74 Scientist dead in 2 years: Another NASA Scientist Has Been Killed - What's Going On?

     

India's Nuclear Scientists Keep Dying Mysteriously

 
Indian nuclear scientists haven't had an easy time of it over the past decade. Not only has the scientific community been plagued by "suicides," unexplained deaths, and sabotage, but those incidents have gone mostly underreported in the country—diluting public interest and leaving the cases quickly cast off by police. 

Stephen Hawking says God particle discovery makes physics boring

Professor Stephen Hawking has two reasons to be sad about the discovery of the Higgs boson particle earlier this year — it lost him a $100 bet and he would’ve been happier if a more “exotic” and fanciful solution to the problem of the mass of the universe had been discovered.

The Greek Doctor Who Exposes Bad Science

  

Don’t tell Professor John Ioannidis – formerly of the University of Ioannina in Greece and now at Stanford in California – that he’s a hero to science deniers because he exposes faulty research among his peers and in his field: which still haven’t kept him from earning the praise of his colleagues and renowned as one of the greatest scientists in the world.

UK: Scientists strive to save dying spoken language of Jesus

British scientists are attempting to preserve the Aramaic language spoken by Jesus and tied to Hebrew and Arabic.

Professor of linguistics at the University of Cambridge, Geoffrey Khan, has begun a quest to record the ancient language that’s been around for three thousand years before it finally disappears.

Prof Khan decided to record the language after speaking to a Jew from Erbil in northern Iraq. “It completely blew my mind,” Khan told Smithsonian.com.

“To discover a living language through the lips of a living person, it was just incredibly exhilarating,” he added.

By recording some of the remaining native Aramaic speakers, the linguist hopes to preserve the 3,000-year-old language on the verge of extinction. Speakers can be found in different parts of the world, from America to Iraq.

Over the past twenty years Prof. Khan has published several important books on the previously undocumented dialects of Barwar, Qaraqosh, Erbil, Sulemaniyya and Halabja, all areas in Iraq, as well as Urmi and Sanandaj, in Iran. He is also working on a web-based database of text and audio recordings that allows word-by-word comparisons across dozens of Aramaic dialects, Smithsonian.com reported.

Aramaic which belongs to the Semitic family of languages is known for its use in large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra. It is also the main language of Rabbinic Judaism’s key text, the Talmud. Parts of the ancient Dead Sea scrolls were written in Aramaic

The language was used in Israel from 539 BC to 70 AD. According to linguists it was most likely spoken by Jesus.

Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science

A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.

 

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

Some commentators believe that such convoluted arrangements are becoming increasingly common to shield the identity and backgrounds of the wealthy supporters of climate scepticism – some of whom have vested interests in the fossil-fuel industry.

The Knowledge and Progress Fund, whose directors include Charles Koch and his wife Liz, gave $1.25m to Donors in 2007, a further $1.25m in 2008 and $2m in 2010. It does not appear to have given money to any other group and there is no mention of the fund on the websites of Koch Industries or the Charles Koch Foundation.

The Donors Trust is a "donor advised fund", meaning that it has special status under the US tax system. People who give money receive generous tax relief and can retain greater anonymity than if they had used their own charitable foundations because, technically, they do not control how Donors spends the cash.

READ MORE>>>

Interview with George Church,the Harvard professor of genetics: Can Neanderthals Be Brought Back from the Dead?

SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, you predict that it will soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. What do you mean by "soon"? Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime?

Church: That depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think so. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before. In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago. Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it's very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn't we be able to do so?

SPIEGEL: Perhaps because it is banned?

Church: That may be true in Germany, but it's not banned all over the world. And laws can change, by the way.

SPIEGEL: Would cloning a Neanderthal be a desirable thing to do?

Church: Well, that's another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what's technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.

SPIEGEL: So let's talk about possible benefits of a Neanderthal in this world.

Church: Well, Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.

SPIEGEL: How do we have to imagine this: You raise Neanderthals in a lab, ask them to solve problems and thereby study how they think?

Church: No, you would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.

SPIEGEL: Wouldn't it be ethically problematic to create a Neanderthal just for the sake of scientific curiosity?

Church: Well, curiosity may be part of it, but it's not the most important driving force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.

SPIEGEL: Setting aside all ethical doubts, do you believe it is technically possible to reproduce the Neanderthal?

