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Links
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- Gadgets
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 AI
Artificial Intelligence
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BCI & BMI
Brain-Computer Interfaces & Brain-Machine Interfaces -- Bionics
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Biometrics
measuring and analyzing human physiological characteristics such as fingerprints, ear prints, eye retinas and irises, voice patterns, facial patterns, gate, and hand measurements, especially for authentication purposes
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Brain fingerprinting
and subvocal speech
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Chemicals
incl. gender bending childrens' products
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Chemtrails
Ethylene dibromide and other chemicals sprayed over America
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Chimera
an organism consisting of two or more cell lines from different genetic donors
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Cigarettes
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Cloning
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Cryptography
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Depleted Uranium
poisoning the Middle East and killing our people back home
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Echelon
electronic spying network
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Energy Weapons
EM, radiation, lasers, sound
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Flu
biological pathogens and immunizations
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Food additives
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GPS
Global Positioning Satellites
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Gay Bomb
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Hearing voices?
voice to skull technologies
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In-Q-Tel
and other venture capital arms
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Internet
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Myostatin
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Nanotech
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Nukes
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Optical computers
light-processing and quantum CPUs
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Pokemon
December 16, 1997 Japanese episode caused seizures in hundreds of children and some adults
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RFID
Radio Frequency IDentification, the Verichip, and the REAL ID Act
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Ray Kurzweil
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SME-PED
secure mobile environment - portable electronic device
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Sony
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Spinal cord
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Spybots
robotic assassins?
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Taraxein
Perps can make you crazy...it's easy
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Television
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Toxoplasma gondii
from food to pets to perps, it can make you crazy
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Vehicles
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Virtual Retinal Display
The virtual retinal display scans a low-power beam of light that "paints" an image directly onto a user's retina rather than a screen.
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Weather
global warming, HAARP, and weather manipulation
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Wiretapping
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Yale remote-controlled flies
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The (really scary) soldier of the future
Vast government contracts have corrupted the American university system, turning off the fountainhead of unfettered ideas and scientific discovery. Multibillion-dollar federal R&D budgets have replaced the solitary inventor with veritable armies of scientists and engineers in laboratories across the country. Public policy itself has become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. -- taken with only minor changes from President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address, 1961
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/10/20/soldier/index_np.html |
skews_me
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'Minority Report' interface created for US military
A computer interface inspired by the futuristic system portrayed in the movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, could soon help real military personnel deal with information overload. The system under development at Raytheon lets users don a pair of reflective gloves and manipulate images projected on a panoramic screen. A mounted camera keeps track of hand movements and a computer interprets gestures. Raytheon plans to offer the technology as a way to sort through large amounts of satellite imagery and intelligence data. But the technology might also have non-military applications, says Stephen Brewster, who is also developing gesture-based computer interfaces at the University of Glasgow, UK. Raytheon, based in Massachusetts, US,...has even employed John Underkoffler, the researcher who proposed the interface to the makers of the film.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7271 |
skews_me
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'Miracle mouse' can grow back lost limbs
SCIENTISTS have created a “miracle mouse” that can regenerate amputated limbs or badly damaged organs, making it able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals. The researchers have also found that when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate. “We have experimented with amputating or damaging several different organs, such as the heart, toes, tail and ears, and just watched them regrow,” [Ellen Heber-Katz, professor of immunology at the Wistar Institute, an American biomedical research centre,] said. “It is quite remarkable. The only organ that did not grow back was the brain. “When we injected foetal liver cells taken from those animals into ordinary mice, they too gained the power of regeneration. We found this persisted even six months after the injection." Heber-Katz made her discovery when she noticed that the identification holes that scientists punch in the ears of experimental mice healed without any signs of scarring. The self-healing mice, from a strain known as MRL, were then subjected to a series of surgical procedures. In one the mice had their toes amputated — but the digits grew back, complete with joints. In another test some of the tail was cut off but also regenerated. Then the researchers used a cryoprobe to freeze parts of the animals’ hearts, only to see these grow back again. A similar phenomenon was observed when the optic nerve was severed and the liver partially destroyed.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-210-1754008-210,00.html |
skews_me
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'Personal supercomputer' goes on sale
The DC-96 computer was developed by Orion Multisystems in California, US, and is aimed at scientists and engineers who routinely carry out computationally intensive calculations. About the size of small refrigerator, the DC-96 contains a "cluster" of 96 interconnected low-voltage microprocessors, each of which is capable of running at 1.2 Gigahertz, or 1.2 billion cycles per second. Together, these processors give the machine a peak computing power of 230 gigaflops, or the ability to carry out 230 billion complex mathematical operations every second. The machine also comes with a massive 192 gigabytes of memory. Such computer power does not come cheap, however, and one DC-96 costs $100,000.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7340 |
skews_me
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'See through clothes' scanner gets outing at Heathrow
A security scanner that sees through clothes and produces a nude image of passengers has made its debut in a trial at Heathrow Terminal 4, according to a report in the Sunday Times. [aka backscatter] (see Photos section)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/08/heathrow_scanner_pilot/ |
skews_me
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3D Printing Gets Into Top Gear
The concept of producing material objects from 3D CAD is commonly known as Rapid Proto-Typing, or ‘RPT’. It has had quite a short history, but has seen many new technologies introduced in that short time. The first process, called stereolithography, used a vat of liquid polymer plastic which was hardened in layers by a laser to create a solid plastic object. The liquid material was a very expensive item, the process very slow, and it needed a controlled environment room. The cost of both machine and material kept the process to a few bureaux and research institutions. Many other technologies followed, usually offering faster and cheaper operation. One particular system (LOM) uses sheets of paper that are laser cut and laminated. All processes have their advantages and disadvantages and those that have stood the test of time have some particular characteristic that gives them a market niche. All systems are based on the idea of taking a computer 3D model and calculating paper-thin slices through it, so that the data represents a laminated model. This laminated-model data is then output layer-by-layer to the machine to solidify, fuse or cut material for each lamination. A standard now exists for the lamination model data – the STL file format – and virtually all 3D manufacturing CAD systems can now generate STL files. A US company, Z-Corporation, has developed a Rapid Prototyping machine that offers a very attractive combination of features. It uses extremely cheap material, operates very quickly and does not need elaborate special environments. The machine is based on inkjet printer head technology and so has been labeled a "3D Printer". The only downside aspect of the machine is that the models produced are not as strong as from some other systems. So, although they cannot serve as short-term mechanical working components, they do provide very good quality, highly detailed objects that are ideal for design-team and client evaluation.
http://www.cadinfo.net/editorial/z402.htm |
skews_me
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A Cellphone Powered by Urine
Physicists in Singapore have developed a battery that can be powered by human urine. Using 0.2 ml of urine, the team were able to generate a voltage of around 1.5 Volts with a corresponding maximum power of 1.5 mW. Battery performance can also be adjusted by using different construction materials. The battery is made from a layer of paper that is soaked in copper chloride (CuCl) and then sandwiched between strips of magnesium and copper. The final product has dimensions of 6cm x 3cm, and a thickness of just 1 mm. The research was published in the Institute of Physics' Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/15564.php |
skews_me
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A Force Field for Astronauts?
