Henrietta Lacks rests today in an unmarked grave in the cemetery across the street from her family’s tobacco farm in Virginia. / photo by Rebecca Skloot

‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot [excerpt]
http://wired.com/magazine/2010/01/st_henrietta/
http://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123232331
“There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.” No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells — her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. Her real name is Henrietta Lacks. I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever —bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she — like most of us — would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons — an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall. Before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory. “Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,” Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we’d probably find millions — if not billions — of Henrietta’s cells in small vials on ice. Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse: “HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years.”"

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8448974573505946013#]

The Way of All Flesh, by Adam Curtis

Knowledge or Consent
http://jhu.edu/~jhumag/0400web/01.html
“Gey and his colleagues went on to develop a test, using HeLa cells, to distinguish between the many polio strains, some of which had no effect on the human body. With this information, Jonas Salk and his colleagues in Pittsburgh created a vaccine, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis established facilities for mass-producing the HeLa cells. They would use them to test the polio vaccine before its use in humans. In the meantime, Gey shared his resources. Researchers welcomed the gifts, allowing HeLa to grow. And though Henrietta never traveled farther than from Virginia to Baltimore, her cells sat in nuclear test sites from America to Japan and multiplied in a space shuttle far above the Earth. Still, David Lacks and his children hadn’t a clue. That is, until a day in 1975, 24 years after Henrietta’s death, when his daughter-in-law went to a friend’s house for dinner. Her friend’s brother-in-law looked across the table at Barbara. ”You know,” he said, “your name sounds so familiar.” He was a scientist who spent his days in a Washington laboratory. “I think I know what it is… I’ve been working with some cells in my lab; they’re from a woman called Henrietta Lacks. Are you related?” “That’s my mother-in-law,” Barbara whispered, shaking her head. “She’s been dead almost 25 years, what do you mean you’re working with her cells?” Actually, by that time, they were standard reference cells–few molecular scientists hadn’t worked with them. Since no one had called in the two decades after Henrietta’s death, the Lacks family got on the phone and rang Hopkins themselves. They did it at an opportune time. Henrietta’s cells, it turned out, had grown out of control. Some scientists thought her relatives were the only people who could help. Henrietta’s cells were, and still are, some of the strongest cells known to science–they reproduce an entire generation every 24 hours. “If allowed to grow uninhibited,” Howard Jones and his Hopkins colleagues said in 1971, “[HeLa cells] would have taken over the world by this time.” In 1974, a researcher by the name of Walter Nelson-Rees started what everyone called a nasty rumor: HeLa cells, he claimed, had infiltrated the world’s stock of cell cultures. No one wanted to believe him. For almost three decades researchers had done complex experiments on what they thought were breast cells, prostate cells, or placental cells, and suddenly, rumor had it they’d been working with HeLa cells all along.”

‘Lab Weeds’
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-133-a-conspiracy-of-cells.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa#Contamination
“Because of their adaptation to growth in tissue culture plates, HeLa cells are sometimes difficult to control. They have proven to be a persistent laboratory “weed” that contaminates other cell cultures in the same laboratory, interfering with biological research and forcing researchers to declare many results invalid. The degree of HeLa cell contamination among other cell types is unknown because few researchers test the identity or purity of already-established cell lines. It has been demonstrated that a substantial fraction of in vitro cell lines — approximately 10%, maybe 20% — are contaminated with HeLa cells. Stanley Gartler in 1967 and Walter Nelson-Rees in 1975 were the first to publish on the contamination of various cell lines by HeLa. Science writer Michael Gold wrote about the HeLa cell contamination problem in his book A Conspiracy of Cells. He describes Nelson-Rees’s identification of this pervasive worldwide problem — affecting even the laboratories of the best physicians, scientists, and researchers, including Jonas Salk — and many, possibly career-ending, efforts to address it. According to Gold, the HeLa contamination problem almost led to a Cold War incident: The USSR and the USA had begun to cooperate in the war on cancer launched by President Richard Nixon only to find that the exchanged cells were contaminated by HeLa. Rather than focus on how to resolve the problem of HeLa cell contamination, many scientists and science writers continue to document this problem as simply a contamination issue — caused not by human error or shortcomings but by the hardiness, proliferating, or overpowering nature of HeLa. Recent data suggest that cross-contaminations are still a major ongoing problem with modern cell cultures.”

New Species?: Helacyton gartleri
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa#Helacyton_gartleri

“Due to their ability to replicate indefinitely, and their non-human number of chromosomes, HeLa was described by Leigh Van Valen as an example of the contemporary creation of a new species, Helacyton gartleri, named after Stanley M. Gartler, whom Van Valen credits with discovering “the remarkable success of this species.” His argument for speciation depends on three points:

• The chromosomal incompatibility of HeLa cells with humans.
• The ecological niche of HeLa cells.
• Their ability to persist and expand well beyond the desires of human cultivators.

It should be noted that this definition has not been followed by others in the scientific community, nor, indeed, has it been widely noted. As far as proposing a new species for HeLa cells, Van Valen proposes in the same paper the new family Helacytidae and the genus Helacyton. Recognition of Van Valen and Maiorana’s names, however, renders Homo and Hominidae paraphyletic because Helacyton gartleri is most closely related to Homo sapiens.

Cancer Don’t Stop
http://rebeccaskloot.com/book-special-features/henrietta-lacks-foundation/
http://smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html
“It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. It became an enormous controversy. In the midst of that, one group of scientists tracked down Henrietta’s relatives to take some samples with hopes that they could use the family’s DNA to make a map of Henrietta’s genes, so they could tell which cell cultures were HeLa and which weren’t, to begin straightening out the contamination problem. Deborah’s brothers didn’t think much about the cells until they found out there was money involved. HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry. When Deborah’s brothers found out that people were selling vials of their mother’s cells, and that the family didn’t get any of the resulting money, they got very angry. Henrietta’s family has lived in poverty most of their lives, and many of them can’t afford health insurance. One of her sons was homeless and living on the streets of Baltimore. So the family launched a campaign to get some of what they felt they were owed financially.”

The Henrietta Lacks Foundation
http://rebeccaskloot.com/book-special-features/henrietta-lacks-foundation/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42653706@N00/sets/72157623243930457/
http://oprah.com/world/Excerpt-From-The-Immortal-Life-of-Henrietta-Lacks_1
“HeLa cells rode into the mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules and flew around the country in the breast pockets of researchers until they were growing in laboratories in Texas, Amsterdam, India, and many places in between. The Tuskegee Institute set up facilities to mass-produce Henrietta’s cells, and began shipping 20,000 tubes of HeLa—about six trillion cells—every week. And soon, a multibillion-dollar industry selling human biological materials was born. HeLa cells allowed researchers to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living human. Scientists exposed them to toxins, radiation, and infections. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones. They studied immune suppression and cancer growth by injecting HeLa into rats with weak immune systems, who developed malignant tumors much like Henrietta’s. And if the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter—scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again. Meanwhile Henrietta’s children were consumed with questions: Were clones of their mother walking the streets of cities around the world? And if Henrietta was so vital to medicine, why couldn’t they afford health insurance?”

Pre-Industrial Land-Use
http://www.detroitagriculture.org/GRP_Website/Grown_In_Detroit.html
http://www.greeningofdetroit.com/3_0_cool_projects.php
http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/policy.html
http://urbanfarming.org/homefarming.html

Downsizing
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/09/detroit-looks-at-downsizing-to-save-city/
Detroit wants to save itself by shrinking
“Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile. Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural. Detroit officials first raised the idea in the 1990s, when blight was spreading. Now, with the recession plunging the city deeper into ruin, a decision on how to move forward is approaching. Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month. Though the will to downsize has arrived, the way to do it is unclear and fraught with problems. Politically explosive decisions must be made about which neighborhoods should be bulldozed and which improved. Some won’t go willingly. “I like the way things are right here,” said David Hardin, 60, whose bungalow is one of three occupied homes on a block with dozens of empty lots near what is commonly known as City Airport. He has lived there since 1976, when every home on the street was occupied, and said he enjoys the peace and quiet. On some blocks, only one or two occupied houses remain, surrounded by trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out homes. Scavengers have stripped anything of value from empty buildings. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots. The approximately 40 square miles of vacant property in Detroit is larger than the entire city of Youngstown. Faced with a $300 million budget deficit and a dwindling tax base, Bing argues that the city can’t continue to pay for police patrols, fire protection and other services for all areas. The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years. The city might offer larger tracts for sale or lease, or turn over smaller pieces to community organizations to use.”

More Modest View
http://www.detroitmi.gov/DepartmentsandAgencies/MayorsOffice/ContacttheMayor/tabid/1238/Default.aspx
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703503804575083781073108438.html
Mayor Plans to Use Census Tally Showing Decline as Benchmark in Overhaul
“This city is shrinking, and Mayor Dave Bing can live with that. The nation’s once-a-decade census, which gets under way next month, usually prompts expensive tally-building efforts by cities eager to maximize federal funding tied to the count. But this time, Mr. Bing is pushing the city to embrace the bad news. The mayor is looking to the diminished tally, down from 951,270 in 2000, as a benchmark in his bid to reshape Detroit’s government, finances and perhaps even its geography to reflect its smaller population and tax base. That means, in part, cutting city services and laying off workers. His approach to the census is a product of not only budget constraints but also a new, more modest view of the city’s prospects. “We’ve got to pick those core communities, those core neighborhoods” to sustain and preserve, he said at a recent public appearance, adding: “That’s something that’s possible here in Detroit.” Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Bing, a Democrat first elected last year to finish the term of disgraced former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, hasn’t touted big development plans or talked of a “renaissance.” Instead, he is trying to prepare residents for a new reality: that Detroit—like the auto industry that propelled it for a century—will have to get smaller before it gets bigger again. With no high-profile census push, the city risks an undercount that would mean forgoing millions of dollars in federal funding. Nationwide, each person counted translates into about $1,000 to $1,200 in federal funding to municipal governments. But some community leaders see the hands-off approach as a sign the city’s leadership under Mr. Bing, a 66-year-old businessman and former basketball star, is prepared to face up to the depopulation problem and rethink Detroit’s future. “This is going to be hard to wrestle to the ground,” said Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation of Troy, Mich., a national philanthropy that has invested heavily in development projects aimed at salvaging the nicest remnants of the city. “He deserves enormous credit for leading the community into this.”

Economies of Scale
http://hantzfarmsdetroit.com/press.html
http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit.fortune/index.htm
Can farming save Detroit?
“John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. With a net worth of more than $100 million, he’s one of the richest men left in Detroit. Not long ago, while commuting, he stumbled on a big idea that might help save his dying city. In some stretches he sees more pheasants than people. “We need scarcity,” he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. “We can’t create opportunities, but we can create scarcity.” Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He’ll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit’s east side. “Out of the gates,” he says, “it’ll be the largest urban farm in the world.” If you let it revert to nature, you abandon all hope of productive use. If you turn it over to parks and recreation, you add costs to an overburdened city government that can’t afford to teach its children, police its streets, or maintain the infrastructure it already has. Houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $15,000. That sounds like a buying opportunity, and in fact Detroit looks pretty good right now to a young artist or entrepreneur who can’t afford anyplace else — but not yet to an investor. The smart money sees no point in buying as long as fresh inventory keeps flooding the market. As Hantz began thinking about ways to absorb some of that inventory, what he imagined, he says, was a glacier: one broad, continuous swath of farmland, growing acre by acre, year by year, until it had overrun enough territory to raise the scarcity alarm and impel other investors to act. Rick Foster, an executive at the Kellogg Foundation whom Hantz sought out for advice, nudged him gently in a different direction. “I think you should make pods,” Foster said, meaning not one farm but many. Hantz was taken right away with the concept of creating several pods — or lakes, as he came to think of them — each as large as 300 acres, and each surrounded by its own valuable frontage. “What if we had seven lakes in the city?” he wondered. “Would people develop around those lakes?”

photo by James Griffioen

To increase the odds that they will, Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State’s agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings. Some of Hantz’s biggest skeptics, ironically, are the same people who’ve been working to transform Detroit into a laboratory for urban farming for years, albeit on a much smaller scale. The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network counts nearly 900 urban gardens within the city limits. That’s a twofold increase in two years, and it places Detroit at the forefront of a vibrant national movement to grow more food locally and lessen the nation’s dependence on Big Ag. None of those gardens is very big (average size: 0.25 acre), and they don’t generate a lot of cash (most don’t even try), but otherwise they’re great: as antidotes to urban blight; sources of healthy, affordable food in a city that, incredibly, has no chain supermarkets; providers of meaningful, if generally unpaid, work to the chronically unemployed; and beacons around which disintegrating communities can begin to regather themselves. That actually sounds a lot like what Hantz envisions his farms to be in the for-profit arena. But he doesn’t have many fans among the community gardeners, who feel that Hantz is using his money and connections to capitalize on their pioneering work. “I’m concerned about the corporate takeover of the urban agriculture movement in Detroit,” says Malik Yakini, a charter school principal and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which operates D-Town Farm on Detroit’s west side. “At this point the key players with him seem to be all white men in a city that’s at least 82% black.”"

City Services
http://instructables.com/id/Bicyle-Power-for-Your-Television,-Laptop,-or-Cell-/
http://treehugger.com/files/2010/01/pedal-power-in-detroit-green-gym-for-homeless.php

Pathways Of Desire
http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/trailmode.png
http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/06/streets-with-no-name.html
Streets With No Name / by James Griffioen / June 23, 2009
“This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed. In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren’t designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go. Desire lines are considered by many landscape architects to be proof of a flaw in the design of a physical space, or more gently, a sign that concrete cannot always impose its will on the human mind. But what about a physical space that no longer resembles its intended design, a city where tens of thousands of homes have been abandoned, burned, and buried in their own basements? While actual roads and sidewalks crumble with each season of freezing and thawing, Detroiters have taken it upon themselves to create new paths, in their own small way working to create a city that better suits their needs.”

photo by James Griffioen

Days Now Slightly Shorter
http://jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-071
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aLAUn4Gy92ss
“The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a NASA scientist has said. Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects. “The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross said. “It’s what we call the ice-skater effect,” said David Kerridge, head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey. “As the ice skater’s going around in a circle, and she pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It’s the same idea with the Earth going around if you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes.” The magnitude 9.1 Sumatran in 2004 that generated an Indian Ocean tsunami shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted the axis by about 2.3 milliarcseconds, Gross has said.”

