Category Archives: Science

Own the Night With This Essential Tool

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3:00 a.m. – Location: Undisclosed
I’m seated on the deck of an MH-60 Black Hawk. My legs are hanging out the starboard door. I lean forward into the night, my weight supported by my anchored harness. The warm prop wash hits my face as we continue to slowly orbit the compound 500 feet below.
I’m intently scanning the city of green through my night vision goggles (NVGs). I train my rifle with infrared (IR) laser site, providing sniper cover as my team clears the structures beneath me.
If you own the night – you own the operation.
But you don’t have to be a member of an elite Tier 1 special ops unit to know that having the advantage in the night could mean all the difference. Night vision could be extremely valuable:
When hunting or camping In the event of a power disruption during a natural disasters During a home invasion When you don’t want to give up your position

This post was published at Laissez Faire on Jun 16, 2017.

FACEBOOK NOW HAS A PATENT TO LITERALLY USE YOUR CAMERA AND WATCH YOUR EMOTIONAL REACTIONS

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In its latest dystopian innovation, Facebook has decided it would like to surreptitiously spy on people through their cameras, employing contentious facial recognition technology to analyze their emotions – in essence, this amounts to reading a person’s mind.
A recently-resurfaced patent filed by Facebook previously evinces the social media platform’s remarkably Orwellian goal of reading users’ emotions upon encountering various content – information which would then be used to tailor material for relevance to a person’s mood.
Flatly called ‘Techniques for emotion detection and content delivery,’ the patent – filed in November 2015 and rediscovered by New York-based marketing intelligence firm, CB Insights, upon its granting on May 25, 2017 – ‘would automatically add emotional information to text messages, predicting the user’s emotion based on methods of keyboard input. The visual format of the text message would adapt in real time based on the user’s predicted emotion. As the patent notes (and as many people have likely experienced), it can be hard to convey mood and intended meaning in a text-only message; this system would aim to reduce misunderstandings.
‘The system could pick up data from the keyboard, mouse, touch pad, touch screen, or other input devices, and the patent mentions predicting emotion based on relative typing speed, how hard the keys are pressed, movement (using the phone’s accelerometer), location, and other factors.’

This post was published at The Daily Sheeple on JUNE 9, 2017.

The Threat Of An Asteroid Striking Earth Is Higher Than Originally Thought

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New research from a team of Czech scientists, which discovered new asteroids traveling around our planet, suggests that the risk of earth being hit by one of those extraterrestrial rocks is increasing. The likelihood of an asteroid striking Earth increased after the team studied 144 large meteors from the Taurids, a meteor stream – the very stream which appears in our skies twice a year. Most of these asteroids are small and pose no real threat. But some are alarming in size.
The team of Czech scientists discovered a new branch of the Taurid stream phenomenon containing at least two asteroids measuring a whopping 200-300 meters (220-330 yards) in diameter. This branch likely includes even larger undiscovered asteroids, according to a statement from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
The Taurid meteoroid stream produces at least four meteor showers over Earth. Two of those streams are active from the end of September until the beginning of December, and two from the end of May to the middle of July. Earth encounters the newly discovered branch every few years for about three weeks. Scientists say that during this time, the chance of an impact with a sizeable asteroid (measuring up to tens of meters) is significantly greater. The new digital autonomous observatories of the European Fireball Network spotted the fireballs over Czech Republic (at 13 stations), Austria (1 station) and Slovakia (1 station).

This post was published at shtfplan on June 8th, 2017.