Many experts are skeptical that electric fields can be made to protect astronauts. But Charles Buhler and John Lane, both scientists with ASRC Aerospace Corporation at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, believe it can be done. They've received support from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, whose job is to fund studies of far-out ideas, to investigate the possibility of electric shields for lunar bases. "Using electric fields to repel radiation was one of the first ideas back in the 1950s, when scientists started to look at the problem of protecting astronauts from radiation," Buhler says. "They quickly dropped the idea, though, because it seemed like the high voltages needed and the awkward designs that they thought would be necessary (for example, putting the astronauts inside two concentric metal spheres) would make such an electric shield impractical." Buhler and Lane's approach is different. In their concept, a lunar base would have a half dozen or so inflatable, conductive spheres about 5 meters across mounted above the base. The spheres would then be charged up to a very high static-electrical potential: 100 megavolts or more. This voltage is very large but because there would be very little current flowing (the charge would sit statically on the spheres), not much power would be needed to maintain the charge. Skeptics note that an electrostatic shield on the Moon is susceptible to being short circuited by floating moondust, which is itself charged by solar ultraviolet radiation. Solar wind blowing across the shield can cause problems, too. Electrons and protons in the wind could become trapped by the maze of forces that make up the shield, leading to strong and unintended electrical currents right above the heads of the astronauts.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/24jun_electrostatics.htm?list169554 |
skews_me
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Actual Patents Of Mind Control And Behavior Modification Technology
Compiled by Theresa de Veto
http://www.rense.com/general3/patent.htm |
skews_me
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Agencies rev up security, data-sharing projects following attacks
Doug Naquin, the deputy chief information officer of the CIA,..urged vendors unfamiliar with the intelligence community to begin a dialogue with the CIA. “The CIA is more open to new vendors than ever before,” he said. “We remain open to the newest and freshest ideas.”
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1101/110101j1.htm |
skews_me
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AirScooter
"The original Sikorsky rotorcraft helicopter concept was based on a coaxial design much like the AirScooter," says Woody Norris; internationally recognized inventor and AirScooter Corporation co-founder, "what we've done is package the coaxial design in a modern light-weight craft that allows for intuitive control and incredible maneuverability."
http://www.airscooter.com/ |
skews_me
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AntiPolygraph.org
Polygraph "Testing" is a Fraud - A danger to the truthful, easily beaten by liars
http://antipolygraph.org/ |
skews_me
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Asimov's legacy
The term robot comes from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labour". Modern use of the term stems from the play R.U.R., written in 1920 by the Czech author Karel Capek, which depicts society as having become dependent on robots that are able to do all the mental and physical work. The word "robotics" also comes from science fiction. It first appeared in the short story "Runaround" (1942) by Isaac Asimov, which was later included in his classic I, Robot. Asimov's robot stories also introduced the idea of a "positronic brain" (as used by the character Data in Star Trek) and the "three laws of robotics", which state: 1: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate a higher order law. 2: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with a higher order law. 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with a higher order law.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article318927.ece |
skews_me
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Audio Tooth Implant
The Wellcome Wing's latest Talking Points exhibit is a new concept in communication - an audio tooth implant that allows you to receive useful information in secret.
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/talkingpoints/audiotooth/ |
skews_me
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Automated synchronization of video image sequences to new soundtracks , United States Patent 5880788
The synchronization of an existing video to a new soundtrack is carried out through the phonetic analysis of the original soundtrack and the new soundtrack. Individual speech sounds, such as phones, are identified in the soundtrack for the original video recording, and the images corresponding thereto are stored. The new soundtrack is similarly analyzed to identify individual speech sounds, which are used to select the stored images and create a new video sequence. The sequence of images are then smoothly fitted to one another, to provide a video stream that is synchronized to the new soundtrack. This approach permits a given video sequence to be synchronized to any arbitrary utterance. Furthermore, the matching of the video images to the new speech sounds can be carried out in a highly automated manner, thereby reducing required manual effort.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5880788.html |
skews_me
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Bandwidth Advance Hints at Future Beyond Wi-Fi
In March [2005], the Federal Communications Commission took a significant step toward breaking an industry deadlock over setting a single standard for a new wireless technology called ultrawideband, or UWB. While traditional radio technologies have transmitted and received analog signals only on specific frequencies, UWB uses inexpensive computing power to send short radio pulses across much of the radio spectrum. Because it does not use a single frequency, UWB offers several advantages, including the capacity to send high volumes of information quickly and the ability to share frequencies and resist interference. Today's Wi-Fi systems are limited to about 100 megabits of data a second, a rate that will realistically support no more than a single high-definition television video stream in the home, whereas UWB's capacity is 500 megabits and faster.
http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=9401E0DD1630F937A35756C0A9639C8B63 |
skews_me
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BlueSniper Rifle
The gun, which is called the BlueSniper rifle, can scan and attack Bluetooth devices from more than a mile away. The first version of the gun showed up at Defcon 2004. While the early version was held together with tie-straps and rubber bands, this newest version has a much more professional look. The team at Flexilis learned a lot from making their previous gun, and have made many improvements. The gun is now bigger, stronger and more durable and the antenna is almost twice a powerful as the older model. It also has a small computer which eliminates the need for lugging around a heavy laptop just to gather data.
