Archive

Archive for December 16, 2013

Is War With China Inevitable?

By Brandon Smith  11th December 2013.

Find Full Article Here:-  http://www.alt-market.com/articles/1866-is-war-with-china-inevitable

As a general rule, extreme economic decline is almost always followed by extreme international conflict. Sometimes, these disasters can be attributed to the human survival imperative and the desire to accumulate resources during crisis. But most often, war amid fiscal distress is usually a means for the political and financial elite to distract the masses away from their empty wallets and empty stomachs.

War galvanizes societies, usually under false pretenses. I’m not talking about superficial “police actions” or absurd crusades to “spread democracy” to Third World enclaves that don’t want it. No, I’m talking about REAL war: war that threatens the fabric of a culture, war that tumbles violently across people’s doorsteps. The reality of near-total annihilation is what oligarchs use to avoid blame for economic distress while molding nations and populations.

Because of the very predictable correlation between financial catastrophe and military conflagration, it makes quite a bit of sense for Americans today to be concerned. Never before in history has our country been so close to full-spectrum economic collapse, the kind that kills currencies and simultaneously plunges hundreds of millions of people into poverty. It is a collapse that has progressed thanks to the deliberate efforts of international financiers and central banks. It only follows that the mind-boggling scale of the situation would “require” a grand distraction to match.

It is difficult to predict what form this distraction will take and where it will begin, primarily because the elites have so many options. The Mideast is certainly an ever-looming possibility. Iran is a viable catalyst. Syria is not entirely off the table. Saudi Arabia and Israel are now essentially working together, forming a strange alliance that could promise considerable turmoil — even without the aid of the United States. Plenty of Americans still fear the Al Qaeda bogeyman, and a terrorist attack is not hard to fabricate. However, when I look at the shift of economic power and military deployment, the potential danger areas appear to be growing not only in the dry deserts of Syria and Iran, but also in the politically volatile waters of the East China Sea.

China is THE key to any outright implosion of the U.S. monetary system. Other countries, like Saudi Arabia, may play a part; but ultimately it will be China that deals the decisive blow against the dollar’s world reserve status. China’s dollar and Treasury bond holdings could be used as a weapon to trigger a global sell-off of dollar-denominated assets. China has stopped future increases of dollar forex holdings, and has cut the use of the dollar in bilateral trade agreements with multiple countries.  Oil-producing nations are shifting alliances to China because it is now the world’s largest consumer of petroleum. And, China has clearly been preparing for this eventuality for years. So, given these circumstances, how can the U.S. government conceive of confrontation with the East? Challenging one’s creditors to a duel does not usually end well. At the very least, it would be economic suicide. But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps America is meant to make this seemingly idiotic leap.

Here are just some of the signs of a buildup to conflict…

Currency Wars And Shooting Wars

In March 2009, U.S. military and intelligence officials gathered to participate in a simulated war game, a hypothetical economic struggle between the United States and China.

The conclusions of the war game were ominous. The participants determined that there was no way for the United States to win in an economic battle with China. The Chinese had a counterstrategy to every U.S. effort and an ace up their sleeve – namely, their U.S. dollar reserves, which they could use as a monetary neutron bomb, a chain reaction that would result in the abandonment of the dollar by exporters around the world . They also found that China has been quietly accumulating hard assets (including land and gold) across globe, using sovereign wealth funds, government-controlled front companies, and private equity funds to make the purchases. China could use these tangible assets as a hedge to protect against the eventual devaluation of its U.S. dollar and Treasury holdings, meaning the losses on its remaining U.S. financial investments was acceptable should it decide to crush the dollar.

The natural response of those skeptical of the war game and its findings is to claim that the American military would be the ultimate trump card and probable response to a Chinese economic threat. Of course, China’s relationship with Russia suggests a possible alliance against such an action and would definitely negate the use of nuclear weapons (unless the elites plan nuclear Armageddon). That said, it is highly likely that the U.S. government would respond with military action to a Chinese dollar dump, not unlike Germany’s rise to militarization and totalitarianism after the hyperinflationary implosion of the mark. The idea that anyone except the internationalists could “win” such a venture, though, is foolish.

