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Sott Editors
Sott.net 2013-03-28 17:10:00
The War on Iraq was one of the most brutal events in modern history. Sold to the people on the basis of lies about non-existent WMDs and Saddam Hussein's non-existent ties to non-existent al Qaeda, the above quote from a Bush administration official encapsulates the pathological delusion of grandeur that is US government foreign policy. On this week's show we'll be marking the 10th anniversary of 'Shock and Awe' by comparing American fantasy with reality and examining the disastrous choices American policy-makers have taken as the economy implodes. 9/11 gave the warmongers their "new Pearl Harbor." Couched in lofty rhetoric about spreading democracy and liberating the world from tyrannical dictators, America's glorious self-image stands in stark contrast to the brutal reality of ten years of bloody mayhem that has left Iraq and its people ripped apart. But it's not just Iraqis that have suffered. This insane warmongering is having a disastrous effect on the American and European populations, both economically and morally. History shows that when a civilization reaches a certain level of selfishness and depravity, cosmic disaster follows.
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| Puppet Masters |
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Megan Carpentier
Raw Story 2013-03-26 17:54:00
When I think of LGBT people, I think of my dad's best friend, the village's sole male hairdresser who catered to female clients and how he taught my mom and me how to French braid so I could be cooler in my ballet class. I think of the sweet high school boy who kissed me over a screening of "Truth Or Dare" (yes, I know) and later was so worried that I would hate him forever when he told me he liked boys. I think of my friend in high school who, after she came out, had guys screaming "Dyke!" at her as she walked down the hall to her locker, and all the teachers who never came out of their classrooms to have her back. I think of my friend's two mommies, my college roommate who came out as bi, the guys at the goth club who felt they could only there kiss in front of straight people and know no one cared, my friend who found drag at an urban university a world away from Texas, the guy upstairs, the couple across the hall, my cousins, fellow writer friends, artist friends, my family. You think of sex with children. And sex with animals. And goodness only knows what else (other than butt sex and until what point in life a man's, i.e., your own, sperm is viable, which isn't exactly giving straight marriage the best reputation). | |
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David Edwards
Raw Story 2013-03-27 17:49:00
A failed Republican mayoral candidate says that he has raised enough money to give away dozens of shotguns in the same town where former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 18 other people were shot. Former mayoral candidate Shaun McClusky told Tucson Weekly that he was leading a Tucson chapter of the Armed Citizen Project, which launched in Houston earlier this year to prove that more guns mean less crime. McClusky said that he had already gotten $12,000 in pledges, enough to arm at least three dozen people. Participants in high-crime neighborhoods "will receive a cleaning kit, they'll receive the shotgun, they'll receive slugs, they'll go through a background check and they'll also go through the training class," McClusky explained. | |
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Andrew Watt
Raw Story 2013-03-27 17:45:00
Proper analysis suggests Germany is not a wage-productivity paragon but a major cause of the eurozone crisis Over the course of the last week's tense negotiations over a Cyprus bailout deal, much of the commentary has focused on the role of Europe's finance ministers. But perhaps closer attention should be paid to Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank. On 14 March Draghi made a presentation to heads of state and government on the economic situation in the euro area. His intent was to show the real reasons for the crisis and the counter-measures needed. In this he succeeded - although not in the way he intended. Draghi presented two graphs that encapsulate his central argument: productivity growth in the surplus countries (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands) was higher than in the deficit countries (France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain). But wage growth was much faster in the latter group. Structural reforms and wage moderation lead to success; structural rigidities and greedy trade unions lead to failure. QED. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which reported the affair approvingly, the impact of Draghi's intervention was devastating. François Hollande, the French president, who had earlier been calling for an end to austerity and for growth impulses, was, according to the newspaper, completely silenced after the ECB president had so clearly demonstrated, with incontrovertible evidence, what was wrong in Europe - or rather in certain countries in the eurozone - and what must be done. | |
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Raw Story
2013-03-26 17:41:00
There are "new and rapidly growing threats" of a cyberstrike to the US homeland - perils that will require hundreds of young, college-age hackers to counter an alarming number of daily incursions into the nation's electrical grid and financial networks, says Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Janet Napolitano. This will be "hackers for good," and the DHS currently has a need for about 600 of them, Secretary Napolitano added in remarks Tuesday at a Monitor Breakfast. The need to develop a skilled cyber workforce has been a common - and formidable - challenge for a number of US government agencies, including DHS and the Pentagon, which is also struggling to build its own cyber workforce. That's because most skilled "cyber warriors," as the US military calls them, often get recruited by private industry after their service commitments are up. "That's a big concern, to be honest," says Col. Kiley Weigle, commander of the Air Force's Cyber Training Unit. "We have not, in my opinion, fully cracked that nut yet." | |
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Eric W. Dolan
