Artificial brain ‘10 years away’

A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed.Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.

He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.

Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.

“It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,” he said.”And if we do succeed, we will send a hologram to TED to talk.

“‘Shared fabric’

The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.In particular, his team has focused on the neocortical column – repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex.

“It’s a new brain,” he explained. “The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions.

“It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ.”

And that evolution continues, he said. “It is evolving at an enormous speed.”

Over the last 15 years, Professor Markram and his team have picked apart the structure of the neocortical column.

“It’s a bit like going and cataloguing a bit of the rainforest – how may trees does it have, what shape are the trees, how many of each type of tree do we have, what is the position of the trees,” he said.

“But it is a bit more than cataloguing because you have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity.”

The project now has a software model of “tens of thousands” of neurons – each one of which is different – which has allowed them to digitally construct an artificial neocortical column.

Although each neuron is unique, the team has found the patterns of circuitry in different brains have common patterns.

“Even though your brain may be smaller, bigger, may have different morphologies of neurons – we do actually share the same fabric,” he said.

“And we think this is species specific, which could explain why we can’t communicate across species.”

- via BBC

Massive quake moves NZealand 1 ft closer to Australia

A massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake last week has moved the south of New Zealand closer to Australia, scientists said Wednesday.With the countries separated by the 2,250-kilometre-wide 1,400-mile-wide Tasman Sea, the 30 centimetre 12 inch closing of the gap in New Zealand’s southwest won’t make much difference.But earthquake scientist Ken Gledhill of GNS Science said the shift illustrated the huge force of the tremor, the biggest in the world so far this year.”Basically, New Zealand just got a little bit bigger is another way to think about it,” he told AFP.While the southwest of the South Island moved about 30 centimetres closer to Australia, the east coast of the island moved only one centimetre westwards, he said.The biggest quake in New Zealand in 78 years caused only slight damage to buildings and property when it struck the remote southwest Fiordland region of the South Island last Thursday.A small tsunami was generated by the earthquake, with a tide gauge on the West Coast of New Zealand recording a wave of one metre.”For a very large earthquake, although it was very widely felt, there were very few areas that were severely shaken,” Gledhill said.Aerial inspection of the forested fiords near the quake’s epicentre showed few land slips or other signs of damage.

via physorg

Brain Surgery Using Sound Waves

A new ultrasound device, used in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allows neurosurgeons to precisely burn out small pieces of malfunctioning brain tissue without cutting the skin or opening the skull. A preliminary study from Switzerland involving nine patients with chronic pain shows that the technology can be used safely in humans. The researchers now aim to test it in patients with other disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease

“The groundbreaking finding here is that you can make lesions deep in the brain–through the intact skull and skin–with extreme precision and accuracy and safety,” says Neal Kassell, a neurosurgeon at the University of Virginia. Kassell, who was not directly involved in the study, is chairman of the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation, a nonprofit based in Charlottesville, VA, that was founded to develop new applications for focused ultrasound.

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is different from the ultrasound used for diagnostic purposes, such as prenatal screening. Using a specialized device, high-intensity ultrasound beams are focused onto a small piece of diseased tissue, heating it up and destroying it. The technology is currently used to ablate uterine fibroids–small benign tumors in the uterus–and it’s in clinical testing for removing tumors from breast and other cancers. Now InSightec, an ultrasound technology company headquartered in Israel, has developed an experimental HIFU device designed to target the brain.

The major challenge in using ultrasound in the brain is figuring out how to focus the beams through the skull, which absorbs energy from the sound waves and distorts their path. The InSightec device consists of an array of more than 1,000 ultrasound transducers, each of which can be individually focused. “You take a CT scan of the patient’s head and tailor the acoustic beam to focus through the skull,” says Eyal Zadicario, head of InSightec’s neurology program. The device also has a built-in cooling system to prevent the skull from overheating.

