Archive for November, 2011
Dutch Researcher Creates A Super-Influenza Virus With The Potential To Kill Half the World’s Population
Via DoctorTipster.com:
A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet’s population. Now, researchers and experts in bioterrorism debate whether it is a good idea to publish the virus creation ”recipe”. However, several voices argue that such research should have not happened in the first place.
The virus is a strain of avian influenza H5N1 genetically modified to be extremely contagious. It was created by researcher Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, Netherlands. The work was first presented at a conference dedicated to influenza, that took place in September in Malta.
Avian influenza emerged in Asia about 10 years ago. Since then there were fewer than 600 infection cases reported in humans. On the other hand, Fouchier’s genetically modified strain is extremely contagious and dangerous, killing about 50% of infected patients. The former strain did not represent a global threat, as transmission from human to human is rare. Or, at least, it was before Fouchier genetically modified it.
Your Civil Liberties for Lower Prices (Video)
Luke Rudkowski reports on Black Friday in Brooklyn, New York outside a Best Buy & Toys ‘R’ Us:
Occupy Wall Street Electronics Destroyed By NYPD
Via Motherboard, the police apparently took baseball bats to all of the property they confiscated in their Zuccotti Park raid a couple weeks ago. Was the goal to destroy devices that might contain documentation of the protests, or simply to punish the protests by breaking their possessions?
Don’t let the media have you fooled. This is what really happened to the protesters property after the OWS raid last week.
The NYPD smashed/broke laptops, camera’s, tents, all electronics, bikes, etc. and took $5,000 of cash from a man’s backpack. That was all the money he had left to get by. The cops are now facing legal charges for violating their own rules and not giving protesters receipts for materials “confiscated”.
Daniel Wolpert: The Real Reason for Brains
Via TED Talks:
Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. In this entertaining, data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility of human motion.
The Neuroeconomics Revolution
The left/right paradigm is coming to a quicker end than I thought. Robert Schiller writes at Al Jazeera:
Economics is at the start of a revolution that is traceable to an unexpected source: medical schools and their research facilities. Neuroscience — the science of how the brain, that physical organ inside one’s head, really works — is beginning to change the way we think about how people make decisions. These findings will inevitably change the way we think about how economies function. In short, we are at the dawn of “neuroeconomics”.
Efforts to link neuroscience to economics have occurred mostly in just the last few years, and the growth of neuroeconomics is still in its early stages. But its nascence follows a pattern: revolutions in science tend to come from completely unexpected places. A field of science can turn barren if no fundamentally new approaches to research are on the horizon. Scholars can…
Turn On, Tune In And Get Better?
Disinformation readers who have read Graham Hancock’s recent books Supernatural and Entangled are well aware that hallucinogens can be powerful and highly effective medicine, but until recently US government policy more or less prohibited any scientific research. The tide is starting to turn, as this article from the LA Times makes clear:
What a long, strange trip it’s been. In the 1960s and ’70s, a rebellious generation embraced hallucinogens and a wide array of street drugs to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” Almost half a century later, magic mushrooms, LSD, Ecstasy and ketamine are being studied for legitimate therapeutic uses. Scientists believe these agents have the potential to help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, drug or alcohol addiction, unremitting pain or depression and the existential anxiety of terminal illness.
“Scientifically, these compounds are way too important not to study,” said Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths, who conducted the psilocybin trial.
In their next incarnation, these drugs may help the psychologically wounded tune in to their darkest feelings and memories and turn therapy sessions into heightened opportunities to learn and heal…
Did Life On Earth Start With A Single Ocean-Sized Mega-Creature?
File this under we-are-all-connected: three billion years ago, life on Earth may have been a global mega-organism called LUCA, from which all living things today are descended. Can we get an artist’s rending of this colossal being? New Scientist writes:
ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet’s oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.
This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor – not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.
The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life’s fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling…
Pro And Anti-Christmas Retailers List
Keepers of morality the American Family Association have released their annual list of companies that are “Christmas friendly” or “anti-Christmas” (the latter using the term “Christmas” sparingly and instead referring to “the holidays”). Lesson learned: Jesus loves Wal-Mart, and when you shop at Staples, you’re shopping with Satan.
Northern Lights Attacking Earth?
A special report from BBC Nature:
Could our planet be under attack from the unearthly forces that cast a mysterious glow across the poles, disrupting life as we know it?
The strange, beautiful coloured lights that circle the Earth’s polar regions are a source of fascination for many.
The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, shines above Bear Lake, Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska.
But as the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, dance in the frozen skies over Alaska, scientists’ trigger fingers are poised to launch rockets.
The researchers at the world’s largest land-based rocket range hope to learn more about these storms and their impact on lives in the northern hemisphere.
Rocket men
The Poker Flat Research Range’s location in central Alaska makes it the perfect place to study, and film, the Aurora Borealis.So filmmakers headed there to capture footage both of the natural phenomenon and the scientists’ explosive experiments for the BBC series Frozen Planet.
They worked…
Sex Addiction – A Real Epidemic?
