Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Students Build a Hydrogen-Fuel-Cell-Powered Locomotive
Engineering students at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. have successfully built and demonstrated a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered locomotive.
In testing at the Stapleford Miniature Railway in Leicestershire, the hydrogen-powered narrow-gauge train managed to carry a load that weighed more than 8,800 pounds. ”The hydrogen system worked quietly, efficiently and reliably throughout two days of testing,” said project leader Stephen Kent. “The same could not be said for the mechanical, electrical and control systems, all of which required a degree of fettling.”
Though it’s the first hydrogen-powered locomotive to be built in the U.K., so-called “hydrail” projects have been underway elsewhere since 2002, when the first hydrogen-powered locomotive prototype debuted in a mine in Val d’Or, Quebec. Since then, projects in Japan, China, and Denmark have attempted to fuel trains with hydrogen, and there’s even an annual hydrail conference sponsored by Appalachian State University.
The appeal of a hydrogen-powered locomotive is especially great for rural lines, where diesel is the current fuel of choice. “It is highly unlikely they will ever be electrified, and at some point diesel is going to become too scarce and too expensive to carry on using,” Kent said. “Hydrogen appears to be an ideal alternative.”
The student-built locomotive features a hybrid drivetrain that combines a hydrogen fuel cell and lead acid batteries for power storage. It has a 1,320-gallon hydrogen tank that stores fuel at a low pressure of just 72.5 psi, and it’s possible to fit a larger tank to allow for greater range.
According to Kent, the first “rail-world” uses of hydrogen fuel cells will likely be in low-power situations. For example, trams, trolleys, shorter branch lines and switchers don’t require the same power needs as, say, a high-speed passenger train.
“It is probably not yet a viable solution for more power-hungry applications such as high-speed trains, but then high-speed services increasingly tend to operate on electrified routes, so perhaps that’s not an issue,” he said.
Scientists Invent Oxygen Particle That If Injected, Allows You To Live Without Breathing
New Medical Discovery
A team of scientists at the Boston Children’s Hospital have invented what is being considered one the greatest medical breakthroughs in recent years. They have designed a microparticle that can be injected into a person’s bloodstream that can quickly oxygenate their blood. This will even work if the ability to breathe has been restricted, or even cut off entirely.
This finding has the potential to save millions of lives every year. The microparticles can keep an object alive for up to 30 min after respiratory failure. This is accomplished through an injection into the patients’ veins. Once injected, the microparticles can oxygenate the blood to near normal levels. This has countless potential uses as it allows life to continue when oxygen is needed but unavailable. For medical personnel, this is just enough time to avoid risking a heart attack or permanent brain injury when oxygen is restricted or cut off to patients.
Dr. John Kheir, who first began the study, works in the Boston Children’s Hospital Department of Cardiology. He found inspiration for the drug in 2006, when he was treating a girl in the ICU who had a sever case of pneumonia. At the time, the girl didn’t have a breathing tube, when at the time she suffered from a pulmonary hemorrhage. This means her lungs had begin to fill up with blood, and she finally went into cardiac arrest. It took doctors about 25 minutes to remove enough blood from her lungs to allow her to breath. Though, the girl’s brain was severely injured due to being deprived of oxygen for that long and she eventually died.
Microparticle Composition
The microparticles used are composed of oxygen gas pocketed in a layer of lipids. A Lipid is a natural molecule that can store energy and act as a part of a cell membrane, they can be made of many things such as wax, vitamins, phospholipids, and in this case fat is the lipid that stores the oxygen.
These microparticles are around two to four micrometers in length and carry about three to four times the oxygen content of our own red blood cells. In the past, researchers had a difficult time succeeding as prior tests caused gas embolism. This meant that the gas molecules would become stuck trying to squeeze through the capillaries. They corrected this issue by packaging them into small deformable particles rather ones where the structure was rigid.
Potential Future Uses
Medical: There is the obvious medical uses where the microparticles can be used to save off death from a restriction in breathing due to inflammation of the lungs, collapsed lungs, and the like. It would be good to have these injections ready in hospitals and ambulances for when the time is needed.
Military: Can you imagine a navy seals capability when they wouldn’t need to surface for air and could stay underwater for over 20 minutes? If a boat was to begin to sink, you could shoot yourself as the boat is going down to ensure you aren’t drowned in the under current of the sinking vessel. How about for toxic gases when a facemask is unavailable. The military could have a number of uses for such a medical advancement.
Private Sector: Really this can be used as a precaution for anything nautical where the potential to drown is a real danger. Deep sea rescue crews could inject themselves prior to making a rescue, underwater welders can use it in case they become stuck or air is lost to their suits. The potential use for anything water related seems extremely worthwhile.
Conclusion
In the end, this is an amazing medical advancement and I cant help but recall the movie the Abyss when they took the pill, their helmets filled with air, and they were told they can breathe the water. Well what if they really couldn’t “breathe” water” but since the urge to breathe is natural, that must take place… even if you’re not breathing air per se. But your body was provided with enough oxygen for a time period by taking a pill. It’s just goes to show that anything, absolutely anything that can be thought up, can potentially one day become reality. Thank you scientists, for reminding me that people and their ingenuity are nothing short of awesome.
The author of this article is Damien S. Wilhelmi, an SEO tactician and SEM strategist. If you enjoyed this article, you can follow me on twitter @JakabokBotch. I am writing on behalf of Wilderness Aware Rafting who offer some of the best Colorado White Water Rafting trips in the state.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Saturday, August 25, 2012
The Program
The Program: The filmmaker Laura Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.
It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a “target” of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency turned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: “I’m tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I’ll talk to you.”
Two weeks later, driving past the headquarters of the N.S.A. in Maryland, outside Washington, Mr. Binney described details about Stellar Wind, the N.S.A.’s top-secret domestic spying program begun after 9/11, which was so controversial that it nearly caused top Justice Department officials to resign in protest, in 2004.
“The decision must have been made in September 2001,” Mr. Binney told me and the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. “That’s when the equipment started coming in.” In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year. He is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying.
To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.
The 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which oversees the N.S.A. activities, are up for renewal in December. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, are trying to revise the amendments to insure greater privacy protections. They have been warning about “secret interpretations” of laws and backdoor “loopholes” that allow the government to collect our private communications. Thirteen senators have signed a letter expressing concern about a “loophole” in the law that permits the collection of United States data. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have also challenged the constitutionality of the law, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case on Oct. 29.
Laura Poitras is a documentary filmmaker who has been nominated for an Academy Award and whose work was exhibited in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She is working on a trilogy of films about post-9/11 America. This Op-Doc is adapted from a work in progress to be released in 2013.
This video is part of a series by independent filmmakers who have received grants from the BRITDOC Foundation and the Sundance Institute.