Raw Story 2013-03-26 17:37:00
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly knocked opponents of same sex marriage on Tuesday night, claiming they had a weak argument that relied entirely on religious beliefs. The conservative Fox News host was discussing two cases before the Supreme Court regarding same sex marriage with his colleague Megyn Kelly. During the segment, O'Reilly remarked that public policy should not be based on religion. Kelly responded by saying that arguments against same sex marriage were not very persuasive when the religious element was removed. | |
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Yes, he signed HR 993. It was a bill funding the federal government. There was a rider in it. A Monsanto and biotech rider. The gist of the rider is: a dangerous ghoulish GMO food crop can't be stopped by a court order. That crop can still be grown, harvested, and sold in the US. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't it grand? 250,000 people signed an emergency letter to Obama, telling him to send HR 993 back to Congress so the rider could be removed. He didn't. Of course, there must be some mistake here, because we all know Obama is the radiant messiah. Right? He's constantly assuring us "we're all in this together." | |
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Graham Templeton
ExtremeTech 2013-03-28 08:00:00
Somebody should check and make sure that Kim Dotcom hasn't started funding any research in genetics. Maybe those guys from the Pirate Bay, too. With a paper that must send chills of fear and vindication down the spine of every internet freedom fighter, researchers from Cornell University this week presented evidence that genetic copyright is a "direct threat to genomic liberty." Could this be the newest, most easily altruistic frontier in copyright banditry? The study in question looked at existing patented stretches of DNA, notably in the hotly contested BRCA1 gene [1], and set about testing whether these patented sequences might pop up elsewhere due to chance or redundant function. They searched the human genome for small and large sequences patented under just a single diagnostic test, and found that these sequences existed in 689 other places. This isn't all that surprising. As the researchers point out, take any 15-nucleotide sequence (a '15mer'), check it against the human genome, and you'll always find a match somewhere else. In medicine researchers are generally selecting stretches of DNA for some sort of useful function, and evolution happens to like useful things, too; if we can't construct a 15mer at random and find it only once in the genome, how could we possibly hope a medically useful one, one with a distinct selective advantage, will be unique? The code for several types of protein motifs, most of which are much longer than 15 nucleotides, are repeated literally thousands of times in humans. (See: Your complete DNA genome can now be sequenced from a single cell [2].) [3]That certainly sounds scary, but doesn't this all seem just a little alarmist? | |
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RawStory
2013-03-28 06:40:00
The judge who charged former president Nicolas Sarkozy with taking financial advantage of France's richest woman has received a bullet and a death threat in the post, say lawyers. Jean-Michel Gentil, the most prominent of three judges investigating the case, received the threatening letter together with blank cartridges on Wednesday, the magistrate's union SM said in a statement published on its website. One of Gentil's colleagues said the letter, which arrived at the judge's offices in Bordeaux, contained threats against other magistrates. Police had been called in to investigate, the colleague added. The SM, in its online statement, denounced what it called "insulting statements" made by some of Sarkozy's political allies which it said were designed to undermine the work of the judiciary. It noted too that Sarkozy's own lawyer, Thierry Herzog, had questioned Gentil's impartiality. The SM said a number of its members were targeted in the letter. Gentil is not a member of the union, one colleague told AFP. Sarkozy's lawyers are attempting to overturn last week's decision by three examining magistrates to charge him in a case that threatens to destroy his hopes of a political comeback. | |
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Evan Bleier
Opposing Views 2013-03-26 13:37:00
The government spent more than $1.3 million on former President George W. Bush in 2012, the highest amount spent on any ex-president. According to an analysis released by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, the government spent nearly $3.7 million on former presidents in 2012, an amount that is about $200,000 less than what was spent in 2011. The money pays for a pension, compensation, benefits for office staffers and other costs. The Former Presidents Act gives old Oval Office inhabitants a $200,000 annual pension and $96,000 a year for a small office staff. Taxpayers also foot the bill for things like travel, office space and postage. The large amount spent on Bush seems a little objectionable considering how much former presidents are able to make for books and speaking engagements. | |
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John Yuro
MSNBC 2013-03-25 13:12:00
The Internal Revenue Service now admits it made a mistake when it spent $60,000 in taxpayer money to produce a video parodying the 1960s Star Trek television series, along with a second Gilligan's Island parody. The Star Trek segment was used to open a 2010 training and leadership conference, while the latter clip was used to avoid the cost of training employees in person. Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr., R-La., first asked the IRS to hand over copies of the videos in a Feb. 11 letter to Acting Commissioner Steven T. Miller. "It is important to determine whether and to what extent taxpayer resources were devoted to activities unrelated to your agency's core functions," Boustany wrote, claiming the Star Trekvideo "did not contain meaningful training content." Miller acknowledged the existence of both videos in his March 4 response along with the $60,000 price tag. A copy of the Star Trek parody surfaced on Friday. | |
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David Edwards
