Phase III - Stealth Is.

A new “tea bag” uses nano-fibers to suck contaminants and bacteria out of water, providing a desperately-needed, cheap solution for the billions of people without clean drinking water.Researchers at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University made the device from the same material used for the bags of the country’s popular rooibos tea. Inside the sachets are two tiny destroyers of all things unsafe: ultra-thin nanoscale fibers, which filter harmful contaminants, and bacteria-killing grains of carbon.

To use the device, a person simply has to place the bag in the neck of a water bottle, and the bag cleans the water as he or she drinks. A single bag can filter up to a liter of even the most heavily polluted water. The bags are thrown away once used.

Without Ruth Drown, it is likely that American radionics would have ended with Abrams, a novelty from the dawn of our electrical age. Her efforts helped to push Abrams’s discipline into the realm of the vitalistic, seeking out the connective tissue between the ancient Hermetic sciences and the new science of Radionics.

It was in 1923, the year before Abrams death, that Drown, then head of the Southern California Edison Company’s mechanical addressing department, was first introduced to the radionic theories that would so impact the rest of her life. She attended a lecture on the use of radio energies in disease treatment, presented by a Dr. Frederick F. Strong, and was so moved that she immediately sought to work for him, resigning her high-paying job with Edison to take on a post as a part-time office assistant. This, in turn, led to her employment by Dr. Thomas McAllister, under whose encouragement Drown briefly studied osteopathy, before she eventually became licensed as a Doctor of Chiropractic.

First as a student and then as a doctor, Drown extensively experimented with the radionics that Strong’s lecture had introduced to her, but found problems in the theories as they had been expressed. Influenced partly by a long interest in metaphysics and Kabbalism, she came to believe that, while Abrams had touched on an underlying truth, electricity proved too coarse to be truly useful in effective diagnosis and treatment— there had to be some more subtle force at work. Further, the means of detection had to be refined to reduce the kinds of errors that had plagued Dr. X, allowing the practitioner to lock on to a very specific, individual frequency.

The answer, she speculated, might be found by studying radio technology. In her own words: “When placed on a blotter, the blood is crystallized, even as ice is crystalized steam, and each small atom is the precipitated crystallized end of an invisible line which reaches out to the ethers. This invisible line passes through the body over the nerves and through the blood vessels and the electrons from the air, water and earth supply the body structure, attaching themselves to that line, which holds the pattern of the body.”

With this understanding of life forces as a basis, it made sense to “cut the cord” between the Electronic Reactions of Abrams and a new, more overtly vitalistic radionics, replacing “ohms” with “rates”, electronic responses with human vibration radiation. Likewise, the reagent medium once used to feel out the diagnosis, too imprecise and open to interferences, could be replaced with the simpler, more sensitive radio-like mechanism of the Homo-Vibra Ray.

An excellent overview of the early history of Radionics care of the Kook Science Resistance. Thanks for your noble efforts in research, guys!

Reto Meier, an “Android Developer Advocate for Google,” recently laid out a forecast of where computer (or at least mobile) interfaces are headed:

Five years from now: first widely available flexible displays and built in HD projectors

10 years from now: transparent LCD patches that can be applied to regular glasses, and full virtual keyboards and voice input eliminate physical keyboards entirely.

20 years from now: contact lenses that project a visual feed directly onto your retina, and we’ll interface with computers through mind control.

The article goes onto explain how most of these technologies already exist and/or are being developed.

By analyzing just 150 spots on the genome, researchers can predict who will live to extreme old age with almost 80 percent accuracy, according to a study published online today in the journal Science. Researchers from Boston University employed a widely used genetic-screening technology to find genetic variations that occur more frequently in centenarians–people age 100 and older.
In addition to providing a potential way to predict who might live into their 100s, the findings suggest that genetics play a major role in surviving to extreme old age. And the team hopes that identifying the genes and corresponding molecular mechanisms that promote longevity will give new insight into how to prevent or delay age-related diseases, such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.

“Centenarians are a model of aging well,” says Thomas Perls, director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston Medical Center and an author of the study. Previous findings from the project, the largest study of centenarians in the world, show that 90 percent of them are free of disability to an average age of 93. “They seem to compress disability to the end of their lives,” says Perls. “I am very hopeful that understanding how centenarians do that will lead to new strategies for therapies.”

Perhaps most surprisingly, preliminary analysis showed that centenarians had just as many genetic variants linked to diseases as did people in the control group. “That suggests that what makes people live long lives is not lack of genetic disposition to disease but longevity-promoting genes,” says Paola Sebastiani, a biostatistician at Boston University and coauthor of the study. “If longevity variants cancel out disease-associated variants, it could open new ways of treating age-related diseases.”