Julian Assange arrest plan revealed accidentally
Plans to seize Julian Assange "under all circumstances" the moment he leaves the Ecuadorean embassy in London have accidentally been revealed by a police officer displaying restricted documents outside the embassy.
The document, pictured under the officer's arm by a Press Association photographer, appears to advocate arresting the WikiLeaks founder whether he leaves the building in a diplomatic bag or in a diplomatic car.
The handwritten plan was recorded at a police briefing and only partially covered by the officer's arm as he arrived at the embassy in Knightsbridge on Friday.
The brief begins: "BRIEF – EQ. Embassy brief – Summary of current position Re Assange. Action required – Assange to be arrested under all circumstances." It then makes reference to a "dip bag" and a "dip vehicle".
A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "The document is one officer's notes from a briefing. Our objective is to arrest Julian Assange for breach of bail. Under no circumstances would any arrest be made which was in breach of diplomatic immunity."
Assange, who has been in the building for two months, is wanted for questioning in Sweden over claims of sexual assault.
He is refusing to travel to Scandinavia amid fears he will be extradited to the United States over his controversial website. Ecuador granted the Australian political asylum last week.
The UK government has made it clear Assange, who denies the allegations, will be arrested if he steps outside the embassy after jumping bail.
Speculation has been rife about possible escape routes, and Assange's legal team and the Ecuadorean government have talked about the possibility of safe passage to Ecuador.
Ambassadors from several South American countries went to the embassy on Friday to show their solidarity with Ecuador.
The British government has threatened, under a 1987 Act, to enter the embassy and arrest the 41-year-old, but foreign secretary William Hague has said there is no intention to "storm" the building.
Ecuador's president has said the diplomatic row "could be ended tomorrow" if Britain gave the activist safe passage to South America.
Putin Replaced by Politburo?
Experts: a new Politburo to lead Russia .... According to the report of a leading Russian think tank, the 'tandem' structure no longer exists. In its place, a group of eight people representing different interests and the balance of which is the guarantor of President Putin. The system of power that governs Russia today is a "conglomerate of groups and clans that compete for the resources of the country"; it resembles a sort of a "Politburo", consisting of about eight people governed by the president, Vladimir Putin. This is the conclusion of the report by the authoritative think tank Minchenko Consulting Group. Released on 21 August, the document states the "tandem" Putin-Medvedev mechanism that characterized the last eight years of the country's political life is "buried", and reveals the exit strategy of power in the event of a serious political crisis. – Moscow (AsiaNews)
Dominant Social Theme: Alone, he stands up to the West, this courageous Russian bear.
Free-Market Analysis: In a recent article we pointed out that we had a lot of trouble with the weird idea now popular in alternative media circles that Vladimir Putin is some sort heroic figure standing up to the West's central banking power elite.
We focused on how Putin had enriched himself by some US$50 billion supposedly during his term in office and how despite his tough talk on Libya, he had not ultimately interfered with the invasion and rape of that country.
We explained that from our point of view Russia was not necessarily a beacon of freedom and that between its punitive penitentiary system and its underdeveloped economy, Russia was not necessarily a state to be emulated. You can see our article here:
Obama has millions of fake Twitter followers
A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers," The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased.
"The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have," the Times reports.
"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."
Notes the Times:
If accurate, the number of fake followers out there is surprising. According to the StatusPeople tool, 71 percent of Lady Gaga's nearly 29 million followers are "fake" or "inactive." So are 70 percent of President Obama's nearly 19 million followers.
Republican opponent Mitt Romney has far fewer Twitter followers -- not quite 900,000 -- but it's a good bet that some of them are fake as well.
Both campaigns have denied buying Twitter followers.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Wearable Electronics A Second Skin “The Mark of the Beast”?
This new wearable electronic technology is called “epidermal electronic system” (EES) it allows for a circuit to be fixed to the skin and moves with the body; stretching, bending and twisting without damaging the circuit. This is the first wearable technologies to be marketed under the guise of hip and cool targeting the tattoo enthusiasts with integrated LED’s, transistors, wireless antennas, biometric sensors and radio frequency capacitors.
Big pharma have already concocted a way to embed microchips into medications to monitor patient compliance sending information to a patch worn by the user which relays biometric information to the doctor. How many different applications for surveillance can you think of for this wearable WIFI device? Will the medical industry use this technology to spy on you by monitoring your brain waves, moods and negative thoughts while receiving medications for anti-depression or anxiety?
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
US teen invents advanced cancer test using Google
Fifteen-year-old high school student Jack Andraka likes to kayak and watch the US television show Glee.
And when time permits, he also likes to do advanced research in one of the most respected cancer laboratories in the world.
Jack Andraka has created a pancreatic cancer test that is 168 times faster and considerably cheaper than the gold standard in the field. He has applied for a patent for his test and is now carrying out further research at Johns Hopkins University in the US city of Baltimore.
And he did it by using Google.
The Maryland native, who won $75,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in May for his creation, cites search engines and free online science papers as the tools that allowed him to create the test.
The BBC's Matt Danzico sat down with the teenager, who said the idea came to him when he was "chilling out in biology class".
Is Chewing Gum the Most Toxic Substance in the Supermarket?
Recently, I asked about thirty women, whose ages were mostly under the age of forty, if they carried chewing gum with them. Twenty seven of the thirty were able to pull out a pack of gum, some even going as far as telling me why they loved a particular brand/flavor of gum.
While this demographic is not representative of all women, 90% of them chewed gum on a daily basis, some consuming more than one stick per day. As with many things that we expose our bodies to on a daily basis, let’s take a moment and analyze the ingredients of chewing gum and ask some important questions that pertain to whether it contributes to good health. How many of us have looked at the ingredients on a pack of gum?
If you have, do you know what each one of the substances is? Is a stick of chewing gum more of a “cancer stick” than a cigarette? As you will see below, commercial gum products are some of the most toxic substances that you can expose your body too and literally can lead to some of the worst diseases on the planet.
Here is a list of the most common ingredients in the most popular chewing gum products on the market:
- Sorbitol, Xylitol, Mannitol, Maltitol
- Gum Base
- Glycerol
- Natural and Artificial Flavors
- Hydrogenated Coconut Oil and Starch
- Aspartame –Acesulfame
- Soy Lecithin
- Colors (titanium oxide, blue 2 lake, red 40)
- BHT
- Malic Acid, Citric Acid
Ingredient #1: Gum Base. Imagine if someone came up to you and said, “Hey, would you like to chew on some tire rubber and plastic?” You probably would politely decline and want to report this person to a doctor for a psychological evaluation. “Gum base” is a blend of elastomers, plasticizers, fillers, and resin. Some of the other ingredients that go into this mix are polyvinyl acetate, which is frequently referred to as “carpenter glue” or “white glue”. Paraffin wax is another ingredient that is a byproduct of refined petroleum. Is chewing plastic, petroleum and rubber safe? As you chew, these substances leach into the mouth and body. Yummy.
