Psychic Spies In The Military

Psychic Spies: Any Truth in 'Men Who Stare at Goats?' -- ABC News

Movie, Book Claim Military Officers Dabbled in the Paranormal

Major Paul H. Smith calls it his "Men in Black" moment.

It was 1983 and he was working as a Middle East analyst at Fort Meade, Md., when a fellow intelligence officer approached him with a highly-classified, so-called "black project."

They couldn't tell him what it was. They just said that as an intelligent, accomplished, open-minded and creative person, he fit the profile.

Intrigued, Smith agreed to take the tests thrown at him. And when the results confirmed his competence for the top-secret task, he was invited to try his hand at a new mission: To uncover details about places and activities around the world without stepping off of a U.S. military base.

"We're basically asking you to become a psychic spy," Smith, now retired, said he was told.

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My Comment: The Americans may have extensively studied this field of interest .... it pales when compared to what the Russians were doing.

Receptor Controls Long Term Memory Formation

From Future Pundit:

A drug that turns off the nogo receptor 1 blocks long term memory formation in mice. Imagine a drug that did the same thing in humans. It would have all sorts of uses and abuses.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered a mechanism that controls the brain's ability to create lasting memories. In experiments on genetically manipulated mice, they were able to switch on and off the animals' ability to form lasting memories by adding a substance to their drinking water. The findings, which are published in the scientific journal PNAS, are of potential significance to the future treatment of Alzheimer's and stroke.

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EPA Study Says Mercury-Tainted Fish Found In 49% Of U.S. Lakes And Reservoirs

From The Bloomberg:

Fish with potentially harmful levels of mercury were found in 49 percent of U.S. lakes and reservoirs studied, the Environmental Protection Agency said.

Lakes in almost half of the states had fish contaminated by toxic chemicals such as mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls or pesticides, the EPA said in a statement Tuesday on a study conducted from 2000 to 2003.

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Star Trek-like Replicator? Electron Beam Device Makes Metal Parts, One Layer At A Time

Electron beam freeform fabrication process. (Credit: NASA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 11, 2009) — A group of engineers working on a novel manufacturing technique at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., have come up with a new twist on the popular old saying about dreaming and doing: "If you can slice it, we can build it."

That's because layers mean everything to the environmentally-friendly construction process called Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, or EBF3, and its operation sounds like something straight out of science fiction.

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One Key Found For Living To 100

From Live Science:

Scientists have zeroed in on one apparent key to long life: an inherited cellular repair mechanism that thwarts aging and perhaps helps prevent disease. Researches say the finding could lead to anti-aging drugs.

The study involves telomeres, the ends of chromosomes that have been likened to the plastic tips that prevent shoelaces from unraveling. Telomeres were already known to play a key role in aging, and their discovery led to this year's Nobel Prize in medicine.

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Universities Reject Kindle Over Inaccessibility For The Blind

Photo: Kindle DX. (Credit: Amazon)

From The CNET:

The National Federation of the Blind is applauding the decisions of Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison not to Amazon.com's Kindle DX as a textbook replacement.

The universities cited the Kindle's inaccessibility to the blind as the problem.

The federation said Wednesday that while it appreciates the Kindle's text-to-speech feature, the "menus of the device are not accessible to the blind...making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon's Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, and use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX."

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Super-Sniffing Bees Combat Colony Pest

Government scientists have developed a population of honeybees that can root out the Varroa mite, a main culprit in a honeybee die-off. Getty Images

From Discovery News:

Government-developed honeybees are equipped with a keen sniffing ability to root out a deadly parasite.

In an effort to stem a massive bee die-off, government scientists have developed a population of honeybees that can root out a main culprit in the epidemic -- a parasite that feeds on pupae in nests and spreads viruses within hives.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists hope the population of Varroa mite-detecting honeybees could potentially improve the health of the overall honeybee population.

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Sniff Test To Preserve Old Books

From The BBC:

The key to preserving the old, degrading paper of treasured, ageing books is contained in the smell of their pages, say scientists.

Researchers report in the journal Analytical Chemistry that a new "sniff test" can measure degradation of old books and historical documents.

The test picks up and identifies the chemicals that the pages release as they degrade.

This could help libraries and museums preserve a range of precious books.

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Will Probe's Upcoming Fly-By Unlock Exotic Physics?

The Rosetta probe will fly by Earth on Friday (Illustration: ESA/C. Carreau)

From New Scientist:

What's causing spacecraft to mysteriously accelerate? The Rosetta comet chaser's fly-by of Earth on 13 November is a perfect opportunity to get to the bottom of it.

The anomaly emerged in 1990, when NASA's Galileo spacecraft whizzed by Earth to get a boost from our planet's gravity and gained 3.9 millimetres per second more than expected. And the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft had an unexpected increase of about 1.8 millimetres per second during a previous fly-by of Earth in 2005.

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The Milky Way As You've Never Seen It Before: The Colourful Centre Of Our Galaxy In All Its Glory

Unprecedented: A beautiful composite image of the Milky Way centre using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory

From The Daily Mail:

Colourful, swirling clouds of cosmic dust interspersed with glowing star clusters are revealed in this extraordinary image of the Milky Way.

The dazzling image combining reds, yellows, blues and purples, was created by layering stunningly detailed pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory on top of each other.

The Milky Way is at the centre of our own galaxy and this image shows its core. The image was created to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's first demonstration of his telescope.

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Convicted Murderer Sues Wikipedia, Demands Removal of His Name

From The Threat Level:

Wikipedia is under a censorship attack by a convicted murderer who is invoking Germany’s privacy laws in a bid to remove references to his killing of a Bavarian actor in 1990.

