Medvedev threatens US over missile shield

Russia’s president said country would deploy missiles to target the shield in Europe if the US fails to provide guarantees

Russia’s president has threatened to deploy missiles to target the US missile shield in Europe if Washington fails to give a legal guarantee that it will not be aimed against country’s nuclear forces.

Strange “Non-Human” Mummy Found in peru

Today Renato Davila Riquelme, an anthropologist that works for the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco, announced the findings of the strange and freaky mummy you see before you. The remains, which are 50cm [20 inches] tall, were thought to be those of a child until Spanish and Russian doctors said otherwise:

“It has a non-human appearance because the head is triangular and big, almost the same size as the body. At first we believed it to be a child’s body until Spanish and Russian doctors came and confirmed that, yes, it’s an extraterrestrial being.”

Source: Guanabee.com

U.S military has a new toy.

A hypersonic flying missile that can strike a target anywhere in the world in just 30 minutes has been unveiled by the U.S. military.

The Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW), which travels five times the speed of sound, was successfully tested yesterday.

It was launched by rocket from Hawaii at 11.30am, glided south westwards through the upper atmosphere over the Pacific at ‘hypersonic speed’ before hitting its target on the Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands – some 2,500 miles away.

It comes hot on the heels of the U.S. Air Force announcement that it has taken delivery of eight, 15-ton bunker buster bombs, called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, that can blow apart 200ft of concrete.

And if it is rolled out by the U.S. military, it will mean America will no longer have to rely on stationing missiles in foreign countries.

The Pentagon did not reveal how fast the AHW, which unlike traditional ballistic missiles can be manoeuvred, reached.

Source: Dailymail.co

Thomas jefferson a Freemason?

By James W. Beless, 33° | Scottish Rite Journal

Jefferson may not have been a card-carrying Mason, but his philosophy and actions certainly paralleled Masonic ideals and practices.

Was Thomas Jefferson a Freemason? This question has been asked by Masons and others and not conclusively answered for 200 years. In 1960, Brother William R. Denslow, Masonic scholar and editor of the Transactions of the Missouri Lodge of Research, concluded that Jefferson was not a Mason, saying all claims for his membership are based on association or insinuation, with no proof by records.

The Lightbulb Conspiracy – Planned Obsolescence

Once upon a time….. products were made to last. Then, at the beginning of the 1920s, a group of businessmen were struck by the following insight: “A product that refuses to wear out is a tragedy of business” (1928). Thus Planned Obsolescence was born. Shortly after, the first worldwide cartel was set up expressly to reduce the life span of the incandescent light bulb, a symbol for innovation and bright new ideas, and the first official victim of Planned Obsolescence. During the 1950s, with the birth of the consumer society, the concept took on a whole new meaning, as explained by flamboyant designer Brooks Stevens: “Planned Obsolescence, the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary…”. The growth society flourished, everybody had everything, the waste was piling up (preferably far away in illegal dumps in the Third World) – until consumers started rebelling…

Do Loved ones bid farewell from beyond the grave?

(CNN) — Nina De Santo was about to close her New Jersey hair salon one winter’s night when she saw him standing outside the shop’s glass front door.

Are these the footsteps of T-Rex’s cousin? The 2ft-long footprints in an Arkansas field that have astounded scientists

Researchers at the University of Arkansas are studying a new field of fossilised dinosaur tracks, including one set which appears to be from a large three-toed predator.

The tracks were found on private land in south-west Arkansas and provide a window into the lifeforms which roamed the area as long as 120 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous period.

Researchers say the dinosaurs who left them probably included giant predators, such as Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, an early cousin of T Rex.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2046738/Dinosaur-footprints-Arkansas-Are-T-Rexs-cousin.html#ixzz1aO53vs2L

The EarthScraper: An Inverted Pyramid 65 Storeys Deep

By Kevin Hall | DVice.com

The folks over at Mexican architecture group BNKR Arquitectura call this thing an “earthscraper,” and the reason why should be obvious: it’s a monstrous, beautiful, 65-story inverted skyscraper that hides a mini city underground.

Drones That Never Forget a Face

Army Tracking Plan: Drones That Never Forget a Face

By Noah Shachtman | Wired.com

Perhaps the idea of spy drones already makes your nervous. Maybe you’re uncomfortable with the notion of an unblinking, robotic eye in the sky that can watch your every move. If so, you may want to click away now. Because if the Army has its way, drones won’t just be able to look at what you do. They’ll be able to recognize your face — and track you, based on how you look. If the military machines assemble enough information, they might just be able to peer into your heart.

The Pentagon has tried all sort of tricks to keep tabs on its foes as they move around: tiny transmitters, lingering scents, even “human thermal fingerprints.” The military calls the effort “Tagging, Tracking, and Locating,” or “TTL.” And, as the strategy in places like Afghanistan has shifted from rebuilding societies to taking out individual insurgents, TTL has become increasingly central to the American effort. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been devoted to it.