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article106-page1.php |
skews_me
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CIA Overseeing 3-Day War Game on Internet
The CIA is conducting a war game this week to simulate an unprecedented, Sept. 11-like electronic assault against the United States. The three-day exercise, known as "Silent Horizon," is meant to test the ability of government and industry to respond to escalating Internet disruptions over many months, according to participants. The simulated attacks were carried out five years in the future by a fictional new alliance of anti-American organizations that included anti-globalization hackers. The most serious damage was expected to be inflicted in the closing hours of the war game. The national security simulation was significant because its premise - a devastating cyberattack that affects government and parts of the economy on the scale of the 2001 suicide hijackings - contradicts assurances by U.S. counterterrorism experts that such effects from a cyberattack are highly unlikely.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8AAFTE80.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down |
skews_me
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Camera phones will be high-precision scanners
New software, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan, goes further than existing cellphone camera technology by allowing entire documents to be scanned simply by sweeping the phone across the page. As a page is being scanned the OCR software takes dozens of still images of the page and effectively merges them together using the outline of the page as a reference guide. The software can also detect the curvature of the page and correct any distortion so caused, enabling even the areas near the binding to be scanned clearly.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7998&feedId=online-news_rss20 |
skews_me
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Camera sees behind objects
Researchers from Stanford University and Cornell University have put together a projector-camera system that can pull off a classic magic trick: it can read a playing card that is facing away from the camera. The dual-photography system gains information from a subject by analyzing the way projected patterns of light bounce off it. The system can show a scene from the point of view of the projector as well as that of the camera. It could eventually be used to quickly add lighting effects in movie scenes, including the ability to realistically integrate actors who are shot separately and computer graphics into previously shot scenes.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/060105/Camera_sees_behind_objects_060105.html |
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Come fry with me: Experimental electromagnetic weaponry may soon see combat use
The most likely way of creating weaponised high-powered microwaves (HPMs) is through a device known as a vircator. A vircator works by discharging stored electricity into a coil of wires wrapped around an explosive. The flowing electricity creates a magnetic field, which is then compressed as the (relatively small) explosive goes off. This causes a low-frequency electromagnetic pulse that is used to accelerate electrons to high energies and punch through a sheet of foil. The electrons form an unstable bubble of charge that oscillates in a cavity designed for the purpose. The oscillation creates HPMs that are then emitted from an antenna that guides them towards the target. Because the source of the energy is a compact explosive, a vircator could fit inside bombs or cruise missiles. Deployed, they could disrupt a variety of enemy systems, from missile targeting and launch electronics, to command-and-control systems. It is possible that they could penetrate hundreds of metres below the ground and reach underground bunkers built for protection against explosives. Larger, reusable weapons are also being developed for use on ships to disable incoming missiles such as China's Silkworm. Unlike military planes, passenger jets are not well protected against electromagnetic weapons and so are susceptible even to chance electromagnetic emissions from mobile phones, CD players or laptop computers that come from within the plane's metal skin. In what is a textbook case of asymmetrical warfare, a terrorist equipped with a low-powered device (ie, one that is not explosively powered and rather simple to build) could still conceivably cause a plane to crash.
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1559830 |
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Common sense boosts speech software
Speech recognition software matches strings of phonemes -- the sounds that make up words -- to words in a vocabulary database. The software finds close matches and presents the best one. The software does not understand word meaning, however. This makes it difficult to distinguish among words that sound the same or similar. The Open Mind Common Sense Project database contains more than 700,000 facts that MIT Media Lab researchers have been collecting from the public since the fall of 2000. These are based on common sense like the knowledge that a dog is a type of pet rather than the knowledge that a dog is a type of mammal. The researchers used the phrase database to reorder the close matches returned by speech recognition software. In the example 'My bike has a squeaky brake', ordinary speech recognition software might have trouble distinguishing between "brake" and "break", but the researchers' system knows that bicycles have brakes, and so makes the correct choice, said [Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab researcher Henry] Lieberman. The researchers evaluated their common sense speech recognition technique by logging the errors and dictation times of users who dictated text that contained topics covered by the Open Mind database. It prevented 17 percent of the errors and reduced dictation time by 7.5 percent, said Lieberman.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/032305/Common_sense_boosts_speech_software_032305.html |
skews_me
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Conspiracies, quantum physics, and holographics
Quantum Physics, Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Holographics, Neural Biology, Information Theory, Developmental Psychology, Artificial (or Manufactured) Intelligence, Quantum Physics
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mindcontrolresearchforum/message/756 |
skews_me
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Dermal Display
In his book Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities [available on the web at http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI.htm ], Robert A. Freitas Jr. describes [in section 7.4.6.7 (page 204)] a "programmable dermal display" in which a population of about 3 billion display pixel robots would be permanently implanted a fraction of a mm under the surface of the skin, covering a rectangle 6 cm x 5 cm on the back of the hand. Photons emitted by these pixel bots would produce an image on the surface of the skin. This pixelbot array could be programmed to form any of many thousands of displays. Each display would be capable of two functions: (1) presenting to the user data received from the large population of medical bots that roam the user's body; (2) conveying instructions from the user to that same large population of bots. The display could be activated or deactivated by finger tapping on the skin.
http://www.nanogirl.com/museumfuture/dermaldisplay.htm |
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Diagnostic potential of GDV technique
Prof Korotkov confirmed earlier observations of other researchers, such as Semion Kirlian, Dr Mandel from Germany and Prof Milhomens in Brazil, that the stimulated electro-photonic glow around human fingertips contained astonishingly coherent and comprehensive information about the human state - both physiological and psychological. In brief, stress and other negative factors seem to disrupt the uniformity, coherence and the magnitude of the human electro-photonic glow measured with the GDV instrument. Even though the pattern recognition methodology of the electro-photonic glow is still at an early stage of development, extensive clinical trials conducted across Russia since 1997 demonstrated that the correlation between the GDV and conventional diagnostic techniques can be as high as 98%. Following clinical trials and the recommendation of The Russian Academy of Science the GDV technique and equipment have been approved in 1999 by health authorities in Russia for general clinical use without limitations. Today GDV systems of Prof Korotkov are in use in some 20 countries. The GDV diagnostic system of Prof Korotkov is based on stimulating and recording 40 ms of the electro-photonic glow around all ten fingertips, one at a time. Using clinically verified charts and methods developed by Prof Korotkov it seems possible to determine, not only what happens in the human body, but also where it happens – by examining specific sectors of the electro-photonic glow.
http://kirlianresearch.com/kirlian_diagnostic.html |
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Dirty Bomb
The term dirty bomb is most often used to refer to a Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb |
skews_me
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Do You Really Need To Have A Brain?