Raw Story 2013-03-05 12:48:00
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs on Monday repeated a conspiracy theory pushed by fringe conservative websites like Alex Jones' Infowars, that the federal government was "arming up" while trying to disarm U.S. citizens. During an interview with National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, Dobbs explained that "the gun owners are going to be the victims here." "At the same time, we're watching - inexplicably, without any voice from the Department of Homeland Security - we're watching the purchase of another 7,000 AR-15-like rifles. We're watching 2 billion rounds of ammunition, principally .40 [caliber] and 9mm. We are looking at the purchase of 2,700 light armored vehicles in the midst of - at least, allegedly - 2,700 of those vehicles." "What in the world is going on?" Dobbs exclaimed. "As the Department of Homeland Security seems to be armoring up, and the [Obama] administration is trying to disarm American citizens." | |
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CBS Denver
2013-03-22 12:25:00
A proposal to repeal the crime of adultery from Colorado's books has been signed into law. The legislation that Gov. John Hickenlooper signed Friday removes what Democratic bill sponsors say is an outdated 19-century statute. The bill also would repeal the rarely-used law of contributing to "sexual immorality" by providing a place, such as a hotel room, for unmarried people to have sex. | |
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Cheryl K. Chumley
Washington Times 2013-03-22 12:14:00
Automatic federal cuts are bringing staffers to the brink of starvation, suggested Debbie Wasserman Schultz, at a recent House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee hearing. Restaurants on the House side of Congress are increasing in cost so much that aides are being "priced out" of a good meal, she said, as Fox News reported. The comments came by way of a discussion about the impacts of the sequester on lawmakers' office budgets. Rep. Jim Moran said he may be forced to lay off a staffer - and then Ms. Wasserman Schultz weighed in with her tale of hard times. | |
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The Extinction Protocol
2013-03-28 11:21:00
Marc Faber, who authors the Gloom Boom & Doom newsletter, is usually pretty bearish on stocks and bullish on gold. Lately, though, gold doesn't seem like it can catch a bid. "Despite the continued reverberations regarding the Cyprus bailout and its involvement of bank deposits, gold struggled to maintain the positive momentum created in the first two weeks of March and instead now looks very likely to move lower, towards $1580/oz," wrote Deutsche Bank commodities analyst Xiao Fu in a note this morning. So, what does Faber have to say about it? This morning, on Bloomberg Surveillance with Tom Keene and Alix Steel, Dr. Doom was asked why gold wasn't holding up. Here's his explanation: When you print money, the money does not flow evenly into the economic system. It stays essentially in the financial service industry and among people that have access to these funds, mostly well-to-do people. It does not go to the worker. I just mentioned that it doesn't flow evenly into the system. Now from time to time it will lift the NASDAQ like between 1997 and March 2000. Then it lifted home prices in the U.S. until 2007. Then it lifted the commodity prices in 2008 until July 2008 when the global economy was already in recession. More recently it has lifted selected emerging economies, stock markets in Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, up four times from 2009 lows and now the U.S. So we are creating bubbles and bubbles and bubbles. This bubble will come to an end. My concern is that we are going to have a systemic crisis where it is going to be very difficult to hide. Even in gold, it will be difficult to hide. Faber is, of course, still bearish on U.S. stocks. He told Bloomberg that he sees "considerable downside risk" in the market. - Business Insider | |
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Joe Guillen
Detroit Free Press 2013-03-22 11:17:00
The Rev. Jesse Jackson joined the fight against Detroit's emergency financial manager on Friday, calling for mass, nonviolent protest in the city to fend off what he called an attack on residents' voting rights. Jackson and several other opponents to an EFM pledged to file a lawsuit next week challenging the constitutionality of Michigan's new emergency manager law. It takes effect Thursday and grants broad powers to the incoming emergency financial manager, Kevyn Orr, a Washington, D.C., bankruptcy lawyer. "As opposed to having a city council that's democratically elected and a mayor, you'll have a plantocracy, a plantation-ocracy, replacing a democracy," Jackson said. Jackson was joined by Detroit City Councilwomen JoAnn Watson and Brenda Jones, U.S. Rep. John Conyers and a union representative at a rally inside city hall that drew about 100 people. He also called on the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene to protect Detroiters' rights to vote. "We marched too long and bled too much and died too young for the right to vote to have a governor ... take away the impact of our vote," said Jackson, president and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. | |
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Joanna Stern
ABC News 2013-03-23 13:19:00
Offensive jokes whispered at a tech conference last Sunday night have now spread much further than anyone would have ever thought. While at the PyCon technology conference last weekend, Adria Richards, a software developer and self-described technology evangelist, overheard two men behind her making a series of offensive and sexual jokes about "dongles" and "forks." "They started talking about 'big' ad dongles. I could feel my face getting flustered," Richards wrote on her blog titled "But You're a Girl." "I was telling myself if they made one more sexual joke, I'd say something. Then it happened ... the trigger." Richards didn't turn around in her seat and talk to the two men. But she did speak up on the Internet. She snapped a photo of the two men and tweeted it: "Not cool. Jokes about 'forking' repo's in a sexual way and 'big' dongles. Right behind me #pyconpic.twitter.com/Hv1bkeOsYP." Richards then tweeted at the PyCon account, and as a result, the two men were removed from the conference. That was just the start of the impact of those tweets. Later in the week, one of the men, whose name has not been revealed, was fired from his job at Playhaven, a mobile gaming company. | |