FACIAL RECOGNITION: UK Police Starting to Make Arrests

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It is being reported that biometric automatic facial recognition (AFR) systems used by British police have now resulted in their first arrest. Police in Cardiff, Wales claim to have made the arrest on 31 May, but have provided very little information about it beyond the initial news release. This arrest is significant because – regardless of what the police claim – it clearly marks the shift from the testing of these systems to their operational deployment. In other words, the British public can expect these arrests to happen with increasing frequency for the foreseeable future.
For the past few years, 21WIRE has been watching and reporting on the development of biometric tracking and identification systems. Certain systems are concerned with ‘gait analysis’ – identifying people by how they walk and move. Researcher and 21WIRE contributor Pippa King focuses on Biometrics in Schools. A year ago, 21WIRE reported on Britain testing ‘millimetre microwave’ systems that reportedly can detect armed individuals in a crowd.
But AFR systems are arguably more sinister than some other types of biometric tracking. Unlike fingerprints or DNA, our faces are usually on display all the time, and can be captured by CCTV systems, cameras on police vehicles, police body cameras, or any other type of camera. As Alastair MacGregor, the UK’s first Commissioner for the Retention and Use of Biometric Material, wrote in 2014:
‘… a searchable police database of facial images arguably represents a much greater threat to individual privacy than searchable databases of DNA profiles or fingerprints’.

This post was published at 21st Century Wire on JUNE 7, 2017.

Kim Jong-Un Watches As North Korea Tests New Anti-Aircraft Weapon

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With Trump back from his trip, and speculation again emerging that Trump may “wag the dog” and launch an attack on the Kim regime to deflect from the domestic media onslaught a la Syria, especially after last night’s report that the US has deployed a third carrier group to the Western Pacific, on Sunday Korea’s state news agency, KCNA reported that after weeks of defiant ballistic missile tests Kim Jong Un supervised the test of a new anti-aircraft weapon system and ordered its mass production and deployment throughout the country.
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While KCNA did not report the exact nature of the weapon or the time of the test it said it was organized by the Academy of National Defence Science, a blacklisted agency that is believed to be developing missiles and nuclear weapons.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on May 28, 2017.

Stephen Hawking: 100 Years Left For Humans To Escape Earth

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Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,
World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has been discussing the impending doom of the human race for several years.
On multiple occasions, he has warned of the likelihood that alien species will act like colonialists if they ever visit Earth, likening extraterrestrials’ tendencies to our own human behavior.
‘One day we might receive a signal from a planet like this, but we should be wary of answering back. Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well,’ he has said. Stephen Hawking has also warned that it’s only a matter of time until Earth is destroyed. ‘Although the chance of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years,’ he said in November.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on May 5, 2017.

Receding glacier causes immense Canadian river to vanish in four days

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An immense river that flowed from one of Canada’s largest glaciers vanished over the course of four days last year, scientists have reported, in an unsettling illustration of how can dramatically change the world’s geography.
The abrupt and unexpected disappearance of the Slims river, which spanned up to 150 metres at its widest points, is the first observed case of ‘river piracy’, in which the flow of one river is suddenly diverted into another.
For hundreds of years, the Slims carried melt water northwards from the vast Kaskawulsh glacier in Canada’s Yukon territory into the Kluane river, then into the Yukon river towards the Bering Sea. But in spring 2016, a period of intense melting of the glacier meant the drainage gradient was tipped in favour of a second river, redirecting the melt water to the Gulf of Alaska, thousands of miles from its original destination.
The continental-scale rearrangement was documented by a team of scientists who had been monitoring the incremental retreat of the glacier for years. But on a 2016 fieldwork expedition they were confronted with a landscape that had been radically transformed.

This post was published at The Guardian

US Sanctions 271 Syrians, Freezes Their US Assets

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Two weeks after launching missile strikes on Syria, the U. S. Treasury announced it has sanctioned 271 employees of Syria’s Scientific Studies and Research Center in response to the alleged sarin attack conducted by the Assad regime on Kahn Sheikhoun. It’s one of the largest sanction actions in U. S. history.
The action was announced in a statement by the Treasury Department, and Treasury Security Steve Mnuchin simultaneously briefed reporters at the White House.
The action – which takes place in lieu of a probe demanded by Russia and Syria to determine if Assad was indeed responsible for the recent sarin attack – freezes the individuals’ U. S. assets – which we doubt exist – and generally prohibits U. S. persons from dealing with them
The sanctioned employees “have expertise in chemistry and related disciplines and/or have worked in support of SSRC’s chemical weapons program since at least 2012′ said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and added that “These sweeping sanctions target the scientific support center for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s horrific chemical weapons attack on innocent civilian men, women, and children.”