(Rotation Affected Much More by Wind)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-the-earthquake-that-s

Core Flux
http://www.phy6.org/earthmag/dynamos2.htm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091224-north-pole-magnetic-russia-earth-core.html
“The magnetic north pole moved little from the time scientists first located it in 1831. Then in 1904, the pole began shifting northeastward at a steady pace of about 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year. In 1989 it sped up again, and in 2007 scientists confirmed that the pole is now galloping toward Siberia at 34 to 37 miles (55 to 60 kilometers) a year. A rapidly shifting magnetic pole means that magnetic-field maps need to be updated more often to allow compass users to make the crucial adjustment from magnetic north to true North. Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid metal. This creates a “dynamo” that drives our magnetic field. Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north. Nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction.”

Earth’s Inconstant Magnetic Field
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/dynamic.html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/Y2003/29dec_magneticfield.htm
“Every few years, scientist Larry Newitt of the Geological Survey of Canada goes hunting. He grabs his gloves, parka, a fancy compass, hops on a plane and flies out over the Canadian arctic. Not much stirs among the scattered islands and sea ice, but Newitt’s prey is there–always moving, shifting, elusive. His quarry is Earth’s north magnetic pole. Keeping track of the north magnetic pole is Newitt’s job. “We usually go out and check its location once every few years,” he says. “We’ll have to make more trips now that it is moving so quickly.” Earth’s magnetic field is changing in other ways, too: Compass needles in Africa, for instance, are drifting about 1 degree per decade. And globally the magnetic field has weakened 10% since the 19th century. They’ve also learned what happens during a magnetic flip. Reversals take a few thousand years to complete, and during that time–contrary to popular belief–the magnetic field does not vanish. “It just gets more complicated,” says Glatzmaier. Magnetic lines of force near Earth’s surface become twisted and tangled, and magnetic poles pop up in unaccustomed places. A south magnetic pole might emerge over Africa, for instance, or a north pole over Tahiti. Weird. But it’s still a planetary magnetic field, and it still protects us from space radiation and solar storms. And, as a bonus, Tahiti could be a great place to see the Northern Lights…”

North Magnetic Pole Shifting Rapidly Toward Russia
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1215_051215_north_pole.html
“New research shows the pole moving at rapid clip—25 miles (40 kilometers) a year. Over the past century the pole has moved 685 miles (1,100 kilometers) from Arctic Canada toward Siberia, says Joe Stoner, a paleomagnetist at Oregon State. At its current rate the pole could move to Siberia within the next half-century. “It’s moving really fast,” he said. “We’re seeing something that hasn’t happened for at least 500 years.” The shift is likely a normal oscillation of the Earth’s magnetic field, Stoner said, and not the beginning of a flip-flop of the north and south magnetic poles, a phenomenon that last occurred 780,000 years ago. Such reversals have taken place 400 times in the last 330 million years, according to magnetic clues sealed in rocks around the world. Each reversal takes a thousand years or more to complete. “People like to think something special is happening in their lifetimes, but despite the dramatic changes, I don’t see any evidence of it,” Stoner said. “It’s probably just a normal wandering of the pole.” The north magnetic pole shifts constantly, in loops up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide each day. The recorded location of the pole is really an average of its daily treks, which are driven by fluctuations in solar radiation. The pole is currently at about 80º north latitude and 104º west longitude, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.”

Build Yr Own
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90947943
“The compass has been around since at least the 12th century, but scientists still don’t know exactly how the Earth generates the magnetic field that keeps a compass needle pointing north. But geophysicist Dan Lathrop is trying to find out — by building his own planet. Later this year he plans to fill it with molten metal and set the whole 26-ton ball spinning. At top speed the equator will whirl by at 80 miles an hour. “It was a little scary the first time we spun it up,” he says. Lathrop figures it can’t be too hard to get a magnetic field — after all, most planets in our solar system have one. But while nature has an easy time making magnetic fields, scientists do not. This is Lathrop’s third attempt.

If you could dig a deep hole, about 2,000 miles down, you would hit the outer core, which is probably made of liquid iron. That iron can conduct electricity. And if it flows in the right way, it can turn the Earth into what scientists call a dynamo, generating a self-sustaining magnetic field — in Earth’s case, producing one pole up in Canada and another down in Antarctica. Iron only melts at high temperatures, though, so Lathrop’s team will fill his sphere with a different metal — sodium. Sodium becomes liquid at stovetop temperatures and conducts electricity well, but it’s flammable. A sodium fire can’t just be put out with water. Water can actually make things worse — so Lathrop’s team has disabled the sprinkler system…”

Personnel Issue : Not All Pretend Astronauts Equally Serious
http://geekosystem.com/mars-desert-research-station-mdrs/
http://gizmodo.com/5476462/fake-mars-mission-befallen-by-real-drama

“The two-week simulations, including various experiments and equipment tests, take place at the Mars Desert Research Station, located outside Hanksville, Utah. The volunteers who participate are expected to take the matter very seriously—after all, our future Mars colony depends on it. But of course, some pretend Mars astronauts are more dedicated than other pretend Mars astronauts and this is where the trouble starts. After days of snits and snubs, the tension came to a head on February 15. In that day’s report, Commander Vermeulen explains: “…The growing frustration that after 9 days PE, Nora and Margaux are still not able to manage the Hab systems/ standard engineering reporting system (and even don’t consider this as a problem!), exploded during the lunch. The lack of dedication to the mission of some people overloads the others and it had to be spoken out. The problem was already there from the first day, when it came out that some people didn’t prepare anything for the mission, didn’t look at the manuals, which were send to them months ago and didn’t even prepare the tasks for their own role. The accusation into my direction that I didn’t brief enough about the systems was too much. Nicky almost exploded. Arjan reacted double: At one hand he couldn’t stop criticising the incompetence of some others during last week, but during the discussion he acted as if he was from Barcelona (don’t know anything). He has his own mission and own world…” The Commander’s Reports for the last days of the mission, which ended yesterday, obscure the interpersonal conflicts that paralyzed the crew. Only a few bloody noses are referenced, perhaps as physical manifestations of the crew’s frustrations.”

Boredom Practice, Minus Actual Danger
http://newscientist.com/article/dn18025-whats-the-point-of-a-fake-500day-mars-mission.html

“A few aspects cannot be simulated, however. There will be no radiation exposure or zero gravity, and if there is a real emergency during the simulation, volunteers will have the right to get out at any time. A study by Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, argues that such experiments lack some key attributes of real long-haul space flight, such as dangerous voyages through unknown territory and the impossibility of rescue. Suedfeld concludes that mission planners would better identify the psychological stresses likely to be experienced by Mars explorers by reading the diaries of explorers on long expeditions over sea and land in previous centuries. Some behavioural scientists feel Antarctic research stations or nuclear submarines offer better analogies to prolonged space flight. But although Antarctic outposts have the necessary elements of danger, confinement and isolation, they lack the high level of automation found in space flight. Nuclear submarine control rooms are more like spacecraft, but military secrecy puts them off limits for academic research. A better model may be the experience of astronauts aboard space stations orbiting Earth. Their stays have lasted up to 438 days. By and large, space station missions have gone without incident. However, NASA astronauts on a three-month mission to Skylab in 1973 went on strike for a day saying they felt overworked and unsupported by their ground crew. In 1982, two Soviet cosmonauts spent most of a 211-day flight in silence because they got on each other’s nerves. Three years later, a six-month Soviet mission was cut short when a cosmonaut had a nervous breakdown. Sexual harassment could also endanger a mission. In an eight-month space station simulation in 2000, a man twice tried to kiss a woman against her will. As a result, locks were installed between different crew compartments. Astronauts in orbit often express feelings of neglect by ground crews, in part because of lags in communication and perhaps also because of a need by astronauts to take out their frustrations on others. As a result, ground crews as well as astronauts now receive psychological training.”

Alone Time
http://newscientist.com/article/mg18925421.400-in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-scream.html
In space no one else can hear you scream at each other

“You and your fellow inmates are bound to have survived some hair-raising, potentially fatal crises, and everyone’s nerves will be in tatters. The pilot won’t talk to the engineer. And if that geologist looks at you and rolls his eyes one more time, you’ll punch his lights out. Despite the exciting goals, a crewed mission to Mars would mean enormous psychological stress. The centrepiece of each station in the Utah desert and in the outback in Southern Australia, is an 8-metre-wide cylindrical habitat, or hab. Crews of four to six live and work as if they were on Mars, testing reconnaissance robots and collecting rocks in mock spacesuits. During Eggins’s studies, the volunteers completed questionnaires to assess their interactions with others. This revealed that people tend to cluster into cliques that often put their own goals ahead of the whole mission’s objectives. This led to a mishap in a Utah simulation in 2003, when the group split into three teams. One stayed in the hab, and two went out on separate rover trips, returning at about the same time. One person in the second rover damaged his helmet and was theoretically leaking oxygen. “It was obvious to everybody that in theory, if this was really Mars, then this guy would die,” says Eggins. However, the first team insisted on getting into the hab first and told the others to wait their turn, she says: “The first team were not thinking at all in terms of the overall goal of the mission, just of their own rights and the distinct subgroup.” In another Utah simulation last summer, Eggins’s colleague Sheryl Bishop of the University of Texas in Galveston studied the differences between an all-male crew, who lived in the hab for two weeks, and an all-female crew who moved in for the following fortnight. Both teams performed well and were very productive, but they did differ. Personality surveys showed that several of the men scored low on “agreeableness” and “conscientiousness”, and the group’s behaviour echoed this. Every night, the women filed daily reports to mission control by the agreed time. But the men were persistently late. They said they preferred to use the time to explore outside on the buggies.”

Volunteering Not To Leave Earth
http://newscientist.com/article/dn9770

“More than 70 people have volunteered to be confined in a mock mission to Mars – for 520 days. It would be the longest simulation of its kind. The Institute of Medical and Biological Problems (IMBP) in Russia is undertaking the isolation study to learn more about the personal dynamics of long-duration space travel, according to Russian media reports. An actual round-trip mission to Mars could last about 30 months – about twice as long as this simulation. Five people will be eventually be selected for the study. They will spend 250 days on a simulated space trip to Mars. Then, three of the five will leave the mock spaceship for a simulated “landing on Mars” that will last 30 days. The five participants will then embark on a 240-day journey “back to Earth”. They will communicate with mission control by email. The simulations lack some of the appeal that draws people to spaceflight, so researchers may end up studying a different group of people than those who would actually fly on a space mission, he says. The IMBP has tried to minimise this issue by using cosmonauts and astronaut candidates in the past. And they are giving preference in this simulation to applicants who are doctors, biologists and engineers between the ages of 25 and 50. But Musson says a long-duration space mission may take a different type of astronaut than those who go on shorter trips to space. He points out that on the International Space Station and on Russia’s former Mir space station, some of the go-getter astronauts with multiple academic degrees found themselves bored by some of the mundane tasks onboard. Musson says someone with a more laidback personality might be better suited for a long-duration mission to Mars.”

Previously On Spectre :
Faking The Mars Landing
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/04/24/faking-the-mars-landing/
Faking The Mars Landing, pt 2
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/faking-the-mars-landing-pt-2/

Dunbar’s Number
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6999879.ece
“We may be able to amass 5,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook but humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 actual friendships, a study has found. Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history. Dunbar developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number” in the 1990s which claimed that the size of our neocortex — the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are. Dunbar derived the limit from studying social groupings in a variety of societies — from neolithic villages to modern office environments. He found that people tended to self-organise in groups of around 150 because social cohesion begins to deteriorate as groups become larger.”

The Social Brain
http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html
“Dunbar has gone through anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up over and over again. For example, he looked at 21 different hunger-gatherer societies around the world and found that the average number of people in each village was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. Over the years, through trial and error, military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb for the size of a functional fighting unit – 200 men. They have realized that it is quite difficult to make any larger a group than this to function as a unit without complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to insure loyalty and unity within the group. With a group of 150 or so, formalities are not necessary. Behavior can be controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this seems impossible.

Further is the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years, through trial and error, have realized that the maximum size for a colony should be, low and behold, 150 people. They’ve been following this rule for centuries. Every time a colony approaches this number, the colony is divided into two separate colonies. They have found that once a group becomes larger than that, “people become strangers to one another.” At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens that somehow changes the community seemingly overnight. At 150 the colony with spontaneously begin dividing into smaller “clans.” When this happens a new colony is formed.

Another good example of our hard wired social limits is Gore Associates, a privately held multimillion-dollar company responsible for creating Gore-Tex fabric and all sorts of other high tech computer cables, filter bags, semiconductors, pharmaceutical, and medical products. What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150. When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it’s time for another plant. Each plant works as a group. There are no bosses. No titles. Salaries are determined collectively. No organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Wilbert Gore – the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty,” he said.”

A Functional Limit
http://www.liv.ac.uk/researchintelligence/issue17/brainteaser.html
http://radio-weblogs.com/0107127/categories/networksAsTheOrganizationOfTheFuture/2003/02/22.html

Illusion Of Chaos
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/11/noboss.html
http://www.workforce.com/section/09/feature/24/29/22/index.html
“The classic Gore culture began in the basement of the home of Bill Gore, who left DuPont in 1958 to create his own enlightened version of the workplace. Gore built the company upon four core principles–fairness; freedom to encourage others to grow in knowledge, skill and responsibility; ability to honor one’s own commitments; and consultation with others before taking action that could affect the company “below the waterline.” In Gore’s model, associates communicate directly with one another and are accountable to their peers rather than bosses. Ideally, leaders in the company emerge naturally by demonstrating special knowledge, skill or experience –”followship.” Thomas Malone, a professor at MIT and author of The Future of Work, describes Gore as a “miniature democracy. The way you become a manager is by finding people who want to work for you,” Malone says. The $1.84 billion company’s flat organizational structure makes it exceptionally nimble. “If someone has an idea for a new product, they don’t have to go up a hierarchy to find some boss to approve it,” says John Sawyer, chairman of the department of business administration at the University of Delaware. “Instead, they have to find peers in the organization who support the idea and will work with them. That open style of communication allows ideas to come up from the bottom.”