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Benjamin Radford
Discovery News 2013-03-26 15:20:00
Fake and diluted ingredients, including herbs and animal parts, are increasingly finding their way into traditional Chinese medicines. Investigators have found many supposedly medicinal powders diluted with everything from flour to corn starch to sand. Sometimes the dilutions are the result of cutting corners by manufacturers, but often it's done by middlemen and retailers seeking to increase their profit margins. There is little or no governmental regulation of these medicines, and the problem is getting worse. As one traditional Chinese medicine manufacturer noted, "counterfeiters are posing a great threat, as fake products are made to closely resemble genuine ones. Counterfeiters can produce fake medicinal herbs with starch and gypsum powder, or mix dirt or dust with the herbs to increase their weight." | |
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Jamie Doward
Guardian 2013-03-23 13:02:00
Research finds that despite high standard of living happiness is elusive France, once famous for its joie de vivre, is suffering from existential gloom - and the French have only themselves to blame for their malaise, according to a study to be presented in London next month. Research by a French academic to be delivered to the Royal Economic Society suggests that the country's citizens are "taught" to be miserable by elements of their own culture. Claudia Senik, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, argues that her country's education system and its cultural "mentality" make the French far less happy than their wealth and lifestyle suggest they should be. The French enjoy a high standard of living, Senik notes. The country has a generous welfare state, plus universal and free access to healthcare, hospitals, public schools and universities. It also has a 35-hour working week and many foreigners aspire to make it their home - 150,000 Britons have chosen to live there. Yet the French are gloomy. A recent WIN-Gallup poll found that their expectations for the coming year ranked lower than those in Iraq or Afghanistan. | |
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Russ Bynam
Boston Globe 2013-03-23 12:38:00
A pair of teenagers were arrested Friday and accused of fatally shooting a 13-month-old baby in the face and wounding his mother during their morning stroll through a leafy, historic neighborhood. Sherry West had just been to the post office a few blocks from her apartment on Thursday morning and was pushing her son, Antonio, in his stroller while they walked past gnarled oak trees and blooming azaleas in the coastal city of Brunswick. West said a tall, skinny teenager, accompanied by a smaller boy, asked her for money. ''He asked me for money and I said I didn't have it,'' she said Friday from her apartment, which was scattered with her son's toys and movies. ''When you have a baby, you spend all your money on babies. They're expensive. And he kept asking and I just said 'I don't have it.' And he said, 'Do you want me to kill your baby?' And I said, 'No, don't kill my baby!' '' One of the teens fired four shots, grazing West's ear and striking her in the leg, before he walked around to the stroller and shot the baby in the face. | |
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Alexander Abad-Santos
Atlantic Wire 2013-03-27 11:54:00
Tim McDaniel, an 18-year vetaran of the biology department at the public school in Dietrcich, Idaho, might have to figure out how to teach the miracle of life to his high-school students without saying the word "vagina" after a group of unhappy parents found the word offensive. Because now he's kind of in big trouble for, you know, doing his job in the teen pregnancy capital of Idaho. According to what McDaniel told Twin-Falls's Times-News, four parents at the school complained that he taught their children "the biology of an orgasm" and said the word "vagina" during his sex-education lesson to a room of sophomores. Yes,sophomores, some of whom have had vaginas for 14 to 15 years. It's unclear whether the word "penis" was met with equal offense. But, apparently, allegations from parents also complain that McDaniel has shown the film an Inconvenient Truth in class, and according to a letter served to McDaniel by a quick to respond official from Idaho's Department of Education: | |
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jimromenesko.com
2013-03-21 11:47:00
Romenesko reader Mike Poller spotted this on HARO (Help a Reporter Out): | |
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Mark Barber
WISTV.com 2013-03-26 19:29:00 Law enforcement officials pushed back hundreds of people who were crowding around a large pile of merchandise outside an Augusta grocery store Tuesday afternoon. But the goods sitting in the parking lot of the Laney Supermarket didn't make into anyone's hands. Instead, the food people hoped to take home was tossed into the trash. "People have children out here that are hungry, thirsty, could be anything. Why throw it away when you could be issuing it out?" asked Robertstine Lambert. The Marshal of Richmond County, Steve Smith, says the food wasn't theirs to give away, so they had to trash it. |
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David Edwards
The Raw Story 2013-03-27 07:49:00
Federal and state authorities on Tuesday raided a Catholic parish in Independence, Missouri as part of an investigation into child pornography. A spokesperson for the Catholic Dioceses of Kansas City-St. Joseph said that investigators tracked down child porn downloads to an IP address used by an unsecured wireless network at the offices of St. Ann Parish in Independence, according to The Kansas City Star. Four computers seized in the raid will be analyzed to determine if they were used to download the illegal material from a peer-to-peer network. It is possible, however, that outside computers accessed the wireless network because it was not password protected. | |