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Apr 24, 2017.

SCIENTISTS FIND THAT BABIES WHO ARE GIVEN DTP VACCINE ARE UP TO 10 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO DIE

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Research conducted by a team of Scandinavian scientists came to a startling conclusion regarding the DTP vaccine, which is supposed to protect children from diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. Though they found that the vaccine can prevent those diseases, it does so at a terrible cost.
The research, which was partly funded by the Danish government, derived its data from a vaccination campaign conducted in the African nation of Guinea Bissau during the 1980′s. Initially, the campaign offered parents the opportunity to have their babies weighed every 3 months, and in 1981 they started giving out DTP vaccines during these sessions. Because the babies were only allowed to be vaccinated at a certain age, some were not vaccinated, which created the perfect control group.

This post was published at The Daily Sheeple on APRIL 24, 2017.

Insane shrinks say Trump mentally ill: official science howls at the moon

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My readers are familiar with my extended refutation of psychiatry as science. Here I’ll focus on the latest piece of non-logic from professional know-nothings.
The Daily Mail: ‘A group of leading psychiatrists told a conference that Donald Trump has clear hallmarks of mental illness that compromise his role as president. Twenty-five researchers made a drastic break away from ethical standards by meeting at Yale University on Thursday to discuss evidence questioning the commander-in-chief’s mental health.’
Psychiatrist Allen Frances, who has played a central role in defining mental disorders, disagrees. He wrote in the NY Times: ‘Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled [Mr. Trump as having] narcissistic personality disorder. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill.’
Dr. Frances makes an interesting point. He distinguishes between behavior and earning a badge for having a particular mental disorder.
For example, a person can be sad, but that alone doesn’t make him a candidate for the label, ‘clinical depression.’ A person can take aggressive actions against authority, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is suffering from Oppositional Defiance Disorder.

This post was published at Jon Rappoport on Apr 24, 2017.

Taleb Trashes The “Interventionistas” & Their Mental Defects

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Skin in the Game is necessary to reduce the effects of the following divergences that arose mainly as a side effect of civilization: action and cheap talk (tawk), consequence and intention, practice and theory, honor and reputation, expertise and pseudoexpertise, concrete and abstract, ethical and legal, genuine and cosmetic, entrepreneur and bureaucrat, entrepreneur and chief executive, strength and display, love and gold-digging, Coventry and Brussels, Omaha and Washington, D. C., economists and human beings, authors and editors, scholarship and academia, democracy and governance, science and scientism, politics and politicians, love and money, the spirit and the letter, Cato the Elder and Barack Obama, quality and advertising, commitment and signaling, and, centrally, collective and individual.
But, to this author, is mostly about justice, honor, and sacrifice as something existential for humans.
Let us first connect a few dots of items the list above.
Antaeus Whacked
Antaeus was a giant, rather semi-giant of sorts, the literal son of Mother Earth, Gaea, and Poseidon the god of the sea. He had a strange occupation, which consisted of forcing passersby in his country, (Greek) Libya, to wrestle; his trick was to pin his victims to the ground and crush them. This macabre hobby was apparently the expression of filial devotion; Antaeus aimed at building a temple for his father Poseidon, using for material the skulls of his victims.
Antaeus was deemed to be invincible; but there was a trick. He derived his strength from contact with his mother, earth. Physically separated from contact with earth, he lost all his powers. Hercules, as part of his twelve labors (actually in one, not all variations), had for homework to whack Antaeus. He managed to lift him off the ground and terminated him by crushing him as his feet remained out of contact with his mamma.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Apr 23, 2017.