Ingredient #2: Aspartame. The controversy surrounding this substance is widespread. It is one of the most body toxic substances we can consume. The political corruption and money trail behind this agent of disease is a mile long. Aspartame has been linked to all of the major brain diseases including Alzheimer’s and ALS. It is also considered a prime contributor to many other diseases such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis, asthma, obesity, and many others. It is in many diet products on the market today, but in the long run actually contributes to obesity due to his extreme acidity. Aspartame is an excitotoxin, which over excites neurons in the brain until they burn out and die. Dr. Russell Blaylock is the leading expert on Aspartame and other excitotoxins and I would highly encourage you to see the documentary entitled “Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World”.
Ingredient #3: Hydrogenated Coconut Oil and Starch. Hydrogenation is chemical process that adds hydrogen across a double bonded carbon. This is done to increase the shelf life of a product, turning oil into a more plastic like substance. This process also creates Trans fats, which are now known to be very harmful to health.
Ingredient #4: Colors (titanium dioxide, blue 2 lake, red 40). Titanium dioxide is a nanoparticle that is very common in sunscreen and many other health products, including synthetic nutritional supplements. New evidence is leading in the direction of this substance being carcinogenic, leading to cancer. We as humans are drawn to things that are colorful. Artificial food colorings, such as red 40, are made from petroleum and are dangerous to our health. Many people have extreme allergies to these substances and they have been implicated in contributing to ADD and other disorders and diseases.
Ingredient #5: Sorbitol, Xylitol, Mannitol, Maltitol. These sugar alcohols are originally made from sugar, but are altered so much that they are considered sugar free. As a general rule, when nature is altered and changed to make a “better” product, more often than not, the result is something that is not healthy. Some even go so far as to say that these products are far worse than sugar and can stimulate weight gain. Other side effects can include abdominal pain and diarrhea. Is sugar alcohol better than sugar? Neither are good substances, so comparing the two is somewhat pointless.
Chewing Gum and Digestion
Every time you chew gum, your brain is tricked into thinking that you are eating food. Therefore, it sends signals to your stomach, pancreas and other organs involved in digestion to prepare for this “food”. Your salivary glands and pancreas will begin to emit enzymes, which are necessary to digest food and absorb nutrients from food. Constant emission of enzymes over time will deplete enzymes and over time this process can slow down. If you are not breaking down and absorbing food properly over time, you will get disease because the body needs nutrients to rebuild and thrive.
A Great Alternative for Fresh Breath
A great alternative to chewing gum is to carry around a small bottle of organic food grade peppermint oil and when you would like fresh breath, just put one drop in your mouth and you will have achieved the same effect. You can find many food grade oils that are wonderful for helping you have fresh breath.
Nothing in chewing gum is natural. It is chemical goop that in no way contributes to health or is good for your teeth. Don’t be fooled by fancy advertising. The five ingredients that we reviewed above, in one form or another, contribute to disease and poor health. Is this really a risk that you want to expose yourself to all for the sake of fresh breath? In the future, perhaps we will see that chewing gum may be as much of a contributor to disease as are cigarettes.
Source: Activist Post
Is Apple Really Worth More than the Sum of Microsoft, Dell, Google, Facebook and HP?
Because that’s what the market cap suggests:
But not the book value:
Nor revenue:
And nor earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation:
The data suggests that relative to other tech companies AAPL is significantly overvalued. And going forward there is no guarantee that AAPL can justify today’s value by keeping up its dominance of the sector. Tech is an extremely fickle and fast-changing sector where one year’s turkey can be next year’s prize pig. And AAPL’s product lineup is still dominated by products developed under the charge of Steve Jobs — it will take a while longer to fully assess whether or not AAPL can succeed at the same magnitude over the entire product cycle from conception to sales without his leadership.
But I doubt that anything like a sober look at the data will stop the Apple bulls. Because this time is different, right?
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Destroying children with the cloak of ADHD - Parents need to pay attention
Let us start with the conclusion of the study: "Later start of stimulant drug treatment of attention/hyperactivity disorder is associated with academic decline in mathematics." Translation: if you want your kids to do well in school you need to get them on stimulant drugs as early as possible, hopefully while still in the womb.
The fact that one of the researchers on the study received funding from a pharmaceutical company that makes drugs to treat ADHD is more than wrong; it should be outright illegal to have such a conflict of interest - but that's another conversation.
The statistics are out of control and climbing: almost one in ten children in America are diagnosed with ADHD and over 65 percent of them are currently on prescription medication. Medications that have dozens of side effects. Medications that can cause irreversible damage, trigger auto-immune disorders, cause insomnia, stomach disorders... And yet, we see quotes like this: "There are obvious benefits of getting started sooner rather than later," J. Russell Ramsay says to Reuters Health; he studies ADHD at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
In the Reuter's article, titled "Early ADHD treatment may ward off problems in school," they start off by suggesting that kids will have trouble in school if they are not on drugs before the age of 11 or 12. ELEVEN OR TWELVE. ...One tries to be an "objective journalist" and just report the facts but at times like this it gets challenging.
Has it occurred to anyone to check the diets of these kids?
The massive sugar spikes they are getting hit with every day, hyper-active reactions to gluten - which is making its way to the top of the highly inflammatory food list, liters of soda pop that create brain malfunction, rocket fuel in our water supply that causes every kind of system malfunction, excitotoxins, hormones and steroids via animal products, the chemical cocktails sprayed on to the few fruits and vegetables they might be eating... the list is just too long to make it possible for children (and adults) NOT have foggy brains, depression, or ADHD - among hundreds of other disorders. Has anyone thought to try an all natural, organic, plant strong diet and see how children perform?
The problems AND answers lie in food. Sadly, the pharmaceutical companies will do everything in their power to get the "experts" and medical community to say otherwise. Even sadder is that for the mainstream, whatever the guy in the white lab coat says must be true.
The CDC site itself has a page that provides parents with a checklist to help them pre-qualify their child before rushing to their doctor for a prescription. Items on that list: "Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly" and "Is often easily distracted" ...traits that would have had 100 percent of us diagnosed with ADHD when we were kids. Tragically sad.
Horrendous diets can certainly cause issues, but it's also important that parents remember that kids are just kids and most normal kids "act up" and cause trouble. Always have, always will - unless sedated. Please let your kids be kids.
Source: Natural News
Friday, August 17, 2012
Fake Eco-Friendly Corporations Shell out Millions of $ to Stop GMO Labeling
But while an overwhelming number of individuals want nothing more than for GMO foods to be labeled, others are doing everything in their power to stop such a bill from existing.
