Britain: Genetically-Modified Purple Tomatoes Heading for Shops
January 24th, 2014Via: BBC:
The prospect of genetically modified purple tomatoes reaching the shelves has come a step closer.
Their dark pigment is intended to give tomatoes the same potential health benefits as fruit such as blueberries.
Developed in Britain, large-scale production is now under way in Canada with the first 1,200 litres of purple tomato juice ready for shipping.
The pigment, known as anthocyanin, is an antioxidant which studies on animals show could help fight cancer.
Scientists say the new tomatoes could improve the nutritional value of everything from ketchup to pizza topping.
The tomatoes were developed at the John Innes Centre in Norwich where Prof Cathie Martin hopes the first delivery of large quantities of juice will allow researchers to investigate its potential.
Success of “The Wolf of Wall Street” a Sell Indicator?
January 24th, 2014Via: CNBC:
Could the success of “The Wolf of Wall Street” signal that the market is near a top?
Carter Worth, chief market technician at Oppenheimer, argues that the Oscar-nominated movie should indeed give bulls pause. After all, he said, interest in the film shows that interest in the market has gone mainstream—an observation bolstered by measures of participation in the stock market.
“When mass media or broad media picks up on something, typically that thing is reaching an end stage,” Worth said.
For him, looking at movies is a modern-day version of the classic magazine cover indicator, which holds that the market tends to do the opposite of what a cover states about it. For instance, a technical analyst who believes in the magazine cover indicator would take a bear on the cover of Forbes as a bullish sign for equities.
Today, with more eyes on films than on magazines, what might be called the “Hollywood indicator” could prove to be a better tell.
Worth points out that the track record for stocks around the release of a major movie about Wall Street has not been good. In 1987, the market crashed suddenly in October, two months before the release of “Wall Street.” In 2000, “Boiler Room” was released as the market was peaking.
The most damning piece of evidence may be the timing of the first “The Wolf of Wall Street.” An otherwise unrelated film by the same name, it was released in February 1929 (and was produced by Paramount, which distributed the 2013 film)—months before the horrific crash of that year.
“There is some rhythm here, some rhyme,” Worth said.
Dr. Strangelove More of a Documentary Than a Black Comedy
January 24th, 2014Via: The New Yorker:
The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.
Covert Action in Colombia
January 24th, 2014Via: Washington Post:
The 50-year-old Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), once considered the best-funded insurgency in the world, is at its smallest and most vulnerable state in decades, due in part to a CIA covert action program that has helped Colombian forces kill at least two dozen rebel leaders, according to interviews with more than 30 former and current U.S. and Colombian officials.
The secret assistance, which also includes substantial eavesdropping help from the National Security Agency, is funded through a multibillion-dollar black budget. It is not a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military aid called Plan Colombia, which began in 2000.
The previously undisclosed CIA program was authorized by President George W. Bush in the early 2000s and has continued under President Obama, according to U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic officials. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program is classified and ongoing.
The covert program in Colombia provides two essential services to the nation’s battle against the FARC and a smaller insurgent group, the National Liberation Army (ELN): Real-time intelligence that allows Colombian forces to hunt down individual FARC leaders and, beginning in 2006, one particularly effective tool with which to kill them.
That weapon is a $30,000 GPS guidance kit that transforms a less-than-accurate 500-pound gravity bomb into a highly accurate smart bomb. Smart bombs, also called precision-guided munitions or PGMs, are capable of killing an individual in triple-canopy jungle if his exact location can be determined and geo-coordinates are programmed into the bomb’s small computer brain.
Research Credit: conceptualdecay
Watchdog Report Says NSA Program Is Illegal and Should End
January 23rd, 2014Captain Obvious checking in on Cryptogon this morning.
Via: New York Times:
An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.
The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.
The Mysterious Web That Connects All Galaxies In The Universe
January 22nd, 2014Via: Business Insider:
For the first time, astronomers were able to see a string of hot gas known as a filament that is thought to be part of the mysterious underlying structure that dictates the layout of all the stars and galaxies in our universe.
Scientists believe that matter in the universe is arranged into a gigantic web-like structure. This is called the cosmic web.
There are signatures of this structure in the remaining radiation from the Big Bang and in the layout of the universe itself. Without some mysterious force pulling visible matter into this web, galaxies would be randomly scattered across the universe. But they aren’t.