I would suggest that this may actually be the plan of globalists in the United States and their counterparts in Asia and Europe. China’s rise to financial prominence is not due to its economic prowess. In fact, China is ripe with poor fiscal judgment calls and infrastructure projects that have gone nowhere. But what China does have on its side are massive capital inflows from global banks and corporations, mainly based in the United States and the European Union. And, it has help in the spread of its currency (the Yuan) from entities like JPMorgan Chase and Co. The International Monetary Fund is seeking to include China in its global basket currency, the SDR, which would give China even more leverage to use in breaking the dollar’s reserve status. Corporate financiers and central bankers have made it more than possible for China to kill the dollar, which they openly suggest is a “good thing.”

Is it possible that the war game scenarios carried out by the Pentagon and elitist think-tanks like the RAND Corporation were not meant to prevent a war with China, but to ensure one takes place?

Categories: The Politics of War

Have we been conned about cholesterol?

Extracted from The Great Cholesterol Con by Malcolm Kendrick, published by John Blake on January 29th 2013 at £9.99.

Find Article Here:-  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-430682/Have-conned-cholesterol.html

Conventional medical wisdom about cholesterol and the role of statins is now being challenged by a small, but growing number of health professionals. Among them is Dr Malcolm Kendrick.  A GP for 25 years, he has also worked with the European Society of Cardiology, and writes for leading medical magazines:

When it comes to heart disease, we have been sold a pup. A rather large pup.

Actually, it’s more of a full-grown blue whale. We’ve all been conned.

If you’ve got a raised risk of heart disease, the standard medical advice is to take a cholesterol-lowering statin drug to cut your chances of having a heart attack because, as we all know, cholesterol is a killer.

Indeed, many of you already believe that you should take statins for the rest of your natural lifespan.

Nearly everybody is in agreement about the need to lower your cholesterol level. The NHS spends nearly £1 billion a year on prescriptions for statins and possibly the same amount administering the cholesterol tests, surgery visits and the rest.

But is it all worth it? According to an article being published in the medical journal The Lancet this week, the answer is probably no.

A leading researcher at Harvard Medical School has found that women don’t benefit from taking statins at all, nor do men over 69 who haven’t already had a heart attack.

There is a very faint benefit if you are a younger man who also hasn’t had a heart attack – out of 50 men who take the drug for five years, one will benefit.

Nor is this the first study to suggest that fighting cholesterol with statins is bunk. Indeed, there are hundreds of doctors and researchers who agree that the cholesterol hypothesis itself is nonsense.

What their work shows, and what your doctor should be saying, is the following:

• A high diet, saturated or otherwise, does not affect blood cholesterol levels.

• High cholesterol levels don’t cause heart disease.

• Statins do not protect against heart disease by lowering cholesterol – when they do work, they do so in another way.

• The protection provided by statins is so small as to be not worth bothering about for most people (and all women). The reality is that the benefits have been hyped beyond belief.

• Statins have many more unpleasant side effects than has been admitted, while experts in this area should be treated with healthy scepticism because they are almost universally paid large sums by statin manufacturers to sing loudly from their hymn sheet.

So how can I say saturated fat doesn’t matter when everyone knows it is a killer? Could all those millions who have been putting skinless chicken and one per cent fat yoghurts into their trolleys really have been wasting their time?

The experts are so busy urging you to consume less fat and more statins that you are never warned about the contradictions and lack of evidence behind the cholesterol con.

In fact, what many major studies show is that as far as protecting your heart goes, cutting back on saturated fats makes no difference and, in fact, is more likely to do harm.

So how did fat and cholesterol get such a bad name? It all began about 100 years ago, when a researcher found feeding rabbits (vegetarians) a high cholesterol carnivore diet blocked their arteries with plaque.

But it took off in the Fifties with the Seven Countries study by Ancel Keys, which showed that the higher the saturated fat intake in a country, the higher the cholesterol levels and the higher the rate of heart disease.

The countries he chose included Italy, Greece, the USA and the Netherlands. But why these particular ones?

Recently I did my own 14 countries study using figures from the World Health Organisation, and found the opposite.

Countries with the highest saturated fat consumption ? Austria, France, Finland and Belgium ? had the lowest rate of deaths from heart disease, while those with the lowest consumption ? Georgia, Ukraine and Croatia ? had the highest mortality rate from heart disease.

