Electric rain, snow, hail ....

Historic planetary instability and catastrophe. Evidence for electrical scarring on planets and moons. Electrical events in today's solar system. Electric Earth.

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webolife
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Re: Snow formed by Electricity

Unread post by webolife » Tue Jan 12, 2010 3:48 pm

I can never find things when I want them!!! Also on that Snowflakes thread is a note I posted regarding the electrical formation of snowflakes in the atmosphere. The interplay of both the attraction between oppositely charged vapor molecules and the particulate nuclei of condensation, as well as the repulsion between like-charged vapor molecules builds the beautiful hexagonal crystals. Other more chaotic events drive the formation of lichtenbergish ice crystals on a surface such as a car windshield.
Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

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biknewb
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Re: Snow formed by Electricity

Unread post by biknewb » Mon Jan 18, 2010 2:41 am

These snowflakes on a needle remind me of a simple experiment with an air ionizer. Tape some braided synthetic thread to the needle and the thread will unwind itself and spread out to form a globe. Electrical repulsion forces individual strands away from eachother.
Remarkably, these snowflakes stay in one plane.

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webolife
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Re: Snow formed by Electricity

Unread post by webolife » Tue Jan 19, 2010 4:05 pm

Not restricted to one "plane", as Nick's recovered snowflake picture above shows.
All snowflakes have thickness after all. But the relative two-dimensionality of snowflakes shows the importance of rotational symmetry in the formation process. Once they begin to form, snowflakes likely spin a bit like samaras.
Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

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Ion01
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Re: Snow formed by Electricity

Unread post by Ion01 » Wed Jan 20, 2010 12:42 pm

I was wondering why a computer simulation has not been conducted (or maybe I just don't know about it) for the formation of snowflakes. The following link shows the structure of water and how it bonds. It also show why salt is a square shaped crystal.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt ... CAsQ9QEwAg
It is square because of the way each atom bonds to the others electrically. The same should be with snowflakes. Basically, if you look at the shape of an water molecule the resulting field will not have a uniform shape like a bar magnet or a single positively or negatively charged particle. As each molecule bonds to the next it will interact differently that simply attaching two bar magnets. Each molecule added with shift and interact with each surrounding one and should eventually result in the snowfake. I am sure someone could produce a computer simulation either confirming or disproving this as I know we have enough information on magnetic fields to produce such a simulation.
Either way, the idea of Chemistry really is just studying electrically nature of atoms and how they interact with the electric field of different atoms. So, all "chemical" reactions are electrical reactions.......

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webolife
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Re: Snow formed by Electricity

Unread post by webolife » Wed Jan 20, 2010 3:48 pm

Well said!
Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

rangerover777
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Strange rain drops

Unread post by rangerover777 » Sat Apr 03, 2010 3:48 am

I thought this would interest you. I took these pics about a week ago
when we’ve got a few raindrops on a black plastic sheet, which came
after two weeks of a dusty weather.

The plastic sheet was clean since I opened it just when the clouds came.
I laid it flat on the soil and was about to cover some stuff before the rain came.
Then, a few drops came down and after ½ hr. or so when I heard a thunder
I went outside to finish covering the stuff, but to my surprise I saw those
beautiful dried dusty raindrops on the plastic, so immediately I preserved the
plastic sheet w/ the drops on them and used another one to cover.

After close examining these raindrops I realized that they came in an angle
and splashed away (from their impact point) only in one direction. Obviously
there is some static electricity in this process which spread them to look like
a lightning bolt.

Any thoughts ?

Cheers.
_HHP5741-4.jpg
_HHP5740-1.jpg
_HHP5728-1.jpg
* unfortunately the maximum size pics I can upload here is 50k, maybe someone
have an idea how to increase it ?

Osmosis
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Re: Strange rain drops

Unread post by Osmosis » Sat Apr 03, 2010 8:06 am

Hi rangerover777, I wonder if the sheet was unrolled or unfolded, before you laid it out? That could account for an electrostatic charge on the sheet-- :idea: :idea: :idea:

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Re: Strange rain drops

Unread post by Osmosis » Sat Apr 03, 2010 8:44 am

More on my last: The drops were a bit conductive and when they splashed off the plastic, they pull some charge with them. These formed a little brush (corona) discharge. The dust recorded this corona on the plastic, as it dried out. ;)

rangerover777
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Re: Strange rain drops

Unread post by rangerover777 » Sat Apr 03, 2010 10:45 am

The plastic sheet was unfolded and laid on a flat soil maybe 5 - 10 min.
before drops came down. It was not “sticky” as a result of static electricity,
at least I did not noticed that.

In any case the plastic sheet could be a good insulator for the charged raindrops
that during their fall got charged by the friction w/ the dusty air. Another thought
is that in order to create such a pattern at impact, probably the falling object should
carry the charge and not the surface upon which it impacting.

But these are just my thought, I’m not sure what the correct answer is.

Cheers.