Lawyers for Wolfgang Werle, of Erding, Germany, sent a cease-and-desist letter (.pdf) demanding removal of Werle’s name from the Wikipedia entry on actor Walter Sedlmayr. The lawyers cite German court rulings that “have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Mr. Sedlmayr’s death.”

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The Vatican Joins The Search For Alien Life

From The Telegraph:

The Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first ever conference on alien life, the discovery of which would have profound implications for the Catholic Church.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a conference on astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth, with scientists and religious leaders gathering in Rome this week.

For centuries, theologians have argued over what the existence of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for the Church: at least since Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, was put to death by the Inquisition in 1600 for claiming that other worlds exist.

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As Alternative Energy Grows, NIMBY Turns Green

An offshore wind farm in north Wales, U.K. (Credit: Vestas)

From CNET:

Painting the Golden Gate Bridge yellow might cause less fuss than trying to install a wind farm off Cape Cod's historic coast.

But when you're trying to build where the wind is strongest or the sun is brightest, you never know what obstacles you may run into.

In Massachusetts, a proposed wind farm called Cape Wind was dealt a blow last Friday that will delay what would be the first offshore wind farm in the U.S. The Massachusetts Historical Commission agreed with local Indian tribes who claim that the location for the wind farm should be considered for listing in the National Historic Register because the Wampanoags' history and culture are "inextricably linked to Nantucket Sound," according to the opinion.

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Laser-plasma Accelerators Ride On Einstein's Shoulders

Example of a laser wakefield simulated in a “Boosted Frame”. Electrons (colored tubes) are injected and accelerated by surfing the wave (blue surfaces) generated by a laser pulse. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Physical Society)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 11, 2009) — Using Einstein's theory of special relativity to speedup computer simulations, scientists have designed laser-plasma accelerators with energies of 10 billion electron volts (GeV) and beyond. These systems, which have not been simulated in detail until now, could in the future serve as a compact new technology for particle colliders and energetic light sources.

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Researchers Plan Ice Cream That's Good For You

From Live Science:

In what might seem to defy the laws of comfort foods, researchers are setting out to concoct a healthy, yes healthy, ice cream.

If the food scientists are successful, ice cream would become another so-called functional food, alongside whole oat products and foods made with soy protein, which have scientifically established health benefits beyond basic nutrition. (The United States doesn't currently have a formal definition for functional foods.)

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Contact Lenses That Respond To Light

Photo: Seeing the light: A new contact lens technology responds to UV light. The contact lens on the left (blue) contains photochromic dyes that darken the lens in the presence of UV light. The contact lens on the right (clear) contains no dyes. Credit: Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology

From Technology Review:

UV-responsive dyes embedded in contact lenses can quickly adapt.

Transition lenses--which darken automatically in response to bright sunlight--have been available for eyeglasses for 40 years. But adapting this flexibility to contact lenses has proven challenging. Now researchers in Singapore have developed UV-responsive, or photochromic, lenses that darken when exposed to ultraviolet light, protecting the eyes against the sun's damaging rays, and return to normal in UV's absence.

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Dream Of Solar Sailing In Space Lives On In New Project

An artists rendering of a solar sail is shown in this undated publicity image from The Planetary Society released to Reuters. Backers of a failed mission to launch the world's first solar-sail spacecraft unveiled plans on Monday to try again five years later with a smaller, swifter satellite to test the limits of sunlight propulsion. (Handout/REUTERS)

From Christian Science Monitor:

The US-based Planetary Society this week announced its second attempt to launch a small spacecraft with sails propelled by sunlight.

Its designers call it LightSail-1. And if it works as advertised, the solar sail project would represent a baby step toward humanity’s first starship.

This week, the California-based Planetary Society announced a new project to launch a small spacecraft propelled by a solar sail. In principle, the idea is simple: Use the sail to intercept sunlight, which presses on the sail much like wind on canvas. (The same pressure keeps the sun from collapsing under its own gravity.)

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Veterans Day: Why It's Today, How It's Changed & More

President Barak Obama lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns as part of Veterans Day services at Arlington National Cemetery, Nov. 11, 2009. VA courtesy photo

From National Geographic:

At Veterans Day celebrations and events around the country, the United States is honoring the men and women of the nation's armed forces.

So why is November 11 Veterans Day? Who is it for? And how has it changed?

In keeping with Veterans Day tradition, U.S. President Barack Obama today laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, saying, "While it is important and proper that we mark this day, it is far more important we spend all our days determined to keep the promises that we've made to all who answer this country's call."

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My Comment: I know that the day is almost over, but this is a neat summary of what exactly is Veteran's Day.

Microsoft Cuts Off Thousands Of Xbox Players Caught Downloading Pirated Games

Popular: More than 34 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide.
Microsoft is now clamping down on piracy

From The Daily Mail:

Microsoft is clamping down on piracy by banning up to one million customers from using its services if they are caught playing illegal games.

The technology giant said gamers who install hardware to play pirated games on the Xbox 360 console would be barred from using its Live service.

The online service allows multiple players to compete against each other over the internet and is central to the Xbox 360's popularity.

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Dinosaurs Could Have Been Hot To Trot, Say US Scientists

From The Scotsman:

LARGE two-legged dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, were energetic athletes with warm blood running through their veins, it was claimed today.
New evidence suggests that the ancient reptiles were endothermic – or warm-blooded – like their modern descendants, birds.

Far from being lumbering slow beasts, they were likely to have been agile and active.

But warm blood would have come at a price, because it requires more food. If food became scarce 65 million years ago, this could have been a contributory factor in their extinction.

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