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The Oxford University researcher called on the government and private companies to join forces and thoroughly investigate the effects that computer games, the internet and social networking sites such as Twitter may have on the brain.

Lady Greenfield has coined the term “mind change” to describe differences that arise in the brain as a result of spending long periods of time on a computer. Many scientists believe it is too early to know whether these changes are a cause for concern.

“We need to recognise this is an issue rather than sweeping it under the carpet,” Greenfield said. “We should acknowledge that it is bringing an unprecedented change in our lives and we have to work out whether it is for good or bad.”

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“We have got to be very careful about what price we are paying, that the things that are being lost don’t outweigh the things gained,” Greenfield said. “Every single parent I have spoken to so far is concerned. I have yet to find a parent who says ‘I am really pleased that my kid is spending so much time in front of the computer’.”

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London and co-author of the book The Learning Brain, agreed that more research was needed to know whether technology was causing significant changes in the brain. “We know nothing at all about how the developing brain is being influenced by video games or social networking and so on.

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Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of Proust and the Squid, said that brain circuits honed by reading books and thinking about their content could be lost as people spend more time on computers.

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The majority of consumer soaps claiming to be “antibacterial” or “antimicrobial” contain the chemicals triclosan or triclocarban. FDA first proposed a rule that would have removed these chemicals from soaps in 1978. Until this rule is finalized, these chemicals can be widely used with no regulatory oversight — despite evidence that they are not effective and numerous studies associate them with serious health risks. The growing use of these chemicals in products has led to widespread residues in the environment and in people; recent bio-monitoring results found residues of triclosan in 75 percent of Americans over the age of six. The chemicals are absorbed through contact with the skin and tests have found them in human blood, urine and even breast milk.

Laboratory studies have shown that these chemicals are endocrine-disruptors capable of interfering with hormones critical for normal development and reproduction. Such hormonal interference has the potential to cause long-term health problems including poor sperm quality and infertility, and damage to the developing brain leading to poor learning and memory. Several studies suggest that triclosan and triclocarban also may contribute to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

In April, FDA acknowledged soaps containing triclosan offer no additional benefit over regular soap and water. FDA also expressed concern about the development of antibiotic resistance from using antibacterial products and about triclosan’s potential long-term health effects, but did not move ahead on the rule-making.

Reminiscent of the “Collar of Obedience” from Star Trek, this new helmet according to it’s creator William J Tyler at Arizona State University, will be able to non-invasively produce all the same effects that are now possible only through deep surgical implants.  Employing a form of targeted ultrasound technology, the “Helmet of Obedience” will be able to manipulate pain and motivational centers in the brain at a finer scale than even current magnetic stimulation.

It’s no mystery what agencies would be interested in this sort of technology and Tyler makes it painfully clear who his handlers are.  According to Tyler, “We look forward to developing a close working relationship with DARPA and other Department of Defense and U.S. Intelligence Communities to bring some of these applications to fruition over the coming years depending on the most pressing needs of our country’s defense industries.” [ref]

Certainly, everyone is well aware how the poor, under-equipped, under-funded largest military industrial complex in the world has such “pressing needs” for this new technology.

But wait there’s more.  Tyler is obviously a man with lots of DARPA grant money and time on his hands. When he’s not busy developing the “Helmet of Obedience”, he’s hard at work on another much needed technology that will become a boon to mankind: MyBrainCloud.net.

According to Tyler, “MyBrainCloud.net is a concept application of noninvasive brain stimulation using pulsed ultrasound, which is likely to emerge in the future. The concept is essentially to provide individual users with a personalized connection port through which various brain stimulation protocols can be administered in an open access manner using cloud computing. This technology has many broad applications ranging from at-home medicine to recreational applications such as interactive video gaming and virtual experience downloading.” [ref]

So it looks like Tyler might go down in history as the inventor of not only the Star Trek-style “Helmet of Obedience” but also the Matrix-style human-machine interface port; two dystopian science fiction inventions in one career.  Now that’s a level of achievement even the most egotistical, Harvard-educated, grant whore could be proud of putting on their CV.

Boeing says the first SolarEagle under the $89 million contract could fly as early as 2014.

12 mad science projects that could shake the world

The SolarEagle is built under DARPA’s Vulture program. The idea is to build a single aircraft that could support traditional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance functions over country-sized areas – while at the same time providing an unblinking eye over a critical target, monitoring that target night and day, day in and day out, month after month – providing unprecedented high-value intelligence. Vulture aircraft will also be able to provide communications capabilities available today only from geostationary satellites – offering opportunities for new, more flexible, expandable and relocatable communication architectures at a fraction of the cost of dedicated satellite capabilities. The challenges with Vulture include developing solar cell, energy storage, and reliability technologies that will allow the aircraft to operate continuously, unrefueled for over 44,000 hours, DARPA stated.

Under the Vulture II agreement, Boeing will develop a full-scale flight demonstrator, including maturation of the critical power system and structures technologies. Key suppliers for the program include Versa Power Systems and QinetiQ.

The bodies were floating facedown and tethered by ropes to the shore, their mud-covered limbs and rumps protruding from the water.

Wei is a fisher of dead people. He scans the river for cadavers, drags them to shore with a small boat and then charges grieving families to recover their relatives’ corpses. Wei said he kept the faces submerged to preserve their features. Any dispute about identity makes it harder to collect his bounty.