The reason for my apparently absurd question is the remarkable research conducted at the University of Sheffield by neurology professor the late Dr. John Lorber. When Sheffield's campus doctor was treating one of the mathematics students for a minor ailment, he noticed that the student's head was a little larger than normal. The doctor referred the student to professor Lorber for further examination. The student in question was academically bright, had a reported IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate. When he was examined by CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no brain at all. Instead of two hemispheres filling the cranial cavity, some 4.5 centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column. The student was suffering from hydrocephalus, the condition in which the cerebrospinal fluid, instead of circulating around the brain and entering the bloodstream, becomes dammed up inside. Normally, the condition is fatal in the first months of childhood. Even where an individual survives he or she is usually seriously handicapped. Somehow, though, the Sheffield student had lived a perfectly normal life and went on to gain an honours degree in mathematics. This case is by no means as rare as it seems. In 1970, a New Yorker died at the age of 35. He had left school with no academic achievements, but had worked at manual jobs such as building janitor, and was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. Tenants of the building where he worked described him as passing the days performing his routine chores, such as tending the boiler, and reading the tabloid newspapers. When an autopsy was performed to determine the cause of his premature death he, too, was found to have practically no brain at all. Professor Lorber has identified several hundred people who have very small cerebral hemispheres but who appear to be normal intelligent individuals.
http://www.rense.com/general63/brain.htm |
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Doctors claim suspended animation success
Researchers are testing potentially life-saving techniques for keeping humans in a state of suspended animation while surgeons repair their wounds. US doctors have developed a method of inducing hypothermia to shut down the body's functions for up to three hours. In tests, they reduced the body temperature of injured pigs from 37C to 10C before operating on them and then reviving them. A surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Hasan Alam, has tested the technique about 200 times on pigs, with a 90 per cent success rate. First he anaesthetises the animal, then cuts a major vein and artery in its abdomen to simulate multiple gunshots to a person's chest and abdomen. As the pig rapidly loses about half its blood and enters a state of shock, Dr Alam drains its blood and stores it before pumping chilled organ preservation fluid into its system. The animal's body temperature falls to about 10C until it is in a state of "profound hypothermia" and has no pulse and no electrical activity in its brain. But after the blood stored earlier is warmed and pumped back into the pig's body its heart starts beating again and it comes back to life. Other US researchers are working on methods to place organisms in suspended animation by exposing them to a cocktail of gases, including hydrogen sulphide.
http://smh.com.au/news/health-and-fitness/doctors-claim-suspended-animation-success/2006/01/20/1137553739997.html |
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Does your boss want you dead?
'Dead peasants' insurance pays your employer a secret, tax-free windfall when you die. Companies pay a whopping $8 billion in premiums each year for such coverage, according to the American Council of Life Insurers, a trade group. The policies make up more than 20% of the all the life insurance sold each year. Companies expect to reap more than $9 billion in tax breaks from these policies over the next five years. The policies are treated as whole life policies. So, companies can borrow against the policies (though the IRS won't let them write off the interest). And the death benefits are tax-free. Hundreds of companies -- including Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney and Winn-Dixie -- have purchased this insurance on more than 6 million rank-and-file workers.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Insurance/P64954.asp |
skews_me
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EMF Shielding Devices
http://www.lessemf.com/emf-shie.html |
skews_me
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Exhibition gives a look inside the human body
If an anatomy textbook came to life, it might look like “Bodies … The Exhibition.” The exhibit features 22 human bodies and 260 specimens preserved for display. Highlights include skinless cadavers in a football player’s pose, another throwing a baseball and one body holding hands with its own removed skeleton — all to show how muscles, tendons and bones work together. Divided into displays that focus on the body’s different systems — muscular, skeletal, circulatory, reproductive and respiratory — the exhibit features a variety of organs, as well as diseases that affect them. A smoker’s carbon-colored lungs are placed side-by-side with a healthy pair; dark spots of a stroke victim’s brain are shown beside a normal one, extreme cases of cancer show up along with healthy specimens. “We're hoping to create a whole new generation who can converse about their bodies,” said Roy Glover, the medical director for Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions and retired anatomy professor at the University of Michigan School of Medicine. Glover said the specimens were obtained from a laboratory at Dalian Medical University in China that preserved them using a process where water is removed and replaced with a polymer that turns them rubber-like. The show has come under fire from human rights advocates who charge that the bodies and organs may have been illegally obtained through the Chinese government. Objections over the New York show echo similar accusations of exploitation directed at other popular "corpse shows" which have attracted millions of visitors in Asia, Europe and Los Angeles over the last several years.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10137337/ |
skews_me
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FBI Abandons Bullet-Matching Tests
FBI scientists say they are abandoning the bullet-matching technique that has previously been used in thousands of investigations. Known as bullet lead analysis, the FBI says they still have confidence in the reliability of the technique, but criticism of how the results were interpreted in court forced them to scrap the tests. They had imposed a moratorium on the technique a year earlier and are considering further review. A study by the National Research Council found that bureau examiners had sometimes overstated test results in concluding a bullet had come from a certain box or batch of ammunition. The FBI has conducted bullet lead analysis since the 1980s as part of local, state, federal and foreign investigations.
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7000012732 |
skews_me
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FBI shuts down suspected spammer
A federal law that took effect [in 2004] bans use of misleading subject lines and the sending of commercial e-mail messages that appear to be from friends. It also bans use of multiple e-mail addresses or domain names to hide senders' identities.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/breaking/fbi-shuts-down-suspected-spammer/2005/10/17/1129401167350.html |
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FBI: Computer upgrade cost still unknown
FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers [24 May 2005] he still doesn't know how much it will cost to complete the bureau's computer overhaul, already well over budget and behind schedule. He also refused to state publicly the cost of the initial phase of the Sentinel system, the planned successor to a failed project that was supposed to greatly improve management of terrorism and other criminal cases. Mueller had said a cost estimate would be ready in early spring for a new system to replace the Virtual Case File, which has cost taxpayers more than $100 million. Virtual Case File was to have been the final piece of the FBI's upgrade of its antiquated computer system, an instantaneous and paperless way for agents and analysts to manage all types of investigations. The first two phases of the "Trilogy" project -- deployment of a high-speed, secure FBI computer network and 30,000 new desktop computers -- have been completed. But the upgrade already is 2 1/2 years behind schedule and, at nearly $600 million, more than 25 percent over its initial budget. The Sentinel system will not be done until at least 2008, Mueller has said.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/05/25/fbi.computers.ap/ |
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FBI: Fired Professor Used Terror Code
"magazines"...referred to money..."grooms" for terrorist bombers, "wedding" for terrorist act and "the family" for the Jihad organization itself
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=1068224&tw=wn_wire_story |
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Four Prominent Experts Weigh In on the 2005 Government Mind Control Debate
In 1993, U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary declassified government documents proving illegal government human radiation experiments and yet no one was punished for conducting the illegal human experiments.
