Phase III - Stealth Is.

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!

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

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.

Steve Foland: I hear you’ve been working on a definitive Burroughs biography. How is that going, when can we expect it and is that going to be your final word on the subject?

James Grauerholz: In 1972, when I was not yet twenty, I wrote out-of-the-blue fan letters to Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, in New York and London, respectively.

Allen’s reply led to my meeting him in the Lower East Side in spring 1973, and when I returned to New York City in late January 1974, Allen told me William was in New York, too, and sent me over to meet him.

William’s reply in late ‘72 is interesting. In mine to him, I had written something to the effect that I wanted to interview him, with a focus on his childhood, his school years, his early European travels.

Very little about the first 30 years of Burroughs’ life had been published, as of 1972. Only Alan Ansen’s late-1950s essay* offered any real detail, and it compared intriguingly against Burroughs’ own tight-lipped “Prologue” written — reluctantly — in 1952 for his first book, Junkie (1953), and there were only brief, superficial bios in the early “Beat” stories in LIFE, et al.

…

SF: Were you involved with William’s magickal practices personally? And if so, would you describe an experience?

JG: Not really; let’s say, a few things early on. It’s all there in the Red Night Trilogy if you want to look for it.

But I followed my own spirit guides (so to speak), and they did not impel me to participate personally in the rather well-known “Sweat Lodge” experience that William had in 1991 — with Allen Ginsberg and Michael Emerton, as well as facilitator William Lyon, and the Shaman — whose name escapes me.

I kept the same distance — supportive, respectful, encouraging — from William’s developing contacts with the I.O.T.

(Author’s Note: I.O.T. refers to the Illuminates of Thanateros — A Chaos Magick organization founded in Britain in 1978 by Ray Sherwin and Peter J Carroll)

The way some people think of me as “controlling” William and all this horse shit is ironic to the point of bitter hilarity. The truth is, I made sure that I did not come between him and the people and experiences he had, and relationships he started with them, and kept up on his own. Ask Marcus Ewert, who — bless his heart — has charmingly revealed, to the printed (or electronic) page and the motion picture camera, more details about his affair with William in the latter’s, uh, latter years, than I can imagine very many people even wanting to know. But Marc is, like me, a disciple of Ginsberg (if not also of Warhol), and I can only applaud his let-it-all-hang-out policy about those days and nights with William. But Marcus will tell you, I ran our whole little crew away from that house with the two of them in it, postponed the lawnmowing, etc., so they could — well, do whatever they wanted to.

SF: William’s magickal experimentation, the aspects of recording what he called “Danger Sounds” and replaying them in proximity to his target, or using collage to hit a specific target has become the stuff of legend. Some attribute the closing of one particular establishment to William’s hexes. Is there another specific instance which you can recall that is as dramatic and apparently self-evident?

JG: Nope, not really. You are likely referring to the Moka Bar in London, where William said he received snide, snotty service and lousy, weak tea — and his tape-recorders-and-cameras mock-surveillance routine, back and forth on the sidewalk of Frith Street, and how the Moka Bar failed and was shuttered not too long after that.

Forgive me please, but my cast of mind leads me to suspect the Moka Bar, if it really did sell lousy tea with terrible service, might have been headed out of business, with or without the sound-text-tape-film sidewalk-pacing routine…

As with William’s long-ago theory that, because he had never known a NYC junky ever to get a seasonal cold, it was likely that Junk provided a protective covering to the cells (or else, maybe Junk kept the cells well-exercised and in-shape with a constant cycle of shrinking to kick, swelling back up in re-addiction, kicking, hooked again, etc.) — I pointed out that, because a junky with a good supply on hand rarely leaves his apartment to mingle on the sidewalk with other people (which would expose him to more airborne rhinovirus particles), maybe the apparent immunity was more the result of limited exposure to current pathogens…

This all might sound terrible to you, as if I was a bringdown — in fact, William and I were beautifully balanced. He appreciated that about me, and I appreciated his love for the fantastic and extravagantly-explained. Which is funny, when I remember now that it was William’s own mention of “Ockham’s Razor” in my 1966 copy of Naked Lunch that first alerted me to the existence of Occam’s principle of parsimony….

SF: William’s painting “Creation of the Homunculus IV,” graces the cover of Phil Hine’s Prime Chaos, and a glowing endorsement from William appears on the back of Condensed Chaos. Did William have frequent contact with the leaders of the Chaos Magick movement or was his involvement on an individual by individual basis?