The ultrasound beams are focused on a specific point in the brain–the exact location depends on the condition being treated–that absorbs the energy and converts it to heat. This raises the temperature to about 130 degrees Fahrenheit and kills the cells in a region approximately 10 cubic millimeters in volume. The entire system is integrated with a magnetic resonance scanner, which allows neurosurgeons to make sure they target the correct piece of brain tissue. “Thermal images acquired in real time during the treatment allow the surgeon to see where and to what extent the rise in temperature is achieved,” says Zadicario.

via Technology Review: Brain Surgery Using Sound Waves.

Just be careful in there. Too bad they can’t selectively numb the cells to see if the effect is positive or negative. Wow, imagine the ability to stimulate one or two neurons at a time with this. You might be able to evoke specific memories… and then wipe them out?

Woody Allen Quote:

“My brain? That’s my second favorite organ.”

Hard Times at Harvard

Only a year ago, Harvard had a $36.9 billion endowment, the largest in academia. Now that endowment has imploded, and the university faces the worst financial crisis in its 373-year history. Could the same lethal mix of uncurbed expansion, colossal debt, arrogance, and mismanagement that ravaged Wall Street bring down America’s most famous university? And how much of the turmoil is the fault of former Harvard president Larry Summers, now a top economic adviser to President Obama? As students demonstrate, administrators impose Draconian cuts, and construction is halted on an over-ambitious $1.2 billion science complex…

Radical change is coming to Harvard. Fewer professors, for one thing. Fewer teaching assistants, janitors, and support staff. Shuttered libraries. Less money for research and travel and books. Cafés replaced by vending machines. Junior-varsity sports teams downgraded to clubs. No raises. No bonuses. No fresh coats of paint or new carpets. Overflowing trash cans.

The recession has been hard on most Americans. We know that. At Harvard, however, adjusting to the end of the gilded age, the champagne age, is proving especially wrenching: the university’s endowment has collapsed, donations are down, budgets are overstretched. …  All across campus, one after another, new academic buildings have shot up. The price of these optimistic new projects: a breathtaking $4.3 billion.  …

. It can’t be easy to be charged with cost-cutting at a university that refuses to use the term “cost-cutting” and instead goes on about “alignments” and “resizements.”…  “The hope was that the endowment would continue to increase, and we could get some support from our alumni base to help pay for those changes in the program.”

He paused. “And then, of course, the bottom fell out of the market.”

via Nina Munk on Hard Times at Harvard | vanityfair.com.

World’s largest telescope to be built in Hawaii

image: Artists rendering shows proposed Thirty Meter Observatory.

Hawaii was chosen Tuesday as the site for the world’s biggest telescope, a device so powerful that it will allow scientists to see some 13 billion light years away and get a glimpse into the early years of the universe.

The telescope’s mirror — stretching almost 100 feet in diameter, or nearly the length of a Boeing 737’s wingspan — will be so large that it should be able to gather light that will have spent 13 billion years traveling to earth. This means astronomers looking into the telescope will be able to see images of the first stars and galaxies forming — some 400 million years after the Big Bang.

“It will sort of give us the history of the universe,” Thirty Meter Telescope Observatory Corp. spokesman Charles Blue said.

The telescope, expected to be completed by 2018, will be located atop a dormant volcano that is popular with astronomers because its summit sits well above the clouds at 13,796 feet, offering a clear view of the sky above for 300 days a year.

Hawaii’s isolated position in the middle of the Pacific Ocean also means the area is relatively free of air pollution. Few cities on the Big Island mean there aren’t a lot of man-made lights around to disrupt observations. …

Another group of universities plans to finish the Giant Magellan Telescope, also around 2018, with an 80-foot mirror in Las Campanas, Chile.

Rolf Kudritzki, the director of Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, said Hawaii’s northern hemisphere location will help the Thirty Meter Telescope complement other large telescopes planned for Chile in the southern hemisphere.

“I think all of the astronomers in the world can be happy because in principle now the two largest telescopes will be able to cover the whole sky. And for research that’s an important decision,” he said.

It will also be a special boon to Hawaii astronomers, who will be allotted a share of the TMT’s observation time. Kudritzki said his colleagues held an impromptu celebratory party Tuesday.

