath of Boris Johnson resignation is both comedy gold and “politically damaging”

By DANIEL KREPS

Anti-Brexit protester Steve Bray

AP

U.K. activists celebrated the resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson in perhaps the most British way possible: By hijacking live televised interviews with Conservative Party members with the Benny Hill theme song.

The shenanigans started, British-ly enough, after actor Hugh Grant tweeted to activist Steve Bray in the aftermath of Johnson’s resignation, “Glad you have your speakers back. Do you by any chance have the Benny Hill music to hand?”

Bray, who descended on the park outside the British Parliament in anticipation of Johnson’s last day as Prime Minister with portable speakers in hand, eagerly obliged

Bray was in close enough proximity to Parliament that the sound of the Benny Hill theme — a.k.a. “Yakety Sax,” a novelty pop song that remains synonymous with bumbling antics even decades after the sketch comedy show last aired — permeated into news programs’ interviews with Tory members laying the groundwork for the post-Johnson government. The results were hilarious and damning:

As The Guardian politics writer Christopher Hope noted on Twitter, “This interview with its Benny Hill theme is so politically damaging. The Tories are a laughing stock.”

Bray did not escape the clever protest unscathed, later tweeting that the police had confiscated two of the offending speakers. However, reinforcements — three more speakers — were due Friday, ensuring the troll would continue.

TRIGGER WARNING ITS SEXIST , CHAUVINIST, BRIT CULTURE OF THE SIXTIES

UK
Swarms of jellyfish wash up on UK beaches due to high temperatures

The UK saw its hottest day last month with maximum temperatures exceeding heatwave threshold.

By Sadhna Yadav
07/07/22

Thousands of jellyfish have been spotted on beaches all across the UK as warmer temperatures have allowed their population to increase.

Swarms of compass jellyfish and lion's mane jellyfish have been spotted in Wales and Ireland. The lion's mane jellyfish is widespread across Europe. They have a deep red complexion with thin white tendrils and are dangerous creatures. Any contact with them can cause a nasty sting.

Compass jellyfish have distinctive red and orange markings. They are usually 30cm. in diameter and resemble a compass. The experts have attributed the spotting to increased temperatures that allow jellyfish to bloom into large groups as more sunlight results in more plankton for the jellyfish to eat.

Overfishing is another factor which is allowing their population to increase. Less fish in the sea implies there is less competition for food.

Jellyfish populations are expected to further rise due to increasing sea temperatures from global warming, writes The Independent.

Families that have decided to holiday in the UK this summer have been warned to keep a close eye on the jellyfish invasion. The swimmers have been warned not to touch them. The NHS recommends washing the affected area with seawater or vinegar if someone does happen to come in contact with them.

While extremely high temperatures have allowed jellyfish to thrive, other species have not been so lucky. The UK has reported mass fish deaths over the last few months. The authorities even had to issue a red alert for the south-east and east of England.

Hundreds of roach fish were found dead at Belper River Gardens in Derbyshire after temperatures went past 30ºC in the area last month.

Oceans soaking up 90 percent of the excess heat from global warming has caused marine heatwaves that are killing marine species every year. According to a report in CNN, last year was the hottest year for the world's oceans.

A breathtaking view of the illuminated jellyfish that resembles a firework OET/NAUTILUSLIVE

Skies bizarrely turn green in South Dakota before derecho storm

Ellie Abraham

The skies above South Dakota turned a peculiar shade of green on Tuesday (5 July) as a derecho storm rolled in.

According to National Weather Service Sioux Falls, the storm brought winds close to 100 mph in some areas, meaning the “thunderstorm complex will be considered a derecho”.

A derecho storm is defined as a “widespread, long-lived wind storm associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms” by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The National Weather Service also says a derecho classification applies “if the wind damage swath extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length”.

In South Dakota, residents there have grown used to derechos having recently experienced two such storms. However, the green sky was a highly unusual sight and drew far more people’s attention, with some posting images online.

One person posted: “Green Sky’s all of the sudden in South Dakota USA …”

A meteorologist wrote: “Oh my gosh! Look at how green the sky is ahead of severe storms near Sioux Falls, SD!”


One photographer posted an image and explained: "No filter. I have never seen the sky that color of green before, it was almost eerie."



Meteorologist Peter Rogers told NY Times: “I think it caught a lot of people’s attention because the sky did have that very unique green color to it.


“Because of the unique color that it did exhibit, I’m guessing that it will probably be a topic of discussion for quite a long time.”

LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Detector at Sanford Underground Research Facility delivers its first result

The LZ central detector in the clean room at Sanford Underground Research Facility after 

assembly, before beginning its journey underground. 

Credit: Matthew Kapust, Sanford Underground Research Facility.(Download Image)

Deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), an innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector — the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) — has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered its first results.

In a paper posted online today on the experiment’s websit, researchers report that with the initial run, LZ is already the world’s most-sensitive dark matter detector. The paper will appear on the online preprint archive arXiv.or later today.

LZ spokesperson Hugh Lippincott of the University of California, Santa Barbara said: “We plan to collect about 20 times more data in the coming years, so we’re only getting started. There’s a lot of science to do and it’s very exciting.”

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has a long history of contributions to LZ and the preceding LUX experiment, including significant roles in LUX construction, operation and analysis. The success of LUX played a large part in motivating the step up to the larger, more sensitive LZ experiment.

LLNL physicist Jingke Xu oversaw LUX analyses and publications for three years, leading to more than 10 scientific publications under his watch, with LLNL leading three of those publications. In addition, Xu received a Department of Energy early career award to expand the sensitivity of LZ-style detectors.