JG: Yes, William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the I.O.T. Of course, you would have to ask (if they would even describe it for you) the persons who took part in that initiation — I didn’t. Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover; William met and liked Peter Carroll and Phil Hine, I am pretty sure. I myself only got to know the good Doug Grant a couple of years after William’s death, in August 1997.

SF: William’s “Orgone Chamber” is well known to his devotees. Did you feel the effects of it as well? When did William’s interest in Radionics begin? Can you recall who introduced him to the subject?

JG: Yes, I suppose I could feel something in the various Orgone Boxes I have sat in. William’s 1940s letters reveal his early contacts with the works of Wilhelm Reich, although it’s evident (from, for example, several sources gathered by Ted Morgan for Literary Outlaw, 1988) that Burroughs had come into contact with some of Reich’s writings, in translation, by the 1930s. As to who brought it to his attention, my immediate guess would be his childhood friend, Kells Elvins. And there are several sources we might search for more evidence of that source in William’s life for that particular influence.

SF: Given his influence on Magickal theory and practice (The Cut-Up, Third Mind, Dream Machine and his writing) who would you say was William’s largest influence? Crowley, Spare, none of the above?

JG: Pardon me but I don’t see many direct influences by William’s thought upon Magickal theory — the other way around, heavens, yes.

But Burroughs considered Crowley a bit of a figure of fun, referring to him as “The Greeeaaaaaat BEEEEAST!” in that behind-closed-doors, queeny comic delivery he used sometimes: his voice rising straight up in pitch, into an hysterical falsetto. You can hear it in lots of tapes, I’m pretty sure.

William knew quite a bit about Crowley’s life and work, and he certainly dug deep into the Necronomicon (anonymous but often attributed to Crowley) when it became available in a snazzy, black-morocco, tooled-leather hardback binding. He appreciated much about Aleister Crowley. Influenced by him? I don’t really see it. And to be truthful, I knew more about Austin Osman Spare than William did, in the beginning.

…

SF: What, if any, opinion did William have for Jack Parsons’s work?

JG: William’s thoughts about Jack Parsons were, I believe, based far more on what he knew about Parson’s life, than on any writings or paintings by Parsons. William knew about the origins of JPL, the early ties to L. Ron Hubbard, and so forth. If memory serves, William was mainly impressed by the way that Parsons’ life ended.

Klint of Technoccult on ReadWriteWeb:

Last week the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs passed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010, a bill now better known as the “Kill Switch Bill.” The bill will now be considered by the Senate. There’s no “kill switch” provision in the bill, but the President has had that power for decades…

It doesn’t sound like a “kill switch.” The bill would require the President to submit a report describing, among other things, “The actions necessary to preserve the reliable operation and mitigate the consequences of the potential disruption of covered critical infrastructure” (pg. 84 lines 1-4). That sounds like the opposite of a kill switch: this legislation describes a process by which the president is expected to take action to ensure access to “critical infrastructure” -including the Internet.

There’s plenty of room to debate the merits of the federal government dictating the security policies of private companies, the ability of the president to continually extend any provisions beyond 30 days, the value of establishing new cyber security departments within the government, and the vagueness of the language in the bill. But this is nothing nearly so radical as some are making it out to be.

In fact, as Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ web site for the bill points out, the President already has a legislative (but of course, not technological) “kill switch.” The Communications Act of 1934 gave the president power to shut down “wire communications.”

“An Italian inventor, Enrico Dini, chairman of the company Monolite UK Ltd, has developed a huge three-dimensional printer called D-Shape that can print entire buildings out of sand and an inorganic binder. The printer works by spraying a thin layer of sand followed by a layer of magnesium-based binder from hundreds of nozzles on its underside. The glue turns the sand to solid stone, which is built up layer by layer from the bottom up to form a sculpture, or a sandstone building.

The D-shape printer can create a building four times faster than it could be built by conventional means, and reduces the cost to half or less. There is little waste, which is better for the environment, and it can easily “print” curved structures that are difficult and expensive to build by other means. Dini is proving the technology by creating a nine cubic meter pavilion for a roundabout in the town of Pontedera.

The printer can be moved along horizontal beams and four vertical columns, and the printer head is raised by only 5-10 mm for each new layer. The printer is driven by a computer running CAD software and prints at a resolution of 25 dpi (dots per inch). The completed material resembles marble, is stronger than concrete, and does not need iron reinforcing. The printing process can successfully create internal curves, partitions, ducting, and hollow columns

…

Dini will carry out trials in a vacuum chamber at Alta Space’s facility in Pisa to ensure the process is possible in a low-atmosphere environment such as the moon.

The ‘Living Earth Simulator’ will mine economic, environmental and health data to create a model of the entire planet in real time.

