Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Wednesday 12 September 2012


Tuesday, 11 September 2012

SOTT Focus
Lisa Guliani
Sott.net
2012-09-11 10:05:00

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Today is another glorious Tuesday morning, very similar to one we saw precisely 11 years ago. Today, we'll witness (as we did 11 years ago) the mainstream media's propaganda machine spin cycle in rapid motion.

Today we will see a regurgitation of the lies of 9/11, a repeating loop of lies to reinforce the programming of 'shock & awe', and today, we will watch ( yet again) the people of America bow their heads in exactly one minute of government-designated silence, that annual empty token gesture in which the majority will partake, as the psychopaths have told them to.

Today we'll watch people who normally don't give a rat's ass, who disconnect themselves from thinking about 9/11 the other 364 days of the year, who seldom if ever think a solid objective thought about 9/11, bow their heads in 'respectful' empty silence and then run their mouths parroting the patriotic vomitus of government lies and thump their chests.
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Sott.net
2010-09-11 16:46:00
Take five minutes to learn all you need in order to know that a Boeing 757 did not hit the Pentagon on September 11th 2001.

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Joe Quinn
Sott.net
2006-06-09 12:00:00

Comment: As part of our commemoration of 9-11, we are running this infamous piece that invoked the ire of the COINTELPRO masters operating behind abovetopsecret.com. With their Neocon lawyer breathing fire, they took down our server and we had to move this article to a Russian server for 2 years! We sure must have hit a nerve!


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©Department of Defense


After the release of the QFG Pentagon Strike Flash Animation on August 23rd, 2004, a veritable onslaught of new articles were published that sought to dismiss the "no plane at the Pentagon" theory. One such article, that is frequently referenced by certain '9/11 researchers' was authored by a member of the forum at the "Above Top Secret" (ATS) website. Interestingly, the article was written just a few weeks after the release of the Pentagon Strike Flash animation, which by then, was winging its way around the world and into the inboxes of millions of ordinary citizens. Perhaps you were one of them...
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--- Best of the Web
Craig Ranke and Aldo Marquis
Citizen Investigation Team
2009-06-23 13:32:00
In 2006 Citizen Investigation Team launched an independent investigation into the act of terrorism which took place at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. This exhaustive three-year inquest involved multiple trips to the scene of the crime in Arlington, Virginia, close scrutiny of all official and unofficial data related to the event, and, most importantly, first-person interviews with dozens of eyewitnesses, many of which were conducted and filmed in the exact locations from which they witnessed the plane that allegedly struck the building that day.

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Corbett Report
2011-09-11 04:07:00
Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.

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Puppet Masters
Matt Spetalnick & Allyn Fisher-Ilan
Reuters
2012-09-11 16:50:00

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In a highly unusual rebuff to a close ally, the White House said on Tuesday that President Barack Obama would not meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a U.S. visit later this month, as tensions escalated over how to deal with Iran's nuclear program.

The apparent snub, coupled with Netanyahu's sharpened demands for a tougher U.S. line against Iran, threatened to plunge U.S.-Israeli relations into crisis and add pressure on Obama in the final stretch of a tight presidential election campaign.

An Israeli official said the White House had refused Netanyahu's request to meet Obama when the Israeli leader visits the United States to attend the U.N. General Assembly, telling the Israelis "the president's schedule will not permit that."

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor denied Netanyahu's request had been spurned, insisting instead that the two leaders were attending the General Assembly on different days and would not be in New York at the same time.

Netanyahu has had a strained relationship with Obama, but they have met on all but one of his U.S. trips since 2009. The president was on a foreign visit when the prime minister came to the United States in November 2010.
Comment: Fake tensions between the US and Israel, lies about Iran's nuclear intentions, it's all in there folks. Just out of spite though, what if Iran made a nuclear bomb, many other countries have them, so what. Would it be the end of the world or a counter-balance to Israels arsenal and constant threat to her neighbors?

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Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian
2012-09-11 16:03:00

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With closing Guantánamo given up as a lost cause, Obama's policy has moved onto assassination rather than detention

A detainee at Guantánamo was found dead in his cell on Saturday, according to camp officials. He is the ninth person to die at the camp since it was opened more than ten years ago. As former Gitmo guard Brandon Neely pointed out Monday, more detainees have died at the camp (nine) than have been convicted of wrongdoing by its military commissions (six). This is the fourth detainee who has died at the camp since Obama's inauguration.

Although the detainee's identity has not been disclosed, a camp spokesman acknowledged that he "had not been charged and had not been designated for prosecution". In other words, he has been kept by the US government in a cage for many years without any opportunity to contest the accusations against him, and had no hope of leaving the camp except by death.
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Youtube
2012-06-23 16:02:00
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The Wisdom Fund
2011-09-11 15:10:00

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"All the proffered evidence that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11, when subjected to critical scrutiny, appears to have been fabricated."

David Ray Griffin, Professor Emeritus, author of 11 books on 9/11 - including the just published 9/11 Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed.
Military and Intelligence Personnel

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"Scholars and professionals . . . have established beyond any reasonable doubt that the official account of 9/11 is false and that, therefore, the official 'investigations' have really been cover-up operations."

Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, PhD, Former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development

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"It is as a scientist that I have the most trouble with the official government conspiracy theory, mainly because it does not satisfy the rules of probability or physics."

Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski, PhD, Former Political-Military Affairs Officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense

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"Your countrymen have been murdered and the more you delve into it the more it looks as though they were murdered by our government, who used it as an excuse to murder other people thousands of miles away."

Lt. Col. Shelton F. Lankford, U.S. Marine Corps (ret) fighter pilot with 300+ combat missions
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Les Visible
Smoking Mirrrors
2012-09-10 11:12:00
Dog Poet Transmitting.......

May your noses always be cold and wet.

Yes, 9/11 is the Litmus test. If you fail it, you are dumber than a chicken, with a heart to match. Israel did 9/11. Israel did 9/11! ISRAEL DID 9/11!!! (9/11 is tomorrow). That is the result of this sad and twisted affair, brought to you by the people who invented Homeland Insecurity and the TSA? The result is special treatment for The Monsters of the Middle East. They have created a police state in your country, people. The horrible behavior of the domestic police, they are behind it. The wars all over the place and the callous and brutal murders of millions, they are behind them. The avalanche of lies in the media, they are behind them.

The disgusting state of the culture and the abysmal soundtrack and odious and profane entertainments, they are behind them. The endless mentions of themselves in nearly every movie that comes around, they are behind that. The pornography empires, the rulership of the alternative sexual machine, the organ harvesting racket, the sex slave trade and God knows what ancillary evils without number, they are behind them, or deep to their eyebrows into them. The genetic modification of food, they are behind it. The corruption of the political realm and the perversion of the judicial system, they are behind it. If you are unaware of this, you fail the intelligence litmus test, you fail as a human being, you fail the test of life. Mr. Apocalypse is on your doorstep and the walking stick will not be tapping.

What is the meaning of the riddle of the present state of the human heart and mind? Surely it appears that there is no real response across the mass of the population but, that is just the lack of reportage on the part of the dual national owned media. A revolution of both action and consciousness is brewing under the radar. It's coming because of push and shove. The time comes when push and shove result in that being pushed and shoved, coming up against an unmovable wall.

We are talking about monsters. We are talking about brutal, psychopathic monsters, beyond actual description. Words fall short of the ability to define them and they have been doing this for a long, long time. The time of their ruinous fall and pending judgment has come. They are dark and dreadful monsters. There is no form of life or anti-life on the planet like them.
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Associated Press
2012-09-11 09:30:00

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The U.S. government's debt rating could be heading for the "fiscal cliff" along with the federal budget.

Moody's Investors Service said Tuesday it would likely cut its "Aaa" rating on U.S. government debt, probably by one notch, if budget negotiations fail.

If Congress does not reach a budget deal, more than $600 billion in spending cuts and tax increases will automatically kick in starting Jan. 1, a scenario that's been dubbed the "fiscal cliff," because it is likely to send the economy back into recession and drive up unemployment.

A year ago, Moody's cut its outlook on U.S. debt to "negative," which acts as a warning that it might downgrade the rating, after partisan wrangling over raising the U.S. debt limit led the nation to the brink of default.
Comment: So, if the US does not increase it's debt limit, which will be reached "by the end of the year," Moody's will downgrade the US credit rating?

The whole financial system is backward. It sounds like, if you don't borrow more money (DEBT) we'll lower your credit rating. ...

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Are You Better Off?: 40 Statistics That Will Absolutely Shock You
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BrasscheckTV.com
2010-09-11 11:22:00
How do you know the people who told the official story of the 9/11 attack were lying?

Because their lips were moving.

ALL the misinformation that became the 9/11 official story wad laid down by the US news media within minutes after the attack.

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YouTube
2011-07-03 10:02:00
Morgan O. Reynolds was a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University and former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.

He served as chief economist for the United States Department of Labor during 2001 - 2002, George W. Bush's first term. In 2005, he gained public attention as the first prominent government official to publicly claim that 9/11 was an inside job, and is a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

Glad to see these kinds of people speaking out!

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CNN
2001-09-17 19:59:00

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Doha, Qatar - Islamic militant leader Osama bin Laden, the man the United States considers the prime suspect in last week's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, denied any role Sunday in the actions believed to have killed thousands.

In a statement issued to the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, bin Laden said, "The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.

"I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks
, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons," bin Laden's statement said.

"I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations," bin Laden said.
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A. K. Dewdney, PhD
Physics911.net
2006-04-13 12:00:00

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The evidence is in, the analyses have been made, and conclusions have been drawn by scientists, engineers and other experts: the so-called terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were faked. There is, moreover, independent evidence from multiple and credible sources that Al Qaeda is the creation of western intelligence agencies.

If you have any questions concerning these assertions, visit http://www.physics911.net

The Scientific Panel Investigating Nine-Eleven has formed around this website. The Panel consists of over thirty experts in the fields of science, engineering, architecture, intelligence, the military, medicine, Islamic studies and other disciplines. The members are willing to stand up and be counted, even the ones with the highest public profiles. You will find them listed on this page: http://physics911.net/spine.htm

Of course, the Physics 911 website is hardly alone in cyberspace. There are now literally hundreds of skeptical websites on the internet (with only a handful of dissenting sites defending the official story). There are other working groups with websites, as well, not to mention thousands of people doing their own inquiries into 911, and millions of people skeptical of the official story (including 48% of New Yorkers, according to a Zogby poll taken in 2005).
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Len Hart
OpEdNews
2008-02-18 17:17:00
Nothing Bush has ever said about 911 is true --nor is there a shred, a scintilla of verifiable evidence in support of it. Bush put forward a crazy conspiracy theory about a world wide conspiracy of radical Arabs and incompetent pilots. Not a word of it can be believed! Three indisputable, verifiable facts utterly disprove everything said by Bush and apologists about 911.