Church: The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.

SPIEGEL: And the surrogates would be human, right? In your book you write that an "extremely adventurous female human" could serve as the surrogate mother.

Church: Yes. However, the prerequisite would, of course, be that human cloning is acceptable to society.

SPIEGEL: Could you also stop the procedure halfway through and build a 50-percent Neanderthal using this technology.

Church: You could and you might. It could even be that you want just a few mutations from the Neanderthal genome. Suppose you were to realize: Wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. They could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. I doubt that we are going to particularly care about their facial morphology, though (laughs).

SPIEGEL: Might it one day be possible to descend even deeper into evolutionary history and recreate even older ancestors like Australopithecus or Homo erectus?

Church: Well, you have got a shot at anything where you have the DNA. The limit for finding DNA fragments is probably around a million years.

SPIEGEL: So we won't be seeing the return of the caveman or dinosaurs?

Church: Probably not. But even if you don't have the DNA, you can still make something that looks like it. For example, if you wanted to make a dinosaur, you would first consider the ostrich, one of its closest living relatives. You would take an ostrich, which is a large bird, and you would ask: "What's the difference between birds and dinosaurs? How did the birds lose their hands?" And you would try to identify the mutations and try to back engineer the dinosaur. I think this will be feasible.

SPIEGEL: Is it also conceivable to create lifeforms that never existed before? What about, for example, rabbits with wings?

Church: So that's a further possibility. However, things have to be plausible from an engineering standpoint. There is a bunch of things in birds that make flying possible, not just the wings. They have very lightweight bones, feathers, strong breast muscles, and the list goes on.

SPIEGEL: Flying rabbits and recreated dinosaurs are pure science fiction today. But on the microbe level, researchers are already creating synthetic life. New bacteria detect arsenic in drinking water. They create synthetic vaccines and diesel fuel. You call these organisms "novel machines". How do they relate to the machines we know?

Church: Well, all organisms are mechanical in the sense that they're made up of moving parts that inter-digitate like gears. The only difference is that they are incredibly intricate. They are atomically precise machines.

SPIEGEL: And what will these machines be used for?

Church: Oh, life science will co-opt almost every other field of manufacturing. It's not limited to agriculture and medicine. We can even use biology in ways that biology never has evolved to be used. DNA molecules for example could be used as three-dimensional scaffolding for inorganic materials, and this with atomic precision. You can design almost any structure you want with a computer, then you push a button -- and there it is, built-in DNA.

SPIEGEL: DNA as the building material of the future?

Church: Exactly. And it's amazing. Biology is good at making things that are really precise. Take trees for example. Trees are extremely complicated, at least on a molecular basis. However, they are so cheap, that we burn them or convert them into tables. Trees cost about $50 a ton. This means that you can make things that are nearly atomically precise for five cents a kilo.

SPIEGEL: You are seriously proposing to build all kinds of machines -- cars, computers or coffee machines -- out of DNA?

Church: I think it is very likely that this is possible. In fact, computers made of DNA will be better than the current computers, because they will have even smaller processors and be more energy efficient.

SPIEGEL: Let's go through a couple of different applications of synthetic biology. How long will it take, for example, until we can fill our tanks with fuel that has been produced using synthentic microbes?

Church: The fact is that we already have organisms that can produce fuel compatible with current car engines. These organisms convert carbon dioxide and light into fuels by basically using photosynthesis.

SPIEGEL: And they do so in an economically acceptable way?

Church: If you consider $1.30 a gallon for fuel a good number, then yeah. And the price will go down. Most of these systems are at least a factor of five away from theoretical limits, maybe even a factor of 10.

SPIEGEL: So we should urgently include synthetic life in our road map for the future energy supply in Germany?

Church: Well, I don't necessarily think it's a mistake to go slowly. It is not like Germany is losing out to lots of other nations right now, but there should be some sort of engineering and policy planning.

READ MORE >>>

George Church, a Harvard geneticist: I CAN create a neanderthal baby, if I can find a willing woman

'I CAN create a neanderthal baby, if I can find a willing woman.' No, it's not the world's worst pick-up line. It's science.

This incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world's leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man's long-extinct close relative back to life.

Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago.