Added to this, the biggest ever trial on dietary modification put 50 million people on a low saturated fat diet for 14 years.

Sausages, eggs, cheese, bacon and milk were restricted. Fruit and fish, however, were freely available. I?m talking about rationing in Britain during and after World War Two. In that time, deaths from heart disease more than doubled.

Even more damning is what happened in 1988. The Surgeon General’s office in the US decided to gather all evidence linking saturated fat to heart disease, silencing any nay-sayers for ever.

Eleven years later, however, the project was killed. The letter announcing this stated that the office “did not anticipate fully the magnitude of the additional expertise and staff resources that would be needed”.

After eleven years, they needed additional expertise and staff resources? What had they been doing? If they’d found a scrap of evidence, you would never have heard the last of it.

Major trials since have been no more successful. One involved nearly 30,000 middle-aged men and women in Sweden, followed for six years.

The conclusion? “Saturated fat showed no relationship with cardiovascular disease in men. Among the women, cardiovascular mortality showed a downward trend with increasing saturated fat intake.” (In other words, the more saturated fat, the less chance of dying from heart disease).

Even stronger evidence of the benefits of increased fat and cholesterol in the diet comes from Japan. Between 1958 and 1999, the Japanese doubled their protein intake, ate 400 per cent more fat and their cholesterol levels went up by 20 per cent.

Did they drop like flies? No. Their stroke rate, which had been the highest in the world, was seven times lower, while deaths from heart attacks, already low, fell by 50 per cent.

It’s a bit of a paradox, isn?t it? That’s one of the features of the dietary hypothesis – it involves a lot of paradoxes.

The most famous is the French Paradox. They eat more saturated fat than we do in Britain; they smoke more, take less exercise, have the same cholesterol/LDL levels, they also have the same average blood pressure and the same rate of obesity.

And you know what? They have one quarter the rate of heart disease we do.

The official explanation is that the French are protected from heart disease by drinking red wine, eating lightly cooked vegetables and eating garlic.

But there is no evidence that any of these three factors are actually protective. None. By evidence, I mean a randomised, controlled clinical study.

Every time a population is found that doesn’t fit the saturated fat/cholestrol hypothesis – the Masai living on blood and milk with no heart disease, the Inuit living on blubber with low heart disease – something is always found to explain it.

One research paper published more than 20 years ago found 246 factors that could protect against heart disease or promote it. By now there must be more than a thousand.

The closer you look the more you find that the cholestrol hypothesis is an amazing beast. It is in a process of constant adaptation in order to encompass all contradictory data without keeling over and expiring.

But you don’t need to look at foreign countries to find paradoxes – the biggest one is right here at home. Women are about 300 per cent less likely to suffer heart disease than men, even though on average they have higher cholesterol levels.

For years there was an ad hoc hypothesis to explain this apparent contradiction – women were protected by female sex hormones.

In fact, there has never been a study showing that these hormones protect against heart disease in humans.

But by the Nineties, millions of women were being prescribed HRT to stave off heart disease.

Then came the HERS trial to test the notion. It found HRT increased the risk of heart disease.

So what to do? Put them on statins; bring their cholesterol level down ? below 5.0 mmol is the official advice.

But, as The Lancet article emphasises, women do not benefit from statins. The phrase “Statins do not save lives in women” should be hung in every doctor’s surgery.

But it’s not just hugely wasteful handing out statins to women and men who are never going to benefit; it also exposes them to the risk of totally unnecessary side effects.

These include muscle weakness (myopathy) and mental and neurological problems such as severe irritability and memory loss.

How common are they? Very rare, say experts, but one trial found that 90 per cent of those on statins complained of side effects, half of them serious.

Only last week, a study reported a link between low LDL cholesterol and developing Parkinson’s disease.

Statins are designed to lower LDL. In the face of anticholesterol propaganda, it is easy to forget cholesterol is vital for our bodies to function.

Why do you think an egg yolk is full of cholesterol? Because it takes a lot of cholesterol to build a healthy chicken.

It also takes a hell of a lot to build and maintain a healthy human being.

In fact, cholesterol is so vital that almost all cells can manufacture cholesterol; one of the key functions of the liver is to synthesise cholesterol.

It’s vital for the proper functioning of the brain and it’s the building bock for most sex hormones.