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Jill Filipovic
AlJazeera 2013-03-27 14:55:00
The current legal model for prosecuting rape should shift to that of 'affirmative consent'. Earlier this month, the Steubenville, Ohio high school football players who sexually penetrated an intoxicated and sometimes unconscious teenage girl were found guilty of rape. The boys' defence was that the girl was drinking, but she wasn't so drunk that she couldn't have said no if she didn't like what they were doing. A week before that, on the HBO television show Girls, one of the lead male characters initiated a variety of sex acts that his girlfriend clearly did not enjoy or anticipate, but to which she doesn't exactly say "no" even though she doesn't exactly say "yes", either. Think pieces and 140-character philosophies on consent abounded. Were the events in Steubenville and the scene onGirls rape, rape-rape, unfortunate misunderstandings or just bad sex? To abate our widespread confusion about sex and consent, we need to change our understanding of masculinity, sexual virtue and sex itself. But we also need to change the law. Rape laws have always both reflected and shaped our cultural views of women and of sex, and our modern system is no exception. The feminist movement of the 1970s achieved significant victories in how our legal system deals with rape and sexual assault. Decades later, our understanding of sex crimes is more evolved, and it's time for another legal shift to reflect that. | |
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Eric W. Dolan
The Raw Story 2013-03-26 18:42:00
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp on Tuesday asked the school's Honor Court to drop its proceedings against a student who said she was raped. "For several weeks, the University has grappled with how best to respond to a public claim of retaliation against the University while maintaining the autonomy and integrity of our Honor Court proceedings and the privacy of the individuals involved," Thorp said in amessage to students. "Recognizing the potential conflicts that may exist by allowing both processes to continue, we have asked the Student Attorney General to suspend the Honor Court proceeding pending an external review of these allegations of retaliation," he continued. "The University takes all allegations of retaliation seriously, whether against an individual or an institution, and this allegation is no exception." The situation has prompted outrage across the nation. Landen Gambill, a sophomore at the university, found herself facing the threat of expulsion after speaking out against her ex-boyfriend and abuser. Along with other students and a former assistant dean, Gambill filed a federal complaint against UNC in January over its handling of sexual assault cases. | |
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Deborah Esch
AlJazeera 2013-03-25 15:03:00
Author details her experience of getting open access to a scholarly archive that had been locked away from the public. "Ah, it must be desolate and sad to outlive one's own heart," wrote the author of a handful of ground-breaking works, published early in the 19th century, shortly before he joined a recent acquaintance in a meticulously planned suicide pact and carried it out, by all accounts, to the letter. Among many other things, certainly, I thought a lot about Heinrich von Kleist, and re-read some of his work, as I tried to make sense of the devastating news of the suicide of Aaron Swartz and of the events that led to that premature and apparently senseless ending. At a loss, I plumbed the reserves of several decades of reading, teaching and writing about literature and the history of philosophy in an attempt to locate at least one example, a telling instance from the (possibly) remote past that would illuminate this episode from the proximate past that seemed pointless, without reason. As I pored over news reports, editorials, blogs (including Aaron's own), videos of Aaron speaking at conferences and rallies, I was also pulling books off my shelves, returning to pages and passages annotated over the course of multiple readings, marginalia layered as palimpsest. From Kleist (who had always been my go-to guy on suicide, having not just staged it repeatedly in his work but performed it himself), I reverted to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had such a manifold impact on subsequent generations of writers. One of the protagonists in his epistolary novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise, finding that his "soul is oppressed with the weight of life", delivers an impassioned argument for the human right to "willful death":
Rousseau's St Preux concludes his case with an invitation to his interlocutor to join him in the kind of suicide pact in which Kleist would later (in the aftermath of his own reading of Rousseau) enlist his new friend. In the event, St Preux, whose "life" as a fictional character is arguably more dispensable, goes on to live another day - but not before summoning for his reader the spectre of Cato, the Roman warrior (and thorn in the side of Caesar) whose gruesome suicide is immortalised in Plutarch. Perhaps naively, I was still in quest of an example that might throw Aaron's final act into relief. Possibly biography and historiography would furnish what literature, thus far, had not. Like most people on the planet, I don't happen to own a copy of Plutarch's Lives, so I logged on in order to refresh my memory of the details of his account of (the in many ways exemplary) Cato. Here is what happened next: My Google search for "Plutarch life of Cato" turned up a link to Jstor - the "digital library of academic journals, books and primary sources" that Aaron had infamously hacked from a closet at MIT, downloading onto his laptop the numerous files that would shortly thereafter result in his indictment by the district attorney for Massachusetts. | |
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| Science & Technology |
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Tanya Lewis
LiveScience 2013-03-28 15:52:00
