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Excerpts from the Office of Director of National Intelligence, Preliminary - Assessment Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UFOs), 25 June 2021
"Limited data and inconsistency in reporting are key challenges to evaluating UAP. No standardized reporting mechanism existed until the Navy established one in March 2019... The UAPTF regularly heard anecdotally during its research about other observations that occurred but which were never captured in formal or informal reporting by those observers... After carefully considering this information, the UAPTF focused on reports that involved UAP largely witnessed firsthand by military aviators and that were collected from systems we considered to be reliable... We were able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence. In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained." more »
National Archives Virtual Daytime Programs in March; Celebrating Women’s History Month
One example of the programs available: Book Talk – Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution, Tuesday, March 8, at 1 p.m. ET; Register in advance; watch on the National Archives YouTube Channel; Mary Sarah Bilder looks to the 1780s — the age of the Constitution — to investigate the rise of a radical new idea in the English-speaking world: female genius. English-born Eliza Harriot Barons O’Connor delivered a University of Pennsylvania lecture attended by George Washington as he and other Constitutional Convention delegates gathered in Philadelphia. As the first such public female lecturer, her courageous performance likely inspired the gender-neutral language of the Constitution. more »
GAO; Cybersecurity: Internet Architecture is Considered Resilient, but Federal Agencies Continue to Address Risks
GAO collected and analyzed publicly available reports from federal and nonfederal organizations to identify risks to internet architecture components GAO also reviewed federal law and policy and its prior work to identify federal internet architecture security roles and responsible agencies. Based on the agencies' roles, GAO collected and analyzed relevant documents and conducted interviews with officials from the responsible agencies. In addition, GAO convened two panels with subject matter experts. The panelists have experience in various aspects of the internet architecture, such as owning and operating elements of the infrastructure, participating in and contributing to standards-setting organizations, and studying and participating in various multistakeholder governance entities. more »
A Tisket, A Tusket: A New Study and Fossil Dental Exams Reveal How Tusks First Evolved
“Dicynodont tusks can tell us a lot about mammalian tusk evolution in general,” says Ken Angielczyk. “For instance, this study shows that reduced rates of tooth replacement and a flexible ligament attaching the tooth to the jaw are needed for true tusks to evolve. It all ladders up to giving us a better understanding of the tusks we see in mammals today.” “Tusks have evolved a number of times, which makes you wonder how — and why? We now have good data on the anatomical changes that needed to happen for dicynodonts to evolve tusks. For other groups, like warthogs or walruses, the jury is still out,” says Christian Sidor, a curator at the University of Washington Burke Museum and one of the paper’s authors.
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