Wei doesn’t worry about how they got here, but he’s heard tales over the years from relatives who’ve come to claim the bodies, haunting portraits of average people crushed in the extraordinary stress of China’s economic boom.

While some of the 80 to 100 bodies Wei gathers each year are victims of accidents and floods, he thinks that the majority end up in the river after suicide or murder. There’s no overt sign of a crime spree, though there’s evidence of many people taking their own lives. Indeed, suicide is the leading cause of death for women in rural China, and 26 percent of all suicides in the world take place in the nation, according to the World Health Organization

Most of the bodies apparently are swept downriver from Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu in the country’s northwest. The city boasts rows of new skyscrapers, built by a rush of poor laborers with few rights, and businessmen notorious for operating above the law.

The work of “body fishers” has received increased attention in Chinese media lately, including the release of a documentary about a clan of them who work near Wei. One English-language state newspaper described the profession as “living on the dead”; it noted that the filmmaker saw the family retrieving bodies almost daily.

Wei’s fishing spot is about 18 miles from Lanzhou. A bend in the river and a hydroelectric dam slow the currents and give the bodies a place to float to the surface.

The family members who come to claim them whisper about a father who, unable to make ends meet with low pay, killed himself by jumping off a bridge. Wei also has retrieved bodies with gagged mouths and bound hands, the hallmark of criminal gangs and corrupt police. Finally, there are the remains of young women whom no one recognizes, which Wei eventually cuts loose back into the river, he said.

“Most of the bodies that are not claimed by relatives are female migrant workers who had moved to Lanzhou,” said Wei, who drives a red motorcycle and wears large circle-rimmed sunglasses. “Most of them have been murdered. … Their families don’t know; they think they’re still working in Lanzhou.”

The families who are left to search for the deceased often do so without much help from the police and, instead, have to haggle with men such as Wei over the price of the dead.

A Lanzhou business journal wrote in 2006 about a local firm that got a call from a body fisher who’d found a corpse floating in the river with employee identification. When a company representative, identified only by the surname Wang, went to collect the body, he was told that it would cost 200 yuan (about $30) to view the face and 6,000 yuan ($895) to take the dead man away. Wang and the body fisher argued, finally settling on 4,000 yuan ($597). The news article expressed outrage at the situation and quoted police as saying there’d be a crackdown, something that almost four years later has yet to happen.

Body fishing is by all accounts a thriving business in Gansu province; practitioners advertise their names and phone numbers by painting them on the sides of buildings near the river. Chinese newspapers and news websites have run stories recently about body fishers working from the southwest mega-city of Chonqing to the eastern coastal province of Shandong.

Wei and others said they called the police when they’d found murder victims, though it isn’t clear that’s always the case.

“They’re not only making a business from this, but they’re cheating people,” said Zhu Wenhuan, a Lanzhou man who’s visited Wei twice looking for his mother after she vanished June 3.

Dubbed a glucose biofuel cell, the implant gets its juice from glucose—aka blood sugar—and oxygen, both of which are naturally present in the fluids between a body’s cells.

In a recent study, researchers created a test version of their glucose biofuel cell and implanted it in a white lab rat named Ricky. The rat sported the device successfully for 11 days and suffered no ill effects.

Wires running from the fuel cell out of the rat’s neck showed that the device was producing a significant amount of energy.

James F. Powers Jr. has basically gone underground since Tuesday, when Gov. Ed Rendell denounced a $103,000 no-bid contract that Mr. Powers had given to the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, which has offices in Philadelphia and Israel.

Mr. Powers, who makes $106,602 a year, hasn’t been returning phone calls from the news media this week and was said to be out of his office when a reporter stopped in on Wednesday. He did not return a call to his home and his office turned down a request to interview him.

Mr. Powers, who lives in Carlisle, served in the Army from 1971 to 2001 in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Korea and Washington.

The Rendell administration chose him in June 2006 to direct the state Office of Homeland Security, part of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

A combination of the recession and growing awareness in the shipping industry about climate change emissions encouraged many ship owners to adopt “slow steaming” to save fuel two years ago. This lowered speeds from the standard 25 knots to 20 knots, but many major companies have now taken this a stage further by adopting “super-slow steaming” at speeds of 12 knots (about 14mph).

Travel times between the US and China, or between Australia and Europe, are now comparable to those of the great age of sail in the 19th century. American clippers reached 14 to 17 knots in the 1850s, with the fastest recording speeds of 22 knots or more.

Maersk, the world’s largest shipping line, with more than 600 ships, has adapted its giant marine diesel engines to travel at super-slow speeds without suffering damage. This reduces fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 30%. It is believed that the company has saved more than £65m on fuel since it began its go-slow.

One of the most incendiary details in the documents is that Blackwater, through Total Intelligence, sought to become the “intel arm” of Monsanto, offering to provide operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm.

Governmental recipients of intelligence services and counterterrorism training from Prince’s companies include the Kingdom of Jordan, the Canadian military and the Netherlands police, as well as several US military bases, including Fort Bragg, home of the elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and Fort Huachuca, where military interrogators are trained, according to the documents. In addition, Blackwater worked through the companies for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the US European Command.

On September 3 the New York Times reported that Blackwater had “created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq.” The documents obtained by The Nation reveal previously unreported details of several such companies and open a rare window into the sensitive intelligence and security operations Blackwater performs for a range of powerful corporations and government agencies. The new evidence also sheds light on the key roles of several former top CIA officials who went on to work for Blackwater.