The transistor revolutionized electronics and computing. Now, researchers have made a biological transistor from DNA that could be used to create living computers. A transistor is a device that controls the flow of electrons in an electrical circuit, which acts as an on-off switch. Similarly, the biological transistor - termed a transcriptor - controls the flow of an enzyme as it moves along a strand of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). These cellular building blocks could be used to do anything from monitoring their environment to turning processes on and off in the cells. The findings were reported today (March 28) in the journal Science. "Transcriptors are the key component behind amplifying genetic logic," lead author Jerome Bonnet, a bioengineer at Stanford University, said in a statement. On their own, these devices do not represent a computer, but they allow for logical operations, such as "if this-then that" commands, one of three basic functions of computers (the other two being storing and transmitting information). To make the transcriptors, the researchers took a group of natural proteins, the workhorses of cells, and used them to control how the enzyme known as RNA polymerase zipped along a DNA molecule. The team used these transcriptors to create the mathematical operators that perform computations using Boolean logic. | |
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Rachel Nuwer
ScienceNow 2013-03-28 13:35:00
Like others who came before him, Norbert Juergens was caught in the spell of fairy circles. These bare patches of ground, often outlined with a fringe of tall grass, pockmark a 2000-kilometer-long strip of desert stretching from Angola to South Africa. Though the formations have confounded scientists for years, Juergens - an ecologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany - thinks that he may be the first to crack the puzzle. The strange saga of the fairy circles got even stranger last year. That's when Walter Tschinkel, a biologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, analyzed 4 years of satellite images of the formations in Namibia's NamibRand Nature Reserve. Tschinkel had been intrigued by the circles since first encountering them on a vacation to Africa in 2005. The images revealed that some of the formations arose and others vanished over the 4-year period - the first evidence that they were somehow "alive." Extrapolating from the data, Tschinkel estimated an average "lifespan" of 41 years. But he couldn't figure out what made them. Some suspected that termites were killing the grass from below, but Tschinkel found no evidence that the insects caused fairy circles. Nor did he find anything wrong with the soil itself. Juergens's search for answers began a year after Tschinkel's. He started traveling throughout Africa in 2006 - including to remote areas in Angola, still reeling from its recent civil war - in search of fairy circles. He became intrigued with the formations after noticing, like Tschinkel, that the mysterious patches seemed to come and go from the landscape. He recorded any signs of animal life that he came across in and around the circles, such as tracks, dung, or nests. He also dug trenches from the center of the circles to the outside in order to find any subterranean organisms that may be lurking below. | |
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Charles Choi
LiveScience 2013-03-28 07:10:00
A blood type that can turn blood transfusions deadly has proven a perplexing mystery for 60 years. Now researchers have finally identified the secret behind the blood type known as "Vel," findings that could help make blood safer for hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The mystery began in 1952, when a 66-year-old woman in New York, sick with colon cancer, received a blood transfusion and unexpectedly suffered from a severe and potentially fatal rejection of the blood. Investigators referred to her, using her last name, simply as Patient Vel. Further research found that Mrs. Vel had developed a potent immune response against some unknown compound found on the red blood cells she had received. However, scientists could not identify this compound, opening the mystery of a new blood type, "Vel-negative." "The molecular basis of the Vel-negative blood type remained elusive for more than 60 years despite intense efforts worldwide," researcher Bryan Ballif, a biochemist and mass spectrometrist at the University of Vermont, told LiveScience. | |
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| Earth Changes |
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spiegel.de
2013-03-28 16:39:00
Complaining about the weather has reached epidemic proportions in northern Germany this "spring." And with good reason. With Easter just around the corner, meteorologists are telling us this could end up being the coldest March in Berlin and its surroundings since records began in the 1880s. The poor Easter Bunny deserves our sympathy. Whereas in recent years he has grown used to dodging daffodils, lilies and tulips as he carries his cargo of eggs and chocolate to homes across northern Europe, this year the rabbit will find himself confronted with ice slicks, snow drifts and bundled up humans in foul moods. Easter, after all, may be upon us. But spring weather most definitely is not. Biologists are warning that the Easter Bunny's wild brethren, European hares, are having trouble keeping their broods warm and healthy in the unseasonable chill. Meteorologists are keeping close tabs on thermometers to determine whether this March will go down as the coldest ever -- since records began in the 1880s. And wiseacres on the streets of Berlin have not yet tired of noting that Easter promises to be colder than last Christmas. And it's not just the northern regions of Continental Europe where the Easter Bunny will encounter problems. Great Britain and Ireland are likewise suffering through unseasonable weather, with power outages threatening the roast lamb and snow drifts making hopping difficult. Russia and Ukraine are also suffering. | |
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Guardian.co.uk
Mean temperature for the month so far is 2.5C (36.5F) - three degrees below long-term average2013-03-28 16:38:00 This March is set to be the coldest in the UK since 1962, weather experts have said. Statistics from the Met Office showed that from 1 March to 26 March the UK mean temperature was 2.5C (36.5F), which is three degrees below the long-term average. This made it the joint fourth coldest in the UK, in records going back to 1910.
