Where Is the Left’s Outrage? Obama Kills Bill to Save Battle Hero Dogs

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Seven award-winning service, police, and military dogs descended upon Capitol Hill to lobby Congress in support of the National Defense Authorization Act this week.

The dogs, who had all recently been honored at the American Humane Association’s (AHA) Hero Dog Awards, appeared before an overflow crowd that included congressmen from both parties at the Cannon House office building. Their owners and handlers spoke on their behalf, advocating for a number of issues including adoption of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The act, which includes a provision ensuring military dogs are returned to the United States at the end of their service, was vetoed by President Obama over funding concerns.

The bill was passed with large bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress. The vote was 270-156 in the House of Representatives and 70-27 in the Senate. If those numbers hold, the Senate would be able to override the veto, but the numbers in the House would require representatives to switch their vote.

AHA said they were targeting 12 congressmen in particular.

“We’re down to 12 members in the House to override the veto threat that President Obama has made,” AHA president Robin Ganzert said. “So if we can get to those 12 members and make sure they support the NDAA with the possible veto threat then our military dog legislation we have been fighting for more than a year will become reality.” (Read more from “Where Is the Left’s Outrage? Obama Kills Bill to Save Battle Hero Dogs” HERE)

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A New Material Promises NSA-Proof Wallpaper

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Your next tinfoil hat will won’t be made of tinfoil. A small company called Conductive Composites out of Utah has developed a flexible material — thin and tough enough for wallpaper or woven fabric — that can keep electronic emissions in and electromagnetic pulses out.

There are a few ways to snoop on electronic communications. You can hack into a network or you can sniff out radio emissions. If you want to defend against the latter, you can enclose your electronic device or devices within a structure of electrically conductive, (probably metallic) material. The result is something like a force field. The conductive material distributes the electromagnetic energy away from the target in every direction — think of the *splat* you get when you hurl a tomato at a wall. These enclosures are sometimes called Faraday cages after the 18th-century British scientist who discovered electrolysis.

Today, Faraday cages are all over the place. In 2013, as the College of Cardinals convened to elect a new Pope, the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel was converted into a Faraday cage so that news of the election couldn’t leak out, no matter how hard the paparazzi tried, and how eager the cardinals were to tweet the proceedings. The military also uses Faraday cages for secure communications: Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities or SCIFs are Faraday cages. You’ll need to be in one to access the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, or JWICS, the Defense Department’s top-secret internet . . .

The material also holds promise for a scalable defense against an electromagnetic pulse weapon. EMPs are a rising concern for the national security community, but not a new one. Soviet research into electromagnetic pulse weapons goes back to 1949, and active experimentation back to the 1970s. EMPs entered the public eye via the 2005 James Bond movie GoldenEye, in which an EMP caused massive blackouts and widespread fried electronics. Two years later, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Schweitzer testified before the House Joint Economic Committee that such weapons might help fulfill Sun Tzu’s dictum to conquer an enemy without fighting. “If you can take out the civilian economic infrastructure of a nation, then that nation, in addition to not being able to function internally, cannot deploy its military by air or sea, or supply them with any real effectiveness,” he said. Translation: EMPs offer all the victory at a fraction of the cost. (Read more from “A New Material Promises NSA-Proof Wallpaper” HERE)

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Photo of Woman Scattering Beloved Dog’s Ashes Reveals a Haunting Image

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Losing a pet is never easy. And although you may think Fido is gone for good, chances are your furry friend may still be right by your side. At least, that’s what Ashley Lang discovered after she scattered the ashes of her beloved golden retriever, Wagner.

The dynamic duo had spent 12 action-packed years together before he passed away. As Lang tossed the ashes onto the green grass at Wagner’s favorite park, one of her friends took a picture of her farewell.