So it should not be such a surprise to learn that lowering cholesterol can increase death rates.

Woman with a cholesterol level of five or even six have a lower risk of dying than those with a level below four.

The Lancet reported that statins didn’t benefit anyone over 69, not even men; in fact, there’s good evidence that they may hasten your death.

The Framingham study in the US found that people whose cholesterol levels fell were at a 14 per cent increased risk of death from heart disease for every 1mg/dl.

Set up in 1948, the study screened the whole population of Framingham near Boston for factors that might be involved in heart disease and then followed them to see what happened to them.

It is still going today, making it the longest running and most often quoted study in heart-disease research.

A massive long-term study that looked specifically at cholesterol levels and mortality in older people in Honolulu, published in The Lancet, found that having low cholesterol concentration for a long time increases the risk of death.

This may be because cholesterol is needed to fight off infections or there may be other reasons ? but many other studies have found exactly the same thing.

Low cholesterol levels greatly increase your risk of dying younger. So the cholesterol hypothesis looks something like this:

There is no evidence that saturated fat is bad – and there are lots of ‘paradoxes’ where countries with a high cholesterol intake don’t have a higher death rate from heart disease.

But there is an even more fundamental problem. The theory claims fat and cholesterol do things in the body that just don’t make sense.

To begin with, saturated fat and cholesterol are talked of as if they are strongly connected. A low-fat diet lowers cholesterol; a high-fat diet raises it.

What is never explained is how this works. This isn’t surprising because saturated fat doesn’t raise cholesterol. There is no biochemical connection between the two substances, which may explain all those negative findings.

It’s true that foods containing cholesterol also tend to contain saturated fats because both usually come from animals.

It’s also true that neither dissolve in water, so in order to travel along the bloodstream they have to be transported in a type of molecule known as a lipoprotein – such as LDLs (low-density lipoproteins) and HDLs (high-density lipoproteins).

But being travelling companions is as close as fats and cholesterol get. Once in the body, most fat from our diet is transported to the fat cells in a lipoprotein called a chylomicron.

Meanwhile, cholesterol is produced in the liver by way of an incredibly complicated 13-step process; the one that statins interfere with.

No biochemist has been able to explain to me why eating saturated fat should have any impact on this cholesterol production line in the liver.

On the other hand, the liver does make fat – lots of it. All the excess carbohydrate that we eat is turned first into glucose and then into fat in the liver.

And what sort of fat does the liver make? Saturated fat; obviously the body doesn’t regard it as harmful at all.

Recently, attention has been shifting from the dangers of saturated fat and LDL “bad” cholesterol to the benefits of HDL “good” cholesterol, and new drugs that are going to boost it.

But the idea that more HDLs are going to fight off heart disease is built on equally shaky foundations.

These lipoproteins seem to be cholesterol “scavengers”, sucking up the cholesterol that is released when a cell dies and then passing it on to other lipoproteins, which return it to the liver.

Interestingly, the “bad” LDL lipoproteins are involved in the relay. The idea seems to be that HDLs can also get the cholesterol out of the plaques that are blocking arteries.

However, there is a huge difference between absorbing free-floating cholesterol and sucking it out of an atherosclerotic plaque which is covered by an impermeable cap.

Categories: Health

“Sea Snot” Explosions Feed Deep-Sea Creatures.

By Carrie Arnold  22nd November 2013.

Find Article Here:-  http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/22/sea-snot-explosions-feed-deep-sea-creatures/

It’s a feast of epic proportions. Storms of “sea snot”—a mix of dead plankton and gelatinous sea creatures, and their feces—drift to the ocean floor, where deep-sea organisms gobble up the sudden windfall.

But these snotty blizzards aren’t just an occasional bonus to life at the bottom of the ocean—new research shows they depend on it to stay alive.

Image courtesy Arne Diercks

“Sea snot” seen in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Image courtesy Arne Diercks

The scientists found that not long after sea snot blooms drift to the seafloor, the activity of these deep-sea critters accelerated. (See “Giant, Mucus-Like Sea Blobs on the Rise, Pose Danger.”)

Global warming and ocean acidification, however, may be increasing the frequency of these sea snot storms, which could have unforeseen effects on marine life by altering how nutrients move around the oceans.