The Met Office said this March was likely to be the fourth coldest on record for England, joint third coldest for Wales, joint eighth coldest for Scotland and sixth coldest for Northern Ireland. This March joined 2006, 2001, 1995, 1987, 1979, 1970 and 1962 as years when the month saw significant snowfall. The coldest March in the UK was in 1962, at 1.9C (35.4F), followed by 1947, 2.2C (35.9F), 1937, 2.4C (36.3F), and 1916 and 1917, 2.5C (36.5F). The cold weather is expected to continue through the Easter weekend and into April, a spokesman said. Full figures for the month will be available next week. | |
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Nathan Rao
UK Express 2013-03-22 12:19:00
Heavy snow is expected over the next 36 hours as Britain shivers on the coldest March weekend for 50 years. Up to 16ins will fall over high ground with several inches likely across much of the UK, the Met Office said last night. Over 1,000 schools were shut and transport was disrupted as any hopes of spring were dashed by yet another onslaught of snow and flooding today as temperatures fell as low as -12C (10F). Emergency services saw an early surge in weather-related call-outs as some parts of the country were hit by blizzard conditions. Government agencies issued a string of warnings urging the public to take care on the roads. The South-west, which will escape the worst of the winter blast, faces flooding with up to 100mm of rain - almost two months' worth - over the next 24 hours as yesterday's heavy rain continues. In total The Environment Agency issued 12 flood warnings tonight across the country and 81 less serious flood alerts. In east Cornwall emergency services were searching for a missing woman her partially property collapsed during heavy rainfall overnight. | |
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The Extinction Protocol
Since the plate tectonics revolution of the 1960s, scientists have known that new seafloor is created throughout the major ocean basins at linear chains of volcanoes known as mid-ocean ridges. But where exactly does the erupted magma come from? Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego now have a better idea after capturing a unique image of a site deep in the Earth where magma is generated. Using electromagnetic technology developed and advanced at Scripps, the researchers mapped a large area beneath the seafloor off Central America at the northern East Pacific Rise, a seafloor volcano located on a section of the global mid-ocean ridges that together form the largest and most active chain of volcanoes in the solar system. By comparison, the researchers say the cross-section area of the melting region they mapped would rival the size of San Diego County.2013-03-28 11:19:00
Details of the image and the methods used to capture it are published in the March 28 issue of the journal Nature. "Our data show that mantle upwelling beneath the mid-ocean ridge creates a deeper and broader melting region than previously thought," said Kerry Key, lead author of the study and an associate research geophysicist at Scripps. "This was the largest project of its kind, enabling us to image the mantle with a level of detail not possible with previous studies." The northern East Pacific Rise is an area where two of the planet's tectonic plates are spreading apart from each another. Mantle rising between the plates melts to generate the magma that forms fresh seafloor when it erupts or freezes in the crust. - Science Daily | |
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The Extinction Protocol
Apartment residents claim slow pace of repairs led to second incident. About residents of Pangsapuri Beringin in Puchong, here had to vacate their apartment units yesterday when a nearby hill slope collapsed for the second time this year. The first incident occurred on Feb 19 and residents claimed that repairs were completed late, which resulted in the second landslide about 4.30pm yesterday. They said an official from the Subang Jaya Municipal Council had directed residents of Block B of the apartments to evacuate to a hall nearby. Resident Siti Zaleha Dalli, 38, described this landslide as even worse than the first one. "I was told about the incident at about 4.30pm by my son before I noticed that a large part of the hill slope next to the building had collapsed. I was made to understand that a sewage pipe and a water pipe had burst, which aggravated the situation. The landslide was very near my unit," said Siti Zaleha, who expressed disappointment at the slow pace of repairs following the first landslide. "When such things happen, we cannot sleep peacefully for fear that our lives may be in danger. If it rains, we will be more worried because the soil will sink."2013-03-28 11:15:00
Another resident, L. Vijayan, 31, also expressed disappointment claiming repairs on the temporary retaining wall were a short-term solution. "About 2am, I came to learn that there was a burst pipe. It was raining heavily then, but I did not expect the situation to turn this bad because I thought the temporary retaining wall could sustain the pressure." A check revealed that a section of the landslide had affected the back of a row of terrace-houses located near Block B. Assistant Director of Operations of the Selangor Fire and Rescue Department Mohd Sani Harul said there were no casualties. The cause of the incident was still being investigated. Bernama. - NST | |
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Steve Nolan
Daily Mail UK 2013-03-24 08:20:00
They are one of the most iconic symbols of British independence and the inspiration for one of the most famous wartime songs. But walkers have been warned to take care when walking along a stretch of the famous White Cliffs of Dover after tonnes of chalk crashed into the English Channel when part of the cliff-face sheared off. A giant mound of clay was left on the shore near St Margaret's Bay after the collapse between between Dover and Deal in Kent. Additional Images | |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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Tom Hacker
