Science & TechnologyS


Propaganda

Best of the Web: Climategate: The Backstory

The Corbett Report recently sat down with Dr. Tim Ball, a retired professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg to talk about Phil Jones and the Climate Research Unit. Here, two months before "Climategate" and the hacked emails, we talk about the highly secretive nature of the CRU at East Anglia. To read Dr. Ball's article on the subject in the Canada Free Press, follow this link.


Propaganda

Climate change brainwashing

The media spin masters aren't worried about mercury in the water... but we know exactly what to do to solve the problem.

The media spin master have no problem with toxic gasoline as fuel... even though we've had a superior alternative for over 100 years.

Why then do they have infinite time, money and energy to sell the word on "climate change" (formerly known as "global warming")?

I think the answer is obvious to anyone over the mental age of five years old who hasn't been thoroughly lied to.

Note how children are being terrorized by the global warming scam artists. It's criminal.


Evil Rays

Massachusetts company plans to market wireless electricity system

WiTricity says the technology will be able to power lights, computers, TVs and even charges for electric cars through the air, without power cords.

Could this be the end of electric power cords?

A Massachusetts company said that within 18 months it will have on the market a wireless electricity system to power -- through the air -- lights, computers, televisions and even the chargers for electric cars.

The announcement was made at the TEDGlobal conference, a gathering of technologists and scientists, that wrapped up Friday in Oxford, England.

Comment: Nice to hear there are some that were skeptical. Not a pleasant thought since studies have indicted that wireless telephones have a biological effect on the brain. Now, your neighbors electrical system can do the same.


Robot

Military Soldier Cyborgs - Digital destiny, or Prophetic Holocaust?

Cyborg soldiers are a logical evolutionary link between humans and robots. Yesterdays soldier went into combat alone. Todays soldier is enhanced by human controlled robots. Tommorows soldier will be a soldier cyborg, a cybernetic organism enhanced by everything technology has to offer. The future of combat holds even greater prospects for autonomous robots that kill at their own discretion.

The idea of combining man and machine is nothing new. Ocular cochlear implants have been helping people see and hear for years. Paralytics like Stephen Hawking have been assisted by technology that allows them to speak what they think. Other cases like Prof. Kevin Warwick department of Cybernetics, University of Reading Project Cyborg 1.0, and 2.0 have been documented as well. Artificial Intelligence AI research is exploring organic brains for computing use, that is organic computers that use living neurons as their CPU . Private companies like Digital Angel, Verichip and Applied Digital Solutions are already contracting whole scale human implantation of RFID microchip technology.

Telescope

Pluto's Cloud Components Verified

Newly analyzed observations suggest particles are mostly frozen nitrogen

Clouds in Pluto's atmosphere may be composed of tiny frozen spherules of nitrogen or carbon monoxide, rather than snowflake-like clumps of tiny particles as previous research had suggested, new analyses suggest.

Information about Pluto's atmosphere is, like that atmosphere itself, exceedingly thin because no space probes have yet visited there. So most speculations about the dwarf planet's atmosphere stem from analyses of light passing through that tenuous shroud on the rare occasions when Pluto passes in front of a distant star, says Pascal Rannou, a planetary scientist at the University of Reims in France.

The dwarf planet's tenuous atmosphere contains suspended particles, not just gas. Previous research suggested that those aerosols are about 200 nanometers across - larger than expected and therefore probably raspberry-like clumps or snowflake-like aggregates of tiny particles that had frozen together when they collided aloft, he notes.

Telescope

Large moon of Uranus may explain odd tilt

Image
© NASA/ESA/M. Showalter/SETI InstituteA massive moon that orbited Uranus in the past may explain the planet's extreme tilt
Please try to resist the childish jokes, but the fact is that the odd tilt of Uranus may be the result of a particularly large moon.

Uranus spins on an axis almost parallel with the plane of the solar system, rather than perpendicular to it - though why it does this nobody knows. One theory is that the tilt is the result of a collision with an Earth-sized object, but this "hasn't succeeded in explaining much of anything", says Ignacio Mosqueira of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Why, for example, are the orbits of Uranus's 27 known moons not also tilted?