Living to 1,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4003063.stm
“This means that all parts of the project should be fully working in mice within just 10 years and we might take only another 10 years to get them all working in humans. When we get these therapies, we will no longer all get frail and decrepit and dependent as we get older, and eventually succumb to the innumerable ghastly progressive diseases of old age. We will still die, of course – from crossing the road carelessly, being bitten by snakes, catching a new flu variant etcetera – but not in the drawn-out way in which most of us die at present. So, will this happen in time for some people alive today? Probably. Since these therapies repair accumulated damage, they are applicable to people in middle age or older who have a fair amount of that damage. I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already. It is very complicated, because ageing is. There are seven major types of molecular and cellular damage that eventually become bad for us – including cells being lost without replacement and mutations in our chromosomes. Each of these things is potentially fixable by technology that either already exists or is in active development. The length of life will be much more variable than now, when most people die at a narrow range of ages (65 to 90 or so), because people won’t be getting frailer as time passes. The average age will be in the region of a few thousand years. If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000. And remember, none of that time would be lived in frailty and debility and dependence – you would be youthful, both physically and mentally, right up to the day you mis-time the speed of that oncoming lorry.”

Longevity Escape Velocity
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/degrey07/degrey07_index.html
“The key conclusion of the logic I’ve set out above is that there is a threshold rate of biomedical progress that will allow us to stave off aging indefinitely, and that that rate is implausible for mice but entirely plausible for humans. If we can make rejuvenation therapies work well enough to give us time to make then work better, that will give us enough additional time to make them work better still, which will … you get the idea. This will allow us to escape age-related decline indefinitely, however old we become in purely chronological terms. I think the term “longevity escape velocity” (LEV) sums that up pretty well.”

SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence)
http://www.sens.org/
http://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2009/11/30/vs.clinic.immortality.cnn
http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/strategies_for_engineered_negligible_senescence.cfm

Donate Or Compete
https://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=mj_donations_donate
http://www.mfoundation.org/?pagename=mj_mprize_how

Negligible Senescence
http://www.agelessanimals.org/
http://www.smart-publications.com/articles/MOM-guerin.php
“There are certain species of rockfish, whales, turtles, and other animals that are known to live for hundreds of years without showing any signs of aging—a phenomenon known to biogerontologists as “negligible senescence.” No one knows for sure how long these animals can live for, but we know that they can live for over two hundred years without showing any observed increase in mortality or any decrease in reproductive capacity due to age. Striking examples are a 109 year old female rockfish that was captured in the wild while swimming around with fertilized eggs, and a hundred-plus year old male whale that was harpooned while having sex.

Q: What is negligible senescence?
Guerin: Basically, this refers to an animal species that doesn’t show any significant signs of aging as it grows older. Unlike humans and most other mammals, there’s no decrease in reproduction after maturity. There’s also no notable increase in mortality rate with age, but that’s a little harder to prove. I’ve been talking with a statistician and he’s asking, how do you know? To do a study of this type would take a couple of hundred years to complete. But compared to us there’s no noted increase in mortality rate. I mean, if you are ninety years old, you’re much more likely to die next year then you are if you’re only twenty years old. But we don’t seem to see any increase in mortality with rockfish and several of these other animals over time.

Q: So we don’t know if these animals are simply aging more slowly or not at all? Since we have haven’t found any rockfish or whales that live for four hundred years, that might suggest that there is a certain limit on how long they can live.
Guerin: Well, we just do not know. We honestly do not know. It really is unfortunate that there is so little known in this field. Ecologists have never thought of this in the terms that gerontologists are now thinking of it in. But this other group of organisms, those that possess what Finch termed “negligible senescence,” they don’t seem to be showing the classical signs of aging that we’re used to. So, who is to say the longest they could live? As an example, in Finch’s book that was published in 1990, at that time the longest lived whale was—I believe it was a Blue Whale—something like 108 years old. That’s like, okay, well that’s not so startling. Humans live longer than that. We’re mammals. They’re mammals. We live longer. Then a study was done on bowhead whales, and they found that out of forty whales sampled, four of them were over a hundred years old, and one of them was over two hundred years old. And they didn’t die of old age either—they were harpooned.”

Lobsters Immortal?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11382976
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/400-pound-lobster.htm/
“In humans, telomerase levels decline later in life and are only found in some types of tissue, but in lobsters, telomerase is found in all types of tissue. That likely accounts for lobsters’ ability to grow throughout their lives. And because lobsters’ skeletons are on the outside and the molting process allows them to periodically shed their exoskeletons in favor of a new, larger one, their constant growth isn’t a problem. With a steady, evenly distributed supply of telomerase, lobsters don’t approach the Hayflick limit, which means that their cells stay pristine, young and dividing. Related animal species with vastly different life spans are also a point of interest. Conventional mice live only three years, but naked mole rats can live for 28. Other animals being studied include whales, bats, rockfish, zebrafish and clams, the oldest of which, a quahog clam, lived to be 220 years old. In many of these animals, the rate of telomere deterioration corresponds with their lifespan. The longer the telomeres last, the longer the animals live. Studying these creatures may tell us much about human aging and lead to treatments for aging-related diseases. If one day humans discover an important new treatment for cancer, it may be due to one of these creatures — or to the 200-pound lobster living peacefully in a tank at Boston University.”

Forever
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/20/184723/82
http://metafilter.com/88971/Nobody-Home
“For the past 21 years, across the limitless expanse of the North Pacific, a lonely whale has been singing, calling for a response. There has been none, and there never will. Picked up first in 1989 by NOAA hydrophones, the call is clearly a whale, but different than all other known species. Different enough that no other whale has responded in all this time. Hypotheses vary, but the mental image is definitely haunting.”

Wikileaks Develops New Business Model, Goes On Strike
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8490867.stm
“WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that allows people to publish uncensored information anonymously, has suspended operations owing to financial problems. Its running costs including staff payments are $600,000, but so far this year it has raised just $130,000. WikiLeaks has established a reputation for publishing information that traditional media cannot. The website claims to be non-profit and relies on donations. A statement on its front page says it is funded by “human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public”.

Labor Dispute
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jan/29/wikileaks-shut-down
“Its tremendous success has meant the site has often struggled under the volume of users. It has faced down governments, investment banks and the famously litigious Church of Scientology but paying its operating costs has proved its undoing. As of today instead of reading government secrets and details of corporate malfeasance all visitors to the site will see is an appeal for cash. The site won Index on Censorship’s 2008 freedom of expression award because it’s an invaluable resource for anonymous whistleblowers and investigative journalists. But Wikileaks is not just a tool for journalists, it allows ordinary Kenyans to read a confidential report detailing the billions their former president allegedly siphoned from the country’s coffers. Its repository includes controversial military documents including the US rules of engagement in Iraq and an operating manual issued to army officers in Guantánamo Bay. It has put corporations on notice that the costs of unethical behaviour are immeasurable in PR terms because it amplifies the Streisand effect, the social media phenomenon that punishes those who use the courts to suppress or censor information, by ensuring it has a much wider reach.”

Overworked, Undervalued
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Notable_leaks
http://wikileaks.org/
“To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon. We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.”

Support Technically
“Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software for the project. Become patron of a WikiLeaks server or other parts of our technology, adding more pillars to the stability and balance of the WikiLeaks platform. Servers come trouble-free and legally fortified, software is uniquely challenging. If you can provide rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for WikiLeaks, please write to wl-supporters[at]sunshinepress[dot]org”

Support Legally
“Individuals or organizations wishing to donate lawyer time write to wl-legal[at]sunshinepress[dot]org”

Going Galt
http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/26C3/mp4/26c3-3567-en-wikileaks_release_10.mp4
http://stefanmey.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/leak-o-nomy-the-economy-of-wikileaks/

Q. So, you strike?
A. Yes, it’s similar to what unions do when they go on strike. They remind people that their labour has value by withdrawing supply entirely. We give free and important information to the world every
day. But when the supply is infinite in the sense that everyone is able to download what we publish, the perceived value starts to reduce down to zero. So by withdrawing supply and making our supply to zero, people start to once again perceive the value of what we are doing.
Q. Do you urgently need money?
A. We have lots of very significant upcoming releases, significant in terms of bandwidth, but even more significant in terms of amount of labour they will require to process and in terms of legal attacks we will get. So we need to be in a stronger position before we can publish the material.

Ending in Pay Settlement: Leaked Data Back Up, For Now
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/wikileaks-meets-cash-goal
Wikileaks Meets Its (Minimum) Cash Goal
“The whistleblowing site Wikileaks has apparently raised the money it needs to continue operating, for the time being, according to a message the organization sent out Wednesday night on Twitter.
“Achieved min. funraising [sic] goal; we’re back fighting for another year, even if we have to eat rice to do it,” read the tweet.”

Secure Anonymized Upload [Disclaimer]
https://secure.wikileaks.org/

YOU Submit a document for us to publish and, inorder to maximize its impact, distribute amongst our network of investigative journalists, human rights workers, lawyers and other partners.

WE will publish and keep published the document you submitted, provided it meets the submission criteria. Your data is stored decentralized, encrypted and as a preserved historic record, accessible in full by the public. The information you submit will be cleaned by us to not be technically traceable to your PDF printing program, your word installation, scanner, printer. We also anonymize
any information on you at a very early stage of the WikiLeaks network, and our services neither know who you are nor do they keep any information about your visit. We will never cooperate with anyone trying to identify you as our source. In fact we are legally bound not to do so, and any investigation into you as our source is a crime in various countries and will be prosecuted.

Zero Rupee Note
http://india.5thpillar.org/ZRN
http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/paying-zero-public-services
“In India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials. According to Vijay Anand, the idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. Anand took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people. He thought these notes would be a way to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The notes did just that. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative. Along the way, the organization has collected many stories from people using them to successfully resist engaging in bribery.

Anand believes that the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no longer afraid: first, they have nothing to lose, and secondly, they know that this initiative is being backed up by an organization—that is, they are not alone in this fight. For people to speak up against corruption that has become institutionalized within society, they must know that there are others who are just as fed up and frustrated with the system. Once they realize that they are not alone, they also realize that this battle is not unbeatable. Then, a path opens up—a path that can pave the way for relatively simple ideas like the zero rupee notes to turn into a powerful social statement against petty corruption.”"

5th Pillar
http://india.5thpillar.org/
http://5thpillar.blogspot.com/

Zero Currency (Select by Country)
http://zerocurrency.org/
“Corruption in the form of bribery is prevalent throughout the world. The zero currency note in your country’s currency is a tool to help you achive the goal of zero corruption. The note is a way for any human being to say NO to corruption without the fear of facing an encounter with persons in authority. Next time someone asks you for a bribe, just take your country’s zero currency note and hand it to them. This will let the other person know that you refuse to give or take any money in order to perform services required by law or to give or take money to do something illegal.”

Corruption Perceptions Index
http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2009

Institutional Corruption
http://blip.tv/file/3120038
http://change-congress.org/about/

Google Missing Persons Spreadsheet
http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/

iReport Search By Name
http://www.ireport.com/ir-topic-stories.jspa?topicId=381628

Reuters EIS
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/126373176384.htm
“Emergency Information Service is exclusively operating for and on behalf of earthquake survivors, using local languages, French and Creole. The service is free and global.”

Relief Efforts
http://www.trackernews.net/search/?s=HAITI
http://www.cidi.org/incident/haiti-10a/
http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/earthquake-haiti

Health + Sanitation Guides (Kreyol)
http://www.hesperian.org/publications_download.php
http://www.hesperian.info/assets/Where_There_is_no_Doctor_Creole.pdf
http://www.hesperian.info/assets/hesperian_wwhnd_haitian%20creole_2000.pdf

Learn Kreyol
http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/?lang=ht
http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Creole-French-English_Phrase_Dictionary_Wiki

Technical Volunteer Registry
http://dex.cidi.org/
http://www.ewb-usa.org/haiti.php

Importable Infrastructure : Who’s Where, Doing What
http://haiti-orgs.sahanafoundation.org/prod/or/organisation
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc108?OpenForm&emid=EQ-2010-000009-HTI&rc=2

Conditions
http://wfplogistics.org/haiti-earthquake-2010

Crisis Mapping
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/main
http://sitroom.ushahididev.com/

Crisis Commons [White Hat]
http://haiti.crisiscommons.org/
http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake

Network Relief Kit (NRK)
http://www.nethope.org/impact/programs/
http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol19/?pg=46&pm=1
“NetHope members who have been active in our relief efforts firmly believe that NGOs on the ground require a lightweight “NetHope ICT Kit” they can carry in their baggage to provide instant communications from Day 1 onward. This kit must have the following features:”

U.S. Stops Deporting Haitians
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/0113/Haiti-earthquake-US-stops-deporting-Haitians

Jubilee Act HR 4405 / Drop The Debt
http://www.one.org/us/actnow/drophaitiandebt/index.html
http://www.jubileeusa.org/jubilee-act.html

Inflatable Hospital En Route
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/press/release.cfm?id=4165
Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane Blocked From Landing in Port-au-Prince

No Medicines, Baby Born On Street

PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE :

HASTILY FORMED RELIEF NETWORKS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2006/08/17/strong-angel-iii-hastily-formed-networks/
TXTBANKNG THE UNBANKED
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/sms-banking-in-kenya/
ONE CELLPHONE PER CHILD
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/one-cellphone-per-child
KATRINA 2.0
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/katrina-20/
R U IN JAIL?
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/r-u-in-jail/

….long before the earthquake….

Haitians Eating Mud (cont.)

Buying Cooking-Dirt On Credit [Video]
http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/02/19/dirt-poor-haitians-eat-cookies-made-of-mud/4120/

Geophagy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_eating
“Geophagy is the practice of eating earthy or soil-like substances such as clay, and chalk, in order to obtain essential nutrients such as sulfur and phosphorus from the soil. It is closely related to pica, a classified eating disorder in the DSM-IV characterized by abnormal cravings for nonfood items. The many possible health benefits of geophagy remain under study and are much debated. Many scientists believe that it is only harmful, while others argue that there may be adaptive benefits to the practice, since humans and animals alike have engaged in it for thousands of years.”

Butter-Flavored
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=b7ed2a4ccb7fdae5294a5dbad78a45306d828d99
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html
‘In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute. “It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”’

Acacia Self-Defense
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717361.200-antelope-activate-the-acacias-alarm-system.html
Antelope activate the acacia’s alarm system
“Acacia trees pass on an ‘alarm signal’ to other trees when antelope browse on their leaves, according to a zoologist from Pretoria University. Wouter Van Hoven says that acacias nibbled by antelope produce leaf tannin in quantities lethal to the browsers, and emit ethylene into the air which can travel up to 50 yards. The ethylene warns other trees of the impending danger, which then step up their own production of leaf tannin within just five to ten minutes. Van Hoven made his discovery when asked to investigate the sudden death of some 3000 South African antelope, called kudu, on game ranches in the Transvaal. He noticed that giraffe, roaming freely, browsed only on one acacia tree in ten, avoiding those trees which were downwind. Kudu, which are fenced in on the game ranches, have little other than acacia leaves to eat during the winter months. So the antelope continue to browse until the tannin from the leaves sets off a lethal metabolic chain reaction in their bodies.”

