Dr. Mercola, GuestIn the video below, Funny or Die pokes fun at Monsanto’s “feeding the world” message by highlighting some of the most obvious features of genetically engineered (GE) foods, such as the unnatural crossing of genetic material between plant and animal kingdoms, the use of toxic chemicals and Monsanto’s ever-expanding monopoly.“I own everything!” Mama Monsanto exclaims, and that’s pretty close to the truth. Monsanto [...]
Irwin Ozborne, ContributorThanksgiving: Celebrating all that we have, and the genocide it took to get it.Thanksgiving is one of the most paradoxical times of the year. We gather together with friends and family in celebration of all that we are thankful for and express our gratitude, at the same time we are encouraged to eat in excess. But the irony really starts the next day on Black Friday. On Thursday we appreciate all the simple things in life, such as having a meal, a roof over [...]
Vic Bishop, Staff WriterIt’s not too often that you see the mainstream be honest about what it is that makes themmainstream. Media is big money and has significant influence in our lives, and at present a mere 6 corporations own 90% of all the mediathat makes it into your mediasphere. Voices critical of this power structure are rarely heard on the big networks, however, sometimes the truth gets through.Take this eye-opening cartoon for example.In 1998, cartoonist Robert Sm [...]
By Mercedes Kirkel My mother is in the hospital and seems like she may be dying. Like many elderly people who seem to be approaching death, her process has been up and down, and none of us really know if this will be “it.” The sense I have is that she’s hovering between the worlds. […]
Jack Hanna is the Director Emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and the host of Jack Hanna’s Wild Countdown and Jack Hanna’s Into the Wild television shows.
Primatologist Jane Goodall's recent statement calling for the closing of zoos and aquariums such as Sea World obviously has big money wildlife theme parks very nervous. Firing back with their side of the debate is Jack Hanna, Director Emeritus (which means now retired) of the Columbus Zoo, through a Time.com feature story penned by Hanna entitled, Jack Hanna: What Zoo Critics Don’t Understand, a one-sided dialogue of pro-zoo and pro-aquarium absurdity. Isn't it funny that so often those who possess, let's say, cagey attitudes towards human and animal rights believe it is the rest of us who don't 'understand' something, and if we could just find a way to understand, then we'd see things their way.
This weak and quite scattered opposing view offered by Hanna begins its argument against animal rights supporters and their efforts to free wild life from their theme park imprisonment by first declaring just how popular zoos and aquariums are with folks. Oh well, gee, say no more Jack. Popular? Slavery was pretty popular with some folks too, perhaps we should rethink that whole abolition thing? Do go on. And on Hanna did just that.
Realizing quickly the only direction this lopsided piece could possibly go from that genius insight, I bit down hard and finished the article, which to me read more like a paid endorsement from those establishments that profit greatly from the abduction, caging, and exploitation of defenseless animals. I made it all the way to the point where the popular wildlife celebrity, whose biggest talent appears to be how he makes so many immediately see how the world was such a better place when Steve Irwin was in it, actually said that animals need to be in cages because there's not enough room for them in the wild. Here is the segment written by Jack Hanna as posted on time.com.
"Critics say the only place animals belong is in the wild, but those boundaries are shrinking each day. Having traveled the world, the only places I consider truly “wild” are Antarctica, parts of the Amazon and some places in Africa. Even in Africa, the “wild” places tend to be national parks with guarded boundaries. Animals face many challenges, including habitat loss, poaching, severe weather, and war. The “wild” is not necessarily the idyllic place people imagine..."
And you have just the 'idyllic place' for animals at your Columbus zoo, don't you Jack?
The official crew poster for the International Space Station's 42nd expedition parodies "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." NASA astronaut Terry Virts and Russia's Anton Shkaplerov portray the two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox, Russia's Alexander Samokutyaev is Humma Kavula, NASA's Butch Wilmore is Arthur Dent, Russia's Elena Serova is Ford Prefect and Italy's Samantha Cristoforetti is Trillian. NASA's Robonaut 2 guest-stars as Marvin the Paranoid Android.
What do astronauts and cosmonauts, a towel and a paranoid android have in common? The answer is 42.
The International Space Station's Expedition 42 crew members, who are due to assemble aboard the orbiting laboratory in November, have embraced the connection between their numerical designation and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," the Douglas Adams sci-fi franchise, by adopting its imagery and slogans for their official poster and unofficial patch.
"I was super excited when I was assigned to an [space station] expedition, mostly because I was assigned to an ISS expedition, of course, but part of the excitement was that it was 42," Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian astronaut representing the European Space Agency, said in a recent press briefing. "I am a big science fiction fan, and one of the things I really love is this 'trilogy in five parts' that some of you might know."
