FEAR FACTOR

Negative subliminal messages work

People are more confident about their choices if the message is negative and they can perceive subliminal messages, particularly if the message is negative, according to a UK study.
In three experiments at University College London, participants were briefly shown masked words and asked to classify them as emotional or neutral.

MULL IT OVER

California mulls legalising marijuana

In 1996, voters in California approved a referendum that made it legal for the first time in decades in the US for people to consume cannabis for medicinal purposes.

More than a dozen states have followed suit since and several others - the most recent of which is Massachusetts - have approved laws decriminalising the possession of small amounts of the drug.

Now, there are moves afoot in California to go further to fully legalise marijuana.

CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE

In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value.

Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow.

She says: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established.

"The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments."

DYING ART

Assisted suicide: Debate around the world

Proponents of assisted suicide believe support for legalisation is growing among lawmakers and the public around the world. In the past year three names have been added to the list of places which permit it.

SEVEN SATELLITES

India launches seven satellites

INDIA has successfully launched seven satellites including six from foreign countries underlining the country's ambitions in the space business.

The country's space agency announced that the seven satellites had been put into orbit about 720 kilometres (447 miles) above the
India will use one of the satellites, Oceansat-2, for monitoring ocean patterns and identifying fishing zones.

INSURANCE RULES

Insurance issue leaves swine flu vaccination plans in shambles

The federal government's plan to immunise the population against swine flu is under threat because insurers may not cover doctors who administer the injections.

Insurers say inadequate testing and the possibility of spreading infections means there is too high a risk that patients will sue, Fairfax newspapers report.

BOOT CAMP

Teen internet addict 'beaten to death'

A Chinese teenager, 15-year-old Deng Senshan, sent to an internet addiction rehabilitation camp has allegedly been beaten to death by counsellors. China is increasingly taking action against what it sees as a pandemic of web addiction.

[People around the world are becoming addicted to a virtual life because their real world is populated by brutal and oppressive rulers.]

PLAYING CHIKAN

Japan’s Simulated Train Cafe – Groping Allowed

The record number of women groped on Tokyo’s trains continue to rise. As the suburban trains are usually crowded, bringing the workers to large cities and back to their suburban homes, close physical contact is unavoidable. Many men use this to their advantage, pressing onto women and groping them. The groping problem is so extreme that Tokyo started a campaign of women-only carriages.

So how’s a groper supposed to get his kicks? Welcome to “Train Cafe,” a simulated train where groping is allowed just minutes away from Tokyo’s Ikebukuro station. The cost to ride is 5,000 yen (~$42US). Once each hour, Train Cafe holds an “all aboard” event, where the paying male members “board” the train together with the girls and engage in simulated ‘chikan’ (groper) play.

Each 20 minute ride allows gropers to grabs any girl’s behinds or breasts. Upskirt grabs aren’t allowed and will result in a violation. Since the girls are just normal folk that hang out at the Cafe after work, male attenders are free to ask them for a date or drink after the session has ended.

TROUSER PRESS

Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed Al-Hussein
wearing her trousers

Woman may receive 40 lashes for wearing trousers

Lubna Ahmed Hussein says she was arrested for wearing trousers. She has adopted a defiant attitude, urging authorities to try her although she faces up to 40 lashes in public.

Earlier, she told the BBC she was not afraid, saying: "Flogging is not pain, flogging is an insult to humans, women and religions."

Ms Hussein has resigned from a UN job that would have given her immunity to take on the case - indicating she wants it to become a test case for women's rights in Sudan.

"If the court's decision is that I be flogged, I want this flogging in public," she told the BBC's Today programme.

[Update: She missed a flogging but copped a $300 fine.]

GREEN SHOOTS

Obama right to be circumspect

HOURS AFTER reading Jeff Jacoby’s column criticizing President Obama’s cautious response to the protests in Iran (“Obama’s restraint on Iran,’’ Op-ed), I was reading reports that the regime in Tehran was already blaming the US for the demonstrations.
Iran’s current government was created after the toppling of the shah, an American proxy.
It has subsisted for 30 years on anti-American rhetoric, and like all authoritarian states it uses imagined external threats to cement its power at home and crush dissent.

[Sound familiar?]

POLICE STATE

Gangs unite against anti-bikie laws

QC Geoffrey Nicholson says the laws are unfair and could be used to target other groups.

"They are very wide in their application, they refer generally to any organisation or club in the community," he said.

"Members of such organisations, if declared, can have their communications, their right to speak, the right to use the telephone, the right to meet and mix with whoever they want for lawful purposes, stopped."

OUR BACKYARD

At left is the parachute and backshell that guided the Mars rover Opportunity to a safe landing. link

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted the remains of space probes and landing gear on the surface of Mars. The camera was able to zoom in on Viking I and Viking II, which landed in 1976, in addition to the two currently operating rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

CONDOMNATION

Pope's condom stance sparks backlash

"To claim that condoms 'aggravate' the problem of AIDS goes totally against all the efforts made by the Cameroonian Government and other actors implicated in the struggle against AIDS in Cameroon."