It isn’t surprising to see biotech giants like Monsanto go against Proposition 37 and GMO labeling, but do you have any idea who else is fighting Prop 37?
Who is Really Supporting Prop 37? More Importantly, Who is Really Against it?
On November 6, 2012, voters will decide if California’s Proposition 37 will be the first bill to require the labeling of genetically modified foods. About 18 states have made similar attempts, fighting for the labeling of GMOs, but nothing has even come close to Prop 37.
Since Proposition 37 came to light, it has received significant backing both from the public and various entities. A recent poll shows that GMO labeling is so desired that the pro-labeling side has a 3-to-1 advantage. Organic leaders supporting Prop 37 have contributed approximately $2.6 million so far, with leaders like Dr. Mercola, Organic Consumers Association, Nature’s Path, and Lundberg donating the most. But even as supporters rise up and speak out, those fighting GMO labeling aren’t even close to throwing in the towel.
You would think that donations of at least $2.6 million would be enough, and maybe it is, but the funds are nothing compared to the opponent. While $2.6 million had been raised so far supporting Prop 37, a whopping $23.5 million (for visual purpose: $23,000,000 dollars) has been donated to fighting Prop 37. Biotech giant Monsanto donated $4,208,000 alone. Here is a short list of the top deep-pocket anti-labelers and their respected donations.
- Monsanto – $4,208,000
- Pepsi Co. – $1,716,300
- Coca Cola – $1,164,400
- Congara – $1,076,300
- Kellogg – $632,500
- General Mills – $520,000
While these corporations are dumping millions of dollars to ensure the public doesn’t know about GMOs, millions of people are seeing who they truly are. Such publicity will only result in the massive loss of customers and an eventual disintegration of power. These corporations are trying to keep GMOs hidden from the public eye – it is time we stop supporting these companies, and spend our dollars with trusted companies.
Monsanto Dishes Out $4.2 Million to Squash California GMO Labeling Initiative
Monsanto is doing its absolute best to ensure that you do not know what you are putting into your mouth, now confirmed to have donated $4.2 million in an attempt to fight the California GMO labeling initiative that could very well put them out of business.
You see, if people actually knew that they were consuming genetically modified ingredients, they would stop buying the engineered products on a massive scale.
Monsanto simply cannot have that, which is why it is doing its best to squash any possibility of a successful labeling initiative (along with a conglomerate of corporate entities).
It is already well known that the general public is highly supportive of GMO labeling in general, with many polls finding that around 93% of the population is supportive of knowing what is in their food. Monsanto obviously does not care much about the general public, however, as exemplified by the company’s utter lack of concern over public health and baseline human rights. And if over 90% of support is not enough, then there is the Just Label it Campaign. While the actual end result of the mission is debatable, the massive support is not.
The GMO labeling campaign was backed by over 1 million signatures from around the country, all individuals who were seeking to help others learn what is in their pantry.
Whether its censoring research on their GM products, ignoring evidence that links the engineered crops to serious biological and environmental damage, or managing ‘slave-like’ workers on their corn fields for withheld pay, Monsanto has continually shown its true allegiance does not lie with the citizens of the world. The biotech giant has already made several moves to crush GMO labeling initiatives in the past.
Back in April following the announcement of a bill centered in Vermont known as the ‘VT Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act’ that would require the labeling of genetically modified ingredients, Monsanto threatened to sue the entire state in order to prevent its passing. As a result, the bill went on hold despite a majority (6 to 5) of Agriculture Committee members actually supporting the passage of the bill. Officials actually refused to take a vote. It sounds like mafia-styled intimidation, but it is actually just business as usual.
Instead of allowing Monsanto to win once more through intimidation and financial influence, vote “YES” on the 37 Right to Know California GMO labeling initiative.
Source: Activist Post
Finland prepares for euro break up scenario-report
European leaders must prepare for the possibility that the euro zone breaks up, Finland's foreign minister, Erkki Tuomioja, said in the Daily Telegraph on Friday.
Tuomioja said Finnish officials have prepared for the break up of the single currency with an "operational plan for any eventuality."
"It is not something that anybody — even the True Finns (a Eurosceptic opposition party) — are advocating in Finland, let alone the government. But we have to be prepared," Tuomioja was quoted as saying.
"Our officials, like everybody else and like every general staff, have some sort of operational plan for any eventuality."
"This is what people are thinking about everywhere," said Tuomioja. "But there is a consensus that a euro zone break-up would cost more in the short-run or medium-run than managing the crisis."
The article also quoted Timo Soini, head of the Finns Party who said Finnish taxpayers were angry.
"There are no rules on how to leave the euro, but it is only a matter of time. Either the south or the north will break away because this currency straitjacket is causing misery for millions and destroying Europe's future," Soini was quoted as saying.
"It is a total catastrophe. We are going to run out of money the way we are going. But nobody in Europe wants to be first to get out of the euro and take all the blame," he said.
Finland, which has a veto that could be used to block any new bailout measures, has insisted on collateral from both Greece and Spain in exchange for rescue loans.
New 'Male Birth Control' Compound Can Temporarily Turn Off Sperm Formation
Successful experiments in mice offer new hope in the search for the elusive male birth control pill, researchers report today.
A small molecular compound can induce temporary infertility in mice by targeting the process of sperm formation, or spermatogenesis, according to the study to be published Friday (Aug. 17) in the journal Cell. It will be a long journey to a drug in humans, if that day comes at all, but researchers are hopeful that they have hit on a compound with few side effects.
"No one has ever had a drug that they've been able to test in mice that actually targets the germline, that is the spermatogenic cells, that has reversibility," said study researcher Martin Matzuk, a developmental biologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Male contraception
Developing a male birth control pill is more difficult than creating female contraceptives. To render a woman temporarily infertile, all you have to do is disrupt the monthly hormonal cycles that lead to the release of a single egg. Men, on the other hand, produce a "continuous daily wave of sperm" numbering in the millions, Matzuk told LiveScience. [10 Wild Facts About His Body]
Researchers have yet to find the perfect solution to stopping this sperm production in a reversible way. Hormonal methods to stop sperm production have whole-body side effects, and nonhormonal methods such as blocking the body's ability to use vitamin A, a crucial component of sperm production, are still in the early stages. In fact, Matzuk said, the challenges are so stark that many major pharmaceutical companies have given up on trying to develop a male pill.
Matzuk and his colleagues are making the latest attempt with a compound called JQ1, which was originally developed at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. JQ1 binds to a protein called BRD4, which plays a role in some cancers.
