Genetic Modification Gone Wild: 10 Signs That Our World May Be Destined To Resemble A Really Bad Science Fiction Movie

Did you know that today scientists are actually producing mice that tweet like birds, cats that glow in the dark, "monster salmon", "spider goats", cow/human hybrids, pig/human hybrids and even mouse/human hybrids?  The very definition of life on earth is changing right before our eyes.  Many scientists believe that genetic modification holds the key to feeding the entire planet and healing all of our diseases, but others are warning that genetic modification could literally transform our environment into a desolate wasteland and cause our world to resemble a really bad science fiction movie.  For decades, scientists around the globe have been fooling around with DNA and have been transplanting genes from one species to another.  But now technology has advanced so dramatically that just about the only thing limiting scientists are their imaginations.   link

Pfizer Drug Tests Kills 11 Children In Nigeria

Tibetan encyclopedia provides evidence of ancient brain surgery

LHASA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Brain surgery was practiced by doctors at least 2,900 years ago, a specialist on Tibetan culture and literature said Wednesday after four decades of research on the Tibetan Tripitaka, an ancient encyclopedia.
"The 2,900-year-old Tibetan Tripitaka states clearly why and how brain surgery was carried out," said Karma Trinley, an associate professor from the Tibetan language and literature department of Tibet University in Lhasa, capital of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region.   link

Anders Behring Breivik: Manufacturing a Patsy?

However, it’s quickly becoming apparent that just as many eyewitnesses reported two gunmen on the island where the rampage unfolded, there are two different personas behind Breivik himself.
Indeed, there are two different Facebook profiles for Breivik, one from before the massacre and one from after. The latter profile appears to have been embellished and deliberately altered to emphasize the notion that the gunman was motivated by his “Christian conservative” beliefs.
Compare the two profiles below (click to enlarge). The first one in Norwegian was deleted minutes after Breivik’s identity became public. The second profile in English appeared after the original was deleted, and became the de facto profile of the killer.   link

Shooting Survivors Convinced There Were 2 Gunmen on Norway's Utoya Island

 The shooting survivors quoted by the VG paper, however, are convinced that there was a second shooter on the island. They claim that they saw another man shooting at them who was not wearing a police uniform, and that they heard firing from two sides. Their accounts remain unconfirmed.  link

A 32 Year Old Freemason, Christian, Conservative and Nationalist Arrested for Oslo Bombing and Shootings

Behring studied at the Oslo Commerce School, and is a self-described Conservative, Christian and Nationalist. He is also described as a one-time freemason. He owns the company Breivik Geofarm.

The reference to his ties to freemasonry can be found on TV 2, the largest commercial television station in Norway. See here.

His Twitter account, that only has one post from July 17th says:
One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests.

Also, every profile picture on his Facebook account was uploaded on July 17, 2011, just five days before the attacks.   link

Hungary destroys all GMO maize fields

Some 400 hectares of maize found to have been grown with genetically modified seeds have been destroyed throughout Hungary deputy state secretary of the Ministry of Rural Development Lajos Bognar said. The GMO maize has been ploughed under, said Lajos Bognar, but pollen has not spread from the maize, he added. Unlike several EU members, GMO seeds are banned in Hungary. Authorities have been checking for GMO crops since the beginning of this year as a new regulation came in force this March which stipulates GMO checks before seeds are introduced to the market. The checks will continue despite the fact that seed traders are obliged to make sure that their products are GMO free, Bognar said.   link

 

Why Brains Get Creeped Out by Androids

We’ve all found ourselves in the uncanny valley before. It’s that uneasy feeling you get when viewing a realistic humanoid or CGI person that’s so close to looking human that it seems almost spooky.

The actual “valley” refers to a precipitous drop in “likeability” as onscreen characters and humanoid robots step too far towards being human-like. As in, we enjoy Pixar’s Wall-E and Nintendo’s Mario, but we get the heeby jeebies from the ultra-realistic faces of The Polar Express or the upcoming Tintin movie.