But the decision invited protests from some Native Hawaiian and environmental groups.

Native Hawaiian tradition holds that high altitudes are sacred and are a gateway to heaven. In the past, only high chiefs and priests were allowed at Mauna Kea’s summit. The mountain is home to one confirmed burial site and perhaps four more, and environmentalists oppose the telescope on the grounds it would hurt some endangered species.

“This the kind of legacy they want to leave? They just keep building on our mountain,” said Kealoha Pisciotta, president of Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, a group with family and religious ties to the mountain.

via World’s largest telescope to be built in Hawaii – Yahoo! News.

Bottled water companies win fluoride battle

Bottled water containing fluoride is expected to hit shelves within six months in a move that has irked anti-fluoride crusaders.

Australia’s food safety authority decided to allow the voluntary addition of fluoride into packaged water today after lengthy appeals by the Australasian Bottled Water Institute.

Bottled water companies argued that lifting restrictions would increase consumer choice.

It is understood several will now move to include the chemical, which boosts dental health, in their products. The first bottles will hit shelves in less than six months.

Meanwhile, fluoride is expected to be added to the Bellingen shire water supply shortly.

General Manager, Mike Colreavy said testing and commissioning of fluoridation equipment was delayed by flood. “It is now expected to be completed in July.”

“It relies on the availability of specialist staff from Department of Water and Energy being available for final approval before it will be switched on,” Mr Colreavy told the Courier-Sun.

Anti-fluoride advocate Keith Oakley denounced the move to add fluoride to bottled water, saying it would make it harder for him and his colleagues to access water.

He said the move would also backfire.

“If they want to put fluoride in there, then that’s their problem. But bottled water sales will go down,” he said.

“It’s a bit disappointing but at the very least it should be labelled so I can still buy non-fluoridated water.”

Mr Oakley is a resident of Geelong where the most recent fluoride battle took place last month. He said the options available to opponents of fluoridation were getting smaller.

Since the introduction of fluoride into tap water last month, he has been buying bottled water and is trying to install a rainwater tank at home.

via Bottled water companies win fluoride battle – Local News – News – General – Bellingen Courier Sun.

Checking “Visit Australia” off my list.

I started out neutral. I wrote to people cited in studies. I talked to many dentists. I read everything I could find on the subject in a major University health science library. My personal conclusion: thumbs down for fluoride.

Some believe that fluoride is a neurotoxic, poison, industrial waste that is a byproduct of, among other things, atom bomb production. It was once used as rat poison.  I’ve communicated with scientists over the years and there is no evidence that ingested fluoride does anything good for teeth.  Topical fluoride does help minerals stick to teeth, in the right amount… however, getting too much damages teeth (fluorosis). There is no way to know what total daily dose an individual is getting from various sources. Therefore, putting it in our water is a criminal and insane act of forced medication.

It is my experience that fluoride is not needed for healthy teeth. When I used it, I had several cavities each year. Then I stopped using it and quit eating refined sugar, I  healed (remineralized) multiple cavities in my teeth. I’ve remained cavity free and fluoride free for many years.

Read my article:

I’ve avoided it for years due to claims of weakened bones ( 30 ), a lowered IQ ( 31 ), cancer ( 32 ), thyroid dysfunction ( 33 ), anemia ( 34 ), liver disease ( 35 ), heart disease ( 36 ), Down’s syndrome ( 37 ), and others. Many hold that fluoride is a politically protected poisonous industrial waste. I’ve also read startling reports that fluoride is a byproduct of atomic bomb production. ( 38 ) Documents obtained by researchers seem to support the claim that it was sold to the public as beneficial to teeth with bogus studies in order to protect early military interests. Believe this part or not, but my personal experience is that I healed five cavities without fluoride. No matter where you stand on the fluoride debate, it seems most reasonable to focus on the cause of cavities, the microscopic tooth eating beastliest themselves. …

If you personally want to ingest fluoride, go for it … but don’t force it on me.