Coincidentally, a closely related protein called BRDT is produced only in the testes and is crucial to the process of sperm maturation. If JQ1 could also bind to BRDT, Matzuk and his colleagues realized, it might act as a very local way to stop sperm production.
Developing a pill
The researchers tested JQ1 by injecting the compound into male mice that had access to female mice. They found that the compound sent sperm counts plummeting. After six weeks of low daily doses, for example, male mice had only 11 percent as many sperm as control mice without JQ1 injections, and only 5 percent of the sperm were motile, or capable of swimming.
The same low doses reduced the number of litters sired by the male mice, even as they continued normal sexual behavior. In the first month of breeding, seven male mice not treated with JQ1 sired 14 litters of offspring. Only four of the treated mice became fathers. Once taken off the drug, the mice returned to normal fertility in about two months.
"We show in these studies that not only can we induce a contraceptive effect so the mice are infertile, but when we stop the drug, that spermatogenesis returns and the mice are able to sire offspring," Matzuk said.
To transfer the drug for human use, scientists would have to find a dose that would result in complete infertility among all men, Matzuk said. The compound is promising, Matzuk said, but there is still much more testing to be done.
"This is an early step," he said. "You can say this is the drug discovery stage of working on a male contraceptive pill. We've recently received funding for five years from the National Institutes of Health to further this research."
CHART OF THE DAY: The World's Central Banks Are Bulking Up In Gold
The World Gold Council released its latest quarterly Gold Demand Trends report today.
Demand for gold as an investment got crushed in the second quarter this year, declining 25.9 percent from last quarter – the worst quarter-over-quarter drop seen since the third quarter of 2010.
The drop in investment demand was led by weakened demand in India and China for physical gold like bars and coins. The WGC report says that in both countries, "interest in gold bars and coins remains fundamentally strong," but the slump in demand in the second quarter came from profit-taking in India and directionless price action in China.
On the other hand, official sector purchases soared in the second quarter, with central banks around the world scooping up 157.5 tons of gold. That number marks a 62.9 percent increase from the first quarter and a whopping 137.9 percent increase year-over-year.
It is also the most gold central banks have bought up in a single quarter since the WGC started tracking the numbers in the Q2 2009.
Buyers include South Korea, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine.
As you can see, much of that official sector demand came from emerging market central banks. Here's a passage from the report looking at Kazakhstan as an example:
Some central banks have clearly indicated te hir intention to bolster gold reserves. One such institution is the National Bank of Kazakhstan, whi hch state in July that it had increased its 2012 target for gold purchases from 24.5 tonnes to 26 tonnes. The bank has previously stated that it plans to buy the country's entire domestic production over the next two to three years in order to reduce its reliance on the US dollar as a reserve asset, confirming that it is targeting an allocation to gold of 15% of its foreign exchange reserves.
The WGC's report had a section focused on Russia where they charted the historical gold trading activity of the official sector.
And Now China Is Looking Into Taking Over One Of Africa's Biggest Gold Miners >
Ecuador may file appeal to ICC if UK refuses Assange safe passage
Ecuador has said it may appeal to the International Criminal Court (ICC) if the UK refuses to grant Julian Assange safe passage out of the country.
Eciadorian presidential staff adviser Alexis Mera said his government would pursue every legal means to bring Assange to Ecuador.
"We are open to discuss with Britain the solution to this problem, and if there is no diplomatic solution, we may resort to the International Court of Justice," Ecuadorian daily EL Commercio quoted Mera as saying.
"It would be terrible and an attack on all international rights" if British police were to enter the Ecuadorian embassy, he said.
On Friday Mera attended a cabinent meeting with President Rafael Correa and other ministers in the Southern city of Liba.
The WikiLeaks founder Assange took shelter in Ecuador’s UK Embassy two months ago, with Quito granting him political asylum after careful deliberation on Thursday.
Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said that Julian Assange’s rights are endangered as he was at high risk of being extradited to the United States upon being handed over to Sweden by UK authorities.
Patino further stated that Assange’s home country Australia was not providing him with sufficient legal protections, thus facilitating Ecuador’s decision to grant him asylum.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said that Britain did not recognize Assange’s asylum status and would continue with its efforts to extradite him to Sweden, where he is currently wanted for questioning on suspicion of sexual assault.
Hague reiterated that the UK “will not allow Mr Assange safe passage out of the UK."
On Thursday, the head of Assange’s legal team Baltasar Garzon said that any attempt by the UK to block Assange’s safe passage to Ecuador would be subject to an ICC appeal.
"What the United Kingdom must do is apply the diplomatic obligations of the Refugee Convention and let him leave, giving him safe conduct," the former judge told Spanish newspaper El Pais.
In the run up to the decision to grant Assange asylum, the British government reportedly warned Ecuador it could revoke diplomatic immunity for its embassy in London, empowering police to enter the building and arrest Assange.
Patino responded that such an unprecedented action would be a “flagrant violation” of international law.
A GPS in Your DNA
TAU research says genetics can reveal your geographic ancestral origin
While your DNA is unique, it also tells the tale of your family line. It carries the genetic history of your ancestors down through the generations. Now, says a Tel Aviv University researcher, it's also possible to use it as a map to your family's past.
Prof. Eran Halperin of TAU's Blavatnik School of Computer Science and Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology, along with a group of researchers from University of California, Los Angeles, are giving new meaning to the term "genetic mapping." Using a probabilistic model of genetic traits for every coordinate on the globe, the researchers have developed a method for determining more precisely the geographical location of a person's ancestral origins.
The new method is able to pinpoint more specific locations for an individual's ancestors, for example placing an individual's father in Paris and mother in Barcelona. Previous methods would "split the difference" and place this origin inaccurately at a site between those two cities, such as Lyon.
Published in the journal Nature Genetics, this method has the potential to reveal the ancestry, origins, and migration patterns of many different human and animal populations. It could also be a new model for learning about the genome.
Points of origin
There are points in the human genome called SNPs that are manifested differently in each individual, explains Prof. Halperin. These points mutated sometime in the past and the mutation was then passed to a large part of the population in a particular geographic region. The probability of a person possessing these mutations today varies depending on the geographical location of those early ancestors.
"We wanted to ask, for example, about the probability of having the genetic mutation 'A' in a particular position on the genome based on geographical coordinates," he says. When you look at many of these positions together in a bigger picture, it's possible to group populations with the same mutation by point of origin.
To test their method, Prof. Halperin and his fellow researchers studied DNA samples from 1,157 people from across Europe. Using a probabilistic mathematical algorithm based on mutations in the genome, they were able to accurately determine their ancestral point or points of origin using only DNA data and the new mathematical model, unravelling genetic information to ascertain two separate points on the map for the mother and father. The researchers hope to extend this model to identify the origins of grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on.
