Science & TechnologyS


Eye 1

Latest NSA leaks show US intelligence spying on 38 European 'targets'

snowden leaks
© The GuardianOne of the bugging methods mentioned is codenamed Dropmire, which according to a 2007 document is 'implanted on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy, DC'.
Exclusive: Edward Snowden papers reveal 38 targets including EU, France and Italy

US intelligence services are spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, according to the latest top secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

One document lists 38 embassies and missions, describing them as "targets". It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electronic communications gear to taps into cables to the collection of transmissions with specialised antennae.

Along with traditional ideological adversaries and sensitive Middle Eastern countries, the list of targets includes the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as a number of other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey. The list in the September 2010 document does not mention the UK, Germany or other western European states.

Eye 1

SOTT Focus: 21st Century Industrial Complexes, part 2: Surveillance, Cyber-Spying and the National Stasi Agency

Bilderberg2013
© pic.twitter.com/4c3j4XXlmpA protestor who's come dressed as a CCTV camera surveys the entrance waiting for delegates to arrive #Bilderberg2013
The recent reports concerning National Security Agency (NSA) collusion with the world's largest IT giants provide an insight into surveillance techniques the US government is using to spy on its citizens (and the rest of the world), with blatant disregard of human rights, privacy and legality.

As well as the Orwellian 'Big Brother' ramifications of Stasi cyber spying and digital tracking, the ongoing revelations from 'NSA whistleblower' Edward Snowden provide glimpses of the cooperation between government, the internet giants, private corporations, and private contractors profiteering from what might be termed the
'Surveillance Industrial Complex'.

Despite their denial of any knowledge of the PRISM program, or any wilful cooperation with the US government, the 'leaks' raise serious questions over the extent of complicity between the big internet firms and the NSA.

If the big tech firms were genuinely unaware of government monitoring then it exposes severe security flaws and poses the obvious question of whether they can be trusted to ensure users' data is safe. If, on the other hand, these firms were aware of PRISM, but have been forced to deny it for reasons of 'national security', it means individuals and international businesses are victims of total digital surveillance with minimal oversight.

We are told Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defence contractor that is involved in virtually every aspect of US government intelligence gathering and mass surveillance, and is majority-owned by the politically-affiliated Carlyle group. How is it that private contractors have access to the most sensitive data concerning 'US national security'? Just how much of the state's intelligence infrastructure is being built, operated and maintained by totally unaccountable private interests?

Satellite

Electric Universe: The accelerating winds of Venus


The astronomers studying the atmosphere of Venus are facing a new mystery. The Venusian winds have been steadily accelerating for the last 6 years. Scientists monitoring the Venus Express orbiter since 2006 noted the stunning increase in the already super fast winds, from 186 mph to 249 mph. The astronomers acknowledge they do not understand why this enormous variation in wind speed occurred. What is it about the Venusian atmosphere that mainstream astronomers find so puzzling?

Magic Wand

New language discovered in northern Australia

Scientists have discovered a new language in northern Australia which contains rare grammatical innovations and a unique combination of elements from other languages.

The language, now known as Light Warlpiri, is spoken by approximately 300 people in a remote desert community about 644 kilometres from Katherine, a town located in Australia's Northern Territory, said Carmel O'Shannessy, a professor in the department of linguistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Light Warlpiri is known as a "mixed language," because it blends elements from multiple languages: Traditional Warlpiri, which is spoken by about 6,000 people in indigenous communities scattered throughout the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory; Kriol, an English-based Creole language spoken in various regions of Australia; and English.

Satellite

NASA's Voyager 1 craft enters unfamiliar space

New research pinpoints the current location of NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft: It's still in our solar system. Since last summer, the long-running spacecraft has been exploring uncharted territory where the effects of interstellar space, or the space between stars, can be felt. Scientists don't know how thick this newfound region in the solar system is or how much farther Voyager 1 has to travel to break to the other side.
Image
"It could actually be anytime or it could be several more years," said chief scientist Ed Stone of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission. Stone first described this unexpected zone at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union last year. A trio of papers published online Thursday in the journal Science confirmed just how strange this new layer is.

