WikiLeaks to release video of civilians, journalists being murdered in airstrike
Whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks is planning to release a video that reveals what it’s calling a Pentagon “cover-up” of an incident in which numerous civilians and journalists were murdered in an airstrike, according to a recent media advisory.

The video will be released on April 5 at the National Press Club, the group said.

They also noted their members have recently been tailed by individuals under State Department diplomatic immunity, and that “one related person was detained for 22 hours” while authorities seized computer equipment.

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Professor Michel Mayor, the scientist who led the team that identified the first extrasolar planet in 1995, believes a planet similar in size and composition to Earth will soon be found.

Prof Mayor, of Geneva University, said that the prospect of finding a planet habitable for humans had come a step closer through rapid technological advances allowing observation of planets outside the solar system.

Addressing a Royal Society conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme, he said: “The search for twins of Earth is motivated by the ultimate prospect of finding sites with favourable conditions for the development of life. Read the full story

Understanding how to control light in this way has important implications for laser technology used in wide a range of industries.

Dr Mark Dennis from the University of Bristol and lead author on the paper, explained: “In a light beam, the flow of light through space is similar to water flowing in a river. Although it often flows in a straight line – out of a torch, laser pointer, etc – light can also flow in whirls and eddies, forming lines in space called ‘optical vortices’.

“Along these lines, or optical vortices, the intensity of the light is zero (black). The light all around us is filled with these dark lines, even though we can’t see them”. Read the full story

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. Read the full story

Of the billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, 15 percent may host “twins” of our solar system, a new study says.

While that might not sound like much, the find suggests that several hundred million star systems look a lot like the one we call home, the study authors say.

The research is based on surveys of stars with gas giant planets—similar to Jupiter and Saturn—that orbit far from their stars. Read the full story

(NaturalNews) The CDC is engaged in a very clever, statistically devious spin campaign, and nearly every journalist in the mainstream media has fallen for its ploy. No one has yet reported what I’m about to reveal here.

It all started with the CDC’s recent release of new statistics about swine flu fatalities, infection rates and vaccination rates. According to the CDC:

• 61 million Americans were vaccinated against swine flu (about 20% of the U.S. population). The CDC calls this a “success” even though it means 4 out of 5 people rejected the vaccines. Read the full story

About 80 percent of Americans approve of medical marijuana laws, but some conservatives are incensed that state legislatures keep passing them. In a recent column, George F. Will, the Washington Post’s bow-tied curmudgeon, decried the reefer madness he sees taking over California, sweeping across Colorado and perhaps even coming to a normal state near you. Read the full story

Scientists have detected a flash of light from across the Galaxy so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The flash was brighter than anything ever detected from beyond our Solar System and lasted over a tenth of a second. NASA and European satellites and many radio telescopes detected the flash and its aftermath on December 27, 2004. Two science teams report about this event at a special press event today at NASA headquarters. A multitude of papers are planned for publication.

Read the full story

How much entertainment versus news can be found in American mainstream television news shows? Read the full story

ScienceDaily (Dec. 26, 2009) — The “magnetically best shielded room on earth” has the size of an apartment block and is located on the site of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Institute Berlin. Magnetic fields such as that of the earth are kept out here as effective as nowhere else. Such ideal conditions allow to measure the tiny magnetic fields of, e.g., the human heart.

This was the motivation for the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ask PTB to jointly test a newly developed optical magnetic field sensor. It is based on a physical principle very different from SQUIDs, which are usually applied for biomagnetic field measurements. The optical sensor does not need advanced cooling and has the size of a lump of sugar. A high-quality measurement of the human heart signal was demonstrated using this optical sensor. The sensor’s suitability was thus proven for biomagnetic measurements in the picotesla range. In future magnetocardiographic measurement devices — to be used as a supplement or an alternative to the ECG — could become simpler and less expensive.

Up until now one had to cool as much as one could for biomagnetic measurements. This was necessary as SQUIDs, superconducting quantum interference devices, work optimally at -269 degrees Celsius and can only then fulfil their purpose of measuring tiny magnetic fields. SQUIDs are the best suited sensors to record the magnetic fields arising during the electrical activity of the human heart. A magnetocardiogram (MCG) can be compiled supplementing a conventional electrocardiogram (ECG). (The same applies to the magnetoencephalogram, MEG, which is a recording of the magnetic field of the brain.) Yet to use SQUIDs requires well-shielded rooms and complicated cooling systems. The latter might become obsolete in the future if the optical magnetometer developed by NIST continues to fulfil expectations.

Read More:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

It looks like the tagline “Chris Brown album in stores everywhere on December 8th” was a bit of an overstatement -  at least in his opinion. The R&B singer is accusing Walmart of intentionally not selling his new album, Grafitti. It all started two weeks ago when fans of the 20-year-old singer claimed that they were having difficulty finding the album at mainstream CD retailers. To investigate what he determined as “major retailers blackballing his album”, Brown visited a Walmart  store in Wallingford, Connecticut last weekend and found that the store did not have his album on shelves and also did not have any copies of his CD in stock. Read the full story

The latest calculation of the National Debt as posted by the Treasury Department has – at least numerically – exceeded the statutory Debt Limit approved by Congress last February as part of the Recovery Act stimulus bill.

The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.

A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some “extraordinary accounting tools” it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling. Read the full story

WASHINGTON, DC (Herald de Paris) - EXCLUSIVE - Researchers have revealed the first images from the Caribbean sea floor of what they believe are the archaeological remains of an ancient civilization.  Guarding the location’s coordinates carefully, the project’s leader, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, says the city could be thousands of years old; possibly even pre-dating the ancient Egyptian pyramids, at Giza. Read the full story

Tiger Woods isn’t just America’s greatest golfer, and he isn’t just America’s greatest philanderer. He’s also America’s greatest vocabulary teacher.

Woods hasn’t yet spoken publicly in the two weeks since his mysterious car accident led to a media feeding frenzy about his sex life. But he has issued a couple of public statements on TigerWoods.com, and in those statements he showed a grasp of the English language that was apparently too difficult for some. Read the full story

Bangalore: Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) are on the brink of a path-breaking discovery. They may have found signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon.

They believe so because scientific instruments on India’s first unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface, Surendra Pal, associate director, Isro Satellite Centre (Isac), said at the international radar symposium here on Friday. Read the full story

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story. Read the full story