‘World’s Biggest’ Snake Has Been Discovered – and It Will Send Chills Down Your Spine [+video]

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A new contender for the title of world’s biggest snake has been discovered.

With a head that dwarfs any human’s and a seemingly neverending body the terrifying beast is sure to send chills down your spine.

Footage has emerged of the snake bound up in chains after it was captured in the wild, but that doesn’t make it any less fearsome.

As the camera pans along the snake its body is swollen in places as evidence of its voracious appetite. (Read more from “‘World’s Biggest’ Snake Has Been Discovered – and It Will Send Chills Down Your Spine” HERE)

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Here Are the ‘Official’ Amount of Ways to Get Sick or Die

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There are 70,000 ways to get sick, hurt or mortally injured, and the U.S. is making them official.

On Thursday, U.S. hospitals, doctors and other care providers have to start using internationally developed standards called ICD-10 codes to bill government programs and private insurers in the nation’s $2.9 trillion-a-year health-care system. The codes cover everything from parrot bites to getting sucked into a jet engine.

Doctors have already begun mocking the diagnostic list, picking out the most absurd and arcane, such as Z63.1, “Problems in relationship with in-laws,” or V91.07XA, “Burn due to water skis on fire.” Yet for health-care providers who have payments at stake, the complex change is no joke.

Health insurers and government programs stopped accepting the old set of codes, called ICD-9, in the early morning hours Thursday, completing the switch. In a study released last month, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said “little is known” about how much it will cost the health-care system to make the transition. HCA Holdings Inc., the Nashville, Tennessee-based hospital chain, said 2015 costs for the transition to the new codes will be about $30 million.

Insurers began preparing for ICD-10 in 2010 and have been ready since the government first delayed implementation in 2012, said Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a Washington-based industry group. “Every deadline that has come up, we were ready.” (Read more from “Here Are the ‘Official’ Amount of Ways to Get Sick or Die” HERE)

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Obama’s New Ozone Standard Has Green Groups Seeing Red

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The Obama administration handed a win to industry groups Thursday on a fiercely debated rule for smog-causing ozone pollution — leaving green groups feeling betrayed once again and threatening legal action.

The new EPA standard is stricter than one the George W. Bush administration had set in 2008, but it’s far laxer than what environmental and public health groups consider necessary to lessen illnesses like childhood asthma.

Thursday’s action came four years after the White House abruptly squelched an earlier EPA attempt to tighten the ozone rule, a move that greens still regard as one of the great betrayals of Obama’s presidency.

David Baron, the managing attorney with Earthjustice, called the standard “weak-kneed” and “a betrayal of the Clean Air Act’s promise of healthy air.” He said it is likely his group and other environmentalists would sue.

“Lowering the smog standard … is a modest step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough to protect the millions of Americans living in communities with dangerously high levels of smog pollution,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune. (Read more from “Obama’s New Ozone Standard Has Green Groups Seeing Red” HERE)

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Google Exec: With Robots in Our Brains, We’ll Be Godlike [+video]

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I suspect a few of you are looking forward to being robots.

Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the idea of becoming someone other than themselves? We do get so tired of being the same dull soul every day.

What kind of robots will we be? Happily, I can provide an answer. For living inside my head all day have been the words of Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil.

For more than a curt while, he’s been keen on humans going over to the bright side. He’s predicted that humans will be hybrid robots by 2030.

But what will this be like? More importantly, what will this feel like? Are you ready to engage what’s left of your humorous humanity when I offer you the information that Kurzweil believes we’re going to be quite wonderful people when we’re part robot? (Read more from “Google Exec: With Robots in Our Brains, We’ll Be Godlike” HERE)

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NASA Announces Incredible Discovery on the Surface of Mars

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In a groundbreaking announcement Monday, NASA officials confirmed their discovery of liquid water on the surface of Mars.

“Today,” NASA Director of Planetary Science Jim Green said, “we’re revolutionizing our understanding of the planet.”

While scientists have largely agreed that the planet consists of ice, the discovery of salty, flowing water represents a new chapter in our understanding of Mars.

“Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past,” Green continued.

While he went on to qualify that the liquid water was observable “under certain circumstances,” Green described the discovery as “tremendously exciting” and “a great opportunity” to learn even more. (Read more from “NASA Announces Incredible Discovery on the Surface of Mars” HERE)

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DARPA Is Implanting Chips in Soldiers’ Brains, According to This New Book

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For decades, DARPA, the secretive research arm of the Department of Defense, has dreamed of turning soldiers into cyborgs. And now it’s finally happening. The agency has funded projects that involve implanting chips into soldiers’ brains that they hope will enhance performance on the battlefield and repair traumatized brains once the fog of war has lifted.

“Of the 2.5 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, 300,000 of them came home with traumatic brain injury,” journalist Annie Jacobsen told NPR. “DARPA initiated a series of programs to help cognitive functioning, to repair some of this damage. And those programs center around putting brain chips inside the tissue of the brain.”

In her new book about the history of DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” Jacobsen writes that scientists are already testing “neuroprosthetics” brain implants, but that despite her multiple appeals to the Defense Department, she was not allowed to interview any of the “brain-wounded warriors.”

However, Defense One, an online magazine that covers the military, reported last year on DARPA’s work on brain chips to treat PTSD, and said that DARPA was not yet in the testing phase. “The military hopes to have a prototype within 5 years and then plans to seek FDA approval,” according to Defense One. When DARPA launched its RAM (Restoring Active Memory) program last year, it projected it would be about four years until researchers were implanting chips in human.