When it comes to global crises, we’re not short of complex systems that look close to the edge: the climate, the food supply, energy security, the banking system and so on. Add to this the threat of war in many parts of the world and the possibility of global pandemics and it’s a wonder that anybody gets out of bed in the morning.

Science has certainly played an important role in understanding aspects of these systems but could it do more?

Today, Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich outlines an ambitious project to go further, much further.

Helbing’s idea is to create a kind of Manahattan project to study, understand and tackle these techno-socio-economic-environmental issues. His plan is to gather data about the planet in unheard of detail, use it to simulate the behaviour of entire economies and then to predict and prevent crises from emerging.

…

Imagine a similar model that uses in real time things like financial transactions, health records, travel details, carbon dioxide emissions and so on to build a model of not just the planet but the entire society that populates it. Helbing calls it ‘reality mining’.

This model will be capable not only modelling the planet in real time but of simulating the future, rather in the manner of weather forecasters.

Helbing’s simulator will look for economic bubbles and collapses, warn of global pandemics and suggest how to tackle them, it will model and predict the outcome of regional conflicts and determine the effect of our behaviour on the climate. He even wants to create ’situation rooms’ in which global leaders can view and manage crises as they occur.

This Google-Earth-on-steroids is to be called the Living Earth Simulator and Helbing’s plan is to have it working by 2022 at a cost of a cool EUR 1 billion, funded by the European Commission. He’s even assembled an impressive team to help, including partners from most of the top universities in Europe.

If the human species should be destroyed on Earth, our future may reside on the Moon if plans.being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon by the European Space Agency are carried through. The Ark will contain the essentials of life and human civilization, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.

The construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. if no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.

The vault could later be extended to include natural material including microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores.

As a first step to discovering whether living organisms could survive, European Space Agency scientists are hoping to experiment with growing tulips on the moon within the next decade.

Thanks to John Harrigan of Foolish People for pointing this interesting article out.

and from Borderland Sciences on Tumblr:

Break out the fluorescent light bulbs and dust off your Tesla coils: July 10th is Nikola Tesla Day, marking the birth of that greatest of inventors and visionaries. Here’s to you, Mr. Tesla.

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million, said a person familiar with the project.

An NSA spokeswoman said the agency had no information to provide on the program. A Raytheon spokesman declined to comment.

Some industry and government officials familiar with the program see Perfect Citizen as an intrusion by the NSA into domestic affairs, while others say it is an important program to combat an emerging security threat that only the NSA is equipped to provide.

“The overall purpose of the [program] is our Government…feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security,” said one internal Raytheon email, the text of which was seen by The Wall Street Journal. “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

A U.S. military official called the program long overdue and said any intrusion into privacy is no greater than what the public already endures from traffic cameras….

U.S. intelligence officials have grown increasingly alarmed about what they believe to be Chinese and Russian surveillance of computer systems that control the electric grid and other U.S. infrastructure. Officials are unable to describe the full scope of the problem, however, because they have had limited ability to pull together all the private data.

Perfect Citizen will look at large, typically older computer control systems that were often designed without Internet connectivity or security in mind. Many of those systems—which run everything from subway systems to air-traffic control networks—have since been linked to the Internet, making them more efficient but also exposing them to cyber attack.

See also: “The cyberwar & lies” for information about why this hype is being pushed and why big budget defense contract devils like Raytheon are benefiting from it.

The Signs of the oil spill are present along public and open beaches:

It seems Years of Internal BP Probes Warned That Neglect Could Lead to Accidents. As though it’s not bad enough already, BP used oil industry tax break to write off its rent for Deepwater rig. Of course, Freedom of the Press does not apply if it hurts big business barrens: reporters attempting to cover the issue face arrest. $40,000.00 and a class-D Felony is a steep charge. Before the reporter ban this documentary was filmed and later removed by ABC Australia:

Airborne illness is a major problem with oil-spills:

Apparently the average life expectancy for Exxon Valdez cleaners is only 51 years of age. That’s a solid indicator of the health concerns this issue merits.

America continues to reject foreign aid - yet in the past we have forced it on other countries to the point of war and called it “regime building.” The two situations are different, but does this issue not need all the help it can get?

The long term fate of the BP oil spill has models which suggest dire consequences:

“This animation shows one scenario of how oil released at the location of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico may move in the upper 65 feet of the ocean. This is not a forecast, but rather, it illustrates a likely dispersal pathway of the oil for roughly four months following the spill. It assumes oil spilling continuously from April 20 to June 20. The colors represent a dilution factor ranging from red (most concentrated) to beige (most diluted).  The dilution factor does not attempt to estimate the actual barrels of oil at any spot; rather, it depicts how much of the total oil from the source that will be carried elsewhere by ocean currents.”