His scheme is reminiscent of Jurassic Park but, while in the film dinosaurs were created in a laboratory, Professor Church's ambitious plan requires a human volunteer.

He said his analysis of Neanderthal genetic code using samples from bones is complete enough to reconstruct their DNA.

He said: 'Now I need an adventurous female human.

'It depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think it can be done.'

Professor Church's plan would begin by artificially creating Neanderthal DNA based on genetic code found in fossil remains. He would put this DNA into stem cells.

Hey, dad: A child takes a close look at a model at 

the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany.

These would be injected into cells from a human embryo in the early stages of life.

It is thought that the stem cells would steer the development of the hybrid embryo on Neanderthal lines, rather than human ones.

After growing in the lab for a few days, the 'neo-Neanderthal' embryo would be implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother - the volunteer.

Professor Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology who helped initiate the Human Genome Project that mapped our DNA.

He says Neanderthals were not the lumbering brutes of the stereotype, but highly intelligent. Their brains were roughly the same size as man's, and they made primitive tools.

He believes his project could benefit mankind.

He told: 'Neanderthals might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us.

'When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.'

Scientists say that his plan is theoretically possible, although in Britain, like most countries, human reproductive cloning is a criminal offence.

 

But Professor Church's proposal is so cutting-edge that it may not be covered by existing laws.

However, experts worry that neo-Neanderthals might lack the immunity to modern diseases to survive, and some fear that the process might lead to deformity.

There is also uncertainty over how they would fit into today's world. Bioethicist Bernard Rollin of Colorado State University said: 'I don't think it's fair to put people... into a circumstance where they are going to be mocked and possibly feared.'

In a scathing reaction, Philippa Taylor of the Christian Medical Fellowship said: 'It is hard to know where to begin with the ethical and safety concerns.'

Rock solid proof of alien life?

Fossilized algae recently discovered inside a Sri Lankan meteorite could finally prove the existence of extra-terrestrial life, claim the authors of the new paper.

In a recently published article in the Journal of Cosmology titled “Fossil Diatoms in a New Carbonaceous Meteorite”, scientists from the UK and Sri Lanka claim to have found fossilized algae in a meteorite.

The paper alleges that “microscopic fossilized diatoms were found in the sample,” which fell in Sri Lanka in December last year. The finding, the work suggests is a “strong evidence to support the theory of cometary panspermia.” The theory argues that life across planets is spread by meteorites and asteroids.  Panspermia suggests that life could have existed on another planet and moved to Earth.

The scientists concluded the paper by saying “the presence of structures of this kind in any extra-terrestrial setting could be construed as unequivocal proof of biology.”

Samples from the rock were collected immediately after a large meteorite disintegrated and fell in the village of Araganwila in Sri Lanka on 29 December 2012.

The scientific community, including Prof Francis Thackeray from the Institute of Human Evolution at Wits University welcomed the report as  “very exciting” yet “very controversial”, as samples could have been contaminated on earth, Business Day reports.

Comparison of a Polonnaruwa meteorite structure with a well-known terrestrial diatom. (Image from www.journalofcosmology.com)

The study was conducted by a group headed by Chandra Wickramasinghe, the director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, who was also a co-founder of Panspermia theory.

The finding however has already come under sharp criticism, with astronomers claiming that the meteorite looks more like a rock that could be found on earth as the study provides vague details of the finding.

Astronomer and lecturer Phil Plait wrote in his blog on Slate that the chemical analysis presented “doesn’t prove it’s a carbonaceous chondrite, let alone a meteorite,” and there is “no reason to trust that what they have is a meteorite.”

Plait also cited a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Patrick Kociolek as saying that there was no sign that the diatoms illustrated in the study were “fossilized material,” and that most of them were species that represented “a clear case of contamination with freshwater.”

Speaking with HuffingtonPost, the author of the study did not deny that the meteorite his team studied contained known freshwater species from Earth. But there were also “at least half a dozen species that diatom experts have not been able to identify,” Wickramasinghe added.

He also addressed the allegations that the meteorite could be a simple rock, saying that “from all the evidence” his group possessed – which they plan to publish – they “have no doubt whatsoever” it was a meteorite.

“If only ideas that are considered orthodox are given support through award of grants or publication opportunities, it is certain that the progress of science will be stifled as it was throughout the middle ages,” Wickramasinghe said.