What is thought to have been a bright meteor, streaking across the predawn Northern Colorado sky Thursday, sparked reports from dozens of early birds who happened to view it.ReporterHerald 2013-03-28 12:20:00 Loveland resident Shawn Kraft caught it as he drove northward on U.S. 287, between Owl Canyon and Livermore, on his daily commute to Laramie where he works for the city as an information technologist. "Here's what I could equate it with," Kraft said. "You know those little sparklers that kids waved around before they were illegal? It was like that. Green. Bright green. Really bright green, in a pitch-black sky. It took about a second or a second and a half." The "fireball log" maintained by the American Meteor Society, an online gathering spot for amateur observers, contained nearly simultaneous reports of the same sighting -- a bright green meteor seen between 5:46 and 5:50 a.m. The reports came from Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. "It was good-sized," Kraft said. "It's the biggest thing I've ever seen in the sky like that." A meteor is the name given to the light emitted by a meteoroid, a small rocky object that enters the earth's atmosphere from space, as it burns in the upper atmosphere. A rare meteorite is a surviving fragment of a meteoroid that impacts the earth's surface. The vast majority of meteoroids vaporize in the atmosphere. |
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Gainesville Sun
2013-03-21 12:32:00
A sonic boom of some sort caused windows and walls to shake over several counties in North Central Florida Thursday night, and Alachua County sheriff's officials got the explanation that it was "military manuevering of some kind." Alachua County Sheriff's Lt. Art Forgey said late Thursday night that the "west side of Gainesville flooded our communications center" around 9 p.m. with calls about a window-clattering and wall-shaking boom felt by many residents, particularly those in west Gainesville. | |
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| Health & Wellness |
Two studies published in the past six months reveal a disturbing finding: glyphosate-based herbicides such as Roundup® appear to suppress the growth of beneficial gut bacteria, leading to the overgrowth of extremely pathogenic bacteria. Late last year, in an article titled Roundup Herbicide Linked to Overgrowth of Deadly Bacteria, we reported on new research indicating that glyphosate-based herbicides such as Roundup® may be contributing to the overgrowth of harmful bacteria, both in GM-produced food and our own bodies. By suppressing the growth of beneficial bacteria and encouraging the growth of pathogenic ones, including deadly botulism-associated Clostridum botulinum, GM agriculture may be contributing to the alarming increase, wordwide, in infectious diseases that are resistant to conventional antibiotics, such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), which the CDC's director recently termed a 'nightmare bacteria.' | |
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Amanda Warren
Activist Post 2013-03-28 16:56:00
The horse meat fiasco in Europe has prodded scientists to look a bit deeper into what else we might be consuming. A team of South African scientists have just found traces of human tissue in meat meant for public consumption from 9 provinces. The issue was revealed to parliament, almost as a side note, during meat inspection briefings on Tuesday. A University of Stellenbosch scientist and his team conducted a microbial analysis that revealed traces of human elements, but said that slaughterhouse workers sometimes cut themselves . . . or other things . . . which could lead to the findings. If I walked into a factory and the sample I randomly selected to test was a meat sample of which the person de-boning the meat had just picked his nose and then touched the meat, I would get a totally different microbial reading," he said.Delicious. Beyond the findings themselves, it brings up the global hot-button topic of the moment: food labeling. How much should we know about what we are consuming? | |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Source
2013-03-28 16:16:00
Focusing on the present rather than letting the mind drift may help to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, suggests new research from the Shamatha Project at the University of California, Davis. The ability to focus mental resources on immediate experience is an aspect of mindfulness, which can be improved by meditation training. "This is the first study to show a direct relation between resting cortisol and scores on any type of mindfulness scale," said Tonya Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and first author of a paper describing the work, published this week in the journal Health Psychology. High levels of cortisol, a hormone produced by the adrenal gland, are associated with physical or emotional stress. Prolonged release of the hormone contributes to wide-ranging, adverse effects on a number of physiological systems. The new findings are the latest to come from the Shamatha Project, a comprehensive long-term, control-group study of the effects of meditation training on mind and body. | |
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It will help you to have improved overall health, a stronger immune system, better impulse control and reduced inflammation. It will also help you to heal emotional wounds; anything that may hinder or prevent you from leading a healthy and fulfilling life. Visit the Éiriú Eolas site or participate on the forum to learn more about the scientific background of this program and then try it out for yourselves, free of charge.
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| High Strangeness |
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Greg Newkirk
WhoForted? 2013-03-28 13:26:00
Contractors renovating old prison housing were left terrified when a break time dare turned into a brush with the paranormal, sending one worker running for his life. Luckily, he had a camera in hand. When the duo of contractors picked up a job renovating an old building in Derby with a reputation for ghostly happenings, such as odd cold spots, mysteriously flickering lights, disembodied knocks, bumps, and the like (after all, the previous owner died in the home), it became a routine joke to challenge one another to a kind of "terror endurance" game. The two would dare one another to go into the basement, the source of the odd disturbances, and see how long they could last. "See how long you can stay down there for," one contractor, Tom, says to the other. "Ahh... no!" is the immediate response. Well eventually, as tends to happen with dares, the taunted builder wound up in the basement with a camera phone in his hand. He lasted a full 30 seconds before witnessing an admittedly spooky sight, that of a "nude ghost", that sent him fleeing. Tom posted the video online yesterday, sharing the footage and asking for an explanation. |