We can see that galaxies are found in groups and those groups come together in larger clusters.
Computer models tell us that those galaxy clusters are linked by long filaments of hot gas and dark matter — a mystery substance that we can’t see because it doesn’t radiate or scatter light but that makes up most of the web.
It’s believed that gas and dark matter flow along the filaments to form clumps of galaxies where the strands intersect. So filaments are important because they represent what the universe looks like on a large scale. The problem is that, even though we should technically be able to see hot gas filaments, they are really hard to detect.
To find this strand of gas, astronomers where able to take advantage of an extremely bright mass of energy and light known as a quasar.
The light from a quasar located 10 billion light-years-away acted like a “flashlight” to make the surrounding gas glow, researchers report Jan. 19 in the journal Nature. This boosted the Lyman alpha radiation that hydrogen gas emits to detectable levels over a huge swath of the region.
The researchers were able to figure out the wavelength of the Lyman alpha radiation emitted by the gas and used the Keck telescope in Hawaii to get an image at that wavelength.
What they were able to see is a cloud of gas extending two million light years across intergalactic space — the largest ever found. And it wasn’t just a diffuse cloud, there are areas where there is more gas and areas of darker, emptier space. The gas-filled areas are filament, while the emptier areas are the gaps between filaments and galaxy clusters.
Research Credit: emulsified
Utah Is Ending Homelessness by Giving People Homes
January 22nd, 2014Via: Nation of Change:
In eight years, Utah has quietly reduced homelessness by 78 percent, and is on track to end homelessness by 2015.
How did Utah accomplish this? Simple. Utah solved homelessness by giving people homes. In 2005, Utah figured out that the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail says for homeless people was about $16,670 per person, compared to $11,000 to provide each homeless person with an apartment and a social worker. So, the state began giving away apartments, with no strings attached. Each participant in Utah’s Housing First program also gets a caseworker to help them become self-sufficient, but the keep the apartment even if they fail. The program has been so successful that other states are hoping to achieve similar results with programs modeled on Utah’s.
Army Studying Replacing Thousands of Grunts with Robots
January 21st, 2014Via: Military Times:
During remarks at the Army Aviation Symposium in Arlington, Va., on Jan. 15, Cone quietly dropped a bomb. The Army, he said, is considering the feasibility of shrinking the size of the brigade combat team from about 4,000 soldiers to 3,000 over the coming years, and replacing the lost soldiers with robots and unmanned platforms.
“I’ve got clear guidance to think about what if you could robotically perform some of the tasks in terms of maneuverability, in terms of the future of the force,” he said, adding that he also has “clear guidance to rethink” the size of the nine-man infantry squad.
He mentioned using unmanned ground vehicles that would follow manned platforms, which would require less armor and protection, thereby reducing the weight of a brigade combat team.
Over the past 12 years of war, “in favor of force protection we’ve sacrificed a lot of things,” he said. “I think we’ve also lost a lot in lethality.” And the Army wants that maneuverability, deployability and firepower back.
The Army is already on a path to shrink from 540,000 soldiers to about 490,000 by the end of 2015, and will likely slide further to 420,000 by 2019, according to reports.
Files Show Chicago Archdiocese Hid Decades Of Child Sex Abuse
January 21st, 2014Via: CBS:
For decades, those at the highest levels of the nation’s third-largest archdiocese moved accused priests from parish to parish while hiding the clerics’ histories from the public.
In some cases, abuse by priests happened while there were in seminary school before they were ordained. In other instances, priests were promoted, despite knowledge of abuse charges.
The documents, released through settlements between attorneys for the archdiocese and victims, describe how the late Cardinals John Cody and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin often approved the reassignments. The archdiocese removed some priests from ministry, but often years or decades after the clergy were known to have molested children.
Chinese Bootcamps for Internet Addicts
January 21st, 2014Via: news.com.au:
CHINA is the first country to label internet addiction a clinical disorder. But instead of shutting the laptop and going for a stroll, in China there are guarded boot camps intended to deprogram hooked teens.
…
This addiction and social detachment is striking nationwide concern across China, so to stamp it out the country is putting teens into military-style camps where internet addicts are kept behind bars, guarded by soldiers to go cold turkey.
