Technology companies have to fight for their users, or they'll eventually lose them.

It turns out that the NSA's domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we've learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it's easier that way.

I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.

Do you remember those old spy movies, when the higher ups in government decide that the mission is more important than the spy's life? It's going to be the same way with you. You might think that your friendly relationship with the government means that they're going to protect you, but they won't. The NSA doesn't care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it's convenient to do so.

We're already starting to see that. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are pleading with the government to allow them to explain details of what information they provided in response to National Security Letters and other government demands. They've lost the trust of their customers, and explaining what they do -- and don't do -- is how to get it back. The government has refused; they don't care.

It will be the same with you. There are lots more high-tech companies who have cooperated with the government. Most of those company names are somewhere in the thousands of documents that Edward Snowden took with him, and sooner or later they'll be released to the public. The NSA probably told you that your cooperation would forever remain secret, but they're sloppy. They'll put your company name on presentations delivered to thousands of people: government employees, contractors, probably even foreign nationals. If Snowden doesn't have a copy, the next whistleblower will.

Insight from UCSF-led study may advance gene and cell therapy.

Researchers have probed deep into the cell's genome, beyond the basic genetic code, to begin learning the "grammar" that helps determine whether or not a gene gets switched on to make the protein it encodes.

Their discovery -- that the ordering of specific DNA sequences in key regions of the genome affects the activity of genes -- might advance efforts to use gene and cell-based therapies to treat disease, said UCSF molecular biologist Nadav Ahituv, PhD, senior scientist on the study. The findings were published online in the journal Nature Genetics on July 28 and will appear in the September print edition.

In gene therapy, which is still experimental, specific genes are delivered to cells to make proteins that improve cellular physiology and fight disease. The new findings offer a way to activate these genes in specific tissues.

"Our work suggests a framework for the design of synthetic, tissue-specific DNA that could be used to control gene activation," said Ahituv, an associate professor in the UCSF School of Pharmacy.

Researchers have, for the first time, experimentally simulated the pressure conditions of the Earth's deep lower mantle - an achievement that could shed new light on the planet's evolution, according to a study published Friday in the online edition of the journal Scientific Reports.

Experts from the Carnegie Institution and the University of Illinois managed to use their simulation to measure thermal conductivity in this region of the mantle, which is located some 400 to 1,800 miles below the Earth's surface.

Using a newly-developed measurement technique, the study authors found heat transfer is lower than previous predictions had established. In fact, they report the total heat flow across the planet is approximately 10.4 terawatts, which is roughly 60 percent of the power used by people on a daily basis. They also discovered conductivity has less dependence on pressure conditions than had been previously predicted.

"The lower mantle sits on top of the core where pressures range from 230,000 to 1.3 million times the pressure at sea level," lead author Douglas Dalton said in a statement. "Temperatures are like an inferno - from about 2,800°F to 6,700 °F. The major constituents are oxides of magnesium, silicon and calcium. Heat transfer occurs at a higher rate across materials of high thermal conductivity than across materials of low thermal conductivity, thus these low thermal conductivity oxides are insulating."

The day before the child's death was not a pleasant one, because it was not a sudden injury that killed the 10-13 year old child who was buried in the medieval town of Ribe in Denmark 800 years ago. The day before death was full of suffering because the child had been given a large dose of mercury in an attempt to cure a severe illness.

This is now known to chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen from University of Southern Denmark - because he and his colleagues have developed a new methodology that can reveal an unheard amount of details from very shortly before a person's death. Mercury is of particular interest for the archaeologists as many cultures in different part of the world have been in contact with this rare element.

"I cannot say which diseases the child had contracted. But I can say that it was exposed to a large dose of mercury a couple of months before its death and again a day or two prior to death. You can imagine what happened: that the family for a while tried to cure the child with mercury containing medicine which may or may not have worked, but that the child's condition suddenly worsened and that it was administered a large dose of mercury which was, however, not able to save its life", says Kaare Lund Rasmussen.

The detailed insight into the life of the child did not come from analyses of the child's bones. Instead Kaare Lund Rasmussen and his colleagues have developed a method to extract information from the soil surrounding the body of the dead child in the cemetery in Ribe, Denmark.

"When the body decays in the grave a lot of compounds are released to the surrounding soil - by far most of them organic compounds. Also most of the inorganic elements are transformed to other compounds and later removed by the percolating groundwater throughout the centuries that follows. If we can localize an element in the soil in the immediate vicinity of the skeleton which is not normally found in the soil itself, we can assume that it came from the deceased and this can tell us something about how the person lived. We are not interested in death, but in the life before death", Kaare Lund Rasmussen explains.

Some more confirmation that asteroids go around in pairs. Discovered just 48 hours ago, asteroid 2013 PS13 is whizzing by Earth today at only 0.5 Lunar Distances from Earth alongside asteroid 2005 WK4, which is only 8.1 Lunar Distances away from Earth! Slooh tracked both asteroids this morning from the Canary Islands observatory - come check out the spectacular results along with Paul Cox.