After taking a look at it, Lang noticed something strange lingering nearby in the photo. An eerie white figure hovering beside her appeared to be in the shape of Wagner himself, leaping high into the sky, bidding adieu to his loving human. (Read more from “Photo of Woman Scattering Beloved Dog’s Ashes Reveals a Haunting Image” HERE)

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These Halloween Costumes Are Considered ‘Racist’ to This Raunchy Television Station [+video]

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MTV released a video (below) on Oct. 21 telling people not to dress their children in certain Halloween costumes that the cable channel deemed “racist,” and, in the same video, mocked white people.

In the video, adults note the historical inaccuracies of the inexpensive “racist” costumes: “Little Amigo,” “China Boy” (which was manufactured in China), “Arabian Sultan,” “Little Geisha,” “Indian Brave,” “Indian Girl,” “Toddler Jade Harem,” “Gypsy Fortune Teller,” “Kid’s Mac Daddy Pimp,” and “Child Rasta.”

When the “Confederate Officer” costume comes up, one woman states, “Finally, a costume where white people are dressing like their own race, and somehow it’s more offensive.” (Read more from “These Halloween Costumes Are Considered ‘Racist’ to This Raunchy Television Station” HERE)

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Einstein Wouldn’t Like It: New Test Proves the Universe Is…

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The universe really is weird, which is bad news both for Albert Einstein and for would-be hackers hoping to break into quantum encryption systems.

Eighty years after the physicist dismissed as “spooky” the idea that simply observing one particle could instantly change another far-away object, Dutch scientists said on Wednesday they had proved decisively that the effect was real.

Writing in the journal Nature, researchers detailed an experiment showing how two electrons at separate locations 1.3 km (0.8 mile) apart on the Delft University of Technology campus demonstrated a clear, invisible and instantaneous connection.

Importantly, the new study closed loopholes in earlier tests that had left some doubt as to whether the eerie connection predicted by quantum theory was real or not.

Einstein famously insisted in a 1935 scientific paper that what he called “spooky action at a distance” had to be wrong and there must be undiscovered properties of particles to explain such counter-intuitive behavior. (Read more from “Einstein Wouldn’t Like It: New Test Proves the Universe Is…” HERE)

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Secret Service Allowed to Use Warrantless Cellphone Tracking

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A new policy allows the Secret Service to use intrusive cellphone-tracking technology without a warrant if there’s believed to be a nonspecific threat to the president or another protected person.

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Seth M. Stodder described to a House subcommittee Wednesday the department’s policy on the use of cell-site simulators.

Civil libertarians and privacy advocates have long expressed concern about the suitcase-size devices, known as Stingrays, which mimic cell-towers to scoop up electronic data that can be used to locate nearby phones and identify their owners. The devices don’t listen in to phone calls or capture text messages, Stodder said.

The policy the department unveiled this week is similar to the one announced in September by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI.

Federal law enforcement officers are required to get a warrant signed by a judge before using Stingrays, except under emergency “exigent circumstances” meeting the constitutional standard for probable cause under the Fourth Amendment, but when there is no time to get a warrant. (Read more from “Secret Service Allowed to Use Warrantless Cellphone Tracking” HERE)

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Earth Was One of the Universe’s First Habitable Planets, and We’re Likely to Miss Chance to Meet Future Alien Civilizations, Study Claims

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Earth was one of the first habitable planets in the universe, according to a new study.

We were among the first 8 per cent of worlds that could potentially support life when we came into being 4.6 billion years ago, according the astronomers behind the study. Many of the other Earth-supporting planets won’t turn be around for some time — and are likely to come about after our own sun burns out in six billion years.

Astronomers looked at data from the Hubble and Kepler space telescopes to come to the conclusion. The latter was built in part to look for the kind of earth-supporting planets that could be sustaining life elsewhere in the universe.

Lead researcher Dr Peter Behroozi, from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, US, said: “Our main motivation was understanding the Earth’s place in the context of the rest of the universe. Compared to all the planets that will ever form in the universe, the Earth is actually quite early” . . .