Bush kicked up a lot of dust and hoped to hide out in the smokescreen. It hasn't worked. Three irrefutable facts lay waste to the official lies.
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©Joe Tabacca / New York Times


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islandonlinenews
Youtube
2010-02-09 18:04:00


911 Commissioner Bob Kerrey admits 911 was a conspiracy 30 years in the making
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Charles M. Young
Counterpunch
2012-09-10 22:22:00

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I have known Nick Bryant since 1995. He was new to New York from Minnesota then, and looking to make a jump from science reporting in technical journals to writing for a mass audience. I noticed that he was persistent and ethically motivated and I thought, "He might be a good reporter." We got to be friends, and had many long discussions about the nature of evil, which was his preferred subject matter as he tried to make a move into general circulation magazines. When he wasn't chasing doctors at AIDS conferences, he was chasing outlaw bikers and Satanists.

On one such foray in 2002, he stumbled on a scandal that I had never heard of. The scandal centered around the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, which was created to serve a poor black neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska. During the 70s and 80s, its manager, a man named Larry King (not the talk show host), ran the Franklin as a Ponzi scheme and looted over $40 million, which he spent on an opulent lifestyle and Republican fundraising. King sang the National Anthem at the Republican convention in 1984 and served on several committees of the National Black Republican Council. He had a townhouse in Washington, DC, where he threw parties with many prominent guests. In August 1988, he threw a $100,000 party at the Republican convention, and appeared in a video in which he and Jack Kemp urged blacks to vote for George H. W. Bush. In November 1988, his Ponzi scheme crashed and the Franklin was shut down by the National Credit Union Association and the FBI.

All run-of-the-mill scandal stuff, and uncontroversial in the basic facts, except that as King was climbing into the upper levels of the national Republican hierarchy, Omaha was boiling over with rumors that he was also running a pedophile ring, pandering children out to rich and powerful men in Omaha, even flying the children to Washington, Los Angeles and New York for orgiastic, abusive parties with even richer and more powerful men.
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Johnny Barber
Information Clearing House
2012-09-10 21:37:00


"We are at War. Somebody is Going to Pay." George W. Bush, Sept 11th, 2001.

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Eleven years later, we are still at war. Bullets, mortars and drones are still extracting payment. Thousands, tens of thousands, millions have paid in full. Children and even those yet to be born will continue to pay for decades to come.

On a single day in Iraq last week there were 29 bombing attacks in 19 cities, killing 111 civilians and wounding another 235. On Sept 9th, reports indicate 88 people were killed and another 270 injured in 30 attacks all across the country. Iraq continues in a seemingly endless death spiral into chaos. In his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for President, Obama claimed he ended the war in Iraq, well... not quite.

The city of Fallujah remains under siege. Not from U.S. troops, but from a deluge of birth defects that have plagued families since the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus by U.S. forces in 2004. No government studies have provided a direct link to the use of these weapons because no government studies have been undertaken, and none are contemplated.

Dr. Samira Alani, a pediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, told Al Jazeera, "We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine. There are not even medical terms to describe some of these conditions because we've never seen them until now." The photographs are available on line if you can bear to look at what we have wrought. George W. Bush will loudly proclaim his "Pro-life" bona fides, and he'll tell you he believes "that every child, born and unborn, ought to be protected in law and welcomed into life." Apparently, "every child" doesn't apply to the children of Fallujah, and the "law" doesn't apply to George W. Bush.
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Gordon Duff
Press TV
2012-09-10 20:33:00

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Few understand the real crime of deception. Deception can be a simple betrayal or can be contrived to drive you to murder your friends or defend monsters.

Military deception is called "psyops" or "psychological operations" and is, frankly, tasked specifically with creating wrong beliefs to rob leaders or entire populations of their judgment.

A successful "psyop" can be more powerful than any attack. Without firing a shot, you can seem to be defeated, be fooled into misjudging enemies and allies or be set on the path of destroying yourself.

If you are a nation, you are constantly under attack from psychological operations. If you are a nation, it is a prime responsibility to defend your people from "psyops" attacks designed to undermine faith in institutions, to foster dissent and exploit fear or create anger and feelings of being cheated.

Today's world view, from the economic to racial and religious to social, political and military is all hopelessly infected with calculated disinformation created in order to realign society based on belief in falsehood in order to enfeeble and enslave, to drive the civil and good to acts of bestiality through exploiting the genetic weakness Darwinists tell us is bred into man's character, our "reptilian mind."
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Society's Child
AUSCS
Opposing Views
2012-09-11 15:49:00

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People have the right to believe what they want about human origins, but they have no right to use the public school system to propagate religion. Insanity, it has been said, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

In light of that, the state of Louisiana might want to get a mental health check-up. Legislators and some education officials there keep promoting creationism in public school science classes - and they keep getting busted on it.