So far, the phenomenon has been described entirely anecdotally, but an international team of researchers, led by Ayse Pinar Saygin of the University of California, San Diego, wanted to find out if the sensation was actually caused by something deep within our brains.   link

Ancient fish had the genetic code for limbs and fingers long before they scrambled onto dry land

Long before our ancient fish ancestors had even vaguely considered that the dry land might be a place to colonize, they had the genetic switches ready to make limbs and digits — switches which still function on mammals today.


This research was prompted by the discovery of Tiktaalik — a walking fish discovered in 2004. Tktaalik had a limb structure remarkably similar to land mammals, prompting scientists to dig into just how far back our limb coding goes.   link

The face of a frog: Time-lapse video reveals never-before-seen bioelectric pattern (video)

For the first time, Tufts University biologists have reported that bioelectrical signals are necessary for normal head and facial formation in an organism and have captured that process in a time-lapse video that reveals never-before-seen patterns of visible bioelectrical signals outlining where eyes, nose, mouth, and other features will appear in an embryonic tadpole.
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First, a wave of hyperpolarization (negative ions) flashed across the entire embryo, coinciding with the emergence of cilia that enable the embryos to move. Next, patterns appeared that matched the imminent shape changes and gene expression domains of the developing face. Bright hyperpolarization marked the folding in of the surface, while both hyperpolarized and depolarized regions overlapped domains of head patterning genes. In the third course, localized regions of hyperpolarization formed, expanded and disappeared, but without disturbing the patterns created during the second stage. At the same time, the spherical embryo began to elongate.   link

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Galileo and the secrets of Hermeticism

Galileo’s prosecution by the Church for promoting the heliocentric theory – that the Sun sits at the centre of the Solar System encircled by the Earth and other planets – is usually portrayed as a landmark battle in the war between religion and science, the moment when Galileo becomes science’s first great martyr.  However, when revisiting the story during our research for our book The For­bidden Universe, we realized that the trad­itional explanations of the Church’s determin­ation to get Galileo just don’t add up. Applying the shameless CGI of hindsight, science historians transmuted him into a modern rationalist-materialist born out of time, persecuted by superstitious – in other words cretinous – men whose intell­ects, if one could dignify them with the term, were stuck in the Middle Ages.

That’s the lazy sod’s version of history. The reality, as forteans would suspect, is that there’s much, much more to it than that. 
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The answer, we believe, lies in the Hermetic tradition – the heart of the ‘occult philosophy’, a synthesis of magical, esoteric and philosophical systems – which had a profound effect on shaping Western culture during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but which is today shamefully marginalised. But the fact is that the Renaissance is impossible to comprehend without the Hermetic tradition. It’s like trying to write a history of the 20th century while ignoring Communism, on the logic that because it failed as an ideology, it could never have been really important.  The treatises collectively known as the Hermetica, on which the tradition is based, have had the greatest effect on Western civilisation of any texts apart from the Bible – and the greatest effect on modern Western civilisation of any texts including the Bible. Yet very few people have even heard of them. link

Whistleblower's Death: James Corbett on Murdoch scandal turning bloody

The NSA Is Building An Artificial Intelligence System That Can Read Minds

The New Thought Police - The NSA Wants to Know How You Think - Maybe Even What You Think

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell’s Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking.

With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected—through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records—it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.

The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.   link

Space telescope to create radio 'eye' larger than Earth

At 10 metres, RadioAstron's antenna is small compared to Earth's largest radio telescopes, which span 100 metres or more. But when its signals are combined with those of telescopes on the ground – a technique called interferometry – the resulting observations are as sharp as those produced by a single telescope with a dish as wide as the maximum distance between the component antennas.

This strategy has been used for decades to create radio telescopes the size of the Earth, and in 1997 the Japanese Space Agency launched the first space telescope dedicated to radio interferometry, HALCA.