“In the 24 years of this study, the past 2 years have been the biggest amounts of this detritus by far,”  said study leader Christine Huffard, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Marine Banquet

With lead author Ken Smith, Huffard and colleagues were interested in learning how deep-sea marine life uses carbon and other elements, so they turned to Station M, which is located 145 miles (220 kilometers) west of the coast of California (map) between Santa Barbara and Monterey.

Although it sounds more like a secret CIA hideout than an ocean-research area, Station M has been giving scientists data on ocean productivity for two decades.

The ocean is most productive at the surface, where algae and phytoplankton use the sun’s energy to photosynthesize, creating a large portion of our atmosphere’s oxygen. Other animals, like slimy sea salps—barrel-shaped, jellyfish-like organisms—feed on the phytoplankton. (Related: “Huge Swarm of Gelatinous Sea Creatures Imaged in 3-D.”)

Somewhat regularly, large blooms of phytoplankton cover large areas of the ocean’s surface, which in turn boosts populations of sea salps that gorge on the giant marine banquet.

Eventually, however, all good things come to an end. The phytoplankton eventually dies off, and so do the hordes of sea salps.

“Anything that was once living or breathing or had been eaten at the surface makes its way to the bottom of the ocean,” Huffard said. “The sea salps sink pretty quickly because they’re very dense, but even fecal pellets from zooplankton fall to the seafloor.” (See pictures of deep-sea creatures.)

Tracking Oxygen

All of this feasting—and the digesting that follows—requires significant amounts of oxygen. So, using a special deep-sea robot, Huffard and colleagues measured the oxygen used by this deep sea life and the subsequent carbon it produces (as proteins and cells) to determine its activity level.

Their data revealed small seasonal increases in the activity of deep-sea organisms after spring and fall phytoplankton blooms.

Huffard points out that the use of oxygen and carbon levels to measure deep-sea productivity does have limitations.

Perhaps the biggest one is that the method can’t tell whether the number of deep-sea organisms has increased, or if they’re just more active and thus producing more carbon.

Mysterious Explosions

Global warming may also be influencing the rhythm of sea snot explosions. For instance, warmer oceans may encourage the growth of more phytoplankton. The scientists observed the largest spikes in deep-sea productivity in 2011 and 2012, corresponding with massive phytoplankton blooms. (Also see “‘Sea Snot’ Explosion Caused by Gulf Oil Spill?”)

In March 2012, less than one percent of the seafloor beneath Station M was covered in dead sea salps. By July 1, more than 98 percent of it was covered in the decomposing organisms, according to the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The major increase in activity of deep-sea life in 2011 and 2012 weren’t limited to Station M, though: Other ocean-research stations reported similar data.

Although climate change is a leading contender for explaining the major increases in 2011 and 2012, Huffard says that these spikes could be part of a longer-term trend that scientists haven’t yet observed.

She hopes to continue gathering data from Station M to try and figure it out.

Sun’s Current Solar Activity Cycle Is Weakest in a Century.

December 16, 2013 1 comment

By Mike Wall  11th December 2013.

 

Aug. 9, 2011 solar flare in ultraviolet range

 

This still from a video taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the Aug. 8, 2011 solar flare as it appeared in the ultraviolet range of the light spectrum. The flare registered as an X6.9 class sun storm, the largest of the Solar Cycle 24.   Credit: NASA/SDO/GSFC

The sun’s current space-weather cycle is the most anemic in 100 years, scientists say.

Our star is now at “solar maximum,” the peak phase of its 11-year activity cycle. But this solar max is weak, and the overall current cycle, known as Solar Cycle 24, conjures up comparisons to the famously feeble Solar Cycle 14 in the early 1900s, researchers said.

“None of us alive have ever seen such a weak cycle. So we will learn something,” Leif Svalgaard of Stanford University told reporters here today (Dec. 11) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. [Solar Max: Amazing Sun Storm Photos of 2013]

The learning has already begun. For example, scientists think they know why the solar storms that have erupted during Solar Cycle 24 have caused relatively few problems here on Earth.

The sun often blasts huge clouds of superheated particles into space, in explosions known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Powerful CMEs that hit Earth squarely can trigger geomagnetic storms, which in turn can disrupt radio communications, GPS signals and power grids.