Soon after Voyager 1 crossed into this region last August, low-energy charged particles that had been plentiful suddenly zipped outside while high-energy cosmic rays from interstellar space streamed inward. Readings by one of Voyager 1's instruments showed an abrupt increase in the magnetic field strength, but there was no change in the direction of the magnetic field lines - a sign that Voyager 1 has not yet exited the solar system.

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 to visit the giant gas planets, beaming back dazzling postcards of Jupiter, Saturn and their moons. Voyager 2 went on to tour Uranus and Neptune. After planet-hopping, they were sent on a trajectory toward interstellar space.

Eye 1

Biophotons: The human body emits, communicates with, and is it made from light

Biophotons: The Human Body Emits, Communicates with, and is Made from Light
© Unknown
Increasingly science agrees with the poetry of direct human experience: we are more than the atoms and molecules that make up our bodies, but beings of light as well. Biophotons are emitted by the human body, can be released through mental intention, and may modulate fundamental processes within cell-to-cell communication and DNA.

Nothing is more amazing than the highly improbable fact that we exist. We often ignore this fact, oblivious to the reality that instead of something there could be nothing at all, i.e. why is there a universe (poignantly aware of itself through us) and not some void completely unconscious of itself?

Consider that from light, air, water, basic minerals within the crust of the earth, and the at least 3 billion year old information contained within the nucleus of one diploid zygote cell, the human body is formed, and within that body a soul capable of at least trying to comprehend its bodily and spiritual origins.

Given the sheer insanity of our existential condition, and bodily incarnation as a whole, and considering that our earthly existence is partially formed from sunlight and requires the continual consumption of condensed sunlight in the form of food, it may not sound so farfetched that our body emits light.

Indeed, the human body emits biophotons, also known as ultraweak photon emissions (UPE), with a visibility 1,000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eye. While not visible to us, these particles of light (or waves, depending on how you are measuring them) are part of the visible electromagnetic spectrum (380-780 nm) and are detectable via sophisticated modern instrumentation.[1],[2]

Comment: Further reading on this subject on Sott can be found as follows:

Biophoton: Communication in Cells More Evidence
Confirmed: The Eye Emits Actual Light Biophotons

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Comet

FEMA, Russian Emergencies Ministry to join forces against space threat

Image
© Fotolia/Paul Fleet
Russia and the United States will work together to improve protection against meteorites and other space threats, Russia's emergencies minister said on Tuesday following a joint Russia-US working group meeting in Washington.

"We have decided that the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Russia's Emergencies Ministry will work together to develop systems to protect people and territory from cosmic impacts," Russia's Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov told journalists.

The meeting also covered other kinds of natural emergencies, such as recent years' extreme weather in Russia and United States, but it was cooperation to counter space threats that stole the limelight at the news conference.


Comment: Extreme weather is the result of cosmic climate change, so one can't be dealt with without examining the other. But no doubt they already knew that...


"I believe we can make a technological breakthrough in this area if the Emergencies Ministry and FEMA supervise this project, attracting the finest minds and research groups including in Canada, Europe, China, and Southeast Asia," Puchkov added.

Comment: We feel so much safer now, knowing that our fearless leaders will have "systems" to protect us against space rocks...

Sarcasm aside, the only thing, this far into the unfolding global catastrophe, that could at least mitigate the imminent space threat, is if the U.S. and Russian elites were removed from power by a sweeping tide of peaceful global revolution.