North Korea Arrests US Citizen, Threatens To Sink US Aircraft Carrier As Japan Deploys Warships

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A third US citizen has been arrested and remains in custody in North Korea, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap. A man, a Korean-American professor in his 50s, identified by the surname Kim, had been in North Korea for a month to discuss relief activities and was detained at Pyongyang International Airport just as he was leaving North Korea, the agency reported.
The man was a former professor at Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST), Yonhap said, citing unnamed sources. YUST, a university in neighboring China, has a sister university in Pyongyang. An official at South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said it was not aware of the reported arrest. The reason for his arrest is still unclear, and there has been no comment from the US authorities so far. South Korea’s spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, said it ‘was not aware’ of Kim’s arrest, according to Yonhap.
North Korea, which has been criticized for its human rights record, has in the past used detained Americans to extract high-profile visits from the United States, with which it has no formal diplomatic relations. North Korea already holds two Americans. Ahn Chan-il, director of the World North Korea Research Center in Seoul, said that the North “seems to be intending to use professor Kim as leverage in negotiations” amid the current bad relations between the two countries.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Apr 23, 2017.

Did Russia Shoot Down US Missiles In Syria

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Submitted by Jonathan Roth of RiskHedge
In an exclusive video interview with RiskHedge, a long-time geopolitical expert says there is an alternate story making the rounds about the United States’ April 7 missile strike on Syria’s Shayrat Airbase in response to the Syrian regime’s alleged use of sarin gas on its own people.
‘Not all missiles made their target,’ says Dr. Theodore Karasik, a senior advisor to Gulf State Analytics. ‘There were supposed to be 60. One malfunctioned on one of the ships. 36 made target, the remainder did not. And, there’s a question of where did they go?’
Dr. Karasik, a former senior political scientist in the International Policy and Security Group at RAND Corporation, spent the last decade in the Middle East and retains an extensive network in the region.
‘The missing [missiles] were either brought down by S-300 battery or were taken over by Russian electronic jamming and were plunged into the sea,’ explains Dr. Karasik. ‘Now, this alternative theory means that the US and Russia have already clashed if you will – technically – with the use of the TLAMs (Tomahawk missiles) and then being intercepted or taken over by Russian control.’

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Apr 22, 2017.

Alzheimers’ America – Where Shit Happens & Is Promptly Forgotten

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Paging Doctor Oz! A patient calling itself The United States wandered into the emergency room disoriented, wearing a filthy warm-up suit, claiming it was ‘the greatest’ this and that… but was unable to complete the nine-page admission protocol or present valid insurance ID. Patient is growing increasingly violent, threatening staff and other patients….
Nations do develop something like Alzheimers. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that for some time now nothing sticks in the national brain-pan – if that’s what we can call the news media and its analogs on the Web waves. For months, an obsession about ‘Russian interference in the election’ raged through the left lobe of the national consciousness. Then, about a week ago, it vanished utterly. Grandpa suffered similar delusions about the Russians meddling with ‘our precious bodily fluids.’ (Paging Doctor Strangelove.)
Not so far back as last summer, a candidate named Trump un-ironically called for ‘an end to endless war in the Middle East.’ The oft-applied policy of ‘regime change,’ he said, was not working out in the various US-engineered failed states such as Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine. About two weeks ago, I seem to recall, the State Department even declared explicitly that we had no brief for regime change in the case of one Bashar al-Assad over in Syria.
Then there was something in the wifi waves about a poison gas attack. The evidence as to exactly who perpetrated it looked, how-you-say, not altogether convincing. This evidence amounted to the US Intel services, in their aggregate omniscience, asserting that, ‘yes, it was so that this weasel Assad bombed his people with Sarin.’ Wolf Blitzer and Rachel Maddow ran so hard with the story that they vanished over the horizon.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Apr 21, 2017.