Here's the latest round: In 2008, Louisiana lawmakers passed a law that allows the use of "supplemental" materials in science class so long as the materials "promote critical thinking skills, logical analysis and open and objective discussions of scientific theories being studied." The law lists three scientific theories that would fall under this: the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.

By "origins of life," the legislature clearly meant evolution. Cut through the rhetorical fog about "critical thinking" and "logical analysis," and what legislators really want is to teach religion in biology class.
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Brian Merchant
MotherBoard
2012-09-10 13:52:00

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What's the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many - poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc - but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It's hunger, plain and simple. If there's a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it's food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.

The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI's model works: "The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause." Plot the data, and it looks like this:
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Tiffany Kaiser
DailyTech
2012-09-11 02:40:00

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The previous forecast was 27,000

Hewlett-Packard (HP) upped its number of job cuts to 29,000 globally -- 2,000 more than the computer maker previously forecasted.

Back in May, HP predicted that it would cut 27,000 jobs around the world in its new restructuring plan dubbed the "2012 Plan." Now, HP has adjusted that figure and plans to cut 29,000 jobs.

The latest figure was reported in HP's 10-Q quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). HP plans on saving $3 to $3.5 billion by eliminating these jobs, which it will put toward Research and Development (R&D). As of July 2012, HP had already cut 3,800 jobs.

The filing noted that HP predicts charges of about $3.7 billion through the end of fiscal year 2014. About $3.3 billion of this will be the job cuts while another $400 million will be related to other areas like data center consolidation.

HP has had a pretty terrible time as of late. It had a terrible experience with former CEO Leo Apotheker, who was appointed in October 2010. Apotheker led the company to several missed financial goals and even tried to sell HP's core personal computer business.

HP then killed off its webOS mobile operating system and its TouchPad tablets last year due to overproduction, sloppy execution and slow hardware releases.

Just last month, HP suffered an $8.9 billion USD loss. However, analysts were impressed by the new restructuring plan by new CEO Meg Whitman.
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Sonia Faleiro
New York Times
2012-09-06 21:54:00

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While investigating child labor in India last month for a book, I found myself in the northern state of Bihar, an established source of children for trafficking networks.

Here, alongside the expected stories of abduction, I heard of another unexpected and heartbreaking path to servitude. Children as young as 10 had begun to directly offer themselves to traffickers because they could no longer go hungry.

I met 14-year-old Arun Kumar, who told me of his experience.

Kumar lives with his uncle and two younger siblings in Amni village, a day's journey by bus from Patna, the Bihar state capital.

Two days before we met, Kumar had been returned home by a local nonprofit organization, supported by Save the Children, from a rice mill in the state of Haryana, where he had been working 18-hour days, seven days a week. He had been paid 800 rupees (a bit less than $20) a month.

On a rare day, he said, a machine would break down and the workers would be shooed out for a "holiday." "I'd walk to the next village about an hour away," he said, "to buy biscuits."

The nonprofit organization first entreated, then threatened the factory owner with a noisy protest outside his mill. "I paid for him," the owner argued, before finally releasing Kumar.
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Dylan Stableford
Yahoo! News
2012-08-20 18:49:00

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An Oklahoma high school valedictorian who used the word "hell" in her graduation speech in May has yet to receive her diploma.

Kaitlin Nootbaar graduated from Prague High School with a 4.0 grade point average, her father, David Nootbaar, told KFOR-TV. But school administrators told him that Kaitlin would have to submit a written apology in order to get her diploma.

"We went to the office and asked for the diploma and the principal said, 'Your diploma is right here but you ain't getting it. Close the door, we have a problem,'" David Nootbaar told the network.

"She worked so hard to stay at the top of her class," he said. "This is not right."

In her speech - inspired by a similar address in "Eclipse: The Twilight Saga" - Kaitlin recounted how annoying it is to be constantly asked what she wants to do as graduation approached. "How the hell do I know?" she said, according to her father. "I've changed my mind so many times."
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Secret History
Live Science
2012-09-11 12:25:00
Baelo Claudia site in Spain among the best preserved; funerary monuments, goods found

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Archaeologists are digging up the necropolis of Baelo Claudia, one of the best preserved Roman cities in Spain, and they report that they've already uncovered several intact graves that likely date back more than 2,000 years.

Founded in the late second century B.C., Baelo Claudia lies near today's town of Tarifa at the southernmost tip of Spain, separated from Morocco by the Strait of Gibraltar.

Since 2009, scientists at the University of Alicante have led excavations at the site, which is considered by some the best preserved city from the high imperial Roman period of the Iberian Peninsula.

During this summer's digging season, archaeologists at the ancient coastal town turned their focus to Baelo Claudia's graveyard. In a blog post, Fernando Prados Martínez, a University of Alicante professor who is leading the project, wrote that Monday began the last week of excavations. But his team has already made several finds.

They've uncovered funerary monuments as well as cremation graves and intact graves, complete with their grave goods, according to a statement from Asociación RUVID, a Valencian nonprofit research association. The team hopes to learn more about the ancient funeral rituals of the city through their excavations.
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Science & Technology
ScienceDaily
2012-09-11 16:51:00

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At first glance, the center of the Milky Way seems like a very inhospitable place to try to form a planet. Stars crowd each other as they whiz through space like cars on a rush-hour freeway. Supernova explosions blast out shock waves and bathe the region in intense radiation. Powerful gravitational forces from a supermassive black hole twist and warp the fabric of space itself.