“Our only chance of long term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space,” Stephen Hawking said in an interview Friday with Big Think. “We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.”

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.

“I see great dangers for the human race. There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 was one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future. We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully. But I’m an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space.

“If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth, are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.  But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.  That is why I’m in favor of manned, or should I say ‘personed,’ space flight.”

“According to the quantum theory, everything vibrates,” theoretical physicist Michio Kaku tells NPR’s Guy Raz. Kaku is a frequent guest on the Science and Discovery channels. “When two electrons are placed close together, they vibrate in unison. When you separate them, that’s when all the fireworks start.”

This is where quantum entanglement — sometimes described as “teleportation” — begins. “An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled.”

This process happens even faster than the speed of light, physicists say.

Quantum entanglement isn’t a new idea — Einstein once famously referred to it as “spooky action at a distance” — but it wasn’t until the past 30 years that scientists were first able to observe this process.

It could one day lead to new types of computers, and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy. Scientists aren’t quite ready to beam up Scotty yet, but this is the technology that one day may lead to such a feat.

Mirrors and lenses direct lasers at atoms to catalyze entanglement.

The work is being pioneered at places like the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. In a basement lab, scientist Christopher Monroe has successfully managed to “entangle” two atoms approximately one meter away from each other.

“It’s fun being on the fringe,” Monroe says. “This discipline, we don’t know where it’s going. And that drives me every day.”

Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time.

NASA Telescope Finds Elusive Buckyballs in Space for First Time:

Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered carbon molecules, known as “buckyballs,” in space for the first time. Buckyballs are soccer-ball-shaped molecules that were first observed in a laboratory 25 years ago.

They are named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, which have interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere. Buckyballs were thought to float around in space, but had escaped detection until now.

“We found what are now the largest molecules known to exist in space,” said astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “We are particularly excited because they have unique properties that make them important players for all sorts of physical and chemical processes going on in space.” Cami has authored a paper about the discovery that will appear online Thursday in the journal Science.

Buckyballs are made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in three-dimensional, spherical structures. Their alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons match a typical black-and-white soccer ball. The research team also found the more elongated relative of buckyballs, known as C₇₀, for the first time in space. These molecules consist of 70 carbon atoms and are shaped more like an oval rugby ball. Both types of molecules belong to a class known officially as buckminsterfullerenes, or fullerenes.

Humans can mind-meld too:

The evidence comes from fMRI scans of 11 people’s brains as they listened to a woman recounting a story.

The scans showed that the listeners’ brain patterns tracked those of the storyteller almost exactly, though trailed 1 to 3 seconds behind. But in some listeners, brain patterns even preceded those of the storyteller.

“We found that the participants’ brains became intimately coupled during the course of the ‘conversation’, with the responses in the listener’s brain mirroring those in the speaker’s,” says Uri Hasson of Princeton University.

Justin Boland spits some hard truth about the Top 5 Social Media Lies.

This one just kills me. Social Media is making everything better, right? Well, let’s see…it’s enabled increased surveillance (government and corporate) into our private lives and daily activities, and it’s definitely increased the reach, accuracy and saturation of advertising. All technology is a double-edged weapon — the Machine giveth, and verily, the Machine taketh away.

It gets disturbing fast when you actually think about the major innovations Social Media has bestowed on us. Words like “CrowdSourcing,” which is an exciting new way for corporations to replace paid professionals by running massive contests, where they get thousands of free submissions they will always own the rights to, from people they will never have to pay. Now that’s Capitalism.

Don’t get me wrong — I know very well that people are making money off Social Media. I’m saying that’s not really the point. People make a lot of money off landmines and crack cocaine, too…and both of those things are “changing lives” every day.

Did a Blue screen of death cause the BP oil spill?

Looks like there might not be water on the moon afterall.

Giant Balloons could clear out space junk:

Any new satellite could be launched with a folded-up balloon stowed on board. Once the satellite reached the end of its useful life, the balloon would fill with helium or another gas, creating extra drag as the balloon collided with Earth’s tenuous outer atmosphere.

A balloon 37 metres across would take just one year to drag a 1200-kilogram satellite from an initial orbit of 830 kilometres to an altitude low enough to burn up in the atmosphere, the Global Aerospace team calculates. Without the balloon, this would take centuries.