Interspecies Mutualism
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7179880.stm
“It is all because of the Acacia’s mutually beneficial relationship with a biting ant. Together they fend off Africa’s big grazing mammals; but it is these very antagonists that are needed to keep the plant-insect team working in concert. The whistling thorn tree (Acacia drepanolobium) and the biting ant (Crematogaster) that lives on it form a relationship, evolved over many millennia, in which both species co-operate and in turn benefit from each other. When this “mutualism” is working well, Acacia trees provide ants with swollen thorns, which serve as nesting sites; and nectar, which the ants collect from the bases of Acacia leaves. In return for this investment, ants protect the tree from browsing mammals by aggressively swarming against anything that disturbs the tree.”

Bribes + Repellents
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8383577.stm
“That is the plus side for the plants. But being inhabited by aggressive insects could make one important aspect of a plant’s life difficult – flowering. One clever approach by the plant is a food “bribe”. Acacias produce structures called beltian bodies on the leaf tips. These, Dr Raine explains, are nutritious structures produced by the plant to feed its resident colony of ant-guards. But [when in bloom], it is a case of chemical warfare. Floral volatile compounds can act as signals – drawing in pollinators such as bees and hummingbirds in with their irresistible aromas. To the ants, however, they are far from irresistible. “The flowers seem to produce chemicals that are repellent to the ants,” said Dr Raine. “They release these particularly during the time when they’re producing lots of pollen, so the ants are kept off the flowers.” The researchers think that some of the repellents that acacias produce are chemical “mimics” of signalling pheromones that the ants use to communicate. “We put flowers into syringes and puffed the scent over the ant to see how they would respond, and they became quite agitated and aggressive” he explained. “The ants use a pheromone to signal danger; if they’re being attacked by a bird they will release that chemical that will quickly tell the other ants to retreat.” Dr Raine says this clever evolutionary system shows how the ants and their plants have evolved to protect, control and manipulate each other.”

U.S. Supreme Court vs ‘Flying’ Asian Carp
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/ag/Motion-Petition-Brief_305173_7.pdf
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2009/12/michigan-sues-illinois-in-supreme-court.php

Enforcement Issues

Great Lakes Infected?
http://www.fws.gov/midwest/Fisheries/hot-asian-carp-12-09.html
http://www.asiancarp.org/rapidresponse/greatlakesthreat.htm

Laws Of Nature
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gPBBiKJKfp1MbkPXxJCnNjnZCCrQD9CNR67O0
Michigan files suit in US high court over Asian carp
“Michigan asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to close shipping locks near Chicago to prevent Asian carp from invading the Great Lakes and endangering their $7 billion fishery. State Attorney General Mike Cox filed a lawsuit Monday with the nation’s highest court against Illinois, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. They operate canals and other waterways that open into Lake Michigan. Bighead and silver carp from Asia have been detected in those waterways after migrating north in the Mississippi and Illinois rivers for decades. Scientists say DNA found north of the barrier suggest at least some of the carp have gotten through and may be within 6 miles of Lake Michigan. If so, the only other obstacle between them and the lake are shipping locks, which open frequently to grant passage for cargo vessels. Fifty members of Congress last week joined environmental groups in urging closure of the locks — the same demand made in Michigan’s lawsuit. “The Great Lakes are an irreplaceable resource,” Cox, who is seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Michigan, said at a news conference in Detroit. “Thousands of jobs are at stake and we will not get a second chance once the carp enter Lake Michigan.” He likened the fish to “nuclear bombs.” Cox went directly to the Supreme Court because it handles disputes between states. It asks the court to immediately order them closed, and to create new barriers to prevent the carp from entering the ship canal from nearby waterways during floods. “The carp invasion is a good textbook example of irreparable harm,” law professor Noah Hall said. “It’s unfortunate that there would be an assumption that this would make some positive resolution come sooner than is truly feasible,” Metropolitan Water Reclamation District spokeswoman Jill Horist said. “Even if the locks were closed there’s still a variety of ways for DNA or Asian carp to enter Lake Michigan.” Messages left with the Army Corps of Engineers seeking comment were not returned.”

Rivers Preventively Poisoned
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chicago-river-poisoned-to
Chicago river poisoned to block feared Asian carp
“Two electrical barriers in the canal were erected in 2002 and 2006 to shock any fish, particularly carp, that try to swim up the canal to Lake Michigan. The newer barrier is being switched off to perform maintenance on it. To give themselves a window to complete the task and keep any carp at bay below the barrier, authorities dumped into the canal more than 2,000 pounds (900 kg) of the natural poison rotenone that prevents fish gills from absorbing oxygen. The toxin, which is used as a broad-spectrum insecticide and pesticide, kills fish and freshwater snails but does not harm other animals. It dissipates within two days, though authorities planned to introduce a neutralizing agent to speed up the process. Notre Dame University scientists recently detected carp DNA on the lake side of the barriers, which could indicate the carp have already passed them and the effort is either too little or too late. Fishermen have been asked to look out for the invasive carp on the lake side of the barriers. The DNA discovery led some environmentalists to call for river locks to be shut and ask for permanent separation of the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River watershed. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm has indicated her state might demand locks be closed permanently.”

Previously On Spectre : Cloned Aquarium Plant Takes Over Mediterranean
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/hacking-nature-for-salvation-and-profit/
Viking Mice (+ Mummy Lice)
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/viking-mice/
Bad Moves In Central Planning : Death To Sparrows
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/11/08/spectre-classics-bad-moves-in-central-planning/

Carp Bow-Hunting
http://carpbusters.com/proteams_riversedge.shtml

Dystopian Ecotourism [Wear A Helmet]

Invasive Species Primer
http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=3743
Proposal To Add Carp To State Prison Menus
http://www.sphere.com/nation/article/invasive-asian-carp-inspire-lawsuits-extreme-archery/19296294

Louisiana Gov’t Cajun/Jerk Cooking Show
http://www.lib.niu.edu/2002/oi020509.html
http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/base/sports-164/126199962984530.xml&storylist=louisiana
“The fish are easy to identify. They have small, downward-facing eyes, a stout body and protruding lower jaw. Silver carp commonly exceed 20 pounds. Record catches have approached 100 pounds, Thomas said. But the silver carp is best known for an unusual and dangerous survival behavior. When startled by the sound of a boat motor, it attempts to flee danger by jumping skyward, frequently hitting boats and people. The action has earned them the nickname, “flying carp,” Massimi said. “As you can imagine, getting hit by a 50 or 60 pound carp can cause serious problems,” Massimi said. The fish have been known to cause boating accidents, black eyes, bruises and more severe injuries. Trying to promote annoying invasive species as a tasty treat is a worthwhile tactic, but it might be difficult to pull off, Massimi said. Since the fish eat algae, they don’t tend to bite on hooks. Chapman, however, said that might make the fish a more exciting target for anglers. “You can go bowfishing or wait for them to jump in the boat,” Chapman said. “Commercial fishermen catch them in hoop-and-gill nets in Illinois.” Massimi, who tried Chapman and Thomas’ carp recipes at a recent state coastal meeting said the fish are delicious and taste like “fresh catfish.” Silver and bighead carp have moist, white mild flesh, he said. The larger carp yield meaty fillets. But their unusual bone structure does make them difficult to clean, a drawback that can make fishermen wary. In the video, Chapman demonstrates his unique cleaning methods. He also demonstrates three cooking methods: blackened fillets, grilled fillets and a fried, bone-in preparation he calls ‘flying carp wings’. “You eat the fish off the bone, just like a chicken wing,” Massimi said. The fish, regardless of how they are captured or cook, do need to be put on ice quickly, he said, because they spoil easily.”

Recipes (More Please)
http://www.lib.niu.edu/2002/oi020509.html
http://www.iisgcp.org/AsianCarp/recipes_chapman.pdf
From The Kitchens of Duane Chapman, USGS Fish Biologist, and Rob Maher, head of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources commercial fishing program, with Mike Hooe of the Illinois Division of Fisheries

Synanthropes
http://beefheart.com/walker/lyrics/crow/icecreamforcrow.htm
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10007459o-2000331777b,00.htm
“My new favourite word is synanthropy – the study and practice of creating symbiotic relationships between people and animals. Metafilter pointed me at A Vending Machine For Crows, a project by polymath techie Joshua Klein that aims to put some of the hundreds of millions of dropped coins back in circulation. It does this by training crows to realise that if they find coins and take them to the machine, they’ll get food. The benefits of this idea are manifold. Klein posits that if you can get a few crows trained, then the idea will spread naturally throughout the population – and that means that mostly, human intervention can be restricted to seeding the idea and then leaving enough machines around. That makes it very economical – especially if the crows remain unaware of the true market value of the coinage they find. Although I’m sure that economics will take over if the idea catches on; if it’s profitable for the machine operators, then rival devices will appear offering better deals and a wider range of treats – and I do hope crows really are partial to ice cream. Is it perhaps entirely smart to introduce intelligent non-humans into our economy? If this catches on,avian mugging will spread from the seagulls in no time flat.”

Coconuts As Portable Shelter
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/15/2771822.htm
“Scientists at the Melbourne Museum have recorded the first case of tool use in an invertebrate animal. The veined octopus selects, stacks, transports and assembles coconut shells as portable armour. “It comes at a cost, carrying these shells in this awkward way and it’s a fantastic example of complex behaviours in what we consider the lower life forms,” he said. They watched the octopuses dig out coconut shells from the ocean floor and empty the shells of mud using jets of water. Dr Finn says it is not unusual for octopuses to live inside coconuts but how it uses the shells is unique. “It gathers them together, it stacks them like bowls, covers its whole body over bowls, lifts them up and then trundles along on its arm tips until a predator comes or there’s a threat,” he said. “Then it closes them over like a ball and hides inside.”"

Crow Cam
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/movies/crowcamS1_high.mov
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071008132804.htm

Betty
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/introduction.shtml
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/tool_manufacture.shtml
“In the first experiment, the crows were given a choice between a hooked and a straight piece of wire, and could only get the bucket if they used the hook. On the fifth trial, one of our subjects (“Abel”) removed the hooked wire, leaving the other subject (“Betty”) with only the straight piece. After trying to use this unsuccessfully, she wedged one end of it under a piece of sticky tape and pulled the other end with her beak – creating a hook! – which she then used to retrieve the bucket. When tested with only straight wire, she repeatedly bent it into hooks, using a variety of techniques; it is the first time any animal has been seen to make a new tool for a specific task, without an extended period of trial-and-error learning.”

Flocks Show Cultural Adaptation
http://www.josh.is/projects/index.php
http://www.ted.com/speakers/joshua_klein.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html

[ted id=261]

Teaching Crows (To Teach Other Crows) To Collect Trash, For Peanuts
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/magazine/14Ideas-section4B-t-003.html
“Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish. To Klein, the machine demonstrates the value of cooperating with “synanthropes” — animals that have adapted seamlessly to human environments. “Rather than just killing off a species, why not see if they can do something useful for us, so we can all live in close proximity?” he said. To pursue his research, he founded the Synanthropy Foundation this year. Someday, he hopes, similar techniques may allow us to train rats to sort our garbage for us.”

Previously On Spectre : Effort To Corrupt Birds Pays Off
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/effort-to-corrupt-birds-pays-off/

Mutually Beneficial Synanthropy In Practice

Sniffer Rats + Landmines
http://www.apopo.org/bringing_minefields_to_the_rats.php
http://socyberty.com/issues/unexploded-landmines-call-for-the-herorats/
“Bart Weegens, from Belgium has found a low-technology answer to the continuing issue of unexploded mines. An army of sniffer rats would save hundreds if not thousands of human lives. Why these rats though? As well as having the highly developed sense of smell important in this work they are easy to tame, breed and train. Plus they are too light to detonate a mine by themselves if they step on it.”

Public Shares Offered
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5B01Z920091201
“In Somalia’s main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate. The gangs have made tens of millions of dollars from ransoms and a deployment by foreign navies in the area has only appeared to drive the attackers to hunt further from shore. It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations — and now the gangs in Haradheere have set up an exchange to manage their investments. One wealthy former pirate named Mohammed took Reuters around the small facility and said it had proved to be an important way for the pirates to win support from the local community for their operations, despite the dangers involved. “Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 ‘maritime companies’ and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,” Mohammed said. “The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials … we’ve made piracy a community activity.”

“Piracy-related business has become the main profitable economic activity in our area and as locals we depend on their output,” said Mohamed Adam, the town’s deputy security officer. “The district gets a percentage of every ransom from ships that have been released, and that goes on public infrastructure, including our hospital and our public schools.” Haradheere’s “stock exchange” is open 24 hours a day and serves as a bustling focal point for the town. As well as investors, sobbing wives and mothers often turn up there seeking news of male relatives missing in action. Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. “I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,” she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. “I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the ‘company’.”"

Pirate Democracy
http://www.peterleeson.com/Opportunism_and_Org_Under_the_Black_Flag.pdf
http://www.peterleeson.com/The_Calculus_of_Piratical_Consent.pdf
http://www.peterleeson.com/The_Invisible_Hook.pdf
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/pirate-economics-101-a-qa-with-invisible-hook-author-peter-leeson/
“Q: In the book, you write that pirates had set up their own early versions of constitutional democracy, complete with separation of powers, decades before the American Revolution. Was that only possible because they were outlaws, operating entirely outside the control of any government?
A: That’s right. The pirates of the 18th century set up quite a thoroughgoing system of democracy. The reason that the criminality is driving these structures is because they can’t rely on the state to provide those structures for them. So pirates, more than anyone else, needed to figure out some system of law and order to make it possible for them to remain together long enough to be successful at stealing.
Q: So did these participatory, democratic systems give merchant sailors an incentive to join pirate crews, because it meant they were freer among pirates than on their own ships?
A: The sailors had more freedom and better pay as pirates than as merchantmen. But perhaps the most important thing was freedom from the arbitrariness of captains and the malicious abuses of power that merchant captains were known to inflict on their crews. In a pirate democracy, a crew could, and routinely did, depose their captain if he was abusing his power or was incompetent.”