I am frequently asked by journalists to recall the most surprising finding of our twin studies. The study of religion and belief in God is the one that always comes to mind, and the results are not easily accepted by many people. Most people can accept diseases or height and even weight being genetically heritable to some extent, but when it comes to our personal beliefs we tend to be more skeptical. For many, the idea that there is a genetic component to our faith--or lack of it--is a stretch too far and damages the concept of self-determination that we hold so dear.

Nevertheless science has shown us clearly that one level of belief in God and overall spirituality is shaped not only by a mix of family environment and upbringing--which is not surprising--but also by our genes. Twin studies conducted around the world in the U.S., the Netherlands and Australia as well as ours in the U.K. show a 40 to 50 percent genetic component to belief in God.

What is striking is that these findings of a genetic basis for belief are consistent even across countries like the U.S. and the U.K., with their huge differences in beliefs and church attendance. For example, in the latest surveys in the U.S., when asked, 61 percent of white Americans say they firmly (ie. without any doubt) believe in God, compared with only 17 percent of firm believers in similar populations in the U.K.--greater than a threefold difference. The opposite scenario of non-belief is also true--only a tiny 3 percent of the U.S. population report being firmly atheist compared with 18 percent in the U.K. As well as belief, participation follows separate trends in the two countries. Some form of weekly church attendance is now nearly three times higher in the U.S. than the U.K.

Skeptics among you might say that the twin studies showing similarity for belief are just reflecting some cultural or family influence that wasn't properly corrected for in the study design. However in one study of adopted twins, the researchers looked at religious belief in a number of adopted twins raised apart. They found exactly the same result--greater similarity in identical twin pairs, even if raised apart. The conclusion is unavoidable: faith is definitely influenced by genes.

Scientists from Harvard Medical School and the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, provide evidence that modern-day India is the result of recent population mixture among divergent demographic groups.

The findings, published August 8 in the American Journal of Human Genetics, describe how India transformed from a country where mixture between different populations was rampant to one where endogamy -- that is, marrying within the local community and a key attribute of the caste system -- became the norm.

"Only a few thousand years ago, the Indian population structure was vastly different from today," said co-senior author David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. "The caste system has been around for a long time, but not forever."

In 2009, Reich and colleagues published a paper based on an analysis of 25 different Indian population groups. The paper described how all populations in India show evidence of a genetic mixture of two ancestral groups: Ancestral North Indians (ANI), who are related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who are primarily from the subcontinent.

However, the researchers wanted to glean clearer data as to when in history such admixture occurred. For this, the international research team broadened their study pool from 25 to 73 Indian groups.

Hidden in the tangled, repetitious folds of DNA structures called centromeres, researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute have discovered the hiding place of 20 million base pairs of genetic sequence, finding a home for 10 percent of the DNA that is thought to be missing from the standard reference map of the human genome.

Mathematician Giulio Genovese, a computational biologist in genetics at HMS and at the Broad Institute, working in the lab of geneticist Steven McCarroll, HMS assistant professor of genetics and director of genetics for the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, found a way to use the genomes of Latinos to interpolate the locations of these missing pieces. Their findings will be published in The American Journal of Human Genetics on August 8.

"In nature, polymerase, the molecular machinery that copies DNA within living cells, can sequence hundreds of millions of base pairs of DNA. The techniques we've developed to sequence DNA in the lab can only do relatively short segments, and we need to stitch those pieces together after the fact," Genovese said. "So while we wait for sequencing technology to catch up with nature, we wanted to see if we could use mathematical patterns to find a place for some of the missing pieces."

By using the genomes of admixed populations -- populations, such as Latinos and African Americans that derive ancestry from more than one continent -- the team developed a sophisticated mathematical method to help fill in the uncharted regions on the human genome map. The map is a key tool that geneticists rely on to find disease genes and identify the functional genetic variations at the core of human diversity. The unmapped DNA also sometimes resembles known, mapped genes, which can interfere in attempts to study similar sequences.

Best known as the molecular hinges that help chromosomes divide, centromeres have been widely considered structural elements that were unlikely to harbor protein-coding genes, the researchers said. For this reason, their finding -- that nearly half of the unmapped sequences contained in available genomic reference libraries, including many protein-coding genes, were located in the centromeres -- was unexpected.

When the Perseid meteor shower bursts across the sky later this month, will people be able to hear it?

For centuries, people have reported hearing a sound made by meteors as they streaked across the skies overhead. And with the Perseids about to dazzle skywatchers with a meteor display that will earn it the title "fireball champion," some researchers are wondering if the Perseid meteor shower will be heard as well as seen.

In A.D. 817, as a meteor shower passed over China, many observers reported hearing buzzing, sizzling or hissing sounds, according to a 1992 report by Colin Keay, a physicist at the University of Newcastle in Australia. [When Space Attacks: The 6 Craziest Meteor Impacts]

The earth barely missed taking a massive solar punch in the teeth two weeks ago, an "electromagnetic pulse" so big that it could have knocked out power, cars and iPhones throughout the United States.


Two EMP experts told Secrets that the EMP flashed through earth's typical orbit around the sun about two weeks before the planet got there.


"The world escaped an EMP catastrophe," said Henry Cooper, who led strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and who now heads High Frontier, a group pushing for missile defense.