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Celebrating Genocide – The Real Story of Thanksgiving

November 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

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 [...]

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Our Fatally Fractured Food Chain

September 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Julian Rose, ContributorThe term ‘food chain’ refers to the steps that constitute the movement of food from its starting point in the field to its end point on the fork. This incorporates processing and ultimate consumption.The food chain operates within a dynamic life cycle. One which expresses the inseparable interconnection between soil, plant, animal and man – and ends back in the soil again. So that if any one element of this cycle is poisoned or weakened, the [...]

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Researchers Uncover Connection Between Gut Health and Mood

July 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Kristen Anderson, GuestWe have all heard the old adage “you are what you eat”, but science is discovering even more of a connection between our digestive tract and our overall health.Commonly referred to as “gut health”, the gut microbiota, which consist of trillions of microbes, may influence more than bowel regularity and metabolism. These bacterium make up a 6-pound ecosystem inside of every human and produce hormones, communicate directly with our bra [...]

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The Class-Domination Theory of Power

May 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

by G. William DomhoffNOTE: WhoRulesAmerica.net is largely based on my book,Who Rules America?, first published in 1967 and now in its7th edition. This on-line document is presented as a summary of some of the main ideas in that book.Who has predominant power in the United States? The short answer, from 1776 to the present, is: Those who have the money -- or more specifically, who own income-producing land and businesses -- have the power. George Washington was one of the biggest landowner [...]

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6 Natural Solutions To Decontaminate Soil

May 2, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Marco Torres, Prevent DiseaseWith a progressively educated population becoming more aware of the inherent dangers of the conventional food supply, urban farming has become hugely popular. However, more people are also becoming aware of contaminated soil and how heavy metals pose potential risks to their food crops. As backyard gardening continues to explode in popularity, we must ask how contaminated is our soil?Many municipalities in many countries are embracing urban agri [...]

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8 Myths About Emotions That Are Holding Us Back

April 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comAs a society, we don't talk much about emotions. Conversations tend to focus more on what we're doing or what we're thinking. In fact, most people find it easier to start sentences with, "I think..." instead of "I feel...

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Top Secret Government Programs That Your Not Supposed To Know About

March 23, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Originally Posted at in5d.com The following is the alleged result of the actions of one or more scientists creating a covert, unauthorized notebook documenting their involvement with an Above Top Secret government program. Government publications and information obtained by the use of public tax monies cannot be subject to copyright. This document is released into the public domain for all citizens of the United States of America. THE ‘MAJIC PROJECTS’ SIGMA is the project whic [...]

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Google’s AI Program Is Better At Video Games Than You

February 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments





pcmag.com

IBM's Watson supercomputer may be saving lives and educating children, but Google's new AI program can master video games without human guidance.

The artificial intelligence system from London-based DeepMind, which Google acquired last year for a reported $400 million, represents a major step toward a future of smart machines.

Computers running the deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm were exposed to 49 retro games on the Atari 2600 and told to play them, without any direction from researchers. Using the same network architecture and tuning parameters, the machines were given only raw screen pixels, available actions, and game score as input.

For each level passed or high score earned, the computer was automatically rewarded with a digital treat.

"Strikingly, DQN was able to work straight 'out of the box' across all these games," DeepMind's Dharshan Kumaran and Demis Hassabis wrote in a blog post. The executives cited classic titles like Breakout, River Raid, Boxing, and Enduro.

The AI crushed even the most expert humans at 29 games, sometimes composing what the creators called "surprisingly far-sighted strategies" that allowed maximum scoring possibilities. It also outperformed previous machine-learning methods in 43 of 49 instances.

VIEW ALL PHOTOS IN GALLERY
Google DeepMind's findings were presented in a paper published in this week's Nature journal, which describes the key DQN features that allow it to learn.

"This work offers the first demonstration of a general purpose learning agent that can be trained end-to-end to handle a wide variety of challenging tasks," the researchers said. "This kind of technology should help us build more useful products."

Imagine asking the Google app to complete a complex task—like plan a backpacking trip through Europe, for example.