But that same understanding might be off-limits to future civilisations. Because the universe is expanding so fast, any observable evidence of its beginnings is likely to be erased — leaving people in the future with no clue about how the universe got to where they are. (Read more from “Earth Was One of the Universe’s First Habitable Planets, and We’re Likely to Miss Chance to Meet Future Alien Civilizations, Study Claims” HERE)

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This Robot Uses Artificial Brain Cells to Navigate Like a Human

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The behavior and interplay of two types of neurons in the brain helps give humans and other animals an uncanny ability to navigate by building a mental map of their surroundings. Now one robot has been given a similar cluster of virtual cells to help it find its own way around.

Researchers in Singapore simulated two types of cells known to be used for navigation in the brain — so-called “place” and “grid” cells — and showed they could enable a small-wheeled robot to find its way around. Rather than simulate the cells physically, they created a simple two-dimensional model of the cells in software. The work was led by Haizhou Li, a professor at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

“Artificial grid cells could provide an adaptive and robust mapping and navigation system,” Li wrote in an e-mail coauthored with Huajin Tang, a research scientist at A*STAR, and Yuan Miaolong, a graduate student and first author on a paper about the work. “Humans and animals have an instinctual ability to navigate freely and deliberately in an environment rather effortlessly.”

The work is significant because it shows the potential for having machines mimic more complex activity in the brain. Roboticists increasingly use artificial neural networks to train robots to perform tasks such as object recognition and grasping, but these networks do not faithfully reflect the complexity and subtlety of a real biological brain.

“Neural networks are actually very loosely inspired by the brain,” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. “They are distributed computing elements, but they’re very simple as compared with neurons; the connections are extremely simple as compared with a synapse.” He says this new development that takes inspiration from the brain “seems like good work.” (Read more from “This Robot Uses Artificial Brain Cells to Navigate Like a Human” HERE)

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Genetically-Engineered, Extra-Muscular Dogs Created by Chinese Scientists

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Photo Credit: The Independent Chinese scientists have created genetically-engineered, extra-muscular dogs, after editing the genes of the animals for the first time.

The scientists create beagles that have double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a certain gene, reports the MIT Technology Review. The mutant dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications”, Liangxue Lai, one of the researchers on the project, told the magazine.

Now the team hope to go on to create other modified dogs, including those that are engineered to have human diseases like muscular dystrophy or Parkinson’s. Since dogs’ anatomy is similar to those of humans’, intentionally creating dogs with certain human genetic traits could allow scientists to further understand how they occur . . .

Recent developments in genome editing allow scientists to edit out or change genes relatively easily. The scientists said that the muscular dogs were mostly a proof of concept, and that they hope to go on to create more edited dogs. (Read more from “Genetically-Engineered, Extra-Muscular Dogs Created by Chinese Scientists” HERE)

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Researchers Perform First Surgery on the Human Genome

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Photo Credit: Time Ever since the human genome was mapped in 2001, scientists have been finding new and novel ways to manipulate it: intervening to remove offending genes or DNA sequences that can contribute to disease, and fixing mutations that can affect people’s health. As remarkable as those advances have been, however, they have only occurred on one dimension—the linear sequence of DNA.

Now scientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences their success in manipulating the genome in 3D. The human genome that’s squeezed into every microscopic cell in the body measures more than two meters long. To stuff it into a space just a few microns wide (the human hair, by comparison, is 40 to 50 microns in diameter) requires some masterful origami-like transformation.

In the study, Erez Lieberman Aiden, director of the center for genome architecture at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, and his colleagues describe how DNA performs this shrinking act. It turns out that there is a sequence in the genome—a DNA “word”—that signals when a long string of DNA should turn and form a loop. The end of that loop is signaled by the same word but in reverse, a mirror image of the original. Where these matched-up words appear on the genome determines which genes are exposed in a relatively accessible place and therefore which genes are more active. Loops formed in cells in the heart, for example, will be different from ones generated in skin cells or bone cells. (Read more from “Researchers Perform First Surgery on the Human Genome” HERE)

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