http://www.mindjustice.org/experts_6-05.htm |
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From 'Scientific Racism' to Technocratic Sexism
The C.I.A.'s Bargain to Maintain the Existence of Mind Control Weapons -- by Clare Louise Wehrle (c) 2003
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia_tradecraft/message/2337 |
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Frozen Light
Slowing a beam of light to a halt may pave the way for new optical communications technology, tabletop black holes and quantum computers
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000BAEB1-B2AA-1C6F-84A9809EC588EF21&catID=2 |
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Grammar becomes tool for CIA and businesses
Diagramming sentences - picking out subject, verb, object, adjective and other parts of speech - has been a staple of English grammar lessons for decades. Now, with financing from the CIA, a California company is using the technique to comb through e-mail messages and chat room talks, which can be a rich lode of corporate and government information, and a tough one to mine. Attensity's algorithms can do more than get a document ready to categorize. The software ferrets out meaning in sentences as they are being diagrammed. If the word "purchase" is used as a verb, the person doing the buying is tagged as a possible customer. If the phrase "plastic explosive" is used as an object, the subject is labeled as a potential enemy.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/04/business/ptparse05.html |
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Heathrow to hold iris scanning security trial
Under Project IRIS, anyone not holding an EU passport who regularly travels through Heathrow will be invited to have their iris patterns photographed and stored in a database upon departure. Those passengers can then use special automated security check-points which scan their eyes, avoiding long queues for non-EU passport holders when they return to the country. "It is expected that within five years more than a million people will be registered to use the system," the Home Office said in a statement. This is only a fraction of the 90 million passengers entering the UK each year but is seen as the first step to easing the burden on immigration officers who have to process visitors face-to-face. Airports across the globe are exploring the introduction of biometric systems which can identify passengers passing through security check-points by scanning their eyes, faces or fingerprints. Germany's Frankfurt Airport has already introduced the system on a trial basis, along with some U.S. airports. The technology is likely to arouse less suspicion from passengers than a new X-ray machine introduced at Heathrow last year which sees through clothes. (see backscatter)
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050419/325/fgoub.html |
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Hundreds of children 'vanishing'
Hundreds of African boys have disappeared from London schools, police investigating the murder of a boy whose torso was left in the Thames have said. Scotland Yard asked London education authorities how many black boys aged four to seven had vanished from school. Between July and September 2001, 300 had disappeared, and police fear thousands may go missing annually. Child welfare experts say the figures hint at the scale of child trafficking, sometimes for labour or benefit fraud. A previous BBC investigation found some African children were being held by their parents' creditors, so they could claim extra benefits. Of the missing boys, 299 came from Africa and one from the Caribbean. Under the 2004 Children's Act - being implemented [in 2005] - local authorities are meant to advise people to tell social services if they are caring for a child.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4541603.stm |
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Hydrogen Technology Applications Inc
HyTech (nickname for Hydrogen Technology Applications Inc) claims a process of converting H20 to HHO, producing a gas that combines the atomic power of hydrogen with the chemical stability of water. Tightly related to Brown's Gas (http://www.freeenergynews.com/Directory/RhodesGas) technology. A fuel economy enhancement application is presently being pursued as well. Water is not a fuel, it can be a source material to create an inefficient fuel, the gas HHO.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Hydrogen_Technology_Applications_Inc |
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Hypnosis, Mind Control
hypnotic devices for sale
http://www.amazing1.com/hyp.htm |
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IBM computing algorithm thinks like an animal
The mathematical model created at IBM simulates the behavior of 500,000 minicolumns connected by 400 million connections. With it, "we were able to demonstrate self-organization" and behavior similar to that seen in the real world, [Charles] Peck said. In a test outlined in the upcoming paper, the system was able to solve a pattern recognition problem that will cause errors on ordinary computers.
http://news.com.com/IBM+computing+algorithm+thinks+like+an+animal/2100-7337_3-5630880.html |
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IEI Robotics and Controls
Present day robotics and control systems...are driven by either rule-based systems, fuzzy logic, or very deterministic neural networks (i.e., those that always yield the same output for the same input pattern). Certainly, none of these approaches yield very creative or autonomous behaviors in robotic or control systems. Underlying all future robotics and controls systems will be the ubiquitous Creativity Machine (CM) / Self-Training Artificial Neural Network Object (STANNO) technologies. The CM components of these systems will essentially invent whole new plans of action, such as where to walk or look next, or what to say, all in the context of their environment and interactions with humans.
http://www.imagination-engines.com/applications/robotics.htm |
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Intel Says Forget Megahertz And Gigahertz
Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini says megahertz and gigahertz is out, and "performance per watt" is in. Performance per watt is a way of measuring not just how fast a computer can grind data, but also how much power it uses when doing so. The combined measurement is more relevant to smaller, flexible devices, like notebook computers, portable media players and smart phones.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2005/08/23/intel-chip-marketing-cz_dw_0823intel.html |
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Intel claims power breakthrough
Intel has announced a new chip manufacturing process which it claims could dramatically cut power consumption, and boost battery life by up to 1,000 per cent. The breakthrough is a result of the miniaturisation of the transistor etching process. Intel currently manufactures chips at 90 nanometres (a nanometre is one-billionth of a metre) but the new process works at 65 nanometres. Cutting the physical size of the transistors lowers the amount of power they use. All transistors leak power, even when not in use, but the new process cuts the amount of wastage dramatically. The chip giant said that the 65 nanometre processors for laptops and mobile phones should be available over the next few years. Intel is also working on other improvements, including a second version of its strained silicon technology. This reduces the interference in the flow of electrons through a chip and significantly boosts performance while only raising production costs by a few per cent.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2142569/intel-claims-power-breakthrough |
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Invisible Encryption
Seagate Technology has just announced a hard disk drive for laptops and other mobile devices that automatically encrypts all data as it goes into and comes out of the drive. Result: Nothing on the drive is accessible unless you know the password. If you lose your laptop with a drive like this installed, that's all you lose. The data is safe from prying eyes -- a thief can't even boot it up. Sure, the FBI, CIA or NSA can probably still get at your data. But the bad guys you're most worried about won't have a chance. Actually, that probably explains why this hasn't happened sooner. That automatic encryption could get mighty inconvenient.
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,102414,00.html |
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Ion Propulsion
The ion propulsion system on Deep Space 1 is the culmination of over 50 years of development on electric engine systems in space. Launched on Oct. 24, 1998, Deep Space 1 will be the first spacecraft to actually use ion propulsion to reach another planetary body. The engineering that makes this possible represents a journey that started more than half a century ago, when modern rocketry was invented. Looking back, Ernst Stuhlinger, a world expert on electric propulsion, said that the technology "owed its life-giving spark to Wernher von Braun."
