Britain: Scientists Reconstruct Black Death Plague with Genetic Material Taken from Ancient Corpses Buried Under Royal Mint
October 13th, 2011Don’t look at me. I just work here.
Via: BBC:
The genetic code of the germ that caused the Black Death has been reconstructed by scientists for the first time.
The researchers extracted DNA fragments of the ancient bacterium from the teeth of medieval corpses found in London.
They say the pathogen is the ancestor of all modern plagues.
The research, published in the journal Nature, suggests the 14th Century outbreak was also the first plague pandemic in history.
Humans have rarely encountered an enemy as devastating as the bacterium, Yersinia pestis. Between 1347 and 1351 it sparked the Black Death, an infection carried by fleas that spread rapidly across Europe killing around 50 million people.
Now scientists have uncovered some of the genetic secrets of the plague, thanks to DNA fragments drilled from the teeth of victims buried in a graveyard in London’s East Smithfield.
Professor Johannes Krause from the University of Tubingen, Germany, was a member of the research team. He said all current strains circulating in the world are directly related to the medieval bacterium.
“It turns out that this ancient Yersinia pestis strain is very close to the common ancestor of all modern strains that can infect humans,” he said.
“It’s the grandmother of all plague that’s around today.”
…
Rebuilding the genetic code of the bacterium from DNA fragments was not easy, say the scientists.
They removed teeth from skeletons found in an ancient graveyard in London located under what is now the Royal Mint.
Dr Kirsten Bos from McMaster University explained how the process worked.
“If you actually crack open an ancient tooth you see this dark black powdery material and that’s very likely to be dried up blood and other biological tissues.
“So what I did was I opened the tooth and opened the pulp chamber and with a drill bit made one pass through and I took out only about 30 milligrams of material, a very very small amount and that’s the material I used to do the DNA work.”
From the dental pulp the researchers were able to purify and enrich the pathogen’s DNA, and exclude material from human and fungal sources.
The researchers believe the techniques they have developed in this work can be used to study the genomes of many other ancient pathogens.
‘No Food Rights’ Judge Quits to Work for Monsanto Law Firm
October 13th, 2011There ought to be a RICO investigation into that f*cker.
Via: Food Freedom:
The Wisconsin judge who recently ruled that we have no right to own a cow or drink its milk resigned to join one of Monsanto’s law firms.
Former judge Patrick J. Fiedler now works for Axley Brynelson, LLP, which defended Monsanto against a patent infringement case filed by Australian firm, Genetic Technologies, Ltd. (GTL) in early 2010.
Harrisburg Files for Bankruptcy
October 13th, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which faces a state takeover of its finances, filed for bankruptcy protection after failing to pay the debt on a trash-to-energy incinerator.
The City Council made its 4-3 decision yesterday against the advice of a city attorney who said members did not follow proper procedure. It’s this year’s ninth bankruptcy filing by a municipal-bond issuer and the first by a U.S. state capital in at least three decades, said James Spiotto, a partner at Chapman & Cutler in Chicago who tracks such cases.
“This was a last resort,” said Mark D. Schwartz, the council’s Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania-based lawyer. “They’re at their wits’ end.”
Harrisburg is the biggest city to file for bankruptcy since Vallejo, California, in 2008, according to a ranking by Municipal Market Advisors, a Concord, Massachusetts, research firm. U.S. municipalities have been battered by the financial crisis. Harrisburg’s filing came less than a month after Alabama’s Jefferson County Commission voted to try to avert what would have been the nation’s biggest municipal bankruptcy, and nine months after Vallejo emerged.
Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’
October 13th, 2011Do you notice how this technocratic theocracy is the same old snake handling and sky god worship, but with “science” and computers? Same result, it just doesn’t look like a Pentecostal revival. Instead of people speaking in tongues and waving bibles, technocrats in suits are telling us that the machines will find the terrorists who live amongst us by “pro-actively mining the data.”
—One Magic 8 Ball to Rule Them All? Hallelujah, Brother, Praise the Lord
Some related posts:
Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation
Augmented Google Earth Gets Real-Time People, Cars, Clouds
AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance
Location Intelligence by TruePosition: System for Tracking People via Mobile Devices
General Council of U.S. National Security Agency: Americans Are Tracked Via Mobile Phones
Ok, I think you get the point…
Via: New York Times:
More than 60 years ago, in his “Foundation” series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science — psychohistory — that combined mathematics and psychology to predict the future.
Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones — to do the same thing.
The most optimistic researchers believe that these storehouses of “big data” will for the first time reveal sociological laws of human behavior — enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability, just as physicists and chemists can predict natural phenomena.
“This is a significant step forward,” said Thomas Malone, the director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We have vastly more detailed and richer kinds of data available as well as predictive algorithms to use, and that makes possible a kind of prediction that would have never been possible before.”
The government is showing interest in the idea. This summer a little-known intelligence agency began seeking ideas from academic social scientists and corporations for ways to automatically scan the Internet in 21 Latin American countries for “big data,” according to a research proposal being circulated by the agency. The three-year experiment, to begin in April, is being financed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa (pronounced eye-AR-puh), part of the office of the director of national intelligence.
