NEWS

The NSA Is Building An Artificial Intelligence System That Can Read Minds

The New Thought Police – The NSA Wants to Know How You Think – Maybe Even What You Think

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell’s Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking.

With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected—through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records—it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.

Zahi Hawass remains antiquities minister—for now

CAIRO. Egyptian antiquities boss Zahi Hawass still remains the minister, despite reports that he has been sacked. On 19 July he told The Art Newspaper that prime minister Esssam Sharaf has asked him to continue to go to work. However, Hawass’s future is now very uncertain.

Although Hawass is facing dismissal in an imminent cabinet reshuffle, it is proving complicated to find his replacement as antiquities minister. Last Sunday Abdel Fatah El Banna of Cairo University was named as his successor, but the appointment failed to go ahead after he faced criticism, including protests from antiquities staff. Read More.

Mutated Gene linked to male infertility

A newly discovered cause of infertility could allow millions of infertile couples around the world to have a child. Researchers have found a common gene mutation that causes sperm to be far less able to swim through the mucus of the cervix and reach the egg.

Normally, the gene causes the production of a protein called beta-Defensin 126 or DEFB126, which coats the surface of sperm. When the gene is mutated, the protein is missing, and the sperm have that problem in transit, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis, in a report published Wednesday. Wives of men with the genetic variation were less likely to become pregnant than other couples and 30 percent less likely to give birth, the researchers said. Read more here.

Antiretrovirals Show Huge Promise for Halting HIV Spread in Two Major Studies

Big time news on the fight against AIDS out of Rome today, and it essentially boils down to this: antiretrovirals work (at least, an astoundingly high percentage of the time when they are used correctly). At the biggest forum on HIV and AIDS in the 30-year battle against the deadly epidemic (it still kills 5,000 people a day, FYI), two breakthrough findings show that antiretrovirals (ARVs) not only battle HIV in infected persons, but can stop the disease from spreading in two important ways: it helps prevent HIV-positive folk from transmitting the disease, and also helps prevent non-infected people from contracting it. More at Popsci

Man’s call for Obama assassination is free speech, not crime, court rules

A La Mesa man who posted racial epithets and a call to “shoot” Barack Obama on an Internet chat site was engaging in constitutionally protected free speech, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in overturning his criminal conviction.

Walter Bagdasarian was found guilty two years ago of making threats against a major presidential candidate in comments he posted on a Yahoo.com financial website after 1 a.m. on Oct. 22, 2008, as Obama’s impending victory in the race for the White House was becoming apparent. Bagdasarian told investigators he was drunk at the time.

A divided panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that conviction Tuesday, saying Bagdasarian’s comments were “particularly repugnant” because they endorsed violence but that a reasonable person wouldn’t have taken them as a genuine threat.

The observation that Obama “will have a 50 cal in the head soon” and a call to “shoot the [racist slur]” weren’t violations of the law under which Bagdasarian was convicted because the statute doesn’t criminalize “predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the president,” said the majority opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

“When our law punishes words, we must examine the surrounding circumstances to discern the significance of those words’ utterance, but must not distort or embellish their plain meaning so that the law may reach them,” said the 2-1 ruling in which Chief Judge Alex Kozinski joined but Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw dissented.

Source: LA Times

New Study of Gulf Oil Spill Details the Plume’s Chemical Makeup, Helping Explain Where the Oil Went

Towering flames illuminated the pre-dawn darkness, casting shadows on the ship Ocean Intervention III as it floated over the sunken remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The resonant hum of helicopters fused with the roar of fires on either side of the ship, and Chris Reddy could feel the heat on his face.

The night of June 21, 2010, Reddy and colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution were whisked off their research vessel Endeavor to collect samples directly from the blown Macondo well, which had been spewing oil and natural gas into the Gulf of Mexico for two months. They had 12 hours to do something that had never been done before: Use a robot arm to stick a special bottle directly into the hot hydrocarbons. Now, a year later, their analysis explains just what came out of the well, and sheds more light on what happened to it. More at Popsci.

Masonic Blackmail Behind Murdoch Scandal?

Clearly there is a lot more to the Murdoch scandal than we have been shown. You don’t shutter a 167-year-old newspaper, the largest English-language weekly in the world, just because some reporters were overzealous in their quest for news. If the newspaper had only hacked the phones of Milly Dowler and the 9-11 victims’ families, I doubt we would be…Read more here.

UN Considers “Green Helmet” Climate Army

A special meeting of the United Nations security council is due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change.

Small island states, which could disappear beneath rising seas, are pushing the security council to intervene to combat the threat to their existence.

There has been talk, meanwhile, of a new environmental peacekeeping force – green helmets – which could step into conflicts caused by shrinking resources.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, is expected to address the meeting on Wednesday.

But Germany, which called the meeting, has warned it is premature to expect the council to take the plunge into green peacemaking or even adopt climate change as one of its key areas of concern.

“It is too early to seriously think about council action on climate change. This is clearly not on the agenda,” Germany’s ambassador to the UN, Peter Wittig, wrote in the Huffington Post.

New but tiny moon found circling distant Pluto

HOUSTON (AP) – Distant and tiny Pluto has been hiding something from Earth: another moon.

NASA announced Wednesday that the Hubble Space Telescope has found a fourth moon circling Pluto, which had been demoted from full planet to dwarf planet. Astronomers had been looking to see if Pluto had a ring, but instead they found another object circling the dwarf planet that is 3 billion miles from Earth.

But it is a mini-moon. It is only eight to 21 miles wide. Pluto’s biggest moon, Charon (SHARE-on), is 80 times bigger. The other two moons are Nix and Hydra.

Until astronomers decide a name, this moon is called P4. Source.

___

Online:

http://tinyurl.com/NASAplutomoon

Last space shuttle aims for Thursday landing, excellent weather in Fla. for NASA grand finale

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – On the eve of NASA’s historic, wheel-stopping end to the shuttle program, the four astronauts making the final journey and the flight controllers who will guide them home said Wednesday they’re starting to feel a rush of emotions.

“You know what? I really do feel like it’s coming near the end,” said the commander of the homeward-bound space shuttle Atlantis, Christopher Ferguson. Read More.