Alain Fogue, a spokesman for MOCPAT said in Yaounde that the 81-year-old pontiff was out of touch with the modern world.

SPACE WEATHER

Sunspot 1026 is about as wide as Earth. SOHO measurements show the spot's
magnetic polarity and identified it as a member of new Solar Cycle 24.

New sunspot cycle begins

SUNSPOT 1026: One sunspot is not enough to end the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century, but you've got to start somewhere. "Finally, a new sunspot!" says Paul Maxson who sends this picture from his observatory in Surprise, Arizona: Sunspot 1026 emerged yesterday to break a string of 19 consecutive spotless days.
It's about as wide as Earth, which makes it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has measured the spot's magnetic polarity and identified it as a member of new Solar Cycle 24.

SUNSPOT UPDATE: A second sunspot is emerging to join the one reported below: SOHO image. This is the first time in more than a year that two relatively-large sunspots have shared the Earth-facing side of the sun.

SACRED SHITE

Uluru being 'used as a toilet'

Tourists are defecating on the top of Uluru. It's a sacred site and one of Australia's natural wonders but Andrew Simpson, general manager of the Anangu Waai tour company, says that isn't stopping people from using it as a toilet.
"That's been going on for years," he said. "When people climb up the top of the rock there's no toilet facilities up there. They get out of sight ... (and) most of them have a toilet roll tucked away. They're shitting on a sacred site."
Mr Simpson claims come as the Federal Government considers whether to ban people climbing the 348m-high rock, which is sacred to local Aborigines.
The Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park called for an end to people making the arduous trek up the monolith
earlier this year, citing cultural, environmental and safety concerns.

WAR CRIMES

Nazi deserter hails long-awaited triumph

For almost 20 years, Ludwig Baumann has been fighting for justice, determined to clear the names of all victims of Nazi military justice.

According to historians, around 30,000 people were sentenced to death for desertion or treason by Nazi military tribunals during World War II, and some 20,000 were executed.

Mr Baumann says the men who were described as "wartime traitors" were not traitors at all.

"They behaved humanely. Some hid Jews, others helped prisoners - they followed their moral conscience," he said.

CORRUPTION WATCH

Death threat sent to Heffernan

Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan has told Parliament he received a death threat last week. Senator Heffernan made the revelation while talking about his decision to reject a million dollar bribe offered to him by a Sydney developer last year.

"There is a cost to not having a price. Last Thursday I got a death threat," he said. Mr Heffernan said the bribe offer was made by "people who are wanting develop things in Sydney".

The bribe is believed to be in connection with the controversial development of Sydney's Malabar Rifle Range.

GENETIC ANOMALIES

UFO puzzle: Alien baby or elaborate hoax?

In 2007, a baby 'alien' was found alive by a farmer in Mexico.

After three attempts he managed to drown it in a ditch out of fear, and now two years later scientists have finally been able to announce the results of their tests on this sinister-looking carcass.
At the end of last year the farmer, Marao Lopez, handed the corpse over to university scientists who carried out DNA tests and scans.

And in a further mystery, Lopez has since mysteriously died.
According to American UFO expert Joshua P. Warren (32), the farmer burned to death in a parked car at the side of a road.

OUR COSMOS

NASA:  “The golden bacteria growing in a dish are called Deinococcus radiodurans (D. rad).

Universe teeming with life ... get used to it

Probably one of the oldest surviving Earth life forms, D. rad was discovered by accident in the 1950s when scientists investigating food preservation techniques could not easily kill it. D. rad could live on another planet because in Earth labs, D. rad survives extreme levels of radiation, extreme temperatures, dehydration, and exposure to genotoxic chemicals.

Amazingly, D. rad bacteria even have the ability to repair their own DNA, usually within 48 hours. Known as an extremophile, D. rad is of interest to NASA because the resilient bacteria could help human astronauts survive on other worlds. A recent genome map of D. rad's DNA might allow biologists to augment its survival skills with the ability to produce medicine, clean water, and oxygen.

Already D. rad has been genetically engineered to help clean up toxic mercury spills.”
Image credit: Michael Daly, Dept. of Energy lab.

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

GEOMAGNETIC MEGA-STORM

Northern Lights swept over Cuba and Hawaii.
Telegraph offices caught fire.
Earth's magnetic field shook for nearly a week.
150 years ago our planet experienced a "geomagnetic megastorm".

On Sept. 2nd 1859, a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth's magnetic field. Campers in the Rocky Mountains woke up in the middle of the night, thinking that the glow they saw was sunrise. It was the Northern Lights. People in Cuba read their morning paper by the red illumination of aurora borealis. Earth was peppered by particles so energetic, they altered the chemistry of polar ice.Hard to believe?.

As the day unfolded, the gathering storm electrified telegraph lines, shocking technicians and setting their telegraph papers on fire. The "Victorian Internet" was knocked offline. Magnetometers around the world recorded strong disturbances in the planetary magnetic field for more than a week.