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop06apr99_2.htm |
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Israeli airport technology detects intent of terrorists
So how can US officials go about identifying potential terrorists in their midst? A new solution is Israel's Suspect Detection Systems (SDS) - a company that has developed an advance automated filtering tool for identifying potential suspects with hostile intentions among masses of tens of thousands visitors. Consider it a personal polygraph machine, that will make air travelers infinitely safer, says SDS CEO Shabtai Shoval, a former division manager at Comverse Technology who founded SDS along with former head of the Israel Police's polygraph division Yeshayahu Horowitz and former deputy Mossad chief Amiram Levin. The way it works is that the passenger approaches the machine - they put their passport on a scanner and their other hand on a sensor. He is then presented with an array of written questions in the language indicated by the passport (or in an audio mode with earphones if requested). A special detector then measures physiological responses.
http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enScript=PrintVersion.jsp&enDispWho=Articles^l983 |
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Israelis strap on militant-busting wristwatches
Israel last week revealed that ground troops now sport wrist-borne LCD screens which enable real-time identification and elimination of targets. The Tadiran system - code-named "V-Rambo" - beams images of the enemy from unmanned drone aircraft direct to the men in the field, shortening the time it takes to identify and strike a target from around 10-12 minutes to a matter of seconds, AP reports. The Elisra Group is currently developing other remote-controlled technologies for use in unmanned ground vehicles, which may be adopted by the US as part of its "Gladiator" programme for the US Marines. Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Consortium recently won a $2.3m contract to develop a 7-foot "Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicle", intended to act as a targeting vehicle. The US already has a similar vehicle - Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, aka Swords or TALON - deployed in Iraq. Swords, however, is designed to seek, locate and destroy the enemy and is armed with cameras and either an M249 or M240, thereby removing altogether the need for people to get involved at the dirty end of counter-insurgency.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/07/v-rambo/ |
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Japan developing remote control for humans
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic. A special headset was placed on my cranium by my hosts during a recent demonstration at an NTT research center. It sent a very low voltage electric current from the back of my ears through my head -- either from left to right or right to left, depending on which way the joystick on a remote-control was moved. I found the experience unnerving and exhausting: I sought to step straight ahead but kept careening from side to side. Those alternating currents literally threw me off. The technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulation -- essentially, electricity messes with the delicate nerves inside the ear that help maintain balance. I felt a mysterious, irresistible urge to start walking to the right whenever the researcher turned the switch to the right. I was convinced -- mistakenly -- that this was the only way to maintain my balance. The phenomenon is painless but dramatic. Your feet start to move before you know it. I could even remote-control myself by taking the switch into my own hands.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/10/25/human.remote.control.ap/index.html |
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Japanese firm creates first electronic paper that bends
(AFP) - Japanese researchers showed off a bendable electronic paper that uses almost no power whilst displaying images, making it useful for advertising on buildings and vehicles. Electronics maker Fujitsu said the electronic paper was the first that can preserve images in vivid color and without distortion when they are folded or bent. It said the paper has an image memory function that means it has no need for electricity other than a minimal amount when changing the picture. "Electronic paper offers all the same characteristics of paper such as being thin, flexible and lightweight," Fujitsu said in a statement. It said the product would be suited to public advertisements on trains, buses or buildings as it could be updated more frequently than signs made of traditional paper. It could also be put to use in stores or restaurants or as part of mobile telephones. Fujitsu said it will keep testing the paper's practical uses with the aim of commercializing it in the fiscal year ending March 2007.
http://news.yahoo.com/ |
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Journalism and the CIA: The Mighty Wurlitzer
OSS highbrows had already embraced psychological warfare as a new social science: propaganda, for example, was divided into "black" propaganda (stories that are unattributed, or attributed to nonexistent sources, or false stories attributed to a real source), "gray" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is attributed to others), and "white" propaganda (stories from the government where the source is acknowledged as such) [Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 70-71]
http://www.namebase.org/news17.html |
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LASER-2000 Laser Room Monitoring System
"Listen Through Any Window From 1 Full Mile Away"
http://www.electromax.com/laser.html |
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Leet
Leet (most commonly 1337 but often also leetspeak, leetspeek, l33t5p34k, 133t, or l33t) from the phonetic form of the word "elite", is a cipher, or novel form of English spelling. It is characterized by the use of non-alphabetic characters to stand for letters bearing a superficial resemblance, and by a number of spelling changes such as the substitution of "z" for final "s" and "x" for "(c)k" or "(c)ks." Leetspeak is traditionally used on the Internet and other online communities, such as bulletin board systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet |
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Levitation
Leaving science fiction aside, science does know scores of different ways to levitate things. Today's science knows only one way to achieve REAL levitation, i.e. such that no energy input is required and the levitation can last forever. The real levitation makes use of diamagnetism , an intrinsic property of many materials referring to their ability to expel a portion, even if a minute one, of an external magnetic field. Electrons in such materials rearrange their orbits slightly so that they expel the external field. As a result, diamagnetic materials repel and are repelled by strong magnetic fields. (includes videos)
http://www.hfml.science.ru.nl/levitate.html |
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Lobotomy Back in Spotlight After 30 Years
Lobotomy was pioneered in 1936 by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz. Moniz, already widely respected for inventing an early brain-imaging method, gave sketchy reports that many patients benefited and was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949. A new book and a medical historian contend the crude brain surgery actually helped roughly 10 percent of the estimated 50,000 Americans who underwent the procedure between the mid-1930s and the 1970s. But relatives of lobotomy patients want the Nobel Prize given to its inventor revoked.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia_tradecraft/message/1759 |
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Lockheed Martin Security System Ready to Protect National Security Agency Locations in Washington Metropolitan Area
The National Security Agency (NSA) recently accepted the initial release of a highly integrated electronic security system from its systems integrator Lockheed Martin. The program's acceptance test milestone was achieved within budget and two months ahead of contract schedule. Upon transition to operations, the sophisticated new security system will protect NSA facilities in the Washington metropolitan area.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/08-18-2005/0004090814&EDATE= |
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Lunch with Mikhail Gorbachev
With only 53,000 engineering graduates a year compared to Russia's 200,000, the U.S. needs to "communicate the importance of science in today’s world," Mikhail Gorbachev told Ray Kurzweil in a luncheon discussion that ranged from blogs to nuclear disarmament and longevity.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0621.html |
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Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD)
Magnetohydrodynamics involves magnetic fields (magneto) and fluids (hydro) that conduct electricity and interact (dynamics). MHD technology is based on a fundamental law of electromagnetism: When a magnetic field and an electric current intersect in a liquid, their repulsive intersection propels the liquid in a direction perpendicular to both the field and the current.
http://www.geocities.com/skews_me/mhd.html |
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Medical scans can trigger airport alarms for up to 30 days after
According to a new study, patients who have had medical scans should be warned that they could set off security alarms at airports for as long as a month afterwards. The authors of the study are calling for information cards to be issued to people who have had scans involving radioisotopes, to decrease disruption as a result of the accidental alerts. Apparently more than 18 million such diagnostic and therapeutic procedures are carried out each year. Patients who have had radioisotopes in scans, involving the thyroid gland, bone, and blood flow to the heart muscle, as well as radioactive iodine therapy, are temporarily rendered radioactive, making them at risk of setting off radiation alarms.