Google's DeepMind also hopes its technology will give researchers new ways to make sense of large-scale data, opening the door to discoveries in fields like climate science, physics, medicine, and genomics.

"And it may even help scientists better understand the process by which humans learn," Kumaran and Hassabis said, citing physicist Richard Feynman, who famously said, "What I cannot create, I do not understand."

For more, see How DeepMind Can Bring Google Artificial Intelligence to Life in the slideshow above.

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The Mission to land robot on comet to take final step

November 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments







Excerpt from  theglobeandmail.com
By Ivan Semeniuk

Half a billion kilometres from Earth and 10 years into its remarkable journey, a small robot is about to plunge into space history.

Pending a final green light from mission controllers on Tuesday night, the robot – nicknamed Philae (fee-lay) – will detach from its mother ship and try to hook itself onto one of the most challenging and mysterious objects in the solar system.



It’s a high-risk manoeuvre with plenty of unknowns. But if it works, then the probe will be able to show us what no one has ever experienced: what it’s like to stand on the surface of a comet.

“Comets are new territory,” said Ralf Gellert, a professor of physics at the University of Guelph. “There could be some big surprises.”

Prof. Gellert should know. Fifteen years ago, he helped build one of the instruments on the dishwasher-size lander that will reveal the comet’s composition. No such direct measurement has been made before. Even designing how the instrument should work was fraught with challenges since there was so little known about what kind of surface the lander might find itself on.

“Is it an ice ball with rock and trace metals, or a rock ball with ice on it … or ice below the surface? We didn’t know,” he said.
And scientists still don’t.

When the European Space Agency launched the Rosetta mission in 2004, the mission’s target – Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko – was little more than a fuzzy blip in astronomers’ telescopes. But Rosetta just arrived in August and it’s been in orbit around the comet since then.

What was assumed to be a single, homogeneous lump of ice and rock has turned out to be a bizarre-looking object in two parts, arranged a bit like the head and body of a rubber duck. By October, scientists had zeroed in on the head portion, which is four kilometres across at its widest point, and settled on a landing site.

Remote sensing data from Rosetta suggest that the comet is quite porous, with a surface that is as black as coal and somewhat warmer than expected. In other words, Philae will probably not be landing on skating-rink-hard ice. Yet, whether the surface will be crusty like a roadside snowbank, fluffy like cigarette ash, or something else entirely is anyone’s guess.

And while scientists and engineers say they’ve done everything they can think of to maximize the lander’s chance of success, they acknowledge it’s entirely possible that Philae will encounter something it can’t handle and smash to bits or sink into oblivion.


Yet the landing is more than a daring jaunt to see what has never been seen before. Comets are also among the most primitive bodies in the solar system. Each one is an amalgam of ice and rock that has been around since Earth and its sister planets formed billions of years ago. In a sense, comets are the leftovers of that process – primordial fossils from the birth of the solar system.

The instrument Prof. Gellert worked on, known as the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS), will help illuminate this early period by making precise measurements of the comet’s elemental ingredients.

It is carried on a robot arm that will place a radioactive source near the comet’s surface. The particles and X-rays the comet material gives off as a result of this exposure will provide detailed information about what chemical elements the comet contains. This will be augmented by another experiment designed to drill and extract a comet sample for analysis inside the lander.

Prof. Gellert, who has also been closely involved in NASA’s Mars rover missions, said Rosetta’s long timeline and the many unknowns related to the comet makes this week’s landing a trickier proposition than landing on Mars – but also a tremendously exciting one.

“I think it’s a matter of hope for the best and see what happens.”

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Amazon, Google, IBM & Microsoft Want to Store Your Genome

November 7, 2014 / / 0 Comments


Excerpt from  technologyreview.com


By Antonio Regalado

 For $25 a year, Google will keep a copy of any genome in the cloud.

Google is approaching hospitals and universities with a new pitch. Have genomes? Store them with us.

The search giant’s first product for the DNA age is Google Genomics, a cloud computing service that it launched last March but went mostly unnoticed amid a barrage of high profile R&D announcements from Google...

