Another Staged UFO Crash for British Schoolchildren
October 3rd, 2013[???]
Via: York Press:
PUPILS arriving at a York primary school today had a close encounter – when they found an alien craft crash-landed in their playground.
Youngsters starting their day at Clifton with Rawcliffe school this morning were met by police tape, a NASA investigation unit and a small silver craft billowing smoke and resting on the grass opposite the main entrance to the school.
The scenes were part of an elaborate stunt arranged as part of a day-long exercise to test the youngsters’ investigative skills and to fuel their imaginations as part of a school-wide topic looking at space, said head teacher Chris Wigley.
The craft itself was made by three teaching assistants and the production also involved local police, The Press coming along to investigate and report on the ‘crash’ and a BBC cameraman in the shape of BBC Look North presenter Phil Bodmer, whose son attends the school.
And Another: UFO Crashes Into North Harringay Primary School Playground
TellSpec
October 3rd, 2013Via: TellSpec:
We are raising funds for the development and manufacture of TellSpec, the world’s first reliable and accurate handheld device that scans and analyzes the composition of food so consumers know the real ingredients before they buy or eat the food. TellSpec brings together laser spectroscopy and a unique mathematical algorithm in a revolutionary system that can analyze the chemical composition of any food. This system consists of a convenient handheld wireless scanner communicating with a fast cloud analysis engine. These work together to gather the spectrum of your food, analyze that spectrum, and display information about the food in an easy-to-understand interface on your smart phone.
Ibragim Todashev’s Girlfriend Held in Solitary
October 3rd, 2013Via: Salon:
Ibragim Todashev, the Chechnyan immigrant who was believed to have connections to the Boston Marathon bombings, was shot dead under questionable circumstances during an interview with an FBI agent earlier this year. Now, his girlfriend is being held in solitary confinement in a Florida prison and according to reports has been told she may be deported for talking to the press.
Boston Magazine reported:
In a collect call from Glades County Jail, where she said she is being held in solitary confinement, Tatiana Gruzdeva said that immigration officers told her she was being deported because of her interviews with Boston magazine.
The Glades County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that Gruzdeva is being held in the county jail.
Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law
October 3rd, 2013Via: New York Times:
A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.
Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years.
Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.
People shopping for insurance on the health exchanges are already discovering this bitter twist.
Research Credit: ottilie
New Baby Smell
October 3rd, 2013haha. Becky and I thought that we were just imaging this.
Via: New York Times:
Nature provides plenty of reasons for parents to adore their newborns. The giant eyes, the adorable coos, the flawless skin.
But in the days following the birth of my son in May, it was his fresh, slightly sweet and immensely satisfying scent that did me in. At all hours of the morning, I would take long, greedy sniffs as I cradled him in the dark. I’ve already forgotten the sleep I lost, but I don’t think I will ever forget that smell.
But what, exactly, was I smelling?
It’s a question that proved surprisingly hard to answer. And there is a sizable group out there, a Web search revealed, who insist that new baby smell is merely a myth, the lingering effect of scented wipes or an olfactory hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation. I couldn’t buy that.
Now a study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology confirms my beliefs, suggesting that baby smell is not only real, but acts as a kind of sensory compensation for mothers.
Researchers asked 30 women — 15 who had recently given birth, and 15 who had never given birth — to identify mystery scents while their brain activity was monitored. When given the smell of newborns taken from pajamas, the women all showed activity in the same dopamine pathways that light up after ingesting cocaine, enjoying food, or other reward-inducing behavior.
The reactions were observed in all the women, though they were stronger in the new mothers.
Pentagon Spent $5 Billion on Weapons on the Eve of the Shutdown
October 3rd, 2013Via: Foreign Policy:
The Pentagon pumped billions of dollars into contractors’ bank accounts on the eve of the U.S. government’s shutdown that saw 400,000 Defense Department employees furloughed.
All told, the Pentagon awarded 94 contracts yesterday evening on its annual end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree, spending more than five billion dollars on everything from robot submarines to Finnish hand grenades and a radar base mounted on an offshore oil platform. To put things in perspective, the Pentagon gave out only 14 contracts on September 3, the first workday of the month.
Here are some of the more interesting purchases from Monday’s dollar-dump…
NSA Admits Bulk Collection of Cell Phone Location Data, But Don’t Worry, This Was Only a Test
October 3rd, 2013*wink*
Via: New York Times:
The National Security Agency conducted a secret pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to test the collection of bulk data about the location of Americans’ cellphones, but the agency never moved ahead with such a program, according to intelligence officials.
The existence of the pilot project was reported on Wednesday morning by The New York Times and later confirmed by James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The project used data from cellphone towers to locate people’s cellphones.
In his testimony, Mr. Clapper revealed few details about the project. He said that the N.S.A. does not currently collect locational information under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the provision the government says is the legal basis for the N.S.A.’s once-secret program under which it collects logs of all domestic calls from telephone companies.
“In 2010 and 2011, N.S.A. received samples in order to test the ability of its systems to handle the data format, but that data was not used for any other purpose and was never available for intelligence analysis purposes,” Mr. Clapper said.
He added that the N.S.A. had promised to notify Congress and seek the approval of a secret surveillance court in the future before any locational data was collected using Section 215.
An official familiar with the test project said its purpose was to see how the locational data would flow into the N.S.A.’s systems. While real data was used, it was never drawn upon in any investigation, the official said. It was unclear how many Americans’ locational data was collected as part of the project, whether the agency has held on to that information or why the program did not go forward.
Man Held in Solitary Confinement for 41 Years for a Crime He Didn’t Commit, Released from Prison on Verge of Death
October 2nd, 2013Via: The Times Picayune:
In the last 41 years, Herman Wallace has been incarcerated for a robbery he did commit, indicted for a murder a court ruled he didn’t and diagnosed with a cancer that will end his life. But Tuesday night, he passed through the prison gates and, as a free man, made his way back to the city in which he grew up — New Orleans.
Research Credit: ottilie
Box: Projection-Mapping Onto Moving Surfaces
October 2nd, 2013Via: Bot & Dolly on Vimeo:
Box explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping onto moving surfaces. The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera.
Box from Bot & Dolly on Vimeo.
Research Credit: alvinroasting
Jellyfish Force Nuclear Plant Shutdown in Sweden
October 2nd, 2013Via: AP:
It wasn’t a tsunami but it had the same effect: A huge cluster of jellyfish forced one of the world’s largest nuclear reactors to shut down — a phenomenon that marine biologists say could become more common.
Operators of the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in southeastern Sweden had to scramble reactor number three on Sunday after tonnes of jellyfish clogged the pipes that bring in cool water to the plant’s turbines.
By Tuesday, the pipes had been cleaned of the jellyfish and engineers were preparing to restart the reactor, which at 1,400 megawatts of output is the largest boiling-water reactor in the world, said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for OKG, the plant operator.
All three Oskharshamn reactors are boiling-water types, the same technology at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant that suffered a catastrophic failure in 2011 after a tsunami breached the facility’s walls and flooded its equipment.
Jellyfish are not a new problem for nuclear power plants. Last year the California-based Diablo Canyon facility had to shut its reactor two after gobs of sea salp — a gelatinous, jellyfish-like organism — clogged intake pipes. In 2005, the first unit at Oskarshamn was temporarily turned off due to a sudden jellyfish influx.