The cause of all this was an extraordinary solar flare witnessed the day before by British astronomer Richard Carrington. His sighting marked the discovery of solar flares and foreshadowed a new field of study: space weather. According to the National Academy of Sciences, if a similar flare occurred today, it would cause $1 to 2 trillion in damage to society's high-tech infrastructure and require four to ten years for complete recovery.

A repeat of the Carrington Event seems unlikely from our low vantage in a deep solar minimum--but don't let the quiet fool you. Strong flares can occur even during weak solar cycles. Indeed, the Carrington flare itself occured during a relatively weak cycle similar to the one expected to peak in 2012-2013. Could it happen again?

NASA: Severe space weather.

BLIND JUSTICE

Justice secretary acted unlawfully and "contrary to good administration"

A man serving a life sentence for a double murder has won a High Court victory to allow him to have cosmetic surgery on the NHS.
Denis Harland Roberts, 59, currently in a Durham jail for killing an elderly couple in East Sussex in 1989, will now have treatment to remove a birthmark.
The case may mean other inmates are considered for similar treatments.

An undisclosed policy operated by Justice Secretary Jack Straw had restricted non-urgent inmate treatment.
This included cosmetic surgery.
But Roberts' publicly-funded legal challenge led to the previously-undisclosed policy being revealed in full for the first time last week.
It operated despite the government publicly stating that prisoners were entitled to the same NHS treatment as the rest of the population.

On Wednesday, London's High Court declared that the justice secretary acted unlawfully and "contrary to good administration" in failing to disclose his full policy on medical appointments.
Roberts, who is a Category A prisoner, was represented in court by barrister Adam Straw - the justice secretary's nephew.

HIVE MIND

"Go to the ant thou sluggard. Consider their ways and be wise" (King Solomon)

During its 20-day stationary phase, an army ant colony scatters about 14 foraging raids directed 123° apart. The heavy line indicates the colony's path during the nomadic phase.

Army ants: a collective intelligence?

Put a hundred army ants on a flat surface and they will walk around in never decreasing circles until they die from exhaustion. But a colony of a million army ants is a sophisticated "super-organism." The colony carries out its legendary raids and can even keep nest temperatures constant to within a degree. An army ant colony seems en dowed with an intelligence far beyond that of any individual ant. N.R.Franks speculates thus:

"It seems that intelligence, natural or artificial, is an emergent property of collective communication. Human con-sciousness itself may be an epiphenomenon of extraordinary processing power...
It seems clear that all intelligence involves the rational manipulation of symbolic information. This is exactly what happens when army ants pass information from individual to individual through the 'writing' and 'reading' of symbols, often in the form of chemical messengers or trail pheromones, which act as stimuli for changing behavior patterns."

Remarkable is the systematic orientation of the raids in the stationary phase. These raids are separated by an average 123°, as diagrammed. This scattering allows time for new prey to enter the previously raided areas.
But how does the colony determine direction in the dense rain forest? Probably from polarized sinlight, thinks Franks. But here we have a problem: each army ant, instead of having multi faceted compound eyes like most insects, has just a single facet in each eye.

"The mystery is how the colony can navigate with each of its workers having such rudimentary eyesight. In my wildest dreams, I imagine that the whole swarm behaves like a huge compound eye, with each of the ants in the swarm front contributing two lenses to a 10- or 20-m wide 'eye' with hundreds of thousands of facets."
(Franks, Nigel R.; "Army Ants: A Collective Intelligence," American Scientist, 77:139, 1989.)

LUNAR MYSTERY

India loses communication with lunar satellite

India's national space agency said communications with the country's only satellite orbiting the moon snapped Saturday and that its scientists were no longer controlling the spacecraft.
Radio contacts with Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft were abruptly lost at 0130 Saturday (2000 GMT Friday), the Indian Space Research Organization said.
The agency's monitoring unit near the southern city of Bangalore is no longer receiving data from the spacecraft, spokesman S. Satish told The Associated Press by telephone from Bangalore.
The spacecraft had completed 312 days in orbit and orbited the moon more than 3400 times.
"We are studying the telemetry data and trying to figure out what is the problem," Satish said. The space agency had received a large volume of data from the spacecraft — which is slotted in an automatic orbit of the moon.

NASA - Bizarre Lunar Orbits

Be careful of the orbit chosen for a low-orbiting lunar satellite. "What counts is an orbit's inclination," that is, the tilt of its plane to the Moon's equatorial plane.
"There are actually a number of 'frozen orbits' where a spacecraft can stay in a low lunar orbit indefinitely.
They occur at four inclinations: 27º, 50º, 76º, and 86º" — the last one being nearly over the lunar poles.
The orbit of the relatively long-lived Apollo 15 subsatellite PFS-1 had an inclination of 28º, which turned out to be close to the inclination of one of the frozen orbits — PFS-2 was cursed with an inclination of only 11º.