The balloon and the equipment needed to inflate it would add just 36 kilograms of mass to the satellite, less than the amount of fuel that would be needed to de-orbit it without the balloon, the team says.

Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation in Washington DC, which promotes the peaceful use of space, says the concept sounds feasible. But he says it would not work for all satellites – geostationary satellites orbit 36,000 km above Earth, where there is too little gas to provide the necessary drag.

This Guy’s made an awesome DIY Wearable computer by the way:

Also, Atari’s gonna make a comeback apparently :p

A vital step in building an orbital elevator?

Wielding two claws, a motor and a tail that swings like a grandfather clock’s pendulum, a small robot named ROCR (“rocker”) built by University of Utah robot developers scrambles up a carpeted, 8-foot wall in just over 15 seconds — the first such robot designed to climb efficiently and move like human rock climbers or apes swinging through trees.

The motor that drives the robot’s tail and a curved, girder-like stabilizer bar attach to the robot’s upper body. The upper body also has two small, steel, hook-like claws to sink into a carpeted wall as the robot climbs. Without the stabilizer, ROCR’s claws tended to move away from the wall as it climbed and it fell.

The motor drives a gear at the top of the tail, causing the tail to swing back and forth, which propels the robot upward. A battery is at the end of the tail and provides the mass that is necessary to swing the robot upward.

“ROCR alternatively grips the wall with one hand at a time and swings its tail, causing a center of gravity shift that raises its free hand, which then grips the climbing surface,” the study says. “The hands swap gripping duties and ROCR swings its tail in the opposite direction.”

ROCR is self-contained and autonomous, with a microcomputer, sensors and power electronics to execute desired tail motions to make it climb

Several companies that escaped financial failure two years ago through massive taxpayer-funded bailouts are spending millions of dollars to make donations to political causes and even some candidates’ campaigns.

General Motors, Chrysler and Citigroup are just three of the biggest bailout recipients who have continued to remain politically active, through their political action committees, federal lobbying or direct donations to the pet projects of lawmakers.

The potential public relations disaster for firms spending big dollars on political causes and federal lobbying after being extended a taxpayer lifeline has led some, such as AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to suspend their political activities until they pay the government back in full.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a contract for up to $34.5 million to The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., to manage the development and testing of the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) system on human subjects, using a brain-controlled interface.

APL scientists and engineers developed the underlying technology under DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 program, an ambitious four-year effort to create a prosthetic arm that would by far eclipse the World War II era hook-and-cable device used by most amputees. The program has already produced two complex prototypes, each advancing the art of upper-arm prosthetics.

The final design — the MPL — offers  22 degrees of motion, including independent movement of each finger, in a package that weighs about nine pounds (the weight of a natural limb). Providing nearly as much dexterity as a natural limb, the MPL is capable of unprecedented mechanical agility and is designed to respond to a user’s thoughts.

…

The team will develop implantable micro-arrays used to record brain signals and stimulate the brain. They will also conduct experiments and clinical trials to demonstrate the ability to use implantable neural interfaces safely and effectively to control a prosthesis, and optimize arm control and sensory feedback algorithms that enable dexterous manipulation through the use of a neuro-prosthetic limb.

A battered and corroded thumb-sized piece of bronze has turned out to be a unique find, the earliest representation of an Egyptian deity from any site in Britain – and appropriately, after almost 2,000 years hidden in the ground, it is Harpocrates, the god of secrecy and silence.

The little figure was found at Silchester, site of an abandoned Roman city in Hampshire, in last summer’s excavation, but his identity was only revealed in months of careful conservation work. His Greek and Roman designation as Harpocrates, the god of spymasters, is actually a transcription error.

“In Egyptian mythology the figure is known as Horus, the child of Isis and Osiris,” said Professor Mike Fulford of the University of Reading, director of the Silchester excavation. “He is often shown with his finger in his mouth, a gesture that in Egypt represented the hieroglyph for his name, but was misinterpreted by the Greeks and Romans, resulting in his adoption as the god of silence and secrecy.”

Also, BP may be back to drilling the same spot

The research was inspired by work on Buddhist monks, who spend years training in meditation. “You wonder if the mental skills, the calmness, the peace that they express, if those things are a result of their very intensive training or if they were just very special people to begin with,” says Katherine MacLean, who worked on the study as a graduate student at the University of California – Davis. Her co-advisor, Clifford Saron, did some research with monks decades ago and wanted to study meditation by putting volunteers through intensive training and seeing how it changes their mental abilities.

