Key Figures In CIA-Crack Cocaine Scandal Begin To Come Forward

October 11th, 2014

Via: Huffington Post:

Two years before the Iran-Contra scandal would begin to bubble up in the Reagan White House, pilot William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee revealed to then-Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) that planes would routinely transport cocaine back to the U.S. after dropping off arms for the Nicaraguan rebels. Plumlee has since spoken in detail about the flights in media interviews.

“In March, 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver Senate Office and … raised several issues including that covert U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved in the smuggling and distribution of drugs to raise funds for covert military operations against the government of Nicaragua,” a copy of a 1991 letter from Hart to Kerry reads. (Hart told HuffPost he recalls receiving Plumlee’s letter and finding his allegations worthy of follow-up.)

Plumlee flew weapons into Latin America for decades for the CIA. When the Contra revolution took off in the 1980s, Plumlee says he continued to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with him, with the blessing of the U.S. government.


Documentary Film Claims That There Is Another NSA Leaker with Higher Rank Than Snowden

October 11th, 2014

Via: The Hollywood Reporter:

A second National Security Agency whistleblower exists within the ranks of government intelligence.

That bombshell comes toward the end of Citizenfour, a new documentary from filmmaker Laura Poitras about NSA informant Edward Snowden that had its world premiere on Friday at the New York Film Festival.

In the key scene, journalist Glenn Greenwald visits Snowden at a hotel room in Moscow. Fearing they are being taped, Greenwald communicates with Snowden via pen and paper.

While some of the exchanges are blurred for the camera, it becomes clear that Greenwald wants to convey that another government whistleblower — higher in rank than Snowden — has come forward.

The revelation clearly shocks Snowden, whose mouth drops open when he reads the details of the informant’s leak.

Also revealed by Greenwald is the fact that 1.2 million Americans are currently on a government watch-list. Among them is Poitras herself.


Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics

October 10th, 2014

Via: MIT Technology Review:

In 2012, physicists in the Netherlands announced a discovery in particle physics that started chatter about a Nobel Prize. Inside a tiny rod of semiconductor crystal chilled cooler than outer space, they had caught the first glimpse of a strange particle called the Majorana fermion, finally confirming a prediction made in 1937. It was an advance seemingly unrelated to the challenges of selling office productivity software or competing with Amazon in cloud computing, but Craig Mundie, then heading Microsoft’s technology and research strategy, was delighted. The abstruse discovery—partly underwritten by Microsoft—was crucial to a project at the company aimed at making it possible to build immensely powerful computers that crunch data using quantum physics. “It was a pivotal moment,” says Mundie. “This research was guiding us toward a way of realizing one of these systems.”

Microsoft is now almost a decade into that project and has just begun to talk publicly about it. If it succeeds, the world could change dramatically.

Microsoft has yet to even build a qubit. But in the kind of paradox that can be expected in the realm of quantum physics, it may also be closer than anyone else to making quantum computers practical. The company is developing a new kind of qubit, known as a topological qubit, based largely on that 2012 discovery in the Netherlands. There’s good reason to believe this design will be immune from the flakiness plaguing existing qubits. It will be better suited to mass production, too. “What we’re doing is analogous to setting out to make the first transistor,” says Peter Lee, Microsoft’s head of research. His company is also working on how the circuits of a computer made with topological qubits might be designed and controlled. And Microsoft researchers working on algorithms for quantum computers have shown that a machine made up of only hundreds of qubits could run chemistry simulations beyond the capacity of any existing supercomputer.


Number of Ebola Cases ‘Probably Doubling Every Three to Four Weeks’

October 10th, 2014

Via: Irish Independent:

The UN special envoy on Ebola says the number of cases is probably doubling every three to four weeks and the response needs to be 20 times greater than it was at the beginning of October.


E-Cat Third Party Test: COP Between 3.2 and 3.6

October 10th, 2014

Via: Network World:

Yesterday a new paper was published on a Swedish blog titled Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel. The paper was authored by Giuseppe Levi (Bologna University, Bologna, Italy), Evelyn Foschi (Bologna, Italy), Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson and Lars Tegnér (Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden), and Hanno Essén (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden); all members of the previous test team. Their conclusion?

The measured energy balance between input and output heat yielded a COP factor of about 3.2 and 3.6 for the 1260 ºC and 1400 ºC runs, respectively. The total net energy obtained during the 32 days run was about 1.5 MWh. This amount of energy is far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.


Most U.S. Food Labeled ‘Natural’ Contains GMOs

October 10th, 2014

Via: Russia Today:

Nearly all US packaged food with a “natural” label in fact contains high levels of genetically modified ingredients, tests by the product testing watchdog Consumer Reports reveal.

Consumer Reports said its study included more than 80 different processed foods containing corn or soy – the two most prevalent genetically modified crops in the US – to determine if the “natural” labels was in fact true, Reuters reports.