Yet new research by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that planets still can form in this cosmic maelstrom. For proof, they point to the recent discovery of a cloud of hydrogen and helium plunging toward the galactic center. They argue that this cloud represents the shredded remains of a planet-forming disk orbiting an unseen star.

"This unfortunate star got tossed toward the central black hole. Now it's on the ride of its life, and while it will survive the encounter, its protoplanetary disk won't be so lucky," said lead author Ruth Murray-Clay of the CfA. The results are appearing in the journal Nature.

The cloud in question was discovered last year by a team of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. They speculated that it formed when gas streaming from two nearby stars collided, like windblown sand gathering into a dune.
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Megan Gannon
LiveScience
2012-09-11 13:04:00

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Crows don't forget a face - and they hold grudges, too.

Researchers in Seattle revealed last year that captured crows remember the face of their abductor. Even though years had passed since they saw the threatening face, the crows in the experiment would taunt their captor and dive-bomb him, suggesting the birds held tightly to a negative association.

Now the researchers' follow-up study shows that the birds' brains light up much like the human mind when they see a face they know.

"The regions of the crow brain that work together are not unlike those that work together in mammals, including humans," lead researcher John Marzluff, of the University of Washington, said in a statement from the school. "These regions were suspected to work in birds but not documented until now."

In the study, 12 male adult crows were captured by researchers all wearing one type of mask, referred to in the study as the threatening face. Then during four weeks of captivity, the birds were fed by people wearing a different mask. Though both disguises had neutral expressions, this mask was referred to ask the caring face.

To see what was going on in the birds' brains when they saw both faces, the researchers injected a glucose fluid into the bodies of fully alert crows. The crows were then put in the presence of someone wearing either the threatening or caring mask for about 15 minutes before the birds were sedated and given a brain scan.
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Natalie Wolchover
Life's Little Mysteries
2012-09-10 20:49:00

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A Japanese mathematician claims to have the proof for the ABC conjecture, a statement about the relationship between prime numbers that has been called the most important unsolved problem in number theory.

If Shinichi Mochizuki's 500-page proof stands up to scrutiny, mathematicians say it will represent one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics of the twenty-first century. The proof will also have ramifications all over mathematics, and even in the real-world field of data encryption.

The ABC conjecture, proposed independently by the mathematicians David Masser and Joseph Oesterle in 1985 but not proven by them, involves the concept of square-free numbers, or numbers that cannot be divided by the square of any number. (A square number is the product of some integer with itself). According to the mathematics writer Ivars Peterson in an article for the Mathematical Association of America, the square-free part of a number n, denoted by sqp(n), is the largest square-free number that can be obtained by multiplying the distinct prime factors of n. Prime numbers are numbers that can only be evenly divided by 1 and themselves, such as 5 and 17.

The ABC conjecture makes a statement about pairs of numbers that have no prime factors in common, Peterson explained. If A and B are two such numbers and C is their sum, the ABC conjecture holds that the square-free part of the product A x B x C, denoted by sqp(ABC), divided by C is always greater than 0. Meanwhile, sqp(ABC) raised to any power greater than 1 and divided by C is always greater than 1.
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Spaceweather
2012-09-11 02:33:00
Apparently, something hit Jupiter during the early hours of Sept. 10th (11:35 UT), igniting a ferocious fireball in the giant planet's cloud tops. Amateur astronomer Dan Peterson Racine, Wisconsin, saw it first through his Meade 12" LX200 telescope. "It was a bright white flash that lasted only 1.5 - 2 seconds," he reports. Another amateur astronomer, George Hall of Dallas, Texas, was video-recording Jupiter at the time, and he confirmed the fireball with this video screenshot:

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The fireball was probably caused by a small asteroid or comet hitting Jupiter. Similar impacts were observed in June and August 2010. An analysis of those earlier events suggests that Jupiter is frequently struck by 10 meter-class asteroids--one of the hazards of orbiting near the asteroid belt and having such a strong gravitational pull.
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Mark Green
The Bellarmine Report
2012-03-26 20:02:00

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Book: How Einstein Ruined Physics, by Roger Schlafly
Dark Buzz, 2011

Was Albert Einstein the smartest man and the greatest scientist who ever lived? Millions believe so.

But Roger Schlafly takes a different view, downgrading the rank of the 20th- century's most revered scientist. Why? Schlafly presents compelling evidence that other leading physicists and mathematicians before and concurrent with Einstein made equally important breakthroughs in relativity theory and related fields. Further, Schlafly suggests that Einstein may have purloined some of his most famous insights.

What made Einstein so great? The official story goes this way: Albert Einstein, a young clerk in a Swiss patent office, single-handedly transformed physics from a static, three-dimensional science to a four-dimensional, mind-blowing, time-space universe via brilliant and solitary "thought experiments" involving gravity, motion, space and time. Einstein also made unprecedented inroads into understanding the nature of light and energy and was the first to comprehend the equivalence between energy and mass. Einstein's discoveries not only transformed modern physics but the way we view the universe.