Pirate Utopias
http://books.google.com/books?id=SJEg0p4RCP4C&dq
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html

The Breakaway Semi-Functioning-Democracy Of Somaliland
http://www.somalilandgov.com/
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_1679_287/ai_n27865671

http://gizmodo.com/5413109/the-burj-dubai-just-cant-stop-getting-struck-by-lightning

Dubai Requests Jubilee
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574557453620655942.html
Dubai World Seeks Debt Standstill
“This debt-laden city-state said Wednesday it would restructure its largest corporate entity, Dubai World, a conglomerate spanning real estate and ports, and announced a six-month standstill on the group’s debt. The government said its Financial Support Fund, a fund set up to manage Dubai’s debt earlier this year, would start to assess and valuate the extent of the restructuring required. As part of that assessment, it said officials intend to ask lenders for a debt ’standstill’.”

Debt Insurance Prices Soar
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574561850829787002.html

A Bad Omen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/03/AR2009120303607.html
“No other country built a ski resort in a desert. No other country constructed an archipelago of 300 artificial islands, complete with a man-made reef colonized by parrot fish. But even if Dubai is a gaudy outlier — a sort of Donald Trump of a nation — the bankruptcy of its flagship investment company, Dubai World, holds a warning for others. The nonchalance with which global financial markets have reacted is not reassuring in the least. The lack of alarm is alarming.

Start with the size of the Dubai bankruptcy. Most analysts reckon the emirate will end up defaulting on more than $30 billion. That’s up from the $26 billion advertised at Dubai World but perhaps less than half of the city-state’s accumulated $80 billion debt. Dubai’s bust will be larger than South Korea’s 1998 debt restructuring, which involved $22 billion worth of loans, and not much smaller than Russia’s default that year (which affected loans worth $40 billion). The South Korean and Russian traumas spread panic around the world. Nowadays, investors yawn at losses that don’t run into the hundreds of billions. This is a touch complacent.

The threat of sovereign defaults, disowned state-company debts and continuing commercial real estate troubles comes amid a recovery that is extraordinarily precarious. It is based on fiscal stimulus from governments, but government debt ensures that this game has to stop at some point. It is based on the printing of money by central banks, but a combination of political backlash and inflation fears will eventually close down this game also. To rescue the global economy, governments have exacerbated the flaws responsible for making the system weak. China has too much export capacity; it is building more. China has an undervalued currency; it is weakening further. Meanwhile, the United States has a low national savings rate and is home to financial behemoths that are “too big to fail.” But the U.S. government has been forced to add to the public debt and broker consolidation in the banking business.

Given these troubles, Dubai should have been a wake-up call. Instead, global stock markets have risen since last weekend. We are witnessing the sort of rally that chart-watching traders know well: the kind where investors shrug off most bad news, so you might as well jump on the bandwagon. When this mentality sets in, prices inevitably rise too far. At the end of the trend there is usually a bubble.

Abandoned Mercedes Auctions
http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/world/1194811622205/index.html
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/the_gulf/article5663618.ece
Driven down by debt, Dubai expats give new meaning to long-stay car park
“For many expatriate workers in Dubai it was the ultimate symbol of their tax-free wealth: a luxurious car that few could have afforded on the money they earned at home. Now, faced with crippling debts as a result of their high living and Dubai’s fading fortunes, many expatriates are abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans. Police have found more than 3,000 cars outside Dubai’s international airport in recent months. Most of the cars – four-wheel drives, saloons and “a few” Mercedes – had keys left in the ignition. Some had used-to-the-limit credit cards in the glove box. Others had notes of apology attached to the windscreen. “Every day we find more and more cars,” said one senior airport security official, who did not want to be named. “Christmas was the worst – we found more than two dozen on a single day.””

Theme Party Proposal [Field Manual]
http://www.dareland.com/field_manual.pdf

1st Earth Battalion
http://www.firstearthbattalion.org/
http://www.firstearthbattalion.com/
http://www.neweartharmy.com/

Origins
http://firstearthbattalion.com/frequently-asked-questions/what-is-the-first-earth-battalion-and-how-did-it-originate.php
“Post Vietnam 1978 was a time when military morale and enrollment were at an all time low. Army leaders called upon officers to develop needed creative approaches to dealing with this challenge. They were encouraged to fully explore the Army’s Be All That You Can Be philosophy. In response, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon created the First Earth Battalion, that collected new technologies to support a conceptual prototype of the soldier of the future. Channon was inspired by the human potential and advanced human performance movements and drew many of his ideas from these fields and from the time he spent at Esalen Institute. Channon delivered his ideas through his illustrated field manual, Evolutionary Tactics, which was published by the Army in 1978. The manual was modeled after the popular Whole Earth Catalog with illustrations of advanced human performance skills. It is credited with kick-starting a very creative surge of activity in the U.S. Army. Army commanders adopted the elements that served them. There was no one cookie-cutter solution. Original copies have become something of collector’s item.”

Crazy Rulers Of The World (BBC 2004)

Spoiler Alert
http://www.firstearthbattalion.org/?q=node/96
A viewers guide to the Goats movie : True or False?
BY John B. Alexander / U.S. Army (retired)
“Facts and Fiction
- Remote Viewing – REAL- and was a 20 year official program
- Use of Remote Viewing in Gen Dozier kidnapping by Red Brigade – REAL
- Concern about Soviet psychic research – REAL
- JEDI projects – REAL – but ad hoc (I had one of them with multi-agencies)
- Spoon bending – REAL – was taught to hundreds
- Cloud busting –REAL – though never as fast as done by Clooney
- Computer crashing – REAL – incident did happen
- Fire walking -REAL
- New Age exploration – REAL
- Running into walls – NOT REAL (is the opening scene of the movie)
- Use of LSD – not only NO, BUT HELL NO
- Hamster staring –ATTEMPTED – by Guy Savelli (a civilian martial artist)
- Goat Lab – REAL – used to train medics
- Goats – Hit by martial artists – It did die hours later
- Goats – Staring – no credible evidence to support this allegation
- Dim mak – PROBABLY REAL – supported by physical evidence
- References to a hollow army –REAL – post Vietnam was a traumatic period”

New Earth Army
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/05/1
The armies of the world should unite to save Earth
BY Jim Channon / 5 November 2009
“It is often overlooked, but the Marshall Plan executed after the second world war may have been the largest humanitarian exercise in the history of the planet. The allied armies decided to put Europe back together. Military forces had, and have, the tools and proper organisation to help reconstruct the very things they have destroyed. The army would properly reforest and clean the fresh water sources. The navy would control over-fishing and recycle the ocean waste. The marines would tend the shorelines and restore the coral reefs and wetland areas. Then the air forces would sense the environment from above and detect polluters while also having the instant mass transport of rescue villages for all the displaced refugees likely to surface during climate change. The many national guard units would reconstruct the countryside with the assistance of the youth to bring nature back to her fullness for a more decentralised and sustainable world. The internet will become our worldwide exchange system, and former power centres will just be support services. The world is already one culture. Countries are obsolete and have been for 30 years.”

Jedi Training
http://wisdomatwork.com/WisdomAtWork/JEDIWARRIOR.html
Special Forces of the Mind
“In 1982 we were approached by the US. Army to design and direct the “Ultimate Warrior Training Program”, AKA “Jedi Warrior,” for two A Teams of Special Forces, Green Berets. This six month-long, full-time program came about through the efforts of a number of concerned and high-ranking officers who were inspired by the vision of the First Earth Battalion. Our advisors and collaborators ranged from Vietnam veterans and respected military leaders, to leading martial artists, noted researchers like Elmer Green from the Menninger Foundation, Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, and Nobel Peace Laureate, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. By the time the program began, we had woven the best of our own experience with the insights of many others to deliver what Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute, and Esquire editor George Leonard, once called, “the most intensive leadership and human development program to be offered in modern times.” Our advanced Biocybernaut training combined technologies of biofeedback, neurofeedback, cyberphysiology, and contemplative inner methods of mastery drawn from the vast array of contemplative science traditions. In our lab the soldiers developed the skill and confidence necessary to sense and control many previously unconscious physiological functions: they learned to recognize and control muscle tension, to control blood circulation in order to keep their hands warm in cold environments, manage the intensity and physiology of their responses to stress. For many visiting dignitaries to the base, the Jedi Biocybernaut Lab became a first stop on the tour of the base, where they learned that it was actually possible to recognize and control the level of their blood pressure. The lab included the world’s first multiple-synchrony brainwave feedback system, which we helped to design, in order to teach up to sixteen people at a time to “synchronize” their brain waves in order to move toward a team resonance and flow state of deep attunement to each other’s inner state of being.”

Battlefield Acupuncture
http://www.n5ev.com/battlefield_acupuncture.htm
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2008-12-11/news/0812100207_1_battlefield-acupuncture-pain-with-acupuncture-traditional-chinese-acupuncture

C.I.A. In-House Acid Tests
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0802130623/bizarrehistorica
http://www.historyhouse.com/c/in_history/?lsd
“Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, has been a sacrament of artists, would-be prophets, and other such social chaff since the 1960s. Invented in 1938 by chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann while looking for an analeptic (circulatory stimulant), he found it had no effect on lab animals and forgot all about it. Years later, on the fateful day 16 of April, 1953, he accidentally absorbed a little through his fingertips and went flying on the first acid trip. By then the CIA had a ten-year-old program running, looking for interrogation drugs and truth serums. They’d played with caffeine, barbiturates, peyote, and marijuana. Gottlieb knew that giving LSD to people in the lab was a lot different than just passing it out, and felt the department did not have an adequate grasp on its effects. So the entire operation tripped to learn what it was like, and, according to Lee and Shlain, “agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other’s drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a … colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations (which usually meant taking the rest of the day off). Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to [their own] members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives…. The Office of Security felt that [MK-ULTRA] should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few [MK-ULTRA] jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party … a Security memo writer… concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did ‘not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties.’”

Previously On Spectre : Voice-To-Skull Technologies
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/02/05/voice-to-skull-technologies/
“These People Haven’t Heard Heavy Metal”
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/02/13/these-people-havent-heard-heavy-metal/
Cary Grant’s Thoughts On LSD
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/cary-grants-thoughts-on-lsd/

http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/cambyses-lost-army-images.html
http://news.discovery.com/videos/archaeology-ancient-lost-army-found.html
http://www.archeologiaviva.tv/tv/video/80

Vanished 2,500 Year Old Persian Army Found In Desert?
http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/cambyses-army-remains-sahara.html
Bones found in Egyptian desert may be remains of Cambyses’ army
“The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C. According to Herodotus, Cambyses sent the soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt. After walking for seven days in the desert, the army got to an “oasis,” which historians believe was El-Kharga. After they left, they were never seen again. “A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly, bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear,” wrote Herodotus. As no trace of the hapless warriors was ever found, scholars began to dismiss the story as a fanciful tale. Now, two top Italian archaeologists claim to have found striking evidence that the Persian army was indeed swallowed in a sandstorm. Twin brothers Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni are already famous for their discovery 20 years ago of the ancient Egyptian “city of gold” Berenike Panchrysos. Presented recently at the archaeological film festival of Rovereto, the discovery is the result of 13 years of research and five expeditions to the desert. According to Castiglioni, from El Kargha the army took a westerly route: “Since the oasis on the other route were controlled by the Egyptians, the army would have had to fight at each oasis.” To test their hypothesis, the Castiglioni brothers did geological surveys along that alternative route. They found desiccated water sources and artificial wells made of hundreds of water pots buried in the sand. Such water sources could have made a march in the desert possible. At the end of their expedition, the team decided to investigate Bedouin stories about thousands of white bones that would have emerged decades ago during particular wind conditions in a nearby area. Indeed, they found a mass grave with hundreds of bleached bones and skulls. “We learned that the remains had been exposed by tomb robbers and that a beautiful sword which was found among the bones was sold to American tourists,” Castiglioni said. A number of Persian arrow heads and a horse bit, identical to one appearing in a depiction of an ancient Persian horse, also emerged.”

Buried Alive
http://mitchtestone.blogspot.com/2008/10/lost-army-of-cambyses-redux.html
“The primary source for the tale of Cambyses and his lost army is the ancient Greek traveller and historian Herodotus, an intrepid man who travelled all over Egypt just 75 years after the Persian invasion. Herodotus followed in Cambyses’ footsteps and recorded the local tales and histories of the invader. Unfortunately his impartiality is questionable; his Histories slander Cambyses remorselessly, painting him as a despot, madman and general ne’er-do-well. According to Herodotus, an army of 50,000 men was ordered to ‘enslave the Ammonians and burn the oracle of Zeus’. Led by guides, the army set off into the desert, reaching ‘the city of Oasis’, known to the Greeks as ‘The Isles of the Blest’ (modern-day Kharga), seven days’ march to the west. After this, they were never seen again, although the Siwans themselves were somehow able to give a rough account of what happened next. If Herodotus is right, the Persian army met a bleak end. The Western Desert is one of the hardest places in the world to be looking for lost relics. It is vast, covering about two-thirds of modern-day Egypt: an area of 680,000 square kilometres (263,000 square miles), equal to the combined size of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland. The conditions are incredibly harsh and desolate. Much of the area is restricted owing in part to the millions of landmines from World War II. And there is always the likelihood that any finds that are stumbled across will soon be covered up by the shifting desert sands.”

Better Than Drawing Straws + Eating Each Other
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1938822,00.html
“While these 50,000 Persian warriors disappeared in the desert, Cambyses didn’t fare much better. At the time, he was marching on a kingdom in Ethiopia, but provisions ran out beneath a scorching sun and his troops were forced to pick lots having divided into groups of 10. According to Herodotus, the unfortunate 1 of each 10 was killed and eaten by the other ravenous troops. Cambyses eventually withdrew, chastened by Egypt and its desert.”

Dissent
http://rogueclassicism.com/2009/11/13/cambyses-lost-army-found-dont-eat-that-elmer/
http://rambambashi.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/cambyses-not-so-lost-army/
“…The Persians controled Egypt for more than a century (from 525 to c.401) and there must have been dozens of occasions on which soldiers were sent to the west. All these expeditions may have found itself lost in the western desert…”

Sandstorms 101
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/sandstorms-on-earth/2353
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/worst_case_scenarios/1289311.html

No Provision Against Acts Of God (Or Future God-Particles)
http://edms.cern.ch/file/342513/LAST_RELEASED/AOC_E.pdf
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2009-11/bread-loving-bird-shuts-down-lhc
Bread Dropped By Bird Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)
“The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine. This incident won’t delay the reactivation of the facility later this month, but exposes yet another vulnerability of the what might be the most complex machine ever built. With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.”