Now Gwenaël Boué and Jacques Laskar at the Paris Observatory in France have come up with another explanation: Uranus may once have had an unusually massive extra moon. If the moon had 1 per cent of the mass of Uranus - and orbited at a certain distance - it would slightly unbalance the planet and increase its wobble about its axis. After about 2 million years, the wobbling could have become exaggerated enough to tip the planet on its side, their model has shown.

Magnify

Understanding DNA Repair and Cancer

A protein that plays a key role in copying DNA also plays a vital role in repairing breaks in it, UC Davis scientists have found. The work is helping researchers understand how cancer cells can resist radiation and chemotherapy, as well as how cells become cancerous in the first place.

The protein, known as proliferating cell nuclear antigen, forms a ring that fits around the DNA double helix. This cuff-like ring helps to keep in place DNA polymerase, the enzyme that makes a copy of the DNA strand when cells divide into two new cells.

The new study, published Nov. 25 in the journal Molecular Cell, shows that PCNA performs a similar function during DNA recombination -- when pairs of chromosomes line up and exchange strands of DNA. Recombination occurs when cells divide to form eggs and sperm, and also when cells try to repair breaks that cross both strands of DNA.

Sherlock

Antarctica Served as Climatic Refuge in Earth's Greatest Extinction Event

Image
© Jörg Fröbisch, Kenneth D. Angielczyk, and Christian A. SidorThe illustration shows the geographic location of Kombuisia antarctica in Antarctica with a reconstruction of how the animal probably looked like in life.
The largest known mass extinction in Earth's history, about 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period, may have been caused by global warming.

A new fossil species suggests that some land animals may have survived the end-Permian extinction by living in cooler climates in Antarctica. Jörg Fröbisch and Kenneth D. Angielczyk of The Field Museum together with Christian A. Sidor from the University of Washington have identified a distant relative of mammals, Kombuisia antarctica, that apparently survived the mass extinction by living in Antarctica.

The new species belongs to a larger group of extinct mammal relatives, called anomodonts, which were widespread and represented the dominant plant eaters of their time.

"Members of the group burrowed in the ground, walked the surface and lived in trees," said Fröbisch, the lead author of the study. "However, Kombuisia antarctica, about the size of a small house cat, was considerably different from today's mammals -- it likely laid eggs, didn't nurse its young and didn't have fur, and it is uncertain whether it was warm blooded," said Angielczyk, Assistant Curator of Paleomammology at The Field Museum. Kombuisia antarctica was not a direct ancestor of living mammals, but it was among the few lineages of animals that survived at a time when a majority of life forms perished.

Magnify

Gene Module Underlying Atherosclerosis Development Discovered

By measuring the total gene activity in organs relevant for coronary artery disease (CAD), scientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have identified a module of genes that is important for the recruitment of white blood cells into the atherosclerotic plaque.

The findings, which are to be published in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, suggest that targeting the migration of white blood cells in the development of atherosclerosis may help to reduce the risk for adverse clinical effects such as ischemia and myocardial infarction.

Atherosclerosis is the major cause of myocardial infarction and stroke, and is responsible for half of all deaths in Sweden and other Western countries. Complications of atherosclerosis are rapidly increasing as a major cause of death also in developing countries; the World Health Organization has predicted that this will become the number one killer by 2010.

Magnify

How to Read Brain Activity with an EEG

The electroencephalogram (EEG) is widely used by physicians and scientists to study brain function and to diagnose neurological disorders. However, it has remained largely unknown whether the electrodes on the head give an exact view of what is happening inside the brain.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, have now found a crucial link between the activity generated within the brain to that measured with EEG. These findings will provide a better understanding of the waveforms measured with EEG, and thus potentially allow for a better diagnosis and subsequent treatment of patients.

The electroencephalogram (EEG) has been widely used in research and medicine for more than 80 years. The ability to measure the electrical activity in the brain by means of electrodes on the head is a handy tool to study brain functions as it is noninvasive and easy to apply. The interpretation of the EEG signals remains, however, difficult.