Schlafly disagrees. "It is all a myth. Einstein did not invent relativity or most of the other things for which he is credited." Schlafly makes a very bold and persuasive case.
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RT.com
2012-09-10 16:59:00

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With Congress still unable to iron out a cyber-security bill that both sides of the Legislative Branch can get behind, the White House has drafted an Executive Order that they will roll out if efforts on Capitol Hill remain unproductive.

Despite repeated pleas from lawmakers and other federal officials to have a cybersecurity legislation adopted by the United States government, members of the House and Senate have been unwilling to compromise on a bill. With every attempt at passing cybersecurity legislation ending with roadblocks, the White House has now announced that it is considering taking measures into their own hands.

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden tells the Washington Post that "an Executive Order is among the things we're considering to fulfill the president's direction to us to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today's cyberthreats," though has not confirmed how far along the White House is with efforts to enact such an order.
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Earth Changes
Larry Bell
Forbes
2012-09-09 15:45:00
My wife Nancy and I recently enjoyed a couple of great days with Burt Rutan and his wife Tonya at their beautiful new home in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The visit afforded an opportunity to discuss many topics of keenly shared interest, including the global warming "debate". Although Burt is world renowned for his remarkable record-setting achievements in aircraft and spacecraft design, he has devoted a great deal of attention to this subject as well.

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By way of brief introduction, Burt Rutan designed Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the globe without stopping or refueling. He also designed SpaceShipOne financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen which won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for becoming the first privately-funded manned craft to enter the realm of space twice within a two-week period. Both, along with three other of his aircraft, are on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Burt's recent projects include a flying car, and the Virgin GlobalFlyer which broke Voyager's time for a non-stop solo flight around the world.

Burt, as someone with such intense involvement in aerospace design and development, what got you interested in climate issues?

Even though I've been very busy throughout my entire career developing and flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force, I've always pursued other research hobbies in my time away from work. Since I'm very accustomed to analyzing a lot of data, about three or four years ago many alarmist claims by some climate scientists caught my attention. Since this is such an important topic, I began to look into it firsthand.

Although I have no climate science credentials, I do have considerable expertise in processing and presenting data. I have also had extensive opportunities to observe how other people present data and use it to make their points. There is a rampant tendency in any industry where someone is trying to sell something with a bunch of data, where they cherry pick a little bit...bias a little bit. This becomes quite easy when there is an enormous amount of data to cherry pick from.

The first thing that got my attention, a lot of people's attention, was statements that the entire planet is heading towards a future climate catastrophe that is attributable to human carbon dioxide emissions. So I decided to take a look at that and just see if this conclusion was arrived at ethically. It's obviously an extremely important issue which has gotten a huge amount of media attention. I was particularly concerned because the proposed solutions will have enormous impacts upon costs of energy, which of course, will increase costs of everything.

Many people seem to get much of their information from what they see in newspapers, with variously biased viewpoints presented in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily, Canadian Free Press, etc. I may be considerably different, in that I always like to look at both sides of things that I take special interest in. So when I decided to look closely at the anthropogenic [man-made] global warming crisis claims, I avoided focusing on media reports, and instead, went directly to available raw climate data. The intent was to see if that data might just as reasonably be interpreted differently.

Then, what really drew me into the subject, was when I found that I couldn't obtain the raw data that I was looking for. I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn't share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked.
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The Canadian Press
2012-09-10 13:59:00

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Forecasters say the centre of tropical storm Leslie will almost certainly make landfall Tuesday in Newfoundland, though precisely where is still up for debate.

The Canadian Hurricane Centre in Halifax says Leslie could touch down on the island as a marginal hurricane or a strong tropical storm.

Forecaster Chris Fogarty says the storm's circulation is about 800-kilometres in diameter and its effects will be far-reaching.

He predicts wind gusts could top 100 kilometres an hour in parts of Newfoundland, with strong gusts also expected in Cape Breton.
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Fire in the Sky
Eddie Wrenn
Mail Online
2012-09-11 11:00:00

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  • Jupiter was hit during the day yesterday - but it apparently went unobserved from Earth
  • ...except for one astronomer, Dan Petersen, who saw the flash with his own eyes
  • When Petersen reported the sighting on a web forum, amateur astronomer George Hall checked his overnight footage

This is the moment Jupiter was struck by a mighty meteorite yesterday - and our only record of it is this image, captured by a lone webcam chugging away in the early hours of the morning.

As the people of Earth carried out their lives unawares, it seems our gas giant neighbour took a forceful blow to the side at about 11.35am GMT yesterday.

Amateur astronomer George Hall, from Dallas, captured the flash on video at 5:35am CET - but he only went to check his footage after hearing online that another astronomer, watching the planet with his own eyes, saw the huge explosion bloom out of Jupiter in the blink of an eye.

Now astronomers are waiting for the planet to swing back round - to see if Jupiter has been scarred by the impact.

If it has, a black smudge is likely to appear on the 'clouds' of the planet, a distinctive mark to go alongside the Red Spot - Jupiter's giant storm.
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PigrecoProgetti
You Tube
2012-04-01 14:40:00

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At 9pm on Sunday evening, April 1 2012, a meteorite stuck in Val D'Orcia near the departments of Radicofani and Sarteano, with coordinates: N 42 ° 56'17 "- E 11 ° 47'34". The fireball left a visible streak in the sky and two small-sized meterorites impacted the Senesi hills, causing a patchy fire most likely due to a big heat wave. There's a second site but we are not yet able to reach it.