Retrocausality
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
“More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang. Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half. According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass. “It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.” Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus.”

Long Odds
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/09/19/lhc-first-magnet-failure/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/10/14/spooky-signals-from-the-future-telling-us-to-cancel-the-lhc/
“In their December 2007 paper — before the LHC tried to turn on — they very explicitly say that a “natural” accident will come along and break the LHC if we try to turn it on. Well, we know how that turned out. But NN have an ingenious suggestion for saving us from future accidents at the LHC — which, as they warn, could endanger lives. They propose a card game with more than a million cards, almost all of which say “go ahead, no problem.” But one card says “don’t turn on the LHC!” In their model, the nonlocal effect of the imaginary part of the action is to ensure that the realized history of the universe is one in which the LHC never turns on; but it doesn’t matter why it doesn’t turn on. If we randomly pick one out of a million cards, and honestly promise to follow through on the instructions on the card we pick, and we happen to pick the card that says not to turn it on, and we therefore don’t — that’s a history of the universe that is completely unsuppressed by their mechanism. And if we choose a card that says “go ahead,” well then their theory is falsified. (Unless we try to go ahead and are continually foiled by a series of unfortunate accidents.) Best of all, playing the card game costs almost nothing. But for it to work, we have to be very sincere that we won’t turn on the LHC if that’s what the card says. It’s only a million-to-one chance, after all.”

THE AGE OF JELLYFISH
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/the-age-of-jellyfish/

ETHNO-MATHEMATICS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/ethno-mathematics/

NOTES ON THE BALINESE COCKFIGHT
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2006/06/01/anthro-classics-deep-play-notes-on-the-balinese-cockfight/

BAD MOVES IN CENTRAL PLANNING — DEATH TO SPARROWS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/11/08/spectre-classics-bad-moves-in-central-planning/

DON’T GREASE THE TRACK — HOBO SIGNS + SYMBOLS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/dont-grease-the-track-hobo-signs-symbols/

VALUE OF A STATISTICAL LIFE (U.S.)
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/value-of-a-statistical-life-us/

SHARIA COMPLIANT FINANCIAL PRODUCTS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/09/18/sharia-compliant-financial-products/

IF THEY’VE BOTHERED
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/if-theyve-bothered/

PAN-FRIED T-REX WITH APRICOT MINT CHUTNEY GLAZE
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/pan-fried-t-rex-with-apricot-mint-chutney-glaze/

TAKE THAT, TIGER PENIS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/pigs-bladder-powder-regenerates-human-tissue/

PlayStation 3 Modification Tutorial
http://www.ps3cluster.umassd.edu/
http://www.xbox360forum.com/forum/chit-chat/87640-scientists-use-ps3s-create-supercomputer.html
“Computer hobbyists and researchers take note: two U.S. scientists have created a step-by-step guide on how to build a supercomputer using multiple PlayStation 3 video-game consoles. The instructional guide allows users with some programming knowledge to install a version of the open-source operating system Linux on the video consoles and connect a number of consoles into a computing cluster or grid. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics professor Gaurav Khanna first built the cluster a year ago to run his simulations estimating the gravitational waves produced when two black holes merged. Frustrated with the cost of renting time on supercomputers, which he said can cost as much as $5,000 to run a 5,000-hour simulation, Khanna decided to set up his own computer cluster using PS3s, which had both a powerful processor developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, but also an open platform that allows different system software to run on it. On the how-to-guide Khanna says the eight-console cluster is roughly comparable in speed to a 200 node IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Khanna says his research now runs using a cluster of 16 PS3s. Khanna’s not the first researcher to use PS3s to simulate the effects of a supercomputer. The University of Stanford’s Folding at Home project allows people to help with research into how proteins self-assemble — or fold — by downloading software onto their home PS3s, creating a virtual supercomputer. Their research is currently targeting proteins relevant to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease. But the guide posted by Khanna and Poulin is the first that might allow someone to set up a supercomputer in their own home.”

Previously On Spectre : Gravity Waves
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/gravity-waves/

See Also
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3325757/Why-scientists-love-games-consoles.html
“Todd Martínez has persuaded the supercomputing centre at the University of Illinois to buy eight computers each driven by two of the specialised chips that are at the heart of Sony’s PlayStation 3 console. He is using them to simulate the interactions between the electrons in atoms, as part of work to see how proteins in the body dovetail with drug molecules. He was inspired while browsing through his son’s games console’s technical specification “I noticed that the architecture looked a lot like high performance supercomputers I had seen before,” he says. “That’s when I thought about getting one for myself.” The Wii, made by Nintendo, has a motion tracking remote control unit that is cheaper than a comparable device built from scratch. The device recently emerged as a tool to help surgeons to improve their technique. Meanwhile, neurologist Thomas Davis at the Vanderbilt Medical Centre in Nashville is using it to measure movement deficiencies in Parkinson’s patients to assess how well a patient can move when they take part in drug trials.”

Folding@home
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/02/foldinghome-rea/
Folding@home Reaches Million PS3-User Milestone
“Sony recently announced that more than one million PlayStation 3 owners are taking part in Folding@home, the distributed computing project run by Stanford University. The participation of PS3 owners in Folding@home allows the project “to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally.” Folding@home’s mission is to try and better understand how proteins fold, and how misfolds are related to various diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. PS3s currently comprise about 74 percent of the entire computing power of Folding@home. When the project achieved a petaflop in September, it officially became the most powerful distributed
computing network in the world.”

Salvaged PCs
http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/
http://extremelinux.esd.ornl.gov/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-do-it-yourself-superc
The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer
“Our solution was to construct a computing cluster using obsolete PCs that ORNL would have otherwise discarded. Dubbed the Stone SouperComputer because it was built essentially at no cost, our cluster of PCs was powerful enough to produce ecoregion maps of unprecedented detail. Other research groups have devised even more capable clusters that rival the performance of the world’s best supercomputers at a mere fraction of their cost. We knew that obsolete PCs at the U.S. Department of Energy complex at Oak Ridge were frequently replaced with newer models. The old PCs were advertised on an internal Web site and auctioned off as surplus equipment. A quick check revealed hundreds of outdated computers waiting to be discarded this way. Perhaps we could build our Beowulf cluster from machines that we could collect and recycle free of charge. We commandeered a room at ORNL that had previously housed an ancient mainframe computer. Then we began collecting surplus PCs to create the Stone SouperComputer. Our room at Oak Ridge turned into a morgue filled with the picked-over carcasses of dead PCs. Once we opened a machine, we recorded its contents on a “toe tag” to facilitate the extraction of its parts later on. We developed favorite and least favorite brands, models and cases and became adept at thwarting passwords left by previous owners. On average, we had to collect and process about five PCs to make one good node.”

Brain-To-Brain Technologies
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091006102637.htm
BCI Allows Person-to-Person Communication Through Power Of Thought
“New research from the University of Southampton has demonstrated that it is possible for communication from person to person through the power of thought — with the help of electrodes, a computer and Internet connection. While attached to an EEG amplifier, the first person would generate and transmit a series of binary digits, imagining moving their left arm for zero and their right arm for one. The second person was also attached to an EEG amplifier and their PC would pick up the stream of binary digits and flash an LED lamp at two different frequencies, one for zero and the other one for one. The pattern of the flashing LEDs is too subtle to be picked by the second person, but it is picked up by electrodes measuring the visual cortex of the recipient. The encoded information is then extracted from the brain activity of the second user and the PC can decipher whether a zero or a one was transmitted. This shows true brain-to-brain activity.”

Techlepathy
http://yuri.typepad.com/yuri_blog/2008/02/lift-conference.html
http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Kevin:Warwick.html
“Probably the most famous piece of research undertaken by Professor Warwick is the set of experiments known as Project Cyborg, in which he had a chip implanted into his arm. The first stage of this research, which began on August 24, 1998, involved a simple transmitter being implanted beneath Professor Warwick’s skin, and used to control doors, lights, heaters, and other computer-controlled devices based on his proximity. The main purpose of this experiment was to test the limits of what the body would accept, and how easy it would be to receive a meaningful signal from the chip.

The second stage involved a far more complex chip which was implanted on March 14, 2002, and which interfaced directly into Professor Warwick’s nervous system. The electrode array inserted contained around 100 electrodes, of which 25 could be accessed at any one time, whereas the median nerve which it monitored carries many times that number of signals. A highly publicised extension to the experiment, in which a simpler array was implanted into Professor Warwick’s wife – with the aim of creating some form of telepathy or empathy. Empathy is awareness of the thoughts, feelings, or states of mind of others. When we see another human or animal experiencing something positive or negative, we instinctively identify with the other. One must be careful not to confuse empathy with sympath – was also moderately successful, although the implant seems to have been less successful at stimulating signals than at measuring them.”

Telepathy Chips
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/brain-computer-interfacing-prosthetic-limbs-telepathy-chips
“Consider the “telepathy chip” — a neural implant that allows the wearer to project their thoughts or feelings to others, and receive thoughts or feelings from others. There seems no in-principle reason why this can’t be done, but it raises a huge number of questions philosophically, technically, psychologically and socially. It’s not clear what percentage of a person’s thoughts and feelings would actually be comprehensible to another person — in many cases, you might send your thoughts to someone else only to find them interpreted as 90% gobbledygook mixed up with concepts and images that are recognizable to the receiver. It’s also not too hard to envision some of the social and economic pressures that might arise surrounding telepathy chips. Would you become suspicious if your husband or wife didn’t want to do a telepathy-chip mind-meld after coming home late Friday night? Teams of individuals linked via telepathy chips might achieve far greater efficiency at some sorts of work than any group of detached individuals with similar skill could. Computer programming comes to mind, where the hardest part of the job is often understanding what other people were thinking when they wrote the code that you have to deal with. Social subgroups rejecting telepathy chips could become isolated, backwards communities similar to the Amish today (who, it must be noted, don’t mind their backwardness and isolation at all). Ultimately, telepathy chips and related BCI devices could lead to the emergence of new forms of intelligence, “mindplexes” composed of independent human minds, yet also possessing a coherent self and consciousness at the higher level of the telepathically-interlinked human group. Humans who reject telepathic interplay with AIs could be at a significant disadvantage both socially and economically. Nearly any job requiring insight and creativity would benefit from a stream of “push technology” input from a savvy AI. Potentially all this could lead to the emergence of a global brain spanning human and artificial intelligence.”

Previously On Spectre – Telekinesis Comes To Market
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/telekinesis-comes-to-market/

Researchers Create Portable Black Hole
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2159v1
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091015/full/news.2009.1007.html
Mini-hole made of metamaterials ensnares microwave light
“Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat. The hole is the latest clever device to use ‘metamaterials’, specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. The new meta-black hole also bends light, but in a very different way. Rather than relying on gravity, the black hole uses a series of metallic ‘resonators’ arranged in 60 concentric circles. The resonators affect the electric and magnetic fields of a passing light wave, causing it to bend towards the centre of the hole. It spirals closer and closer to the black hole’s ‘core’ until it reaches the 20 innermost layers. Those layers are made of another set of resonators that convert light into heat. The result: what goes in cannot come out. “The light into the core is totally absorbed,” Cui says.”

Metamaterials
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/apr/10-metamaterial-revolution-new-science-making-anything-disappear/

Artificial Event Horizons
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/fibre.html
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2027413242598238803#
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3325303/Device-mimics-black-hole-event-horizon.html
Device mimics black hole event horizon
“Now it seems these horizons can be mimicked using a table-top device that harnesses lasers to create an artificial black hole, according to a study by Prof Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews that could help win a Nobel prize for the world’s best known physicist, Prof Stephen Hawking. At St Andrews, Prof Leonhardt works on what are called quantum catastrophes, where so-called “singularities” can be created where the laws of wave physics are in danger of breaking down. Black holes are also singularities, where the pull of gravity is so intense that even light is sucked in. The professor’s team accomplished the feat of simulating key features of a black hole by firing lasers down an optical fibre, exploiting how different wavelengths of light move at different speeds within the fibre. Prof Hawking’s chance of winning the Nobel prize has improved markedly because this device makes it possible to test his theories, which make specific predictions about the event horizon – the rim of a black hole. “We show by theoretical calculations that such a system is capable of probing the quantum effects of horizons, in particular Hawking radiation.”

Blackest Body Yet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/ultrablack/
Scientists Make Blackest Material Ever
“Scientists have fashioned what may be the blackest material in the universe: a sheet of carbon nanotubes that captures nearly every last photon of every wavelength of light. The substance absorbs between 97 percent and 99 percent of wavelengths that can be directly measured or extrapolated. It’s the closest that scientists have yet come to a black body, a theorized state of perfect absorption whose closest analogue is believed to be the opening of a deep hole. The material is made from a flat array of vertically-aligned, single-walled carbon nanotubes. Photons that aren’t immediately absorbed by a single nanotube deflect off and are absorbed by its neighbors. “This interaction,” write the researchers, “repeats until the attenuated light is completely absorbed by the forest.” To the naked eye, the substance appears perfectly flat; in effect, it’s a sheet of deep holes. By comparison, the blackest paints and coatings absorb between 84 and 95 percent of all light. Researchers say the material would be useful in solar panels or to collect heat in the frigid vacuum of space.”

Information Loss
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8836-black-holes-the-ultimate-quantum-computers.html

Previously On Spectre : Space-Time Foam
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/space-time-foam/
What Miniature Black Holes Don’t Kill You Make You Stronger
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/what-miniature-black-holes-dont-kill-you-make-you-stronger/

The Ghost Fleet Of Johor
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-ghost-fleet-recession-anchored-just-east-Singapore.html
Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession anchored just east of Singapore

“The tropical waters that lap the jungle shores of southern Malaysia could not be described as a paradisical shimmering turquoise. They are more of a dark, soupy green. They also carry a suspicious smell. But there is something slightly odder which I can’t immediately put my finger on. Then I have it – the 750ft-long merchant vessel is standing absurdly high in the water. The low waves don’t even bother the lowest mark on its Plimsoll line. It’s the same with all the ships parked here, and there are a lot of them. Close to 500. An armada of freighters with no cargo, no crew, and without a destination between them. Nearby, as we meander in searing midday heat and dripping humidity between the hulls of the silent armada, a young European officer peers at us from the bridge of an oil tanker owned by the world’s biggest container shipping line, Maersk. We circle and ask to go on board, but are waved away by two Indian crewmen who appear to be the only other people on the ship. ‘They are telling us to go away,’ the boat driver explains. ‘No one is supposed to be here. They are very frightened of pirates.’