Former British Defense Ministry predicts alien UFO intervention in 2024

Former British Defense Ministry UFO project leader Nick Pope has boldly predicted that aliens will reveal themselves to humans no later than 2024, and might even land on the White House lawn, just like in the movies. Or, they may just send an email.

Eyes to the skies: Nick Popein front of the Jodrell Bank Observatory

What makes him so sure?

According to an article published by the Jagran Post on Thursday, Dec. 27, that's when the largest telescope in history will go online, improving current imaging and spectrum detection quality by a factor of 50, and at 10,000 times the speed of modern field-array radio telescopes.

The telescope, which will be constructed in the Australian outback, is called the Square Kilometer Array, or the SKA. 2024 is the year it's planned to be finished and turned on. According to Pope, it's the technological leap which will help to pinpoint potential alien life forms with more accuracy than ever before.

"If there is a civilization within 100 light years this telescope could find it" says the former top-cop on Britain's UFO beat.

The SKA telescope is the most ambitious ever planned. It will be made up of thousands of receptors, covering around 5,000 square kilometers of the Earth's surface in the remote wilds of Australia.

So, if there are aliens nearby, this telescope has the best chance of spotting and contacting them. But a landing on the White House lawn?

What do you think?

Shock findings in new GMO study (PHOTO)

 

 Eating genetically modified corn (GM corn) and consuming trace levels of Monsanto's Roundup chemical fertilizer caused rats to develop horrifying tumors, widespread organ damage, and premature death. That's the conclusion of a shocking new study that looked at the long-term effects of consuming Monsanto's genetically modified corn.

The study has been deemed "the most thorough research ever published into the health effects of GM food crops and the herbicide Roundup on rats." News of the horrifying findings is spreading like wildfire across the internet, with even the mainstream media seemingly in shock over the photos of rats with multiple grotesque tumors... tumors so large the rats even had difficulty breathing in some cases. GMOs may be the new thalidomide.

It reported, "Scientists found that rats exposed to even the smallest amounts, developed mammary tumors and severe liver and kidney damage as early as four months in males, and seven months for females."

It goes on to say: "The animals on the GM diet suffered mammary tumors, as well as severe liver and kidney damage. The researchers said 50 percent of males and 70 percent of females died prematurely, compared with only 30 percent and 20 percent in the control group."

Findings from the study

Here are some of the shocking findings from the study:

• Up to 50% of males and 70% of females suffered premature death.

• Rats that drank trace amounts of Roundup (at levels legally allowed in the water supply) had a 200% to 300% increase in large tumors.

• Rats fed GM corn and traces of Roundup suffered severe organ damage including liver damage and kidney damage.

• The study fed these rats NK603, the Monsanto variety of GM corn that's grown across North America and widely fed to animals and humans. This is the same corn that's in your corn-based breakfast cereal, corn tortillas and corn snack chips.

The Daily Mail is reporting on some of the reaction to the findings:

France's Jose Bove, vice-chairman of the European Parliament's commission for agriculture and known as a fierce opponent of GM, called for an immediate suspension of all EU cultivation and import authorisations of GM crops. 'This study finally shows we are right and that it is urgent to quickly review all GMO evaluation processes,' he said in a statement. 'National and European food security agencies must carry out new studies financed by public funding to guarantee healthy food for European consumers.'(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2205509/Fresh-fears-GM...)

Read the study abstract

The study is entitled, "A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health." Read the abstract here:
http://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htm

That abstract include this text. Note: "hepatorenal toxicity" means toxic to the liver.

Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded.

Here are some quotes from the researchers:

"This research shows an extraordinary number of tumors developing earlier and more aggressively - particularly in female animals. I am shocked by the extreme negative health impacts." - Dr Michael Antoniou, molecular biologist, King's College London.

"We can expect that the consumption of GM maize and the herbicide Roundup, impacts seriously on human health." - Dr Antoniou.

"This is the first time that a long-term animal feeding trial has examined the impact of feeding GM corn or the herbicide Roundup, or a combination of both and the results are extremely serious. In the malerats, there was liver and kidney disorders, including tumors and even more worryingly, in the female rats, there were mammary tumors at a level which is extremely concerning; up to 80 percent of the female rats had mammary tumors by the end of the trial." - Patrick Holden, Director, Sustainable Food Trust.