With the intervention of the NBCR Fire Brigade, the Operational Nuclear Biological Chemical and "Radfiottivo" of the Department of Siena, the point of impact was identified, the fire was extinguished and soon samples of suspected carbonaceous Chondrite were found. Investigators conducted analyses to determine the type of material.

No radioactivity was registered at the point of impact, an area ​​about 60cm in diameter and up to half a meter deep. A thermal camera registered 756 degrees celsius even though the impact happened more than 18 hours earlier.

Dozens of glowing points of several thousand degrees were detected on the thermal camera's monitor.

Thanks to Simone Seddio of Astrofili ANTARES of Legnano.
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Alan Boyle
NBC News Cosmic Log
2012-09-11 22:00:00

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Astronomers are abuzz over sightings of a flash on Jupiter - which suggests that the giant planet has taken another bullet for the solar system team.

Today's report follows similar sightings of impacts in 2009 and 2010. As in those earlier cases, the call has gone out to look for any visible scars on Jupiter's cloud tops. That would be a sure sign that an asteroid or comet was drawn in by the planet's gravitational pull, potentially saving us from a cosmic collision threat.

"It's kind of a scary proposition to see how often Jupiter gets hit," said George Hall, an amateur astronomer from Dallas who captured the flash on video this morning.

Hall didn't actually see the hit when it happened. Early this morning, he brought out his 12-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with the Point Grey Flea3 video camera attached, just to capture imagery for a composite picture of Jupiter. "Jupiter happens to be ideally positioned at about 6 o'clock in the morning," he explained. "It's right overhead."
Comment: As such events are becoming more common, please have a look at some of the research, sections and articles we continue to provide under Fire in the Sky or read Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls or our continued Sky Watch Fireballs and Meteorites.
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Health & Wellness
ScienceDaily
2012-09-11 16:27:00
It was a quiet Thursday afternoon when AS, a 68-year-old woman from a suburb of Chicago, awakened from a nap to the realization that something was terribly wrong.

Thus begins a Loyola University Medical Center paper on a rare and baffling neurological disorder called Balint's syndrome, which badly impairs a patient's ability to make sense of what he or she sees.

The article describes, in novelistic detail, the difficult adjustments two patients have had to make in their lives. The article is published in the Sept. 11, 2012, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The paper was written by Jose Biller, MD, Murray Flaster, MD, and first author Jason Cuomo. Biller and Flaster are neurologists and Cuomo is a fourth-year medical student at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

The authors note that amid the rigors of clinical practice, physicians can content themselves with understanding the phenomenon of disease to the exclusion of understanding the patient's experience. Their article "is an attempt to inform both our clinical and subjective understandings of Balint's syndrome through narratives of two patients suffering from this rare and unique neurological disorder."
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ScienceDaily
2012-09-11 16:14:00
An observational study of nearly 1 million patients who underwent surgery suggests that preoperative hyponatremia (an electrolyte disorder in which sodium levels in the blood are low) was associated with an increased risk of complications and death within 30 days of surgery, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.

Hyponatremia has been linked to increased morbidity and mortality in a variety of medical conditions but its association with perioperative (around the time of surgery) outcomes is uncertain, according to the study background.

Alexander A. Leung, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital,Boston, and colleagues conducted a study using theAmericanCollegeof Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program database to identify 964,263 adults who underwent major surgery at more than 200 hospitals from 2005 through 2010. Preoperative hyponatremia (defined as sodium level < 135mEq/L) was present in 75,423 surgical patients (7.8 percent).

"We found that preoperative hyponatremia was present in approximately 1 in 13 patients, and this group had a 44 percent increased risk of 30-day perioperative mortality, even after adjustment for all other potential risk factors," the authors note. "Preoperative hyponatremia was also associated with an increased risk of perioperative major coronary events, surgical site wound infections, pneumonia and prolonged hospital stays."
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ScienceDaily
2012-09-11 16:03:00
Teens who play mature-rated, risk-glorifying video games may be more likely than those who don't become reckless drivers who experience increases in automobile accidents, police stops and willingness to drink and drive, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

"Most parents would probably be disturbed to learn that we observed that this type of game play was more strongly associated with teen drivers being pulled over by the police than their parenting practices," said study lead author Jay G. Hull, PhD, of Dartmouth College. "With motor vehicle accidents the No. 1 cause of adolescent deaths, popular games that increase reckless driving may constitute even more of a public health issue than the widely touted association of video games and aggression."

Researchers conducted a longitudinal study involving more than 5,000 U.S. teenagers who answered a series of questions over four years in four waves of telephone interviews. The findings were published online in APA's journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture.
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ScienceDaily
2012-09-11 15:47:00
Toothpicks and surgical swabs can wreak havoc in the gut when inadvertently swallowed or left behind after surgery.

A woman developed severe blood poisoning (sepsis) and a liver abscess, after inadvertently swallowing a toothpick, which perforated her gullet and lodged in a lobe of her liver, reveals a case published in BMJ Case Reports.

Swallowing "foreign bodies" is relatively common, particularly among children, but the subsequent development of a liver abscess is rare, with the first recorded incident dating back to 1898, the authors point out.