The new method could provide information that has applications in population genetic studies — to study a disease that impacts a particular group, for example. Researchers can track changes in different genomic traits across a map, such as the tendency for southern Europeans to have a mutation in a gene that causes lactose intolerance, a mutation missing from that gene in northern Europeans.
A closer look at migration
The researchers believe that their model could have also relevance for the animal kingdom, tracking the movement of animal populations. "In principle, you could figure out where the animals have migrated from, and as a result learn about habitat changes due to historical climate change or other factors," says Prof. Halperin.
http://www.aftau.org/images/content/pagebuilder/globe_225x225.jpgThursday, August 16, 2012
Blurred Eyeglasses Unveiled To Help Israeli Ultra-Orthodox Avoid Impure Sights
Fascinating — wearing blurry goggles to obscure one’s surroundings as a means of keeping the mind and spirit clear. In a world in which are constantly bombarded with undesired information, perhaps we could all use a pair. The Times of Israel writes:
An ultra-Orthodox organization has developed a range of products to act as a first line of defense against the threat of seeing immodest women, Israeli media reported on Tuesday.
In a change of tactics from previous ultra-Orthodox strategies that in the past have targeted women as the culprits of lasciviousness, the Committee for Purity in the Camp offers a variety of gadgets to limit the field of view and so prevent men from exposure to over-exposed women. The devices have recently gone on sale in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem and elsewhere.
Two semi-transparent stickers applied to the lenses of the user’s spectacles blur vision of anything beyond the range of a few meters and so diffuse immodestly dressed women to a harmless blot.
Officials Claim Ecuador Will Grant Julian Assange Asylum
The Ecuadorian president has denied the rumors, saying that his government’s decision will not be cemented until the end of the week, but this seems like a positive development. The Guardian reports:
Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, has agreed to grant Julian Assange asylum, officials within Ecuador’s government have said. The WikiLeaks founder has been holed up at Ecuador’s London embassy since 19 June, when he officially requested political asylum.
“Ecuador will grant asylum to Julian Assange,” said an official in the Ecuadorean capital, Quito, who is familiar with the government discussions.
On Monday, Correa told state-run ECTV that he would decide this week whether to grant asylum to Assange. Correa said a large amount of material about international law had to be examined to make a responsible, informed decision.
It remains unclear if Assange will be allowed to leave Britain and fly to Ecuador, or amounts to little more than a symbolic gesture. At the moment he faces arrest as soon as he leaves the embassy for breaching his bail conditions.
Pigs and squatters threaten Peru's Nazca lines
The squatters have destroyed a Nazca-era cemetery and the 50 shacks they have built border Nazca figures, said Blanca Alva, a director at Peru's culture ministry.
She said the squatters, the latest in a succession of encroachments over the years into the protected Nazca area, invaded the site during the Easter holidays in April and that Peruvian laws designed to protect the poor and landless have thwarted efforts to remove them.
In Peru, squatters who occupy land for more than a day have the right to a judicial process before eviction, which Alva said can take two to three years.
"The problem is that by then, the site will be destroyed," she said.
She said she counted 14 pig corals in a recent inspection that also revealed broken bits of Nazca ceramics.
The Nazca lines known as geoglyphs, declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1994, were produced over a period of a thousand years on a 200 square mile (500 square km) stretch of coastal desert.
They include enormous birds, monkeys and other geometric shapes. The culture ministry evicted a separate batch of squatters in January from near a sprawling design known as the Solar Clock, only to face down a new group months later.
The lines are striking reminders of Peru's rich pre-Columbian history, and are considered one of the world's greatest archeological enigmas, as no one knows for sure why they were drawn, so large, and for so long.
"They're very delicate and they've survived to this point for 1500 years," said Ann Peters, an archeologist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, who hosted an international symposium on Nazca culture in Peru this week.
Peters said encroachments in the area threaten research by 60 or so archeologists specialized in Nazca.
Ancient Nazcans formed the figures by scraping away the desert's dark iron-oxide pebbles to reveal the white soil underneath, which hardened as unearthed limestone was exposed to morning dew.
The head of the squatter settlement, Jesus Arias, denies his community has hurt the area. "It isn't archeological to me. There was no cemetery there, and there are no lines from Nazca culture either."
Arias said the squatters are the grown children of people from the nearby town of San Pablo who want their own homes.
"Our population keeps growing," he said. "These are poor people who don't have the money to buy land or a house."
Arias said the culture ministry should do a better job marking the boundaries of protected areas.
Encroachments are a common way for the poor, and increasingly organized land traffickers, to acquire property in Peru. Evictions can be violent when security forces try to pry thousands of people from their homes.
"It could generate chaos," said Livina Alvis, a prosecutor in the province of Nazca.
The culture ministry's Alva said squatters are the biggest threat to Peru's more than 13,000 archeological and heritage sites, a rich trove of information for scholars around the world.
"We get 120-180 reports or alerts about encroachments every year," Alva said. "For my colleagues in the rest of Latin America, who get two or maybe five cases per year, that figure is unbelievable."
Facebook App To Offer Discounts To People Who Agree To Be Constantly Tracked With Facial Recognition Technology
Would you agree to this in return for a half-price smoothie? Created by advertising agency Redpepper, a program called “Facedeals” is already being tested in Tennessee, with plans to expand nationally in the near future. The way it works is, internet-connected cameras mounted in front of businesses capture the faces of comers and goers. Individuals who have agreed to participate in Facedeals are identified and tracked using facial recognition software when a camera spots them, and as a reward periodically receive personalized deals and coupons via their smartphones:
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
KFC and Pizza Hut closed in Nepal as staff threatens to kill branch managers
All four KFC and Pizza Hut restaurants in Nepal shut down on Tuesday saying that staff had attacked and threatened to kill branch managers.
Devyani International, which operates outlets of KFC and Pizza Hut in Nepal and neighbouring India, wrote a letter to authorities announcing the immediate closure of its eateries in the capital Kathmandu.
“In order to disrupt our operations, some staff have physically attacked and threatened to kill the senior managers,” the company said in a letter leaked to local media and seen by AFP.
“These acts have put the life of senior managers at risk. To maintain the safety of our restaurants and the staff, we have shut down our services for an indefinite period,” it said.
The shutters were down at the four restaurants on Tuesday, and Devyani International and the police were unavailable for comment.
KFC and Pizza Hut, Nepal’s only international fast-food chains, opened their first branches in the country three years ago, generating long queues of locals wanting to sample international cuisine.
Their arrival was seen as a sign of an improving environment for foreign firms in a country ravaged by bloody civil war between 1996 and 2006, when a peace deal was reached between Maoists and the government.
During the violence, rebels targeted foreign ventures including Coke, Pepsi and Unilever, but more recently Kathmandu has seen rapid growth in restaurants, malls and supermarkets selling foreign goods.