With fireballs raining down and extreme weather increasing by the day, it's clear that their 'Mandate of Heaven' has already been withdrawn:
The Chinese believed that an emperor could reign only while he enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven, that is, while he 'looked after his people'; if for any reason he failed to look after their well-being, Heaven would withdraw its Mandate and the emperor and probably his ruling dynasty would be deposed. ... Heaven would have been seen to withdraw its Mandate when the sky darkened, the crops failed and famine ensued bringing death to large numbers of people. The emperor, guilty or not, gets the blame for failing his people. In the aftermath of a calamitous dust-veil event the political upset could easily lead to the deposing of the ruling regime.



Info

Fairy circle mystery solved by computational modelling

Fairy Circles
© MIT Technology Review
Fairy circles are mysterious barren patches of land that are surrounded by healthy vegetation. The circles are common in many parts of the world but particularly in the arid grasslands of southern Africa where they range in size from 2 metres to 10 metres across (see picture left).

Plant biologists know these circles are stable having watched them over periods of decades. So these structures are clearly no accident. Indeed, exactly why fairy circles appear is something of a mystery. In particular, nobody has been able to explain why the patches are circular and not some other shape.

That changes today thanks to the work of Cristian Fernandez-Oto at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and a few pals who have used computer simulations to show that fairy circles are emergent patterns that occur naturally when plants compete for water in arid conditions.

Their model is relatively straight forward. It is based on the fact that a single plant can generate a root system below ground that is many times larger than the structure above the surface. The size of these roots determines how close together the plants can grow.

Next they assume that the land can exist in two stable states: either it is uniformly covered in vegetation or uniformly devoid of vegetation.

Black Cat 2

Cats don't actually ignore us

Cat
© Corbis Cats may be hard to read, but research shows they do pay attention to their owners.
Cats may try to hide their true feelings, but a recent study found that cats do actually pay attention to their owners, distinguishing them from all other people.

The study, which will be published in the July issue of Animal Cognition, is one of the few to examine the cat/human social dynamic from the feline's perspective. Cats may not do what we tell them to, but they usually adore their human caretakers.

Co-author Atsuko Saito of The University of Tokyo explained to Discovery News that dogs have evolved, and are bred, "to follow their owner's orders, but cats have not been. So sometimes cats appear aloof, but they have special relationships with their owners."

"Previous studies suggest that cats have evolved to behave like kittens (around their owners), and humans treat cats similar to the way that they treat babies," co-author Kazutaka Shinozuka of the University of South Florida College of Medicine added. "To form such baby-parent like relationships, recognition of owners might be important for cats."

Their study, mostly conducted in the homes of cats so as not to unduly upset or worry the felines, determined just that.

The researchers played recordings of strangers, as well as of the cats' owners, to the felines. The cats could not see the speakers.

USA

Full remote control of ALL modern U.S. market cars PROVEN

Image
Hastings' 2013 Mercedes could have instead been hijacked via remote control, run to full throttle with all driver input disabled, and rammed into a tree.
A team of hackers from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington conducted a study which has proven that all cars equipped with antilock brakes sold in the U.S. can be hacked via remote control and have their brakes entirely disabled with the car in motion, throttle revved, and remain fully operational with the key removed and the car in park with all driver input entirely ignored.

Though I myself think Hastings was murdered beforehand, parked and burned because the initial fire pictures showed a car with no front impact damage and a blown up rear end, only to be interspersed with scenes of extreme automotive carnage later, I am going to introduce here an entirely new possibility that could have happened. That Hastings' 2013 Mercedes could have instead been hijacked via remote control, run to full throttle with all driver input disabled, and rammed into a tree.

Many people know about GM's Onstar which maintains an always on cellular internet connection to the heart of the engine control system and has been that way since the 90's. But few people know about the Federal mandate, which in 2005 forced manufacturers to include a similar always on internet connection via the cell network in EVERY car sold in America, Onstar or not. And this team of hackers has proven that a remote connection can indeed allow commandeering of these cars (in their case they used a remote controlled laptop plugged into the OBD port rather than the cell connection) that could be used to turn the car into a murder weapon.