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=11955 |
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Memory mimic aids reading
Researchers from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have devised software that leverages the way the brain models words to help speed the process of reading or skimming through digitized text. The software highlights portions of text in a way that makes it cognitively easier for the user to find what she is looking for. The method could be used to make browsing Web search results, reading travel guides, and learning from textbooks easier, said Ed Chi, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. The software, dubbed ScentHighlights, expands on a set of topics of interest supplied by a user to create a list of keywords tailored to the user's interests. "Users indicate their topics of interest by some method -- user profile, search keywords, clicking on words or index entries," said Chi. The system then adds related topics, he said. "The system uses all of the related concepts to create a list of important keywords that might be interesting to the user." The researchers' study showed that users performed a variety of information-finding tasks faster using the system than looking through a paper book. The next step is to perform eye tracking studies to understand how the software changes the user's eye movements while reading, said Chi. "We expect users to more quickly target relevant passages using ScentHighlights," he said. ScentHighlights can be combined with a previously-developed indexing tool dubbed ScentIndex, which allows a user to query the index of an electronic book to get a page of index entries that are conceptually related to the query. When the user places the arrow over one of these entries, the highlighted paragraphs on that page appear in a text box. The ultimate aim of the software is to reduce the cognitive stress of skimming for interesting content, said Chi. "It's very stressful to answer basic questions such as 'is this info available in the source document I'm reading?', 'which part of the document should I pay attention to?'..."
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/050405/Memory_mimic_aids_reading_050405.html |
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Mice put into state like “suspended animation”
Suspended animation is a staple of science fiction tales: a state in which people have their life processes temporarily shut or slowed down, so they can survive centuries of space travel or live into a distant future. Now, scientists say they have put mice into a similar condition, the first time “hibernation on demand” has been induced in mammals. Mice go into the state when exposed to hydrogen sulfide, a chemical that smells of rotten eggs, researchers reported in the April 23 issue of the research journal Science. The condition is marked by dramatically slowed metabolism and drop in core body temperature, according a study by the researchers. “If similar results are seen in other mammal models, this work could eventually lead to new surgical techniques, improved organ preservation and better ways to rapidly lower the core temperature of people with dangerously high fevers,” said an announcement from the journal describing the findings. “Within five minutes of hydrogen sulfide exposure at a concentration of 80 parts per million, oxygen consumption in mice dropped by half and carbon dioxide dropped by two-thirds. In these first few minutes, metabolic rate, then core body temperature, dropped as well.” Normal metabolic function and activity resumed after the researchers removed the hydrogen sulfide, the researchers reported. Hydrogen sulfide, which occurs naturally in the body, disrupts a critical step in a process called oxidative phosphorylation, in which oxygen is burned to produce energy in the form of a substance called ATP. The researchers, Mark Roth and colleagues, work at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050422_suspendfrm.htm |
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Microchips impiantati nel corpo umano e altre sopraffazioni e violazioni
http://www.aisjca-mft.org/chips-viol.htm |
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Microscopic Robot Heads for Surgery
new microscopic robot that it is so small it can be injected into the body through a syringe could one day be used by doctors to analyze medical conditions, deliver drugs or perform minimally invasive surgery. The biomedical micro-robotic system, developed by a team of scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, is the smallest of its kind with machined and assembled parts, and has been demonstrated to successfully maneuver through a watery maze using external energy from magnetic forces. Barely a speck of a robot, the smallest devices Nelson and his team have built are about four hair-widths long and are made up of several components. The mechanical and electrical parts are cut and etched from pieces of nickel and assembled using methods similar to those used to design and make computer chips. Unlike most mobile robots that either have a battery on board or are connected to an electric cable to drive its motors, this robot's power comes from an external magnetic field generated by a machine. The magnet acts to align and pull the robot lengthwise, which because of its elongated shape behaves like a magnetized needle — one tip has a positive charge and the other tip has a negative charge. In addition to being tiny, the robot has movable mechanical components designed to be tuned to specific magnetic frequencies. Just as turning a dial on a radio will tune in a different station, switching to a different frequency in the micro-robotic system vibrates a different mechanical part on the device. For example, tuning to a 2 kilohertz frequency could vibrate a motor that extends a small syringe into a blood vessel. Tuning to 3 kilohertz could drive a pump that delivers drugs into the vessel.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050822/microbot_print.html |
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Microwaves and Behavior
as published in The American Psychologist, Journal of the American Psychological Association, Volume 30, March 1975, Number 3
http://www.raven1.net/v2succes.htm |
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Mind-reading machine knows what you see
It is possible to read someone’s mind by remotely measuring their brain activity, researchers have shown. The technique can even extract information from subjects that they are not aware of themselves. So far, it has only been used to identify visual patterns a subject can see or has chosen to focus on. But the researchers speculate the approach might be extended to probe a person’s awareness, focus of attention, memory and movement intention. In the meantime, it could help doctors work out if patients apparently in a coma are actually conscious.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7304 |
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Missing a few brain cells? Print new ones
A PRINTER that spits out ultra-fine droplets of cells instead of ink has been used to print live brain cells without causing them any apparent harm. The technique could open up the possibility of building replacement tissue cell by cell, giving doctors complete control over the tissue they graft. The device is a variant of a conventional ink-jet printer. Instead of forcing individual droplets of ink through a needle-shaped nozzle and onto the page, the cell printer uses a powerful electric field to produce droplets just a few micrometres in diameter, far smaller than is achievable by other means. Several research groups have shown that modified ink-jet printers can spray droplets of live cells suspended in a sustaining solution. But these devices have not been able to print droplets smaller than 20 micrometres across, because ultra-fine nozzles are prone to blocking.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925366.500 |
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Mission to build a simulated brain begins
An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on [6 June 2005]. The “Blue Brain” project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM’s Blue Gene design. The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness. It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time, says Henry Markram, director of Brain and Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytecnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. For over a decade Markram and his colleagues have been building a database of the neural architecture of the neocortex, the largest and most complex part of mammalian brains. Using pioneering techniques, they have studied precisely how individual neurons behave electrically and built up a set of rules for how different types of neurons connect to one another. Very thin slices of mouse brain were kept alive under a microscope and probed electrically before being stained to reveal the synaptic, or nerve, connections. “We have the largest database in the world of single neurons that have been recorded and stained,” says Markram. Using this database the initial phase of Blue Brain will model the electrical structure of neocortical columns - neural circuits that are repeated throughout the brain. “These are the network units of the brain,” says Markram. Measuring just 0.5 millimetres by 2 mm, these units contain between 10 and 70,000 neurons, depending upon the species.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7470 |
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More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement
by Ramez Naam -- In 1990, a professor at the University of Colorado discovered that changing a single gene doubles the lifespan of tiny nematode worms. In 1999, researchers searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease genetically engineered a strain of mice that can learn things five times as quickly as their normal kin – super-intelligent mice. In 2002, scientists looking for ways to help paralyzed patients implanted electrodes into the brain of an owl monkey and trained it to move a robot arm 600 miles away just by thinking about it. More Than Human takes the reader into the labs where this is happening to understand the science of human enhancement. It also steps back to look at the big picture. How will these technologies affect society? What will they do to the economy, to politics, and to human identity? What social policies should we enact to regulate, restrict, or encourage the use of these technologies? Ultimately More Than Human concludes that we should embrace, rather than fear, the power to alter ourselves - that in the hands of millions of individuals and families, it stands to benefit society more than to harm it.