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GaryN
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Re: Strange rain drops

Unread post by GaryN » Sat Apr 03, 2010 12:07 pm

In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

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Birkeland
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Re: Red rain?

Unread post by Birkeland » Fri Sep 03, 2010 3:37 am

Technology Review, September 1, 2010:
The Extraordinary Tale of Red Rain, Comets and Extraterrestrials

For years, claims have circulated that red rain which fell in India in 2001, contained cells unlike any found on Earth. Now new evidence that these cells can reproduce is about to set the debate alive. Panspermia is the idea that life exists throughout the universe in comets, asteroids and interstellar dust clouds and that life of Earth was seeded from one or more of these sources. Panspermia holds that we are all extraterrestrials. While this is certainly not a mainstream idea in science, a growing body of evidence suggests that it should be carefully studied rather than casually disregarded. If there is life up there, this evidence suggests that it could survive the trip to Earth.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4960
"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see" - Ayn Rand

seasmith
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Re: Red rain?

Unread post by seasmith » Fri Sep 03, 2010 7:05 am

In 2001, numerous people observed red rain falling over Kerala in the southern tip of India during a two month period. One of them was Godfrey Louis, a physicist at nearby Cochin University of Science and Technology. Intrigued by this phenomena, Louis collected numerous samples of red rain, determined to find out what was causing the contamination, perhaps sand or dust from some distant desert.

Under a microscope, however, he found no evidence of sand or dust. Instead, the rain water was filled with red cells that look remarkably like conventional bugs on Earth. What was strange was that Louis found no evidence of DNA in these cells which would rule out most kinds of known biological cells (red blood cells are one possibility but ought to be destroyed quickly by rain water).

Louis published his results in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space in 2006, along with the tentative suggestion that the cells could be extraterrestrial, perhaps from a comet that had disintegrated in the upper atmosphere and then seeded clouds as the cells floated down to Earth. In fact, Louis says there were reports in the region of a sonic boom-type noise at the time, which could have been caused by the disintegration of an object in the upper atmosphere.

Since then, Louis has continued to study the cells with an international team including Chandra Wickramasinghe from the University of Cardiff in the UK and one of the leading proponents of the panspermia theory, which he developed in the latter half of the 20th century with the remarkable physicist Fred Hoyle.

Today Louis, Wickramasinghe and others publish some extraordinary claims about these red cells. They say that the cells clearly reproduce at a temperature of 121 degrees C. "Under these conditions daughter cells appear within the original mother cells and the number of cells in the samples increases with length of exposure to 121 degrees C," they say. By contrast, the cells are inert at room temperature.

That makes them highly unusual, to say the least. The spores of some extremophiles can survive these kinds of temperatures and then reproduce at lower temperatures but nothing behaves like this at these temperatures, as far as we know.

This is an extraordinary claim that will need to be independently verified before it will be more broadly accepted.

And of course, this behaviour does not suggest an extraterrestrial origin for these cells, by any means.

However, Wickramasinghe and co can't resist hinting at such an exotic explanation. They've examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.

It would be fair to say that more evidence will be required before Kerala's red rain can be satisfactorily explained. In the meantime, it looks a fascinating mystery.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/ar ... ?nlid=3456

I read this a couple days ago and wondered, 'what's taking so long to grow the cells' ?
This like the third or fourth outer-space surviving organism i've read about, in the past decade.

I think Bush planted them here...

Total Science
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Re: Red rain?

Unread post by Total Science » Fri Sep 03, 2010 2:38 pm

"... ridiculous. They know! They're born to know that the particles in space are not bacteria. God has told them." -- Fred Hoyle, cosmologist, July 5th 1996
"The ancients possessed a plasma cosmology and physics themselves, and from laboratory experiments, were well familiar with the patterns exhibited by Peratt's petroglyphs." -- Joseph P. Farrell, author, 2007

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bboyer
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Re: Red rain?

Unread post by bboyer » Fri Sep 03, 2010 9:50 pm

Gimme a break. What kind of "reproduction" is that? Read the pdf posted by Birkeland. It has some photos of the supposed "internal reproduction." They're playing awfully liberal with the language for purported scientists. They increase the temperature and then see an increase of similar rounded, internal structure of unknown, or unspecified substance. Why are they publishing such speculative material anyways. If they are competent researchers, why don't they just shut up until they have something definitive to say? Or is this just more of the "publish or perish" ethic at work?

Much ado about nothing if this is all they got.
There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence within our mind. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let one's mind and one's subtle body rest upon that and not rest on anything else. [---][/---] Maitri Upanishad

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Birkeland
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Re: Red rain?

Unread post by Birkeland » Sat Sep 04, 2010 4:21 am

Add a grain or two of salt to the suggestions put forth by the authors of the study, but even if the panspermia hypothesis may turn out to be a crackpot idea, astrobiology is, nonetheless, an intriguing field.
"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see" - Ayn Rand

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