Local fisherman Ah Wat, 42, who for more than 20 years has made a living fishing for prawns from his home in Sungai Rengit, says: ‘Before, there was nothing out there – just sea. Then the big ships just suddenly came one day, and every day there are more of them. Some of them stay for a few weeks and then go away. But most of them just stay. You used to look from here straight over to Indonesia and see nothing but a few passing boats. Now you can no longer see the horizon.’ The size of the idle fleet becomes more palpable when the ships’ lights are switched on after sunset. From the small fishing villages that dot the coastline, a seemingly endless blaze of light stretches from one end of the horizon to another. Standing in the darkness among the palm trees and bamboo huts, as calls to prayer ring out from mosques further inland, is a surreal and strangely disorientating experience. It makes you feel as if you are adrift on a dark sea, staring at a city of light.

As daylight creeps across the waters, flags of convenience from destinations such as Panama and the Bahamas become visible. In reality, though, these vessels belong to some of the world’s biggest Western shipping companies. And the sickness that has ravaged them began far away – in London, where the industry’s heart beats, and where the plummeting profits and hugely reduced cargo prices are most keenly felt. You may wish to know this because, if ever you had an irrational desire to charter one, now would be the time. This time last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500).

Three thousand miles north-east of the ghost fleet of Johor, the shipbuilding capital of the world rocks to an unpunctuated chorus of hammer-guns blasting rivets the size of dustbin lids into shining steel panels that are then lowered onto the decks of massive new vessels. As the shipping industry teeters on the brink of collapse, the activity at boatyards like Mokpo and Ulsan in South Korea all looks like a sick joke. But shipbuilding is a horrendously hard market to plan. There is a three-year lag between the placing of an order and the delivery of a ship. The labours of today’s Korean shipbuilders merely represent the completion of contracts ordered in the fat years of 2006 and 2007. Those ships will now sail out into a global economy that no longer wants them. ‘Whole communities in places like Mokpo and Ulsan are involved in shipbuilding,’ Wallis says. ‘So far the shipyards are continuing to work, but there have hardly been any new orders in the past year. In 2011, the shipyards will simply run out of ships to build.’”

Abandoned Sailors Go On Hunger Strike
http://maritimenews.info/shipping-news/stranded-russian-sailors-go-on-a-hunger-strike-in-dubai/

“Three Russian seamen from a vessel stranded in the port of Dubai began a hunger strike on Friday, an International Transport Workers’ Federation official said. The Magdalena, owned by a German company and flying the flag of Antigua and Barbuda, has been anchored in Dubai since early August. The vessel’s owner reportedly owes the crew $230,000 in wage arrears. Onboard are nine Russians, two Ukrainians, four citizens of the Philippines, and one Estonian. “The captain of the vessel said that three crew members… went on hunger strike. The vessel’s owner has also been informed,” Pyotr Osichansky said. The seamen demand repatriation and the repayment of wage arrears, and refuse to perform their duties. In early September the crew asked for international aid as they were running out of food and water. A week later two weeks’ worth of water supplies, provisions for three weeks, and fuel for 50 days were provided. A total of 23 Russian sailors are currently in a similar situation on two other vessels – the Piryit bulk carrier, which is stranded near the port of Cristobal in Panama, and the Southern Pearl vessel is anchored off the Bulgarian coast.”

Repo Man, International Waters
http://www.vesselextractions.com/
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/01/local/me-repoman1
This repo man drives off with ocean freighters

“If repossessing a used Chevrolet can be tricky, consider retrieving the Aztec Express, a 700-foot cargo ship under guard in Haiti as civil unrest spread through the country. Only a few repo men possess the guile and resourcefulness for such a job. One of them is F. Max Hardberger, of Lacombe, La. Since 1991, the 58-year-old attorney and ship captain has surreptitiously sailed away about a dozen freighters from ports around the world. “I’m sure there are those who would like to add me to a list of modern pirates of the Caribbean, but I do whatever I can to protect the legal rights of my clients,” said Hardberger, whose company, Vessel Extractions in New Orleans, has negotiated the releases of another dozen cargo ships and prevented the seizures of many others. His line of work regularly takes him to a corner of the maritime industry still plagued by pirates, underhanded business practices and corrupt government officials. “International waters,” Hardberger said, “are worse than the Wild West. In many ways, there is little or no opportunity to avenge the wrongs people have done to you.” Before repossessing a ship, they make sure the vessel has been seized illegally and the claims filed against it are fraudulent. If negotiations and legal methods fail, the company will proceed with an extraction, a step that might include payments to local officials if a nation’s government is corrupt. Those payments, Hardberger said, are made under exceptions in the federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from bribing foreign officials to retain or obtain business. “In a rogue state, you can’t tie your hands behind you,” Hardberger said. “It is common to find that the court system is rife with corruption.”"

Alang: Where Ships Go To Die
http://www.wesjones.com/shipbreakers.htm
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/bigbreak/resources.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/alang-the-place-where-ships-go-to-die-1779656.html
Thanks to recession, Gujarat’s ship-breaking yards are booming, but impact on environment is toxic

“It is known as the graveyard of ships, a place where ageing vessels are torn apart by unskilled labourers and the metal then sold on as scrap. The scrapping of ships in South Asia – Bangladesh and Pakistan are also major scrappers – is a rudimentary, almost medieval affair. Ships are allowed to beach on the sands and then armies of men with little or no training pull apart the ships with hand-tools. Toxic substances such as mercury and asbestos are allowed to seep into the environment. One of the attractions to the ship owners of having their vessels dismantled here is that the ship breakers in this part of the world receive little of the regulatory oversight that takes place in Europe or the US. Over the last 10 months, the scrappers at Alang in Gujarat have received and dismantled around 280 ships, up from 163 during the same period a year earlier. Some breakers believe that over a 12-month period from January, they might reach a total of 400 ships. On the edge of Alang a huge flea market has sprung up, selling multifarious equipment and fittings taken from the ships. Locals say that when an owner decides to scrap a vessel, they rarely have the time or opportunity to make a full assessment of the value of such things. As a result, the flea market sells everything from ships motors and cutlery sets to fridges and lifeboats at bargain prices. “Last year I bought a torque wrench here for about 3,500 rupees (£44), which would have cost me 50,000 on the open market,” Vasant Pachal, an engineering workshop owner from the city of Vadodara, recently told The Hindustan Times while browsing at the market. “Apart from the great deals, I get to see the latest in technology every time I come here.”"

Previously On Spectre — Dubai Skips
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/dubai-skips/
So Is It Mom Or Chevrolet?
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/mom-or-chevrolet/
Today’s Pirate
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/11/23/todays-pirate/
Cashless Capitalism
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/cashless-capitalism/
Worldwide Food Riots
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/worldwide-food-riots/
Taken To The Streets
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/taken-to-the-streets/
Fairly Bad Indicators
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/fairly-bad-indicators/
April Fools! Dollar Actually Fine
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/april-fools-dollar-actually-fine/

Realtime Sat Tracking
http://science.nasa.gov/RealTime/jtrack/3d/
http://satellite.tracks.free.fr/satrace/satrace.php?language=en

Community Networks
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1046475/community-wi-fi-network-satellite-dishes
Community Wi-Fi network even uses satellite dishes
“Among the most popular attractions of this year’s CAFECONF 07 Linux conference down in Argentina, the “Buenos Aires Libre” group, is promoting its hobbyist, city-wide “community network”. B.A. Libre aims to run a network with its own backbone, capable of routing traffic between nodes even if the Internet goes down, it doesn’t rely on the public internet for transportation. The project was kick-started by a handful users a long six years ago and after several iterations and change of structure and leadership, now seems to show steady progress. The BAL network spine uses point-to-point links and directional antennas along with inexpensive consumer Wi-Fi APs or in some instances full PCs in waterproof enclosures- loaded with their own customized Linux software, dubbed Obelisco – Spanish for ‘obelisk’ the city’s landmark. I asked them if they had any run-ins with the airwaves watchdog and their response was an emphatic no. There’s a regulation making selling VOIP or telephony services using Wi-Fi equipment strictly and specifically forbidden by the airwaves watchdog, but it’s aimed at ISPs. First BAL is a non-profit endeavour, a community network, and it doesn’t aim to provide any specific services, just inter-connect computers. Thus the local regulating authority gives them no hassle at all because such non-profit usage falls within the ‘private use’ considerations of the local regulations. On the software/organisation aspect, they have done a quite impressive job. The Wiki shows a lot of work, and there’s even an on-line map built using Google Maps satellite images and showcasing all nodes and clients, and which are currently active. The registration /membership system is also well done. Dubbed the “BA Libre Location System” or BALLS for short, the project’s web map lists 259 “points of interest”, that is, either nodes or users who have decided to take part in this project in the whole capital city and its metro area of influence, with 13 on-line nodes and APs in BA city at the time of this writing. There is also a Wiki, an IRC channel and mailing lists.”
http://balls.buenosaireslibre.org/
http://wiki.buenosaireslibre.org/Obelisco
http://www.buenosaireslibre.org/

TV On The Radio
http://www.pervisell.co.uk/ham/gs1.htm
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/sstv.html
“Slow scan television is a way of sending video over a voice bandwidth channel–this can make it practical to send video over thousands of miles via ionospheric propagation. Modern computers have this once rare and expensive mode readily available to the average ham.”

SSTV
http://www.kent.net/ve3rdn/software.html
http://www.kent.net/ve3rdn/ve3rdn.html
“The best way to understand slow scan TV is to imagine it as colour fax pictures but sent over the radio rather than the phone. The pictures are transmitted via tones (1200-2300 HRZ) over the air. There are several simple ways to get setup for slow scan TV, the simplest of which use your computer and software with a hardware interface. There are interface circuits which work excellent and cost less than $20 to build or nil if from your junk box. The quality of the pictures is somewhat dependent upon the computer, (monitor & graphics card), and somewhat on the software, hardware. The better systems support Hicolour which gives typical picture resolutions of 320 x 240 in 32 thousand colours. These pictures are almost photographic quality and are very impressive to say the least. Once you’ve tried it your hooked. Imagine being able to swap mug shots with other Amateurs. See who you’re talking to. Send diagrams and schematics over the air. It’s great. Listen to HF on 14.230 and 14.233 almost anytime to hear the action.”

Guerrilla Television
http://wiki.stealthiswiki.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Television
Experience Behind the Iron Curtan
“Before the downfall of the Soviet Union, there were a number of pirate TV operations scattered around Eastern Europe. Many were guerrilla style hit-and-run operations that would rig up a low-tech transmitter with a junked VCR, set to go on the air during the official government newscast, overriding the signal for several blocks. When the authorities found the transmitter, often on the roof of an apartment house or in an vacant building, they would find home-built equipment that had been abandoned, rigged to a timer switch. Much of the programming was very short (since the authorities would be searching for the source within minutes) and usually consisted of recordings from foreign broadcasters like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, with still photos for visuals. One brave pirate in Moscow would show a tape of the official government news broadcast, with someone else’s voice dubbed onto the soundtrack, reading uncensored news peppered with dirty jokes. In 1985, some very brave astronomers from Poland’s University of Torun used home-made equipment to superimpose pro-Solidarity slogans over the images of the state-run TV network. [1] You can imagine how the viewing public (as well as the authorities) must have felt when, during the official government news broadcast, the words “SOLIDARITY TORUN: ENOUGH OF PRICE HIKES, LIES AND REPRESSION” flashed on the screen. In 1977, back when the UK used analogue television, someone identified as “Vrillion” of the “Ashtar Galactic Command” over-rode the audio channel of England’s Southern Television for 6 minutes.”

Signal Hacks Of Live Satellites
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/13/068222
http://www.dailynews.lk/2007/04/13/news01.asp
Intelsat to turn off LTTE beam – Tigers’ satellite piracy bared
“The Washington-based Intelsat gave a firm assurance yesterday that it would take all possible steps to stop the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) from illegally broadcasting its propaganda over their satellites. In a telephone interview, Intelsat’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel Phillip Spector told this correspondent that his corporation would do “every possible thing to turn off the LTTE (sponsored national Television of Tamil Eelam and Voice of the Tigers radio programme) as soon as possible” from their satellite. Spector maintained the position of the corporation that the LTTE was pirating an empty transponder frequency of their Satellite 12 for the broadcasts. He said it was actually stealing the space of the satellite and called it piracy.”

Known Sat Hacks (cont.)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FGI/is_8_13/ai_91204584/
Behind Falun Gong’s satellite hack – cult hijacks satellite signal
“The Chinese government is furious over a rare but successful case of satellite signal hijacking in which TV signals from the Sinosat-1 satellite were temporarily overridden and replaced with programming promoting the outlawed Falun Gong cult. According to an official Sinosat statement released 8 July, a series of signal hijacks occurred between 23 June and 30 June 2002, attacking Sinosat’s 2A and 3A transponders, which provide TV signals to rural villages in China via an earth station in Yungang, which reported that all of state TV broadcaster CCTV’s nine channels, as well as 10 provincial channels, had been hijacked by “unidentified signals … of similar frequency spectrum with that of the CCTV programs”. Minutes after monitor screens went black, Sinosat says, “Falun Gong propaganda materials appeared on screen; and … the word `Falun Gong’ in Chinese flashed again on the screen”. The Chinese government–which outlawed the Falun Gong as an “evil cult” in 1999, and also puts a premium on strict media control–has predictably condemned the hijackings, and has vowed to hunt down and punish those responsible. One obstacle Chinese officials face in that regard is whether the hijackers are even within China’s legal jurisdiction. The Ministry of information Industry has accused–but not publicly identified–overseas parties of helping to plan the interruption.

Hijacking Sinosat signals from outside the country is possible since Sinosat’s footprint extends well outside China’s borders, to include the Indo-Chinese peninsula, Indonesia and the Philippines. Satellite experts say that overriding a satellite signal requires a satellite dish transceiver a minimum of three meters wide and with a transmission power well beyond the capabilities of off-the-shelf consumer gear. Hijackers would either have to commandeer an earth station facility or get hold of an industrial-grade dish that can be moved around and hidden. This is why jamming satellite signals is often the province of military organizations and disgruntled earth station employees rather than independent groups. However, it wouldn’t be the first time Falun Gong members have interrupted regular TV programming in China. In April, Chinese officials arrested nine Falun Gong members for hacking into a Chinese cable TV system on 5 March in the northeastern city of Changchun, where they allegedly cut off TV signals and used home-made broadcasting equipment to air their own programs. And that was one of seven reported cable-TV hacks during the first half of this year, according to the group’s Falun Dafa Information Center, which confirmed the activity in a 28 June editorial–five days after the first satellite signal hijacking was reported.”

PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE — EARTH WILL HAVE RINGS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/earth-will-have-rings/
CONSUMER SATELLITE USE
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/consumer-satellite-use/
BRAZILIAN SATELLITE SQUATTERS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/brazilian-satellite-squatters/
COWS AS COMPASS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/08/28/cows-as-compass/
SATELLITE KILLER
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/01/21/satellite-killer/
SOLAR FLARES AND OTHER PROTECTIONS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/solar-flares-and-other-protections/
RUSSIANS LAUNCHING SATELLITES FROM SUBS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/07/10/russians-launching-satellites-from-subs/

Bonus : Pringles Cantenna
http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/antennas/mypringles.html
http://www.netscum.com/~clapp/wireless.html
“I’d like to say a little bit about Electromagnetic Waves. Before you do anything else, it is important to think carefully about all the possible consequences of what you are doing. Simply put, you are going to be sending electromagnetic waves through the air. If you do not know what you are doing, study until you are confident that you will not break people, places or things when you start experimenting. As if this was not yet enough to keep you from messing around with fast flying electrons, I have received many emails from folks who are very involved with HAM radio and other professions and hobbies that involve work with high frequency microwave radiation. They warn that 2.4 GHz just happens to also be the resonant frequency of plain old water. This is why a microwave oven works. The energy of an 802.11b device is the same kind of energy that cooks your food, but on a much smaller scale. This is important considering that we as humans are 98% made of water. I have been warned that exposure to even as little as a 1/4 watt amplified with a 14db antenna, such as described here, could lead to severe vision problems and possibly other health issues.”

And The Bugs Inside Them
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/termites
“The greatest mystery of all is found in the worker termite’s third gut, which is delineated by an intricately structured stomach valve, as unique from species to species as individual snowflakes are and, in its way, just as lovely. The size of a sesame seed, the third gut contains a dense mush of symbiotic microbes. Many of these microbes live nowhere else on Earth; they depend on adult termites to pass them on to the young by means of a “woodshake,” a microbial slurry. Recently, sophisticated genetic sequencing produced an inventory of more than 80,000 genes, spanning some 300 microbial species, from the guts of Costa Rican termites. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines. Last year the Department of Energy founded three Bioenergy Research Centers, which collectively house scientists from seven government labs, 18 universities, and several private companies, and are aimed at making cellulosic ethanol competitive with gasoline within five years. The centers are expected to come up with ideas that can be commercialized—actually making them more like Bell Labs, say, than like the Manhattan Project. Even for people accustomed to avalanches of data, the effort to map the contents of the termite’s third gut is extraordinary. “A disgusting mess of a data set,” says Phil Hugenholtz, the head of the institute’s Microbial Ecology Program. Traditional genomic analysis sequences one organism at a time, but Hugenholtz is a leading practitioner of metagenomics—the new science of sequencing genes from whole environments of microbes at once, and sorting out the resulting jumble of loose DNA code with the aid of computer science, statistics, and biochemistry. Metagenomics is not only breathtakingly fast; it allows us to catalog genes that were previously unknowable because so few types of microorganisms—fewer than 1 percent of all species of bacteria—can be cultured in a lab. Many biologists regard metagenomics as a scientific revolution akin to the invention of the microscope.”

Extremophiles
http://www.verenium.com/specialty-enzymes.asp
“In the quest to discover novel products, Verenium has pioneered the field of “bioprospecting”. This has enabled the company to tap into the vast genetic resources of the microbial world by venturing into varied and often hostile environments, such as volcanoes and deep sea hydrothermal vents. Because the harsh temperatures and pH conditions in which these “extremophiles” live often mimic conditions found in today’s industrial processes, extremophilic microbes represent a valuable source of potential products.”

Coal-Eating
http://www.humaxx.com/pdf/Coal-Eating_Microbes_PR_070809.pdf
“Arctech’s microbes have been bio-engineered from the digestive systems of specially-bred termites, which are unique in their ability to digest the compressed, fossilised plant matter we know as coal.”

Metagenomics
http://dels.nas.edu/metagenomics/
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/18073/
“Microorganisms make up an immensely important and often overlooked part of the environment. “They constitute the bulk of our biosphere and underpin all the nutrient cycles on our planet,” says Philip Hugenholtz, leader of the microbial ecology program at the Joint Genome Institute. Converting cellulose in trees and grasses into the simple sugars that can be fermented into ethanol is a very energy-intensive process. “If we had better enzymatic machinery to do that, we might be better able to make sugars into ethanol,” Bristow says. “Termites are the world’s best bioconverters.” Researchers at the Joint Genome Institute, which sequenced some of the human genome and is now largely devoted to metagenomics, have just finished sequencing the microbial community living in the termite gut. They have already identified a number of novel cellulases–the enzymes that break down cellulose into sugar–and are now looking at the guts of other insects that digest wood, such as an anaerobic population that eats poplar chips. The end result will be “basically a giant parts list that synthetic biologists can put together to make an ideal energy-producing organism,” says Hugenholtz. Several other projects–from whale carcasses to wastewater sludge–are under way or already complete, promising a huge volume of novel genetic data. A recent project at the University of California, Berkeley, for example, identified three new organisms living in the highly acidic environment of abandoned mines. (Bacteria covering the floors of these mines convert iron into acid, which can then pollute nearby streams.) “They are close to the size of viruses and may be the smallest organisms ever discovered,” says Brett Baker, a research scientist at UC Berkeley. These organisms may give clues to other life forms adapted to extreme environments, such as Mars…”

HELLO AND WELCOME
TO OUR EXCITING NEW SITUATION

WE ARE ONLY HERE TO HELP
THIS WILL JUST TAKE A MINUTE
IF YOU BELIEVE IN TIME, THAT IS
(HUMANS DON’T WELL UNDERSTAND IT)

MEANWHILE SOME OF YOU LOOK CONFUSED

HERE’S WHAT WE ARE :
A SAMPLING

RECENTLY ON SPECTRE
————————————
TOO FAR TO SHOUT
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/too-far-to-shout/
BRAZILIAN SATELLITE SQUATTERS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/brazilian-satellite-squatters/
ARE WE ON THE CLOCK?
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/are-we-on-the-clock/
MYTH OF FINGERPRINTS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/myth-of-fingerprints/
RETHINKING THE LIPSTICK INDEX
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/great-sex-strikes-thru-history/
COCAINE AS METAPHOR
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/cocaine-as-metaphor/
TANGANYIKA LAUGHTER EPIDEMIC, 1962-64
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/tanganyika-laughter-epidemic-1962-64/
VICTORY IN SIGHT
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/victory-in-sight/
IDLE THEORY
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/idle-theory/
TODAY’S PIRATE
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/todays-pirate/
MONKEY MONEY
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/monkey-money/

A WARNING SHOT
WE LOVE YOU ALREADY
HELLO

GARBAGE PATCH IS SIZE OF CONTINENT
http://www.digitaluniverse.net/upcycling/articles/view/135971/
The World’s Largest “Landfill” is the Middle of the Ocean

There is a large part of the central Pacific Ocean that no one ever visits and only a few ever pass through. Sailors avoid it like the plague for it lacks the wind they need to sail. Fisherman leave it alone because its lack of nutrients makes it an oceanic desert. This area includes the “horse latitudes,” where stock transporters in the age of sail got stuck, ran out of food and water and had to jettison their horses and other livestock. Surprisingly, this is the largest ocean realm on our planet, being about the size of Africa – over ten million square miles. A huge mountain of air, which has been heated at the equator, and then begins descending in a gentle clockwise rotation as it approaches the North Pole, creates this ocean realm. The circular winds produce circular ocean currents which spiral into a center where there is a slight down-welling. Scientists know this atmospheric phenomenon as the subtropical high, and the ocean current it creates as the north Pacific central or sub-tropical gyre. Because of the stability of this gentle maelstrom, the largest uniform climatic feature on earth is also an accumulator of the debris of civilization.

If plastic doesn’t biodegrade, what does it do? It “photo-degrades” – a process in which it is broken down by sunlight into smaller and smaller pieces, all of which are still plastic polymers, eventually becoming individual molecules of plastic, still too tough for anything to digest. For the last fifty-odd years, every piece of plastic that has made it from our shores to the Pacific Ocean, has been breaking down and accumulating in the central Pacific gyre. Oceanographers like Curtis Ebbesmeyer, the world’s leading flotsam expert, refer to it as the great Pacific Garbage Patch. The problem is that it is not a patch, it’s the size of a continent, and it’s filling up with floating plastic waste. On our return trip to Santa Barbara, we discovered something never before documented -a Langmuir Windrow of plastic debris. Circular ocean currents with contrary rotation create long lines of material, visible from above as streaks on the ocean. Normally these are formed by planktonic organisms or foam, but we discovered one made of plastic. Everything from huge hawsers to tiny fragments were formed into a miles long line. We picked up hundreds of pounds of netting of all types bailed together in this system along with every type and size of debris imaginable. Sometimes, windrows like this drift down over the Hawaiian Islands. That is when Waimanalo Beach on Oahu gets coated with blue green plastic sand, along with staggering amounts of larger debris. Farther to the northwest, at the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve, monk seals, the most endangered mammal species in the United States, get entangled in debris, especially cheap plastic nets lost or discarded by the fishing industry. Ninety percent of Hawaiian green sea turtles nest here and eat the debris, mistaking it for their natural food, as do Laysan and Black Footed Albatross. Indeed, the stomach contents of Laysan Albatross look like the cigarette lighter shelf at a convenience store they contain so many of them.

It’s not just entanglement and indigestion that are problems caused by plastic debris, however. There is a darker side to pollution of the ocean by ubiquitous plastic fragments.
As these fragments float around, they accumulate the poisons we manufacture for various purposes that are not water-soluble. It turns out that plastic polymers are sponges for DDT, PCBs and nonylphenols -oily toxics that don’t dissolve in seawater. Plastic pellets have been found to accumulate up to one million times the level of these poisons
that are floating in the water itself. These are not like heavy metal poisons which affect the animal that ingests them directly. Rather, they are what might be called “second
generation “ toxics. Animals have evolved receptors for elaborate organic molecules called hormones, which regulate brain activity and reproduction. Hormone receptors
cannot distinguish these toxics from the natural estrogenic hormone, estradiol, and when the pollutants dock at these receptors instead of the natural hormone, they have been shown to have a number of negative effects in everything from birds and fish to humans. The whole issue of hormone disruption is becoming one of, if not the biggest
environmental issue of the 21st Century. Hormone disruption has been implicated in lower sperm counts and higher ratios of females to males in both humans and animals. 
Unchecked, this trend is a dead end for any species. A trillion trillion vectors for our worst pollutants are being ingested by the most efficient natural vacuum cleaners nature ever invented, the mucus web feeding jellies and salps (chordate jellies that are the fastest growing multicellular organisms on the planet) out in the middle of the ocean. These organisms are in turn eaten by fish and then, certainly in many cases, by humans. We can grow pesticide free organic produce, but can nature still produce a pesticide free organic fish?”

CANADIAN TEEN DECOMPOSES PLASTIC BAG IN 3 MONTHS
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/teen-decomposes.html

The Waterloo, Ontario high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria. (At between one-half and 90 percent of Earth’s biomass, bacteria’s a pretty safe bet for any biological mystery.) The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas. Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide. Amazing stuff. I’ll try to get an interview with this young man who may have managed to solve one of the most intractable environmental dilemmas of our time. And I can’t help but wonder whether his high school already had its prom. If he doesn’t get to be king, there’s no justice in this world.

YEAST, TAP WATER, DIRT
http://news.therecord.com/article/354044
WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags


Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true. After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic — not an easy task because they don’t exist in high numbers in nature. First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees. After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture. Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less. That wasn’t good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.

Next, Burd tried mixing his most effective strain with the others. He found strains one and two together produced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plastic strips. His theory is strain one helps strain two reproduce. Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas. A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know — and they’ve looked — Burd’s research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first. Next, Burd tested his strains’ effectiveness at different temperatures, concentrations and with the addition of sodium acetate as a ready source of carbon to help bacteria grow. At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degradation within six weeks. The plastic he fished out then was visibly clearer and more brittle, and Burd guesses after six more weeks, it would be gone. He hasn’t tried that yet. To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too. Industrial application should be easy, said Burd. “All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags.” The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide — each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd. “This is a huge, huge step forward . . . We’re using nature to solve a man-made problem.”

UPCYCLING
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14764
Plastic-munching bugs turn waste bottles into cash

Newly discovered bacterial alchemists could help save billions of plastic bottles from landfill. The Pseudomonas strains can convert the low-grade PET plastic used in drinks bottles into a more valuable and biodegradable plastic called PHA. PHA is already used in medical applications, from artery-supporting tubes called stents to wound dressings. The plastic can be processed to have a range of physical properties. However, one of the barriers to PHA reaching wider use is the absence of a way to make it in large quantities. The new bacteria-driven process – termed upcycling – could address that, and make recycling PET bottles more economically attractive.

PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE – BIODEGRADABLE PLASTICS
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/spectre-investor-biodegradable-plastics/
DOMESTICATING BIOTECH
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/domesticating-biotech/
GROW YER OWN BACTERIAL SLAVE ARMY
SEA MONKEYS DONE FOR GOOD
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2006/09/05/grow-your-own-bacterial-slave-army-sea-monkeys-done-for-good/

[SHARING IS CARING - Allow us a brief introduction: before we had a name, the Spectre Event Horizon Group used to meet weekly at a bar to commiserate and trade what our business friends call best practices. The group has expanded tremendously since then, but remains premised on smartening the crowd mind. There are no subject limits; a favorite is our sci-fi present, though we like anything that goes toward a better understanding of human behavior + ecology. Our basic idea: to connect minds with mind-blowing information, + create a space for the informal trade of very specialized investigative research, presented for the non-specialist as fair use. The Spectre email list is a moderated open forum. People are encouraged to join and to post. Contact us at spectre.event.horizon.group [at] gmail.com, or to join go to www.spectregroup.org.]