Creating super soldiers isn’t the only thing that DARPA is trying to do. According to Jacobsen’s new book, published by Little, Brown, government scientists hope that implanting chips in soldiers will unlock the secrets of artificial intelligence, and allow us to give machines the kind of higher-level reasoning that humans can do. (Read more from “DARPA Is Implanting Chips in Soldiers’ Brains, According to This New Book” HERE)

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Sports Illustrated Columnist: Tom Brady Must ‘Answer’ for Supporting Trump

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Sports Illustrated published an article Friday by Aaron Leibowitz, an anti-American, anti-military leftist, demanding New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady be made to ‘answer’ for supporting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Tom Brady Needs to Answer Questions About His Support of Donald Trump is the headline to SI’s Stalinist attempt to make Brady toe the party line.

Leibowitz writes for The Cauldron, a site that is published by Medium.com and this month was also picked up by Sports Illustrated. According to his LinkedIn profile, Leibowitz is a 2014 graduate of Tufts who has a “passion for issues involving the intersection of sports and politics.”

Leibowitz’s anti-American, anti-military stance was revealed by him in a Cauldron piece he wrote that was published in May about several NFL teams secretly getting paid by the Defense Department for game-day events honoring service members.

“When I woke up Friday morning, I already knew that the National Football League uses jingoism to promote its brand. I knew that the league profits off the glorification of violence. I knew that the NFL and the military work hand in glove.”

(Read more from “Sports Illustrated Columnist: Tom Brady Must ‘Answer’ for Supporting Trump” HERE)

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Feds Spend Nearly $10M to Develop App That Predicts ‘Psychological Status’ of Americans

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Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed a system that can predict the “psychological status” of users with smartphones and hope to private companies to bring the invention to the market.

The technology appeared on a list of NIH inventions published in the Federal Register that are now available to be licensed by private companies. The government allows companies to license inventions resulting from federal research in order to expedite their arrival on the marketplace.

The system uses smartphones to ask people how they are doing mentally during the day and based on the results can “deliver an automated intervention” if necessary.

“The NIH inventors have developed a mobile health technology to monitor and predict a user’s psychological status and to deliver an automated intervention when needed,” according to the notice published Wednesday. “The technology uses smartphones to monitor the user’s location and ask questions about psychological status throughout the day.”

“Continuously collected ambulatory psychological data are fused with data on location and responses to questions,” the NIH said. “The mobile data are combined with geospatial risk maps to quantify exposure to risk and predict a future psychological state. The future predictions are used to warn the user when he or she is at especially high risk of experiencing a negative event that might lead to an unwanted outcome (e.g., lapse to drug use in a recovering addict).” (Read more from “Feds Spend Nearly $10M to Develop App That Predicts ‘Psychological Status’ of Americans” HERE)

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Shigella on the Rise, 150 Cases Confirmed in This U.S. City

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Medical professionals and the city health department are warning the public about a significant increase in Shigella; an illness that causes high fever and abdominal problems.

The Kansas City Health Department put out new numbers on Friday, explaining that the city normally sees 10 cases of Shigella a year. So far in 2015, there have already been 150 reported cases. From January 1 to July 1 this year, there were 16 reported cases. In the past two months, 134 additional cases. That total, 150, is 15-times the annual average.

Shigella is an infectious bacterial illness that causes high-spiking fever, upward of 104 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Doctors say Shigella can also cause seizures. Though adults are also susceptible, the majority of the patients are children. Many cases have been reported in daycares and elementary schools.

Doctors say symptoms include diarrhea, abdominal cramping, nausea, vomiting, and fever. They say antibiotic treatment will help, though it requires culture testing to determine which kind of medicine is needed.

“We always develop resistance to different bacterial organisms so it’s really important that we are able to identify what type of Shigella it is and how to treat it best,” Scott Dattel, M.D., said. (Read more from “Shigella on the Rise, 150 Cases Confirmed in This U.S. City” HERE)

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Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes

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51644a6b4a568ea1dacdaafc639dc28a.1000x563x1At the request of his probation officer, Tyrone C. Brown came to a community auditorium here in June and sat alongside about 30 other mostly young black men with criminal records — men who were being watched closely by the police, just as he was.

He expected to hear an admonition from law enforcement officials to help end violence in the community. But Mr. Brown, 29, got more than he had bargained for. A police captain presented a slide show featuring mug shots of people they were cracking down on. Up popped a picture of Mr. Brown linking him to a criminal group that had been implicated in a homicide . . .

Mr. Brown, whose criminal record includes drug and assault charges, is at the center of an experiment taking place in dozens of police departments across the country, one in which the authorities have turned to complex computer algorithms to try to pinpoint the people most likely to be involved in future violent crimes — as either predator or prey. The goal is to do all they can to prevent the crime from happening.

The strategy, known as predictive policing, combines elements of traditional policing, like increased attention to crime “hot spots” and close monitoring of recent parolees. But it often also uses other data, including information about friendships, social media activity and drug use, to identify “hot people” and aid the authorities in forecasting crime.

The program here has been named the Kansas City No Violence Alliance, or KC NoVA. And the message on that June night to Mr. Brown and the others was simple: The next time they, or anyone in their crews, commit a violent act, the police will come after everyone in the group for whatever offense they can make stick, no matter how petty. (Read more from “Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes” HERE)

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