But such effects have rarely been seen during Solar Cycle 24, even though the total number of CMEs hasn’t dropped off much, if at all. The explanation, researchers said, lies in the reduced pressure currently present in the heliosphere, the enormous bubble of charged particles and magnetic fields that the sun puffs out around itself.

This lower pressure has allowed CMEs to expand greatly as they cruise through space, said Nat Gopalswamy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Indeed, Solar Cycle 24 CMEs are, on average, 38 percent bigger than those measured during the last cycle — a difference with real consequences for folks here on Earth.

“When the CMEs expand more, the magnetic field inside the CMEs has lower strength,” Gopalswamy said. “So when you have lower-strength magnetic fields, then they cause milder geomagnetic storms.”

London to reach Pinnacle as ‘impossible’ skyscraper plans get green light.

By Adam Withnall  12th December 2013.

Find Article Here:-  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-to-reach-pinnacle-as-impossible-skyscraper-plans-get-green-light-9000548.html

Distinctive “Helter Skelter” design will be kept at end of a thorough review process.

Plans to build a controversial £1 billion skyscraper in London could be set to go ahead – despite architects dismissing the project as “impossible”.

The development of the Pinnacle tower had been halted and a review process launched because of spiralling costs and serious concerns over the building’s feasibility.

Leading designers linked to the plans had said the distinctive “helter skelter” appearance wanted by the developers was far too complicated, requiring every single window to be a slightly different size.

Yet despite an extensive review, no significant changes to the exterior of the tower have been made.

Pinnacle’s 63-storey development first stalled at a time when the Shard was struggling to fill its enormous office space, and property investors were shelving plans across the capital.

Architects KPF were asked to start a redesign in October 2012 – and reports suggest they have successfully cut costs without compromising on the tower’s bizarre visual flourish.

Changes have instead been made to the floor plans and interior, with retail space sacrificed in favour of more room for commercial offices and a larger atrium which could in theory fit in entrances for two major corporate tenants.

When the redesign was launched, rival developers moved in, with Make and PLP linked to the site. At the time Ken Shuttleworth, the chief executive of Make, told Building magazine: “The geometry of the Pinnacle is impossible. It makes the Swiss Re look simple.”

It is understood that the new designs could still require further planning permission, though it is yet to be sought.

If its construction goes ahead, Pinnacle will be the second-tallest skyscraper in the UK. Currently no more than a concrete “stump” at 200 Bishopsgate, it has a budget twice that of the £450 million Shard and would tower over Canary Wharf’s One Canada Square.

Rebecca Evans, the editor of Construction News, said the market in London had changed hugely since the project stalled two years ago.

A survey conducted by Aecom found that the capital’s top contractors have already booked in 70 per cent of their work for next year – up from around 35 per cent at this stage in 2011.

Ms Evans told The Independent: “It is a surprise that the plans have got the go-ahead without many changes, but I gather the main reason is that the developers didn’t want to go back with a fresh planning application.

“The City is also said to be keen on it – and the owners have already borrowed money for it so need to get a big return.

“People were dubious about the unusual floor design at first because it meant costs were higher, and there was a perception that for tenants there was less flexibility over what they could do with the space. The new plans seem to have addressed that and you can see how a possible additional entrance might accommodate tenants better.

“While what’s happening on the inside might actually be more important than what happens outside, Pinnacle’s USP was how different it looked, and if they’ve managed to retain the design they may be able to use that to their advantage – it will be an iconic building and now that the market has picked up that may attract more tenants.”

Developers Arab Investment declined to comment on the project.

Plants won’t grow near Wi-Fi routers, experiment finds.

By Michael Ravensthorpe  13th December 2013.

Find Article Here:-  http://www.naturalnews.com/043238_Wi-Fi_routers_radiation_plant_growth.html#

It’s not difficult to understand the appeal of Wi-Fi. This revolutionary technology, which has been commercially available since 1999, eliminates cabling and wiring for computers, reduces cellular usage charges and allows us to connect to the Internet from anywhere with a signal. Despite these benefits, however, studies continue to show that the radiation generated by wireless routers is negatively affecting our health. In fact, the British activist website Stop Smart Meters recently published a list of 34 scientific studies demonstrating the adverse biological effects of Wi-Fi exposure, including studies linking it to headaches, reduced sperm count and oxidative stress.