French riot night: Cops injured, cars torched, school burnt
Hundreds of French youths torched buildings and cars and clashed with police, injuring 16 officers during an overnight riot in the northern French city of Amiens.
French police reported that the clashes involved some 100 rioters and 150 officers, beginning around 9pm Monday and ending around 4am Tuesday.
At least three bystanders were hurt after rioters pulled drivers from their cars while hijacking the vehicles, the AP reported.
“The confrontations were very, very violent,” Amiens Mayor Gilles Dumailly told French television network BFM.
One of the events that sparked the riot was an arrest made over the weekend for dangerous driving, French media reported. The arrest was seen by many locals as insensitive and unnecessarily violent, as residents were attending a wake for a 20-year-old who died in a motorcycle accident.
A leisure center and two school buildings were razed, along with a dozen cars, local officials said. Rioters used trash cans as flaming barricades, and threw heavy objects at police officers, who responded by deploying tear gas, rubber bullets and a helicopter.
Amiens has experienced riots in the past. The city is infamous for high unemployment, racial tension and an aggressive police force.
The district in Amiens was among 15 areas declared the most troubled in France earlier this month, prompting the government to pledge additional security and money for the region. Dumailly hoped tensions would improve with a plan to fix up the housing projects and offer more services, he said at the time.
In 2005, France saw its worst urban unrest in 40 years, which led to the declaration of a state of emergency by the country’s then-center-right government. Entire neighborhoods of Amiens burned for nearly a month.
The 2007 deaths of two youths hit by a police car sparked another wave of violence in the city. Unrest flared again in 2010 when police shot and killed a youth who had robbed a casino.
Electronic 'Smart Fingertips' Could Give Robots and Doctors Virtual Touch
The same touchy engineers who gave us the first peelable epidermal electronics last year have a new virtual tactile system: Smart fingers, which could someday bring a real sense of touch to telepresence applications. Surgical robots or human doctors could virtually feel surfaces, temperatures and other characteristics, through special smart gloves designed to trick the brain into thinking it's feeling.
Materials scientist John Rogers and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign designed flexible, skin-molded fingertip sensors made of super-thin silicon sheets. The gold conductive lines form a circuit, and the entire sensor is embedded in a flexible polymer material called polyimide. This is transferred to a thin silicone mould, which can be fitted to a fingertip shape. The sensor provides tactile feedback by forming electric currents when you press something. The currents are transmitted to your actual skin.
In tests, Rogers and colleagues donned the electronic fingertips and started touching flat objects. The resulting currents translated to a slight tingling sensation in their flesh-based fingertips. This is a step toward creating electrical signals that could be interpreted by the nervous system, according to ScienceNOW -- eventually, electronic fingers could create patterns of signals that can recreate sensations, from heat to texture.
The fingertips could also include separate sensors to detect things like motion or vibration. Rogers says in a news release that they could be used as medical devices -- perhaps for ultrasound imaging, or even as an ablation device, burning away problem tissue or creating sutures. "Imagine the ability to sense the electrical properties of tissue, and then locally remove that tissue, precisely by local ablation, all via the fingertips using smart surgical gloves," he said.
The main breakthrough here is the fingertips' stretchability and flexibility. Plenty of haptic feedback devices exist, but they're largely bulky, or flat, or otherwise unable to morph very well to the soft geometries of the body. This system is very similar to the first peelable, temporary tattoo-like skin electronics Rogers and colleagues developed last year. In that system, morphable electrodes are pasted onto the skin with water, hence the comparison to temporary tattoos. They could be used as health monitoring devices or machine-human interfaces, among other uses.
These fingertip sensors could conceivably be designed to fit any body part in need of some tactile feedback, Rogers and colleagues say -- like perhaps the heart, where it could sense muscle contraction or get things pumping properly. The research appears in the journal Nanotechnology.
Video: Indestructible Military Inchworm-Bot Survives Attack By Bootheels and Hammers
Soft, bendy robots could have a wide variety of benefits, from squishing into tight spaces to conduct surveillance, to crawling through a person's body to deliver drugs or take medical images. But it's hard to build entirely soft objects containing soft bodies, soft batteries and soft motors. A new version developed at MIT and Harvard is both soft and tough, inching around like an earthworm yet surviving multiple cruel blows from a rubber mallet.
The robot is nicknamed "Meshworm," after the earthworms that inspired its design. Rather than using liquid, air or silicone gears to get around, like other soft robots we've seen, Meshbot uses artificial muscle made from a shape-memory alloy. It looks very much like a squiggling worm, as you can see in the video below.
Researchers led by MIT mechanical engineering professor Sangbae Kim took a flexible mesh tube and encircled it in wires out of titanium and nickel, an alloy that contracts and expands with heat. They separated the wire into segments, much like those found in an earthworm, and applied a current to heat some of the segments. This made Meshworm's soft body squeeze together sections at a time, which caused it to inch along a surface. This type of locomotion is called peristalsis, and it's the same action used by snails, cucumbers and our own gastrointestinal tracts (to move food into our stomachs).
The team examined earthworm body structure to come up with this idea, and found that earthworms use latitudinal and longitudinal muscle groups to inch themselves along. The mesh tube represents the longitudinal section, and the shape-memory alloy represents the horizontal muscle group.
The best part may be the robot's durability. There are no pneumatic pumps, rigid gears or batteries to break, so the robot can survive all kinds of assaults. This could make it useful for military applications — DARPA funded this research. Kim and colleagues subjected the robot to a battery of tests to see how it held up, including smashing it with a mallet and stepping on it.
"You can throw it, and it won’t collapse,” Kim says. “Most mechanical parts are rigid and fragile at small scale, but the parts in Meshworms are all fibrous and flexible. The muscles are soft, and the body is soft … we’re starting to show some body-morphing capability.”
The team recently published details of the design in the journal IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.
Meshbot Faces the Hammer: MIT researchers who designed the soft, flexible inchworm-bot tested its mettle by pounding it with this mallet and by stepping on it. The robot survived intact and kept inching away. MIT News
Monday, August 13, 2012
Stratfor emails reveal secret, widespread TrapWire surveillance system
Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.
Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.
The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce, however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program’s public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year’s hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing.
Hacktivists aligned with the loose-knit Anonymous collective took credit for hacking Stratfor on Christmas Eve, 2011, in turn collecting what they claimed to be more than five million emails from within the company. WikiLeaks began releasing those emails as the Global Intelligence Files (GIF) earlier this year and, of those, several discussing the implementing of TrapWire in public spaces across the country were circulated on the Web this week after security researcher Justin Ferguson brought attention to the matter. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks was relentlessly assaulted by a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, crippling the whistleblower site and its mirrors, significantly cutting short the number of people who would otherwise have unfettered access to the emails.