Newsweek devotes some serious column inches to the “epidemic” that has made its way into popular awareness via notable celebrities such as Tiger Woods and Domenique Strauss-Kahn:
Valerie realized that sex was wrecking her life right around the time her second marriage disintegrated. At 30, and employed as a human-resources administrator in Phoenix, she had serially cheated on both her husbands—often with their subordinates and co-workers—logging anonymous hookups in fast-food-restaurant bathrooms, affairs with married men, and one-night stands too numerous to count. But Valerie couldn’t stop. Not even after one man’s wife aimed a shotgun at her head while catching them in flagrante delicto. Valerie called phone-sex chat lines and pored over online pornography, masturbating so compulsively that it wasn’t uncommon for her to choose her vibrator over going to work. She craved public exhibitionism, too, particularly at strip clubs, and even accepted money in exchange for sex—not out of financial necessity but for the illicit rush such acts gave her.
For Valerie, sex was a form of self-medication: to obliterate the anxiety, despair…
Occupy Wall Street As Pong
From MK12, the opening animation for a special Occupy Wall Street screening, curated by Zero Film Festival in NYC. Here’s how to win at life:
South Korea Rolls Out Robotic Prison Wardens
Incarceration just got a lot more adorable. Via the BBC:
A jail in the eastern city of Pohang plans to run a month-long trial with three of the automatons in March. The machines will monitor inmates for abnormal behaviour.
South Korea aims to be a world leaders in robotics. Business leaders believe the field has the potential to become a major export industry.
The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies. It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide.
Prof Lee Baik-Chu, of Kyonggi University, who led the design process, said the robots would alert human guards if they discovered a problem.
Miley Cyrus Gets Political, Supports #OWS
Does the endorsement of Miley Cyrus spell the end of cool for #OWS? Check it out:
A Browser Extension That Flips Gender
Danielle Sucher’s Jailbreak the Patriarchy is a Chrome extension that substitutes the word “women” for “men” and “he” for “she” and so on within all text. The results are thought provoking — toggle between a patriarchal and matriarchal online world with the click of a button:
Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it’s installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”, that sort of thing.
This makes reading stuff on the internet a pretty fascinating and eye-opening experience, I must say. What would the world be like if we reversed the way we speak about women and men? Well, now you can find out!
Pepper Spray Is Harmful, Torturously Painful, And Can Be Deadly
To sum up: the burning from so-called “pepper spray” is ten times more intense than that of the hottest peppers in existence, it can cause permanent respiratory, nerve, and eye damage, and in the mid-1990s was linked by the Justice Department to 70 deaths. Via Scientific American:
Aa American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the intensity of a pepper’s burn. The scale puts sweet bell peppers at the zero mark and the blistering habanero at up to 350,000 Scoville Units. Commercial grade pepper spray leaves even the most painful of natural peppers (the Himalayan ghost pepper) far behind. It’s listed at between 2 million and 5.3 million Scoville units. The lower number refers to the kind of pepper spray that you and I might be able to purchase for self-protective uses. And the higher number? It’s the kind of spray that police use, the super-high dose given…
Media Roots: OWS, Police State Repression, Unification, Censorship, Citizen Journalism
Via Media Roots:
Abby & Robbie Martin cover Occupy Wall Street: the police state repression against the First Amendment, the Democratic Party’s attempt to co-opt the movement, the Obama administration’s hypocrisy to praise revolution abroad and censor it at home, the fact that the Tea Party and OWS are fighting two heads of the same beast, the “Black Bloc” provocateurs and their attempt to discredit peaceful movements; media censorship and the fact that news anchors are repeaters, not reporters; the two-tiered justice system catered toward the elite; citizen journalism and its role in allowing participation and unification in the global revolution.
The Beauty Of Minefield Landscapes
Will the landmines that were sprinkled across vast swaths of the globe during brutal twentieth-century wars ironically end up saving nature? In Bosnia, “nowhere [in the countryside] is safe” from mines — meaning that animals and plants can flourish where people fear to tread. BLDG BLOG has a gallery of gorgeous mine-infested landscapes and the horrifying devices buried beneath the surfaces:
The Minescape project by Los Angeles-based photographer Brett Van Ort looks at the ironic effects of landmines on the preservation of natural landscapes, placing woods, meadows, and even remote country roads off-limits, fatally tainted terrains given back to animals and vegetation.
“Left over munitions and landmines from the wars in the early 1990s still litter the countryside in Bosnia,” Van Ort explains. Many deminers in the field believe roughly 10% of the country can still be deemed a landmine area. They also feel that nowhere in the countryside is safe, as they may…
Time Magazine’s American Vs. Overseas Covers
Via Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, an illustrative comparison of the front of this week’s issue of Time Magazine in different markets. Does this say something about the U.S. media, the U.S. populace, or both? Either way, I’m not buying that stress is good for you.
The Bank Bailout Was Actually $8 Trillion
Ah, free-market capitalism — the economic system that works best, provided that one infuses $8 trillion to stave off total collapse. The Atlantic Wire writes:
Remember the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program with which the federal government came to the rescue of faltering banks in 2008? Well, according to a Bloomberg report, that was just a fraction of the financial help the Federal Reserve Bank wound up doling out to troubled lenders. The real total was reportedly closer to $8 trillion, after you add up benefits outside TARP, including emergency loans given at below-market rates:
The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and…