The latest research into the dangers of Wi-Fi, though, comes from a surprisingly humble source: Five ninth grade female students from Denmark, whose science experiment revealed that wireless radiation is equally as devastating to plants.

Undeniable results

The experiment began when the five students realized that they had difficulty concentrating in school if they slept near their mobile phones the previous night. Intrigued by this phenomenon, the students endeavored to study the effects of cellphone radiation on humans. Unfortunately, their school prevented them from pursuing this experiment due to a lack of resources, so the students decided to test the effects of Wi-Fi radiation (comparable in strength to cellphone radiation) on a plant instead.

The girls placed six trays of Lepidium sativum seeds (a garden cress grown commercially throughout Europe) in a room without radiation, and an equal amount in a room next to two Wi-Fi routers. Over a 12-day period, they observed, measured, weighed and photographed the results. Even before the 12th day arrived, however, the end results were obvious: The cress seeds placed near the routers either hadn’t grown or were completely dead, while the seeds placed in the radiation-free room had blossomed into healthy plants.

The experiment earned the five students top honors in a regional science competition. Moreover, according to a teacher at their school, Kim Horsevad, a professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden was so impressed with the experiment that he is interested in repeating it in a controlled scientific environment.

You can help reduce your exposure to Wi-Fi radiation by following the advice in this article.

New research raises hopes of finding alien life on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

By Steve Connor   12th December 2013.

Find Article Here:-  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/new-research-raises-hopes-of-finding-alien-life-on-jupiters-icy-moon-europa-9001101.html

Scientists believe life may exist within underground ocean – living off minerals and using tidal heat as a source of energy.

One of the moons of Jupiter may be another habitable part of the Solar System according to new research showing that Europa is rich in vital minerals and has spectacular water fountains spraying from a subsurface ocean.

The Hubble Space Telescope has identified two huge plumes of water as high as 200km (124 miles) which occasionally erupt on Europa, while a separate study has found clay-like minerals littered around the moon’s frozen surface.

The water fountain appears at certain moments in the orbit of Europa around Jupiter, suggesting it is powered by immense tidal forces that periodically increase the pressure within a subsurface ocean, causing it to erupt through cracks in the surface ice, according an analysis of Hubble data published in the journal Science.

Europa is one of the more significant of Jupiter’s 63 known moons and astronomers believe that below is ice-covered surface is an ocean kept liquid by the heat of tidal forces. Some scientists have suggested that life may exist within this ocean, living off minerals and using tidal heat as a source of energy.

A separate study based on a new analysis of data from Nasa Galileo mission detected important clay-like minerals on the surface of Europa which could have come from past collisions with asteroids or comets.

Jim Shirley of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said:  “Organic materials, which are important building blocks for life, are often found in comets and primitive asteroids. Finding the rocky residues of this comet crash on Europa’s surface may open up a new chapter in the story of the search for life on Europa.”

Many scientists believe that Europa may be the best place in the Solar System to find existing life as its ocean is in contact with rock and the icy surface is mixing with the ocean below, creating an energy gradient and a source of heat as the moon get progressively stretched and squeezed by gravity during its orbit around Jupiter.

[Image courtesy of K. Retherford, Southwest Research Institute]

 

Physicists discover ‘clearest evidence yet’ that the Universe is a hologram.

December 16, 2013 1 comment

By James Vincent   12th December 2013.

Find Article Here:-  http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/physicists-discover-clearest-evidence-yet-that-the-universe-is-a-hologram-9000748.html

Latest calculations chime with 1997 theory that reality is only perceived as 3D and is actually a 2D projection on the boundary of the universe.

A team of physicists have provided what has been described by the journal Nature as the “clearest evidence yet” that our universe is a hologram.

The new research could help reconcile one of modern physics’ most enduring problems : the apparent inconsistencies between the different models of the universe as explained by quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.

The two new scientific papers are the culmination of years’ work led by Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan, and deal with hypothetical calculations of the energies of black holes in different universes.

The idea of the universe existing as a ‘hologram’ doesn’t refer to a Matrix-like illusion, but the theory that the three dimensions we perceive are actually just “painted” onto the cosmological horizon – the boundary of the known universe.