On Wednesday, an administrator for the WikiLeaks Twitter account wrote that the site suspected that the motivation for the attacks could be that particularly sensitive Stratfor emails were about to be exposed. A hacker group called AntiLeaks soon after took credit for the assaults on WikiLeaks and mirrors of their content, equating the offensive as a protest against editor Julian Assange, “the head of a new breed of terrorist.” As those Stratfor files on TrapWire make their rounds online, though, talk of terrorism is only just beginning.
Mr. Ferguson and others have mirrored what are believed to be most recently-released Global Intelligence Files on external sites, but the original documents uploaded to WikiLeaks have been at times unavailable this week due to the continuing DDoS attacks. Late Thursday and early Friday this week, the GIF mirrors continues to go offline due to what is presumably more DDoS assaults. Australian activist Asher Wolf wrote on Twitter that the DDoS attacks flooding the servers of WikiLeaks supporter sites were reported to be dropping upwards of 40 gigabits of traffic per second. On Friday, WikiLeaks tweeted that their own site was sustaining attacks of 10 Gb/second, adding, "Whoever is running it controls thousands of machines or is able to simulate them."
According to a press release (pdf) dated June 6, 2012, TrapWire is “designed to provide a simple yet powerful means of collecting and recording suspicious activity reports.” A system of interconnected nodes spot anything considered suspect and then input it into the system to be "analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”
In a 2009 email included in the Anonymous leak, Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence Fred Burton is alleged to write, “TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance.” Burton formerly served with the US Diplomatic Security Service, and Abraxas’ staff includes other security experts with experience in and out of the Armed Forces.
What is believed to be a partnering agreement included in the Stratfor files from August 13, 2009 indicates that they signed a contract with Abraxas to provide them with analysis and reports of their TrapWire system (pdf).
“Suspicious activity reports from all facilities on the TrapWire network are aggregated in a central database and run through a rules engine that searches for patterns indicative of terrorist surveillance operations and other attack preparations,” Crime and Justice International magazine explains in a 2006 article on the program, one of the few publically circulated on the Abraxas product (pdf). “Any patterns detected – links among individuals, vehicles or activities – will be reported back to each affected facility. This information can also be shared with law enforcement organizations, enabling them to begin investigations into the suspected surveillance cell.”
In a 2005 interview with The Entrepreneur Center, Abraxas founder Richard “Hollis” Helms said his signature product “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” He calls it “a proprietary technology designed to protect critical national infrastructure from a terrorist attack by detecting the pre-attack activities of the terrorist and enabling law enforcement to investigate and engage the terrorist long before an attack is executed,” and that, “The beauty of it is that we can protect an infinite number of facilities just as efficiently as we can one and we push information out to local law authorities automatically.”
An internal email from early 2011 included in the Global Intelligence Files has Stratfor’s Burton allegedly saying the program can be used to “[walk] back and track the suspects from the get go w/facial recognition software.”
Since its inception, TrapWire has been implemented in most major American cities at selected high value targets (HVTs) and has appeared abroad as well. The iWatch monitoring system adopted by the Los Angeles Police Department (pdf) works in conjunction with TrapWire, as does the District of Columbia and the "See Something, Say Something" program conducted by law enforcement in New York City, which had 500 surveillance cameras linked to the system in 2010. Private properties including Las Vegas, Nevada casinos have subscribed to the system. The State of Texas reportedly spent half a million dollars with an additional annual licensing fee of $150,000 to employ TrapWire, and the Pentagon and other military facilities have allegedly signed on as well.
In one email from 2010 leaked by Anonymous, Stratfor’s Fred Burton allegedly writes, “God Bless America. Now they have EVERY major HVT in CONUS, the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC as clients.” Files on USASpending.gov reveal that the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense together awarded Abraxas and TrapWire more than one million dollars in only the past eleven months.
News of the widespread and largely secretive installation of TrapWire comes amidst a federal witch-hunt to crack down on leaks escaping Washington and at attempt to prosecute whistleblowers. Thomas Drake, a former agent with the NSA, has recently spoken openly about the government’s Trailblazer Project that was used to monitor private communication, and was charged under the Espionage Act for coming forth. Separately, former NSA tech director William Binney and others once with the agency have made claims in recent weeks that the feds have dossiers on every American, an allegation NSA Chief Keith Alexander dismissed during a speech at Def-Con last month in Vegas.
US Army: ‘Super Soldier’ Genetically Modified Humans Won’t Need Food, Sleep
The next frontier of genetic modification is not centered around a certain fruit or vegetable, but humans. More specifically, military personnel. Genetically modified humans is the next venture for biotechnology companies working with the United States military, with the admitted goal of producing a ‘super soldier’ that does not require food or sleep to perform Olympic-style physical feats.
The genetically modified humans, or ‘super soldiers’, will even be able to regrow limbs that were destroyed by enemy fire and live off of their fat stores for extreme lengths of time.
Backed by $2 billion a year in funding, the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently unleashed the news after years of secret experimentation and study. The organization did not say whether or not genetically modified humans currently exist to any extent; however, it is known based on previous reports that human chimeras have already been created outside of the public spotlight. Such scientific experiments have drawn fire from scientists and activists alike, who are demanding for laws to forbid the creation of ‘monsters’.
As of right now, DARPA has a functioning exoskeleton that enables soldiers to run much faster and handle heavy weights. This is but a step in the direct of full modification of the genetic coding of soldiers.
DARPA, of course, has earned the nickname of the ‘mad scientist’ wing of the military for its rampant experiments in modifying life and fusing biology and technology. In working with killer drones, DARPA earlier this year was developing research into contact lens-mounted displays that could transport information from drones into the eyeballs of soldiers. Furthermore, the agency is also developing helmets in which the soldiers could communicate ‘telepathically’ with the kill drones.
The announcement ties in with the 2045 project, which I’ve covered in the past. The project offers ‘immortality’ to the wealthy elite who financially back it, and touts artificial bodies and brains for humans to achieve ‘immortality’.
This entire system, of course, ties into a larger ‘singularity’ project as outlined by the creator of the 2045 plan and others like Ray Kurzweil. In a nutshell, ‘consciousness singularity’ can be defined by a merging of all ‘transhuman’ bodies into one ‘hive mind’ of sorts. Likely a massive super computer that has full control over the minds of those ‘hooked in’.
It truly sounds insane, yet it is plainly stated out in the open. A number of issues arise from this singularity plan (not to even mention the fact that ‘soldiers’ are slowly becoming more of DARPA creations than human), such as the serious threat to humanity’s very integrity. We’ve seen the many issues regarding traditional GMOs on public health and the environment, now what about human modification?