http://www.morethanhuman.org/ |
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Most scientific papers are probably wrong
Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7915 |
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Nanowires can detect molecular signs of cancer, scientists find
Harvard University researchers have found that molecular markers indicating the presence of cancer in the body are readily detected in blood scanned by special arrays of silicon nanowires -- even when these cancer markers constitute only one hundred-billionth of the protein present in a drop of blood. In addition to this exceptional accuracy and sensitivity, the minuscule devices also promise to pinpoint the exact type of cancer present with a speed not currently available to clinicians. While initial rounds of cancer testing today identify only whether or not cancer is present, nanowire arrays have the potential to immediately fill in details on exactly what type of cancer is present. Nanowires could also track patients' health as treatment progresses. Because the arrays detect molecules suspended in fluids, drops of blood could be tested directly, in a physician's office, without any need for biochemical manipulation. The work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Cancer Institute.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-09/hu-ncd092305.php |
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New Airport Scanners Deliver Electric Shock
Airport security guards already use hand-held electromagnetic wands to detect metal hidden under clothing. The same wand can also sniff for traces of the gases some explosives emit into the air. If the passenger is a suicide bomber who realises the wand has found something, the guard might not have enough time to pull out handcuffs or a gun. So the new wand will have a hidden secret -- a transformer which steps the detector's battery power up to 100 kilovolts and feeds it to disguised metal electrodes at the end of the wand.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7777 |
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New Support-Center Tool Detects Emotion In Voice Of Disgruntled Callers
Software automatically alerts supervisors when customers voice frustration about company's goods and services. The software conducts a flow analysis of each call, examining 200 elements to give a holistic picture of the customer experience. Besides emotion detection, Perform uses two other methods to analyze customer experiences with call centers. The software allows users to create lexicons of words and phrases a caller may say that could raise red flags: cancellation, frustration, or a competitor's name. Perform also tracks the history of a call: the length of time a customer had to wait to speak to an agent, the number of times placed on hold, and the number of times a caller is transferred. The user sets up parameters to determine who and how a supervisor should be contacted. The system also allows callers to rate their experience with the agent after the conversation ends.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=159906176 |
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New algorithm for learning languages
Cornell University and Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences. The development -- which has a patent pending -- has implications for speech recognition and for other applications in natural language engineering, as well as for genomics and proteomics. It also offers new insights into language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Unlike previous attempts at developing computer algorithms for language learning, the new method, called Automatic Distillation of Structure (ADIOS), successfully identifies complex patterns in raw texts. The algorithm discovers the patterns by repeatedly aligning sentences and looking for overlapping parts. The new method was developed jointly with David Horn and Eytan Ruppin, professors of physics and computer science, respectively, at Tel Aviv University, and with Zach Solan, a doctoral student there and the lead author on the paper. Their collaboration with Edelman was supported in part by the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation.
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8802 |
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New drug offers jitter-free mental boost
A new class of drug may increase alertness without any of the jitteriness of over-stimulation, suggest the results of a small clinical trial. A compound dubbed CX717, a member of the new class called ampakines, significantly improved performance on tests of memory, attention, alertness, reaction time and problem solving in healthy men deprived of sleep. Ampakines work by binding to particular receptors in the brain, called AMPA-type glutamate receptors. This boosts the activity of glutamate, a neurotransmitter, and makes it easier to encode memory and to learn. And because of their short half-life - hours in this case - ampakines have few side effects.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7342 |
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Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction
Redaction is the careful editing of a document to remove confidential information. The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. Sensitive government documents, confidential legal documents, insurance contracts, and other sensitive documents are often redacted before being made available to the public. With the Word 2003 Redaction Add-in, users of Microsoft Office Word 2003 now have an effective, user-friendly tool to help them redact confidential text in Word documents.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=028c0fd7-67c2-4b51-8e87-65cc9f30f2ed&DisplayLang=en |
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On the 4th of July [2005], a NASA spacecraft will blast a hole in Comet Tempel 1
Deep Impact is going to shoot an 820-pound projectile into the rocky, icy nucleus of Comet Tempel 1. The 23,000 mph collision will form a big crater, and Deep impact will observe the stages of its development, how deep it gets and how wide it becomes. Researchers expect a plume of gas and dust to spray out of the crater. Deep Impact will measure its composition and record what the billowing plume does to the comet's atmosphere. In all, Deep Impact should be able to peer into the new crater for almost 15 minutes. The comet glows like a 10th magnitude star and can be seen through backyard telescopes. It should brighten considerably when Deep Impact strikes. The impact plume will reflect sunlight, boosting the visibility of the comet to 5th or 6th magnitude, making it a faint naked-eye object. The Pacific side of Earth will be facing the comet at the moment of impact (0552 UT on July 4th; 10:52 pm PDT on July 3rd); observers in Hawaii, Mexico and the US southwest are favored.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/28jun_deepimpact.htm |
skews_me
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OpenEEG project
The OpenEEG project is about creating a low cost EEG device and free software to go with it.
http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/ |
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