If this sounds paradoxical, try to imagine a holographic picture that changes as you move it. Although the picture is two dimensional, observing it from different locations creates the illusion that it is 3D.

This model of the universe helps explain some inconsistencies between general relativity (Einstein’s theory) and quantum physics. Although Einstein’s work underpins much of modern physics, at certain extremes (such as in the middle of a black hole) the principles he outlined break down and the laws of quantum physics take over.

The traditional method of reconciling these two models has come from the 1997 work of theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena, whose ideas built upon string theory. This is one of the most well respected ‘theories of everything’ (Stephen Hawking is a fan) and it posits that one-dimensional vibrating objects known as ‘strings’ are the elementary particles of the universe.

Maldacena has welcomed the new research by Hyakutake and his team, telling the journal Nature that the findings are “an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory.”

Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist regarded as one of the fathers of string theory, added that the work by the Japanese team “numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture.”

For more information on this research, click here to read the original release.

Pledge now to stop Nestlé from privatizing nature.

Fighting for people over profits.

Let’s stand together to stop Nestlé.

Nestlé’s chairman has been caught on camera saying that water isn’t a human right, calling this view “extreme”. Instead, he wants water sold on the open market like anything else, for those who can afford to buy it — and his company is working harder than ever to make sure it happens.

Its business model is clear: privatize and commodify our public resources — under the leadership of a man who says a CEO’s “biggest social responsibility” is to ensure corporate profits. From Pakistan to Canada, Nestlé is busy draining millions of liters of our fresh water — often without paying a cent! — in order to sell back to the public at record prices.

Here’s the thing: if we don’t stand up to Nestlé, no one will. The world’s largest food company already has governments and regulators in its back pocket, and has cowed others with its aggressive PR campaigns.

They have billions in corporate profits and influence. But we are two million strong, and we have the public on our side. And when people stand together, we can win. In Canada, an ambitious lawsuit stopped Nestlé from extracting millions more liters liters of fresh water during a drought. And in Pakistan, Nestlé was even sponsoring fake ‘public health seminars’ to tell people that non-bottled water was dangerous, until public outrage forced them to stop.

Can you commit to stand up to Nestlé, and pledge now to stop Nestlé’s plan to commodify nature for profit? 

SumOfUs.org is a small team who does not take any corporate donations. We couldn’t do it without you.


Note: Our payment gateway is maintained by a U.S. provider called Braintree, and as such your transaction will occur in U.S. dollars. If this is an issue, you can donate via the PayPal button to the right.

If you’d prefer to mail a check, click here for instructions to make sure it makes it to us.

Questions? Shoot us an email at info@sumofus.org.

Categories: Environment, Health, Protest

Robotic Bees to Pollinate Monsanto Crops.

By Russ McSpadden  8th April 2013.

Find Article and 5min Video Here:-  http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2013/04/08/robotic-bees-to-pollinate-monsanto-crops/

Pollinators participate in the sexual-reproduction of plants. When you eat an almond, beet, watermelon or sip on coffee, you’re partaking of an ancient relationship between pollinators and flowers. But since the 1990s, worldwide bee health has been in decline and most evidence points to toxic pesticides created by Shell and Bayer and the loss of genetic biodiversity due to the proliferation of GMO monocrops created in laboratories by biotech companies like Monsanto.

But never worry, those real life pollinators—the birds and the bees, as they say—may soon be irrelevant to the food needs of civilization. Harvard roboticists are developing a solution to the crisis: swarms of tiny robot bees made of titanium and plastic that can pollinate those vast dystopian fields of GMO cash crops.

The Harvard Microrobotics Lab has been working on its Micro Air Vehicles Project since early 2009. Borrowing from the biomechanics and social organization of bees, the team of researchers is undergoing the creation of tiny winged robots to fly from flower to flower, immune to the toxins dripping from petals, to spread pollen. They even believe that they will soon be able to program the robobees to live in an artificial hive, coordinate algorithms and communicate amongst themselves about methods of pollination and location of particular crops.

Of course, published reports from the lab also describe potential military uses—surveillance and mapping—but the dime-sized cyber-bees have yet to be outfitted with neurotoxin tipped stingers.

dead-bee

If you think this bee news is strange, be sure to check out this recent article from the newswire: Anarchist Beekeepers Claim Responsibility for U.S. Drone Attack