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is the first of five comedic science fiction books penned by Adams, as well as the title of the book within the novels. The story follows Arthur Dent as he narrowly escapes the destruction of the Earth and, with his friend Ford Prefect, explores the galaxy in search of a decent cup of tea and the meaning of everything.
"In this book, it is kind of funny, but '42' is the 'answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything,'" Cristoforetti said. "Now, nobody knows what the question is, but 42 is the answer."
Following a trend that began during the now-retired shuttle program, the Expedition 42 crew — Cristoforetti, together with commander Butch Wilmore and flight engineers Terry Virts, Alexander Samokutyayev, Elena Serova and Anton Shkaplerov — selected a movie poster to parody for their official crew poster.
In the spring a group of astronomers who go by the name of Bicep announced that they had detected ripples in the sky, gravitational waves that were the opening notes of the Big Bang. The finding was heralded as potentially the greatest discovery of the admittedly young century, but some outside astronomers said the group had underestimated the extent to which interstellar dust could have contaminated the results — a possibility that the group conceded in its official report in June.
Now a long-awaited report by astronomers using data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite has confirmed that criticism, concluding that there was enough dust in Bicep’s view of the sky to produce the swirly patterns without recourse to primordial gravitational waves.
“We show that even in the faintest dust-emitting regions there are no ‘clean’ windows in the sky,” the Planck collaboration, led by Jean-Loup Puget of the Astrophysical Institute in Paris, wrote in a paper submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and posted online Monday.
As a result, cosmologists like the Bicep crew cannot ignore dust in their calculations. “However,” said Jonathan Aumont, another of the Planck authors, also from the Paris institute, “our work does not imply that they did not measure at all a cosmological signal.
Moreover, due to the very different observation techniques and signal processing in the Bicep2 and Planck experiments, we cannot say how much of the signal they measured is due to dust” and how much to gravitational waves.
So this is not the end of the story, both the Planck scientists and the Bicep group agree. But the original euphoria that the secrets of inflation and quantum gravity might be at hand has evaporated. Planck and Bicep are now collaborating on a detailed comparison of their results.
John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the Bicep paper, said the new report confirmed in greater detail the trend suggested by the first Planck papers in the spring, which indicated there is more dust even in the cleanest parts of the galaxy than anyone had thought.
Raphael Flauger of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J., who first raised the issue of dust in the Bicep report, said it confirmed what he had thought. “It doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room,” he wrote in an email, “and it seems clear that at least the majority of the signal is caused by dust.”
The gravitational waves may exist, although they would be weaker than the Bicep analysis indicated, causing theorists to reshuffle their ideas. As Richard Bond, an early universe expert at the University of Toronto and a Planck team member, put it: “Planck showed that dust could possibly be the entire Bicep2 signal, but Planck alone cannot decide. We have to do this in combination with Bicep2.”
The joint comparison and Planck’s own polarization maps are due at the end of the year.
If true, Bicep’s detection of gravitational waves would confirm a theory that the universe began with a violent outward antigravitational swoosh known as inflation, the mainspring of Big Bang theorizing for the last three decades.
The disagreement over the Bicep finding will not mean the end of inflation theory; it just means it will be harder for cosmologists to find out how it worked. The Bicep group and an alphabet soup of competitors are soldiering on with new telescopes and experiments aimed at peeling away the secrets of the sky.
Michael S. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said: “This is going to be a long march, but the goal of probing the earliest moments of the universe makes it well worth the effort. Dust is the bane of the existence of astrophysicists — and cosmologists. It is everywhere, and yet our understanding of it is very poor.”
Others are less optimistic. Paul J. Steinhardt of Princeton University, a critic of the Bicep paper — and of inflation theory — said in an email that the Bicep paper should be retracted, “and we should return to good scientific practice.”
The Bicep observations are the deepest look yet into a thin haze of microwaves, known as cosmic background radiation, left over from end of the Big Bang, when the cosmos was about 380,000 years old.
According to theory, the onset of inflation, less than a trillionth of a second after time began, should have left ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. They would manifest as corkscrew patterns in the direction of polarization of the cosmic microwaves.
The Bicep group — its name is an acronym for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization — is led by Dr. Kovac; Jamie Bock of Caltech; Clement Pryke of the University of Minnesota; and Chao-Lin Kuo of Stanford. They have deployed a series of radio telescopes at the South Pole in search of the swirl pattern. Their most recent, Bicep2, detected a signal in the sweet spot for some of the most popular models of inflation, leading to a splashy news conference and a summer of controversy and gossip.
As the critics pointed out, things besides quantum ripples from the beginning of time could produce those swirls, including light from interstellar dust polarized by magnetic fields in space.
Planck, launched in 2008 to survey the cosmic microwave sky, can distinguish the characteristic signature of dust by comparing the sky brightness in several radio frequencies, as well as measuring its direction of polarization. Bicep2, in contrast, looked at only one frequency, 150 gigahertz.