About 140 people applied to participate; they heard about it via word of mouth and advertisements in Buddhist-themed magazines. Sixty were selected for the study. A group of thirty people went on a meditation retreat while the second group waited their turn; that meant the second group served as a control for the first group. All of the participants had been on at least three five-to-ten day meditation retreats before, so they weren’t new to the practice. They studied meditation for three months at a retreat in Colorado with B. Alan Wallace, one of the study’s co-authors and a meditation teacher and Buddhist scholar.

The people took part in several experiments; results from one are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. At three points during the retreat, each participant took a test on a computer to measure how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention. They watched a screen intently as lines flashed on it; most were of the same length, but every now and then a shorter one would appear, and the volunteer had to click the mouse in response.

Participants got better at discriminating the short lines as the training went on. This improvement in perception made it easier to sustain attention, so they also improved their task performance over a long period of time. This improvement persisted five months after the retreat, particularly for people who continued to meditate every day.

The task lasted 30 minutes and was very demanding. “Because this task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it’s kind of a perfect index of meditation training,” says MacLean. “People may think meditation is something that makes you feel good and going on a meditation retreat is like going on vacation, and you get to be at peace with yourself. That’s what people think until they try it. Then you realize how challenging it is to just sit and observe something without being distracted.”

In May of last year, David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus from 2006 to 2008, co-authored a strategic analysis (”Death From Above, Outrage Down Below,” New York Times, May 17, 2009). He emphasized that the “public outrage” among Pakistan’s civilians caused by our drone attacks “is hardly limited to the region in which they take place.”

Extensively reported by the news media, “the persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.”

A year later, in Foreign Policy in Focus (fpif.org, May 19), Conn Hallinan, reporting on the increase in drone strikes in Pakistan, notes that the continuing controversy over the actual number of corollary civilian deaths “is a sharply debated issue.” Neither President Obama, who authorizes them, nor the CIA, which does the actual killing, directly gives us the numbers. As for the Pakistani government’s figures, Hallinan continues:

“The word ‘civilian’ is a slippery one, because no one knows exactly what criteria the United States uses to distinguish a ‘militant’ from a civilian. Is someone with a gun a ‘militant’? Since large numbers of males in the frontier regions of Pakistan carry guns, that definition would target a huge number of people.”

I mentioned this life-ending ambiguity in drone strikes to a person who claims to be concerned with human-rights abuses. Shrugging, she said: “I don’t have to worry about that. The drones aren’t coming here; and since they’re pilotless, there are no American casualties. So I’m all for their use.”

But drones are indeed in our skies.

Constitutionalist John Whitehead – who is also a careful master researcher – points out (”Drones Over America: Tyranny at Home,” Rutherford.org, June 28), that “unbeknownst to most Americans, remote-controlled pilotless aircraft have been employed domestically for years now. They were first used as a national-security tool for patrolling America’s borders, and then as a means of monitoring citizens.”

He cites a 2006 news story, moreover, that “one North Carolina county is using (an unmanned aerial vehicle) equipped with low-light and infrared cameras to keep watch on its citizens. The aircraft has been dispatched to monitor gatherings of motorcycle riders at the Gaston County fairgrounds from just a few hundred feet in the air – close enough to identify faces.”

As John Whitehead also reports, “Drones (are) a $2 billion cornerstone of the Obama administration’s war efforts.” And Defense Secretary Robert Gates adds, “The more we have used them, the more we have identified their potential in a broader and broader set of circumstances.”

So broad that – and this is Whitehead’s core discovery – “the Federal Aviation Administration is facing mounting pressure from state governments and localities to issue flying rights for a range of (unmanned aerial vehicles) to carry out civilian and law-enforcement activities.”

You think an unmanned aerial vehicle won’t be interested in you, innocent of any conceivable (even by the CIA) terrorist connections? Do not underestimate an all-seeing, suspicious government. “State police,” writes Whitehead, “hope to send them up to capture images of speeding cars’ license plates.” And, in 2007, “insect-like drones were seen hovering over political rallies in New York and Washington, seemingly spying on protesters.”

As I was writing about drones watching over us, I found a triumphant breakthrough (”Unmanned Phantom Eye Demonstrator Unveiled,” spacedaily.com, July 13): “The Boeing Company has unveiled the hydrogen-powered Phantom Eye unmanned airborne system.” Said Darryl Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works, at the St. Louis unveiling ceremony:

“Phantom Eye is the first of its kind and could open up a whole new market in collecting data and communications. … The capabilities in Phantom Eye’s design will offer game-changing opportunities for our military, civil and commercial customers.”

Also, for Insect Drones, Use 3-D Printing for wings.