Meet the weeds that Monsanto can't beat
Instead of the supposed revolution in agriculture that Monsato's GM seeds were meant to bring, the opposite effect has occurred – a rise in herbicide use
When Monsanto revolutionised agriculture with a line of genetically engineered seeds, the promise was that the technology would lower herbicide use – because farmers would have to spray less. In fact, as Washington State University researcher Chuch Benbrook has shown, just the opposite happened. |  |
Mayan apocalypse: songs and a shrug at French village in media glare
As the village bells struck noon, the moment at which the Mayans had supposedly predicted the world would end, Sylvain Durif was calmly playing the panpipes for a vast crowd of jostling camera crews. "I am Oriana, I embody the energy of cosmic Christ," he said. "When I was five I was abducted by a flying saucer belonging to the Virgin Mary. I'm here to get my message to the world, that there will be a regeneration.".
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Mysterious Attacks Leave Livestock Earless in Kentucky
An unknown animal is attacking, but not eating, livestock in Kentucky, leaving many of the victims with gnawed or detached ears.
According to WAVE News, the attacks have been ongoing for several weeks in Shelby County, Ky. At least five goats have had to be put to sleep due to their injuries, and a goat named Polka-dot has been left with just one ear. Kevin Cox, the local farmer who owns Polka-dot, has also had several of his bulls attacked, he told the news organization. |  |
Hacking the Human Brain: The Next Domain of Warfare
It’s been fashionable in military circles to talk about cyberspace as a “fifth domain” for warfare, along with land, space, air and sea. But there’s a sixth and arguably more important warfighting domain emerging: the human brain.
This new battlespace is not just about influencing hearts and minds with people seeking information. It’s about involuntarily penetrating, shaping, and coercing the mind in the ultimate realization of Clausewitz’s definition of war: compelling an adversary to submit to one’s will. And the most powerful tool in this war is brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, which connect the human brain to devices. |  |
Seeing God in the Third Millennium
There are many carefully documented accounts in the medical literature of intense, life-altering religious experience in epileptic seizures. Hallucinations of overwhelming intensity, sometimes accompanied by a sense of bliss and a strong feeling of the numinous, can occur especially with the so-called "ecstatic" seizures that may occur in temporal lobe epilepsy. Though such seizures may be brief, they can lead to a fundamental reorientation, a metanoia, in one's life.
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Your Alarm Clock May Be Hazardous to Your Health
One overlooked culprit in the world’s obesity epidemic may be the alarm clock, according to Till Roenneberg, a professor at the University of Munich’s Institute of Medical Psychology.
He studies “social jet lag,” a term he coined, perhaps not surprisingly, on an airplane. But unlike the jet lag you get from shifting time zones, social jet lag is the chronic clash between what our bodies need (more sleep) and what our lives demand (being on time). And his research suggests that it’s playing havoc with our biological clocks. |  |
Do Humans Have a Biological Stopwatch?
When we witness the passage of time, according to noted physicist Paul Davies, we are actually observing how the “later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember.” In that sense time is like a movie: We are seeing slightly altered images playing in rapid succession.
That might explain why we perceive time as moving forward, but it fails to account for why we often perceive time moving at varying speeds. Why does it speed up when we’re having fun, but slow down when we’re bored? Most of us are fairly good at measuring short time intervals—seconds, minutes—but neuroscientists aren’t sure how we do it. |  |
Fit for Flight? Space Tourism Lacks Medical Standards
The rise of space tourism is going to bring a new headache to doctors' doors: whether or not to approve their patients for spaceflight. Worse, a new paper cautions, there is no established protocol in place to judge a person fit for making the trip.
The new study stops short of suggesting rigid regulation, saying that too much of it would hurt the space tourism industry before it even gets off the ground. Rather, the researchers encourage doctors to "consider developing a resource file for future reference.". |  |
California meteorite called rare, speedy
DAVIS, Calif., Dec. 20 (UPI) -- A meteorite that lit up the sky over California last spring was fast, rare and traveled a highly eccentric orbital route to get to Earth, scientists say.
A 70-member international team has published its findings in the journal Science about the cosmic object that created a fireball over the Sierra foothills in Northern California. The meteorite that fell April 21 was a carbonaceous chondrite, the rarest type known to hit Earth, and was made up of of cosmic dust and presolar materials that helped form the planets in the earliest age of the solar system, they said. |  |
Mexico's war on cartels made drug crisis worse, says new government
The fracturing of Mexico's organised crime syndicates by a government-led crackdown on drug cartels has created between 60 and 80 new trafficking gangs, according to the nation's attorney general – far more than were active six years ago.
Speaking on Mexican radio on Tuesday, the attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, said former president Felipe Calderón's efforts to stamp out drug trafficking by going after the kingpins had only succeeded in splintering the gangs, spawning many smaller and more dangerous criminal syndicates. |  |
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