The Bicep astronomers asked for Planck data on their patch of sky, but it was not available until now because of suspected instrument problems, Dr. Aumont said. So they extrapolated from existing data to conclude that there was little dust interfering with their observations.
The new Planck report has knocked the pins out from under that. But there are still large uncertainties that leave room for primordial gravitational waves at some level. For example, the Planck team had to extrapolate some of its own measurements.
As the Planck report says, “This result emphasizes the need for a dedicated joint Planck-Bicep2 analysis.”
The group hopes this analysis will include data from the latest Bicep telescope, called the Keck Array, which has been gathering data for several months. In an interview this summer, Dr. Kovac said, “It’s been a funny year to be in the spotlight like this.” He said the group stood behind its work, even if the ultimate interpretation of the measurements is up for grabs.
Acknowledging that dust would not be as sexy a discovery as ripples from inflation, Dr. Kovac said, “It’s really important as an experimentalist that you can divorce yourself from an investment in what the answer is.”
He went on: “One thing that would distress me bitterly is if a major mistake in the measurement or of the analysis would come to light. The most pressing question is, what are the dust contributions to the signal?”
Stay tuned.
Lyman Page, an astrophysicist at Princeton, said the episode illustrated the messy progress of science.
“Taking a step back,” he said by email, “it is amazing that a precise measurement of the cosmos can be made, discussed in fullness, and refuted by another measurement in such a short amount of time. It is testament to a healthy field.”
Our planet has come a long way in scientific breakthroughs and discoveries. Mainstream science is beginning to discover new concepts of reality that have the potential to change our perception about our planet and the extraterrestrial environment that surrounds it forever. Star gates, wormholes, and portals have been the subject of conspiracy theories and theoretical physics for decades, but that is all coming to an end as we continue to grow in our understanding about the t [...]
I found her perched on my work bench the moment I came in and gently laid Netty on the opposite desk. Since she needed to preserve her strength to play with me on the road home, which as I found out just now will probably be long and winding..... No...
I kinda feel like an electron. Continuously bumping into the same other electrons. Sometimes the pattern changes, and I start bumping into new ones, while some of the old ones still remain, but seem less relevant. That's probably when I've skipped a...
Spreading seeds of awareness on this site and within its many forms since 2006.
14 Annual Spins rounds Sol 071120
thank U Mission Control with the way of gratitude for the co-creation and presentation of every piece of information needed in order to complete this mission to disarm dysfunctional patterns Thank you and I’m grateful that I was able to help provide this resource to me and myself and all those who may have you sit and understand it and made it one day find resonate within your field of Attraction so that we may need to maybe get a team there I decided to take another job occupation of your next transition or whatever you choose to focus on next but thank you so much to all the support world-wise that she my homeboys and homegirls over in the Netherlands and Gaia and dr. Diana loopy Philip from France, Alison Maclean, Tolosa Diane Abigail the gfol federation’s confederations and I’ll local Earth groups, dashiki Niro’s the Blu-rays anybody who has been a contributor on this site directly or indirectly providing you help spread through email a different means information that will help raise and lift anybody by not telling him what to do and I appreciate you that I’m not the only religion that may be planting seeds and invited them to investigate for themselves and come to their own understanding and then have the ability to take ownership of their own creation through their own understanding that’s the siren Divinity is about and that’s why we were created to be enough to human beings are it’s time we finish his transition and stop playing games with our probability feels acting like what maybe I’ll be able to work around it there isn’t all roads lead to Rome in the end so he was a program eyelash it’s not going to your face and this is the truth of your life except it start creating from it responsibility for every creation you make all the way down to the thought that’s truly what it’s about we’re about to make a tremendous leap and jump so to speak, was kind of like when the universe itself has created this imagine I can’t even put it into words cuz I don’t have words given no Credence but I invite you I’m honored to have this experience I have one things I cannot even comprehend could cheap or contemplated are received before and it will definitely have any impact in my next transition are eBay’s Road focus on my next project but anyways thank you grateful 14 years they playing and at times her moment of reflection in celebration anytime the turbulence and frequency shift and lots of communication because they’re over there and you’re over here and you’re just too far apart there’s too much interference in between you because of the separation that’s occurring in our own evolutionary stages so many ways to love you like Battlefield thank you president and of course feels cool tribe.net the new entry for fun and have to cancel our society and that’s all I can pull off the top of my head right now in New Zealand and Australia especially the code writers who wrote text eons ago to speak to us right now today and I first had conversation is Remembrance and everybody involved with integrating new variables and help me decide collectively let the new 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 reality in our new home everything will be like more sooner than from here to there were already here there’s nowhere to go nowhere to be no way that she the only thing we have to do is be there now. InJoY!
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