Google Genomics could prove more significant than any of these moonshots. Connecting and comparing genomes by the thousands, and soon by the millions, is what’s going to propel medical discoveries for the next decade. The question of who will store the data is already a point of growing competition between Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

Google began work on Google Genomics 18 months ago, meeting with scientists and building an interface, or API, that lets them move DNA data into its server farms and do experiments there using the same database technology that indexes the Web and tracks billions of Internet users.

This flow of data is smaller than what is routinely handled by large Internet companies (over two months, Broad will produce the equivalent of what gets uploaded to YouTube in one day) but it exceeds anything biologists have dealt with. That’s now prompting a wide effort to store and access data at central locations, often commercial ones. The National Cancer Institute said last month that it would pay $19 million to move copies of the 2.6 petabyte Cancer Genome Atlas into the cloud. Copies of the data, from several thousand cancer patients, will reside both at Google Genomics and in Amazon’s data centers.

The idea is to create “cancer genome clouds” where scientists can share information and quickly run virtual experiments as easily as a Web search, says Sheila Reynolds, a research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. “Not everyone has the ability to download a petabyte of data, or has the computing power to work on it,” she says.

Also speeding the move of DNA data to the cloud has been a yearlong price war between Google and Amazon. Google says it now charges about $25 a year to store a genome, and more to do computations on it. Scientific raw data representing a single person’s genome is about 100 gigabytes in size, although a polished version of a person’s genetic code is far smaller, less than a gigabyte. That would cost only $0.25 cents a year.


The bigger point, he says, is that medicine will soon rely on a kind of global Internet-of-DNA which doctors will be able to search. “Our bird’s eye view is that if I were to get lung cancer in the future, doctors are going to sequence my genome and my tumor’s genome, and then query them against a database of 50 million other genomes,” he says. “The result will be ‘Hey, here’s the drug that will work best for you.’ ”


At Google, Glazer says he began working on Google Genomics as it became clear that biology was going to move from “artisanal to factory-scale data production.” He started by teaching himself genetics, taking an online class, Introduction to Biology, taught by Broad’s chief, Eric Lander. He also got his genome sequenced and put it on Google’s cloud.

Glazer wouldn’t say how large Google Genomics is or how many customers it has now, but at least 3,500 genomes from public projects are already stored on Google’s servers. He also says there’s no link, as of yet, between Google’s cloud and its more speculative efforts in health care, like the company Google started this year, called Calico, to investigate how to extend human lifespans. “What connects them is just a growing realization that technology can advance the state of the art in life sciences,” says Glazer.

Datta says some Stanford scientists have started using a Google database system, BigQuery, that Glazer’s team made compatible with genome data. It was developed to analyze large databases of spam, web documents, or of consumer purchases. But it can also quickly perform the very large experiments comparing thousands, or tens of thousands, of people’s genomes that researchers want to try. “Sometimes they want to do crazy things, and you need scale to do that,” says Datta. “It can handle the scale genetics can bring, so it’s the right technology for a new problem.”

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Richard Branson: We owe it to test pilot to continue Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo

November 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from smh.com.auThe Tony Blair grin was gone but Richard Branson was unbowed by disaster when he appeared on American breakfast television on Monday morning. He vowed his program to hurl paying customers into the...

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10 Qualities Every Human Being Should Have

September 21, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Luminita Saviuc, Purpose Fairy“I decided, very early on, just to accept life unconditionally; I never expected it to do anything special for me, yet I seemed to accomplish far more than I had ever hoped. Most of the time it just happened to me without my ever seeking it.” ~ Audrey HepburnIf you ask me, there are certain qualities each and every human being should have. Qualities that have the power to help each and every one of us to connect with our own selves and the wor [...]

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Do We Plan Our Lives Before We Are Born?

September 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Nikkie Gray, Collective-EvolutionThe theory that we plan our lives was something I had never heard of before 2011. Up until that point, I could not have even imagined such a thing. Even after hearing about it 3 years ago, it took me quite a long time to let this concept into my paradigm. How I stumbled upon it wasn’t even through my avid research of the afterlife and reincarnation. It came to me through a vision I had. Before the vision, I believed in reincarnation. The idea of it ha [...]

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