With an orbit that will extend more than 10 times as far from Earth as HALCA, out to some 350,000 kilometres, RadioAstron promises to capture detail that is more than 10 times as fine. At its best, RadioAstron will be able to resolve points separated by an angle of just 7 microarcseconds, about 10,000 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.  link

One big yawn: boredom is not just a state of mind

 What is boredom? Is it a mood, an emotion, an affliction, a form of social protection, a gateway to the essence of the self, the human condition, or a modern affectation? These are questions that have concerned philosophers and thinkers dating back to the Enlightenment, not least because boredom occupies territory that overlaps with capital letter concepts like Being and Time.   link

Confirmation Bias and Art

By now, our overwhelming tendency to look for what confirms our beliefs and ignore what contradicts our beliefs is well documented. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and its ubiquity is observed in both academia and in our everyday lives: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch MSNB; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, evolutionary biologists see fossils as evidence of evolution; doomsayers see signs of the end of the world, and the rest of us see just another day. Simply put, our ideologies and personal dogmas dictate our realities.
For the most part, confirmation bias has been studied by psychologists and discussed by science journalists in the context of decision-making or reasoning. Examples of this include Jonah Lehrer 's How We Decide, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made , and the recent Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber article (pdf) that has garnered so much popularity. As more is written about confirmation bias and its effects, it is becoming clear that it is describing something much more than a mechanism that influences our everyday choices and rationality.   link

Feds Blame Cancer Patient Urine For Radioactive Iodine In Drinking Water

The Philadelphia Water Department announced yesterday that it is enhancing its testing procedures and reviewing treatment technology after federal environmental officials found radioactive iodine in the city’s drinking water.
The level of Iodine-131 found at the Queen Lane treatment plant is the highest of 23 sites in 13 states where the particles have appeared following the massive radiation leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Lower levels were found at the city’s two other plants.
But the Iodine-131 in Philadelphia may have no connection to Japan, officials say.
[...]
Perhaps more disturbing: Nobody knows exactly how the Iodine-131 – which can cause thyroid cancer if consumed in large quantities or over a prolonged period of time – is getting into Philly’s drinking water.
“At this point, that is not really known,” said EPA spokesman David Sternberg. “We’re investigating.”
Kathryn Higley, a health physicist at Oregon State University, said the most likely source is a facility that treats cancer patients with Iodine-131, which can enter the water supply when patients go to the bathroom. Philadelphia Daily News  link

Sick Children And Dying Pets Accompany New Iodine Radiation In Tokyo

The Latest Reports From Tokyo Include Detection Of Radioactive Iodine Along With Nosebleeds, Hair loss, Diarrhea, Sickness, and Death Of Pets, And Unexplained Illnesses in Children.
With half-life of radioactive iodine being only 8 days, the detection of the material in Tokyo nearly 150 miles away is a clear indication the fresh radioactive material from an ongoing nuclear meltdown is making its way to the capital city of Japan.

The most plausible explanation for radioactive iodine to make its way into the sewers so far away with such a short half life is through direct air transport and the collection of the radioactive rain in the sewer.

In fact, NHK reports that levels of radioactivity in the air at distances of 150 kilometers are higher than in areas near the nuclear power plant.  link

Radiation Coverups Confirmed: Los Alamos, Fort Calhoun, Fukushima, TSA

Are We Living in a Holographic Universe? This May Be the Greatest Revolution of the 21st Century

What if our existence is a holographic projection of another, flat version of you living on a two-dimensional "surface" at the edge of this universe? In other words, are we real, or are we quantum interactions on the edges of the universe - and is that just as real anyway?

Whether we actually live in a hologram is being hotly debated,  but it is now becoming clear that looking at phenomena through a holographic lens could be key to solving some of the most perplexing problems in physics, including the physics that reigned before the big bang,what gives particles mass, a theory of quantum gravity.   link

One of the great surprises that shamanism affords is the joy of the unknown and that the unknown is joyous. There is a sense of wholeness that proceeds from the creativity that is inherent in the shamanic journey.

Sandra Harner, in  Shamanism and Creativity