The current technologies have their limits, however. Transmitters can be discovered, and discarded. Scents eventually waft away. Even the tagged can get lost in a crowd.

But there are some things that can’t be so easily discarded. Like the shape of your face. Or the feelings you keep inside. That’s why the Army just handed out a half-dozen contracts to firms to find faces from above, track targets, and even spot “adversarial intent.”

“If this works out, we’ll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas,” says Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation, which recently won one of the Army contracts. “A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we’ll know it was the same guy that went in.”

Progeny just started work on their drone-mounted, “Long Range, Non-cooperative, Biometric Tagging, Tracking and Location” system.

The company is one several firms that has developed algorithms for the military that use two-dimensional images to construct a 3D model of a face. It’s not an easy trick to pull off — even with the proper lighting, and even with a willing subject. Building a model of someone on the run is harder. Constructing a model using the bobbing, weaving, flying, relatively low-resolution cameras on small unmanned aerial vehicles is tougher still.

[...]

Read the full article at: wired.com

CIA-backed IT firm offers view into the future

A CIA-backed Swedish-American company claims that it’s new technology can predict disease, terrorist threats, economic swings and resource shortages. The Local’s Karen Holst explores.

A look into the future may no longer require palm readings, star alignments or tarot cards after the release of a new technology purporting to be an all-encompassing oracle of the future.

The Swedish-American software company, Recorded Future, has developed a program that specialises in predictive analysis and with backers including the CIA investment arm In-Q-Tel, it is hoped that averting terrorist attacks could be one of its uses.

“It is a useful aid but prediction is always difficult. The world we face has wicked problems, and it’s important to understand that people like (Anders Behring) Breivik and Al-Qaeda are pretty savvy in concealing themselves through code words and disguised meanings,” says Magnus Ranstorp, Research Director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College (Försvarshögskolan) and one of Sweden’s foremost experts on Islamic terrorism.

Using what they coin as a ”temporal analytics engine,” their forecasting tool helps analysts predict events and trends by scanning hundreds of thousands of high-quality news publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade magazines, government web sites, financial databases and more.

The program then sifts through the myriad of publicly available information, looking to identify links, extract information, measure data and visualize information that reveals patterns of the past, present and the future probability of almost anything.

The company claims its tool to be so sensitive to data changes that it could even ”beat the news” and anticipate political crises, disease outbreaks, major market fluctuations, resource shortages and natural disasters, to a name a few.

And the world is listening. Both Google and the United States intelligence agency, the CIA, are financial backers of Recorded Future through their investment arms by In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures, respectively.

The Massachusetts-based Recorded Future’s concept appears to be a close cousin to similar data analysis tools that Dow Jones, Thomson Reuters and Selerity are building for the financial industry. Their idea is to develop a program that analyzes the news to predict how it will affect individual stocks and markets.

While the company offers tailored approaches to the financial arena, it extends its ability to harness the predictive power of the web and can provide analysis for almost any sector or industry.

In this new era of redefined terrorism and the threat of seemingly random attacks around any corner, could such software alter history and evade or thwart evil plots?

“It’s important to have this technology, to use it, and to understand its limits. In the end, it’s not going to be enough though – we need human interaction to sift through data,” says Magnus Ranstorp.

Recorded Future claims it can monitor terrorist activity by tracking the individuals who are attracting attention, who are connected and where they are travelling, to cite a few examples.

Ranstorp, who CNN named its principal terrorism expert following the September 11th attacks and who was invited to testify before the first hearing of the 9/11 Commission, concurs that this type of network analysis can reveal strengths in patterns of different types of relationships between individuals and entities but he points out it is also always limited to open source data.

“Terrorist related operators know what not to say and use closed chat rooms. But, even when trolling open source information, one still needs to know exactly what they are looking for,” says Ranstorp, adding that due to the complicated nature of terrorism, one small change can change and effect many other facets in a blink of an eye.

“No intelligence service has the man-power or man-hours to go through the tsunami of information that is on the web, but it is still a useful tool to indicate broad-based trends and patterns,” he concludes.

Other sectors Recorded Future can assist relate to marketing and branding, public relations, business intelligence and more.

For example, it can monitor the impact of an advertising campaign or view the momentum of online discourse over a period of time for brand analysis.

Naturally, the program transcends language barriers with the ability to understand all the ingenious devices of the human language, amplifying its effectiveness.

Not only does Recorded Future review events and entities, it has the capacity to analyze time and space dimension, meaning references to where and when an event has taken place, or even where and when it will take place.

This is only the tip of its soothsaying abilities. The rest lies buried in the endless undulation of open source information swirling online.

Of course, it is not a perfect tool as some phenomena, like the spontaneous volcano eruption in Iceland, are truly impossible to predict.

While admitting their algorithms are not perfect, Recorded Future believes that by gathering, interpreting and linking the information available to the world, it can effectively reveal all that mankind really does know about the future.

Source: thelocal.se