But it has mostly been associated with inadvertently swallowing pins, nails, fish and chicken bones, rather than toothpicks.

Most foreign body mishaps don't do any damage unless they create an obstruction or chemical burn. But they can be difficult to deal with effectively, because they don't show up on conventional x-rays and symptoms are often non-specific and remote.
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ScienceDaily
2012-09-11 15:41:00
Slow-wave sleep, or 'deep sleep', is intimately involved in the complex control of the onset of puberty, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM).

The many changes that occur in boys and girls during puberty are triggered by changes in the brain. Previous studies have shown that the parts of the brain that control puberty first become active during sleep, but the present study shows that it is deep sleep, rather than sleep in general, that is associated with this activity.

"If the parts of the brain that activate the reproductive system depend on deep sleep, then we need to be concerned that inadequate or disturbed sleep in children and young adolescents may interfere with normal pubertal maturation," said Harvard researcher, Natalie Shaw, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital who led the study. "This is particularly true for children who have been diagnosed with sleep disorders, but may also have more widespread implications as recent studies have found that most adolescents get less sleep than they require."
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ScienceDaily
2012-09-11 15:37:00
Chronic heart failure (CHF) patients are less likely to have died a year after discharge if they are involved in a programme of active follow-up once they have returned home than patients given standard care, according to a new Cochrane systematic review. These patients were also less likely to need to go back into hospital in the six months that follow discharge.

CHF is a serious condition, mainly affecting elderly people. It is becoming increasingly common as the population ages, and carries high risks of emergency hospitalisation and death. It affects around three to 20 per 1,000 of the general population, with figures rising to 10% of people aged between 80 and 89. In the UK, CHF consumes almost 2% of the National Health Service's budget, most of the cost being linked to hospital admissions.

A team of six researchers based in the UK and Australia examined 25 clinical trials with nearly 6,000 patients. The trials tested different methods of organising the care of CHF patients after they leave hospital. The researchers identified three types of care:
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Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
2012-09-10 11:07:00

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The use of marijuana in young adulthood might increase the risk of testicular cancer, researchers at the University of Southern California said in a study published by the medical journal Cancer on Monday.

No tests were carried out to determine whether marijuana use actually causes cancerous growths, but the study marks the first scientific research to actually spot a correlation between marijuana use and testicular cancer.

Researchers said that after interviewing more than 350 men, including a focus group of 163 who were diagnosed with testicular cancer, they determined that men who smoked marijuana in their adolescence and later quit "had a 2-fold increased risk" for developing dangerous germ cell tumors.
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Science Daily
2012-09-10 00:00:00

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With the discovery that the unconscious mind plays a key role in the placebo effect, researchers have identified a novel mechanism that helps explain the power of placebos and nocebos.

Described in the Sept. 10 on-line issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the new findings demonstrate that the placebo effect can be activated outside of conscious awareness, and provide an explanation for how patients can show clinical improvement even when they receive treatments devoid of active ingredients or of known therapeutic efficacy.
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Science of the Spirit
Oliver Burkeman
The Sydney Morning Herald
2012-09-06 14:54:00

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Paul Zak calls oxytocin the ''moral molecule''. He tells Oliver Burkeman how hugging, massage and watching soppy movies could make us better people.

The American academic Paul Zak is renowned among his colleagues for two things he does to people disconcertingly soon after meeting them. The first is hugging: seeing me approach across the library of his club, in midtown Manhattan, he springs to his feet, ignoring my outstretched hand, and enfolds me in his arms. The second is sticking needles in their arms to draw blood.

I escape our encounter unpunctured, but plenty of people don't: Zak's work, which he refers to as ''vampire studies'', has involved extracting blood from a bride and groom on their wedding day; from people who have just had massages, or been dancing; from Quakers, before and after their silent worship; and from tribal warriors in Papua New Guinea as they prepare for traditional rituals.
Comment: Stimulation of the vagus nerve, which the Éiriú Eolas program does wonderfully, also triggers the release of ocytocin. Learn more about the ocytocin releasing effect of the Éiriú Eolas program here.
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Makini Brice
Medical Daily
2012-09-11 12:28:00

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Long before they are able to talk, walk, or even sit up, babies are able to distinguish among different races and genders. A psychologist from the University of Delaware has found that babies are able to classify people by race and gender at 3 months; by 9 months, babies have difficulty remembering the faces of people from less-familiar races.

At 3 months, Paul Quinn says that Caucasian infants prefer Caucasian faces over Asian faces, choosing to stare at Caucasian faces for longer periods of time. At 3 months, infants were able to remember faces of different races equally, but that ability disappeared by the time babies were 9 months old.

Researchers measured babies' preferences by noting how long they stare at different objects, since babies of those ages are generally unable to speak. Looking time also demonstrates babies' familiarity with objects. Babies look at things for longer periods of time when they are more unfamiliar with it; when babies see familiar objects, they spend less time looking at them.

Researchers showed infants pictures of people of the four major ethnic groups: African, Caucasian, East Asian, and South Asian. They realized that 3-month-olds were able to recognize faces from all races, not just their own, but that the ability disappeared for 9-month-olds. Researchers wondered if that development could be changed.
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High Strangeness
No new articles.
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Don't Panic! Lighten Up!
No new articles.