From “How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a ‘world-killing’ event”

“251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed more than 96 percent of all life on Earth. [1] Experts agree that what is known as the Permian extinction event was the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world.

55 million years later another methane bubble ruptured causing more mass extinctions during the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximu…

Now, worried scientists are increasingly concerned the same series of catastrophic events that led to worldwide death back then may be happening again-and no known technology can stop it.

The bottom line: BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years.

The oil giant drilled down miles into a geologically unstable region and may have set the stage for the eventual premature release of a methane mega-bubble.

…

“The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region “boils over,” ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide…”

Methane is now streaming through the porous, rocky seabed at an accelerated rate and gushing from the borehole of the first relief well. The EPA is on record that Rig #1 is releasing methane, benzene, hydrogen sulfide and other toxic gases. Workers there now wear advanced protection including state-of-the-art, military-issued gas masks.

…

If the methane bubble—a bubble that could be as big as 20 miles wide—erupts with titanic force from the seabed into the Gulf, every ship, drilling rig and structure within the region of the bubble will immediately sink. All the workers, engineers, Coast Guard personnel and marine biologists participating in the salvage operation will die instantly.

Next, the ocean bottom will collapse, instantaneously displacing up to a trillion cubic feet of water or more and creating a towering supersonic tsunami annihilating everything along the coast and well inland. Like a thermonuclear blast, a high pressure atmospheric wave could precede the tidal wave flattening everything in its path before the water arrives

When the roaring tsunami does arrive it will scrub away all that is left.

…

A report from one observer in South Carolina documents oily residue left behind after a recent thunderstorm. And before the news blackout fully descended the EPA released data that benzene levels in New Orleans had rocketed to 3,000 parts per billion.

Benzene is extremely toxic and even short term exposure can cause agonizing death from cancerous lesions years later.

The people of Louisiana have been exposed for more than two months—and the benzene levels may be much higher now. The EPA measurement was taken in early May

…

While some say it can’t happen because the bulk of the methane is frozen into crystalline form, others point out that the underground methane sea is gradually melting from the nearby surging oil that’s estimated to be as hot as 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Most experts in the know, however, agree that if the world-changing event does occur it will happen suddenly and within the next 6 months.

See Also: More on the BP Oil spill

Believe it or not, a Harvard study released on April 17, 2007 shows that the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread!

The only clinical trial testing THC as a treatment against cancer growth was a recently completed British pilot study. For three weeks, researchers injected standard doses of THC into mice that had been implanted with human lung cancer cells, and found that tumors were reduced in size and weight by about 50 percent in treated animals compared to a control group. There was also about a 60 percent reduction in cancer lesions on the lungs in these mice as well as a significant reduction in protein markers associated with cancer progression.

By emulating nature’s design principles, a team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has created nanodevices made of DNA that self-assemble and can be programmed to move and change shape on demand. In contrast to existing nanotechnologies, these programmable nanodevices are highly suitable for medical applications because DNA is both biocompatible and biodegradable.

Built at the scale of one billionth of a meter, each device is made of a circular, single-stranded DNA molecule that, once it has been mixed together with many short pieces of complementary DNA, self-assembles into a predetermined 3D structure. Double helices fold up into larger, rigid linear struts that connect by intervening single-stranded DNA. These single strands of DNA pull the struts up into a 3D form—much like tethers pull tent poles up to form a tent. The structure’s strength and stability result from the way it distributes and balances the counteracting forces of tension and compression.

This architectural principle—known as tensegrity—has been the focus of artists and architects for many years, but it also exists throughout nature. In the human body, for example, bones serve as compression struts, with muscles, tendons and ligaments acting as tension bearers that enable us to stand up against gravity. The same principle governs how cells control their shape at the microscale.

“This new self-assembly based nanofabrication technology could lead to nanoscale medical devices and drug delivery systems, such as virus mimics that introduce drugs directly into diseased cells,” said co-investigator and Wyss Institute director Don Ingber. A nanodevice that can spring open in response to a chemical or mechanical signal could ensure that drugs not only arrive at the intended target but are also released when and where desired.

…

“These little Swiss Army knives can help us make all kinds of things that could be useful for advanced drug delivery and regenerative medicine,” said lead investigator William Shih, Wyss core faculty member and associate professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at HMS and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “We also have a handy biological DNA Xerox machine that nature evolved for us,” making these devices easy to manufacture.