The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption and movement of populations. It will use publicly accessible data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic webcams and changes in Wikipedia entries.
It is intended to be an entirely automated system, a “data eye in the sky” without human intervention, according to the program proposal. The research would not be limited to political and economic events, but would also explore the ability to predict pandemics and other types of widespread contagion, something that has been pursued independently by civilian researchers and by companies like Google.
Some social scientists and advocates of privacy rights are deeply skeptical of the project, saying it evokes queasy memories of Total Information Awareness, a post-9/11 Pentagon program that proposed hunting for potential attackers by identifying patterns in vast collections of public and private data: telephone calling records, e-mail, travel data, visa and passport information, and credit card transactions.
“I have Total Information Awareness flashbacks when things like this happen,” said David Price, an anthropologist at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash., who has written about cooperation between social scientists and intelligence agencies. “On the one hand it’s understandable for a nation-state to want to track things like the outbreak of a pandemic, but I have to wonder about the total automation of this and what productive will come of it.”
Iarpa officials declined to discuss the research program, saying they are prohibited from giving interviews until contract awards are made later this year.
X-37 Variant Might Carry Astronauts
October 12th, 2011Via: Wired:
The Air Force’s mysterious X-37B “space plane” is only on its second, eight-month-plus orbital mission, ostensibly conducting science experiments. But manufacturer Boeing has already drawn up plans for a major upgrade to the nimble, 29-foot-long robot — one that could more than double the vehicle’s size and make room for up to six astronauts.
AOL Launches New Unmanned ‘Lights Out’ Data Center
October 12th, 2011They role all the hardware issues into batch jobs that get dealt with by contractors.
I wonder how many years it will be before they build Ikea warehouse style data centers, where robots will actually pull and replace the defective server units? You could have a data center the size of a couple of football fields alert a pimply faced teenager or prison labor pool, when a stack of dead servers reaches a specified height.
A low wage meatsack would replace the dead server component or components and the repaired server would then be placed in an outgoing queue. A robot would return the server the rackspace when necessary. Scripts would handle the rest.
Wow, the prospects for IT work in the future look great!
Via: Data Center Knowledge:
AOL has begun operations at a new data center that will be completely unmanned, with all monitoring and management being handled remotely. The new “lights out” facility is part of a broader updating of AOL’s infrastructure that leverages virtualization and modular design to rapidly deploy and manage server capacity.
…
“Failures and issues on-site go into a planned maintenance mode,” said Manos. “We simply move the instances (or create new ones) to other data center facilities and the failed equipment is addressed in a scheduled way using outsourced or vendor partners. This is hugely cost beneficial for us as we can now build SLAs around the service without having to worry about the cost of staffing for ‘something to go wrong’.”
Related: Some Ikea Warehouses Run 24 Hours Per Day, In the Dark, with the Work Being Done by Robots
Solution to Real Estate Mess: Burn Down Homes
October 12th, 2011AIG Will Offer Reputation Insurance
October 12th, 2011Hilarious.
Via: New York Times:
Insurance providers are constantly coming up with new products to sell to policyholders. But the American International Group has hit upon one of the more unusual new services we’ve heard of in some time: reputation insurance.
Chartis, A.I.G.’s property and casualty insurance arm, said Tuesday that it would begin selling something called ReputationGuard. Created by Chartis’s executive liability team, it would give policyholders access to “a select panel” of experts at the public relations firms Burson-Marsteller and Porter Novelli to protect against negative publicity.
A.I.G. knows a little bit about crisis communications, of course. After its initial $65 billion bailout by the government, the insurer became a target of widespread scorn, its very name a shorthand for the excesses that led to the financial crisis.
Research Credit: ms
Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll
October 12th, 2011Via: CounterPunch:
If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.
The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.
New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.
The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.
Research Credit: noncompliant
U.S. Claims to Have Disrupted Iranian Terror Plot
October 12th, 2011Oh, well, if Tom Kean is on board, there should be no doubts at all about the veracity of these claims. *chortle*
Via: CNN:
The FBI and the DEA have disrupted a plot involving Iran to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States and commit other attacks, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Two men – one arrested, the other at large – have been charged in connection with the plot, which the Justice Department says was directed by elements of the Iranian government.
The Justice Department says one of the men – Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalized U.S. citizen holding an Iranian passport – arranged to hire for the assassination someone in Mexico who he thought was an associate of a drug trafficking cartel. The person in Mexico actually was a DEA confidential source who was posing as a cartel associate, the Justice Department says.
Follow below for the latest developments and read the Justice Department complaint (PDF).
[Updated at 7:41 p.m. ET] Tom Kean, former chairman of the 9/11 Commission said the alleged plot “surprises me.” Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett, Kean said the plot is “pretty close to an act of war. You don’t go in somebody’s capital to blow somebody up.”
Research Credit: RD