The conclusion: consumers are being deceived by the “natural” label, Urvashi Rangan, executive director of Consumer Reports Food Safety and Sustainability, told the agency.

While the “non-GMO” and “organic” labels proved trustworthy, the study found that nearly all of the food bearing the natural “label” contained substantial amounts of GMO ingredients. The watchdog tested a minimum of two samples from each of the 80 products, which were purchased between April and July 2014.

Products considered to be GMO-free contained no more than 0.9 percent genetically modified corn or soy, a stricter standard than that employed by the US government.

Current US Department of Agriculture regulations allow food products that contain 95-100 percent certified organic ingredients to use the USDA Organic seal.

Consumer Reports has long spearheaded a campaign to eliminate the “natural” label from grocery shelves.

Research Credit: Windhorse


Tesla Model S Gains Autopilot

October 10th, 2014

Via: cNet:

…Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk announced at an event in Los Angeles that every car manufactured over the last two weeks comes with new sensor hardware to enable what he calls Autopilot capabilities.

The Autopilot hardware includes forward-looking radar and camera, combined with all-around long-range ultrasonic sensors. A software update being sent out to cars as an over-the-air update will enable driver assistance features such as adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping assist and automated parking.

In addition, Musk said owners will be able to summon their cars, or set a calendar so the cars will meet them at a prearranged spot. However, this capability will only be enabled on private property to avoid liability issues.


UW Fusion Reactor Concept Could Be Cheaper Than Coal

October 8th, 2014

Via: University of Washington:

Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply.

Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven’t penciled out. Fusion power designs aren’t cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.

The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Fusion Energy Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“Right now, this design has the greatest potential of producing economical fusion power of any current concept,” said Thomas Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics and an adjunct professor in physics.

The UW’s reactor, called the dynomak, started as a class project taught by Jarboe two years ago. After the class ended, Jarboe and doctoral student Derek Sutherland – who previously worked on a reactor design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – continued to develop and refine the concept.

The design builds on existing technology and creates a magnetic field within a closed space to hold plasma in place long enough for fusion to occur, allowing the hot plasma to react and burn. The reactor itself would be largely self-sustaining, meaning it would continuously heat the plasma to maintain thermonuclear conditions. Heat generated from the reactor would heat up a coolant that is used to spin a turbine and generate electricity, similar to how a typical power reactor works.

“This is a much more elegant solution because the medium in which you generate fusion is the medium in which you’re also driving all the current required to confine it,” Sutherland said.

Research Credit: SWS


Cancer and Artificial Turf

October 8th, 2014

Via: NBC:

Soccer coach Amy Griffin was in a Seattle hospital visiting a young goalie who was receiving chemotherapy when a nurse said something that made the hair on Griffin’s neck stand up.

It was 2009. Two young female goalies Griffin knew had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Griffin, associate head coach for the University of Washington’s women’s soccer team, had started to visit the women and other athletes in local hospitals, helping them pass the time during chemo with war stories from her three decades of coaching.

That day, the nurse looked down at the woman Griffin was sitting with and said, “Don’t tell me you guys are goalkeepers. You’re the fourth goalkeeper I’ve hooked up this week.”

Later, the young woman with the chemo needle in her arm would say, “I just have a feeling it has something to do with those black dots.”

Artificial turf fields are now everywhere in the United States, from high schools to multi-million-dollar athletic complexes. As any parent or player who has been on them can testify, the tiny black rubber crumbs of which the fields are made — chunks of old tires — get everywhere. In players’ uniforms, in their hair, in their cleats.

Watch NBC Nightly News for More on Concerns about Synthetic Fields

But for goalkeepers, whose bodies are in constant contact with the turf, it can be far worse. In practices and games, they make hundreds of dives, and each plunge sends a black cloud of tire pellets into the air. The granules get into their cuts and scrapes, and into their mouths. Griffin wondered if those crumbs – which have been known to contain carcinogens and chemicals – were making players sick.

“I’ve coached for 26, 27 years,” she said. “My first 15 years, I never heard anything about this. All of a sudden it seems to be a stream of kids.”

Since then, Griffin has compiled a list of 38 American soccer players — 34 of them goalies – who have been diagnosed with cancer. At least a dozen played in Washington, but the geographic spread is nationwide. Blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia dominate the list.


China Overtook U.S. as World’s Largest Economy

October 8th, 2014

Via: Business Insider:

Sorry, America. China just overtook the US to become the world’s largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Chris Giles at the Financial Times flagged up the change. He also alerted us back in April this year that it was all about to happen.

Basically, the method used by the IMF adjusts for purchasing power parity, explained here.

The simple logic is that prices aren’t the same in each country: A shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than San Francisco, so it’s not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist’s Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.

So the IMF measures both GDP in market exchange terms, and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world’s biggest economy.


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