“This is a great result, but only the first step for LZ. We anticipate a lot more exciting dark matter results in the coming years. The various synergetic R&D activities at LLNL will help expand LZ’s dark matter searches,” Xu said.

Looking up into the LZ Outer Detector, used to veto radioactivity that can mimic a dark matter signal. Credit: Matthew Kapust, Sanford Underground Research Facility.

Dark matter particles have never actually been detected — but perhaps not for much longer. The countdown may have started with results from LZ’s first 60 “live days” of testing. These data were collected over a three-and-a-half-month span of initial operations beginning at the end of December. This was a period long enough to confirm that all aspects of the detector were functioning well.

Unseen because it does not emit, absorb or scatter light, dark matter’s presence and gravitational pull are nonetheless fundamental to our understanding of the universe. For example, the presence of dark matter, estimated to be about 85 percent of the total mass of the universe, shapes the form and movement of galaxies, and it is invoked by researchers to explain what is known about the large-scale structure and expansion of the universe.

The heart of the LZ dark matter detector is comprised of two nested titanium tanks filled with 10 tons of very pure liquid xenon and viewed by two arrays of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) able to detect faint sources of light. The titanium tanks reside in a larger detector system to catch particles that might mimic a dark matter signal. 

“I’m thrilled to see this complex detector ready to address the long-standing issue of what dark matter is made of,” said Berkeley Lab Physics Division Director Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille. “The LZ team now has in hand the most ambitious instrument to do so.”

The take-home message from this successful startup: “We’re ready and everything’s looking good,” said Berkeley Lab senior physicist and past LZ spokesperson Kevin Lesko. “It’s a complex detector with many parts to it and they are all functioning well within expectations."

The design, manufacturing and installation phases of the LZ detector were led by Berkeley Lab project director Gil Gilchriese in conjunction with an international team of 250 scientists and engineers from over 35 institutions from the U.S., United Kingdom, Portugal and South Korea. The LZ operations manager is Berkeley Lab’s Simon Fiorucci. Together, the collaboration is hoping to use the instrument to record the first direct evidence of dark matter, the so-called missing mass of the cosmos.

An underground detector

Tucked away about a mile underground at SURF in Lead, S.D., LZ is designed to capture dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The experiment is underground to protect it from cosmic radiation at the surface that could drown out dark matter signals.

Particle collisions in the xenon produce visible scintillation or flashes of light, which are recorded by the PMTs, explained Aaron Manalaysay from Berkeley Lab who, as physics coordinator, led the collaboration’s efforts to produce these first physics results. “The collaboration worked well together to calibrate and to understand the detector response,” he said. “Considering we just turned it on a few months ago and during COVID restrictions, it is impressive we have such significant results already.”

The collisions also will knock electrons off xenon atoms, sending them to drift to the top of the chamber under an applied electric field where they produce another flash permitting spatial event reconstruction. The characteristics of the scintillation help determine the types of particles interacting in the xenon.

The South Dakota Science and Technology Authority, which manages SURF through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, secured 80 percent of the xenon in LZ. Funding came from the South Dakota Governor’s office, the South Dakota Community Foundation, the South Dakota State University Foundation and the University of South Dakota Foundation. 

Mike Headley, executive director of SURF Lab, said: “The entire SURF team congratulates the LZ collaboration in reaching this major milestone. The LZ team has been a wonderful partner and we’re proud to host them at SURF.” 

Fiorucci said the onsite team deserves special praise at this startup milestone, given that the detector was transported underground late in 2019, just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He said with travel severely restricted, only a few LZ scientists could make the trip to help.

"I'd like to second the praise for the team at SURF and would also like to express gratitude to the large number of people who provided remote support throughout the construction, commissioning and operations of LZ, many of whom worked full time from their home institutions making sure the experiment would be a success and continue to do so now,” said Tomasz Biesiadzinski of SLAC, the LZ detector operations manager. 

With confirmation that LZ and its systems are operating successfully, it is time for full-scale observations to begin in hopes that a dark matter particle will collide with a xenon atom in the LZ detector very soon.

LZ is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. LZ also is supported by the Science & Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology; and the Institute for Basic Science, Korea. Over 35 institutions of higher education and advanced research provided support to LZ. The LZ collaboration acknowledges the assistance of the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

Tags:Physical & Life Sciences

INCREDIBLE

NASA SHOWS OFF MESMERIZING FIRST IMAGES FROM JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE
THEY'RE "AMONG THE DEEPEST IMAGES OF THE UNIVERSE EVER TAKEN."

NASA

Deep Deep

Scientists behind NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have given us a first glimpse into the awe-inspiring power of the images it will produce — and what we're seeing is only a test run.

As NASA proudly notes on its website, the calibration test image that was composited together from 32 hours and 72 exposures, "is among the deepest images of the universe ever taken" — and the telescope is only getting started.

Testing 123

Almost as fabulous as the image itself is the fact that this photo was taken as part of an early test of the telescope's Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS). Its task is to make sure the cameras and mirrors are all aligned correctly.

"Even when capturing unplanned imagery during a test," NASA wrote with a flourish on its blog, "FGS is capable of producing stunning views of the cosmos."

Originally taken in May and not released to the public until now, this stunning image is just a precursor for the real thing. In about a week's time, NASA will release the first full-color images of deep space taken by the JWST.

Until then, we're waiting with bated breath to see how the telescope, two decades in the making, can outdo itself.

READ MORE: Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor Provides a Preview [NASA]