Police given powers to enter homes and tear down anti-Olympics posters during Games

Police have been handed ‘Chinese-style’ powers to enter private homes and seize political posters during the London 2012 Olympics.

Little-noticed measures passed by the Government will allow officers and Olympics officials to enter homes and shops near official venues to confiscate any protest material.

Breaking the rules could land offenders with a fine of up to £20,000.

Civil liberties groups compared the powers to those used by the Communist Chinese government to stop political protest during the 2008 Beijing Games.

Anita Coles, of Liberty, said: ‘Powers of entry should be for fighting crime, not policing poster displays. Didn’t we learn last time that the Olympics should not be about stifling free expression?’

The powers were introduced by the Olympics Act of 2006, passed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, supposedly to preserve the monopoly of official advertisers on the London 2012 site.

They would allow advertising posters or hoardings placed in shop or home to be removed.

But the law has been drawn so widely that it also includes ‘non-commercial material’ – which could extend its reach to include legitimate campaign literature.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: ‘This is a Government who just doesn’t understand civil liberties. They may claim these powers won’t be used but the frank truth is no one will believe them.’

Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said: ‘This sort of police action runs the risk of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. ‘We should aim to show the Chinese that you can run a successful Olympics without cracking down on protestors and free speech.’

Scotland Yard denied it had any plans to use the powers.

via Police given powers to enter homes and tear down anti-Olympics posters during Games | Mail Online.

A man who lives without money

His dwelling, hidden high in a canyon lined with waterfalls, is an hour by foot from the desert town of Moab, Utah, where people who know him are of two minds: He’s either a latter-day prophet or an irredeemable hobo. Suelo’s blog, which he maintains free at the Moab Public Library, suggests that he’s both. “When I lived with money, I was always lacking,” he writes. “Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present.”

… I clamber along a set of red-rock cliffs to the mouth of his cave… From the outside, the place looks like a hollowed teardrop, about the size of an Amtrak bathroom, with enough space for a few pots that hang from the ceiling, a stove under a stone eave, big buckets full of beans and rice, a bed of blankets in the dirt, and not much else. Suelo’s been here for three years, and it smells like it.

Night falls … Suelo tramps up the cliff, mimicking a raven’s call—his salutation—a guttural, high-pitched caw. He’s lanky and tan; yesterday he rebuilt the entrance to his cave, hauling huge rocks to make a staircase. His hands are black with dirt, and his hair, which is going gray, looks like a bird’s nest, full of dust and twigs from scrambling in the underbrush on the canyon floor.  …

He moved to Moab and worked at a women’s shelter for five years. He wanted to help people, but getting paid for it seemed dishonest—how real was help that demanded recompense? The answer lay, in part, in the Christianity of his childhood. In Suelo’s nascent philosophy, following Jesus meant adopting the hard life prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. “Giving up possessions, living beyond credit and debt,” Suelo explains on his blog, “freely giving and freely taking, forgiving all debts, owing nobody a thing, living and walking without guilt . . . grudge [or] judgment.” If grace was the goal, Suelo told himself, then it had to be grace in the classical sense, from the Latin gratia, meaning favor—and also, free.

By 1999, he was living in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand—he had saved just enough money for the flight. From there, he made his way to India, where he found himself in good company among the sadhus, the revered ascetics who go penniless for their gods. Numbering as many as 5 million, the sadhus can be found wandering roads and forests across the subcontinent, seeking enlightenment in self-abnegation. “I wanted to be a sadhu,” Suelo says. “But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A true test of faith would be to return to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping nations on earth and be a sadhu there. To be a vagabond in America, a bum, and make an art of it—the idea enchanted me.”

… I sleep in the open, at the edge of a hundred-foot cliff. No worries about animals, he says. Though mountain lions drink from the stream, and bobcats hunt rabbits under the cottonwoods, the worst he’s experienced was a skunk that sprayed him in the face. Mice scurry over his body in the cave, and kissing bugs sometimes suck the blood from under his fingernails while he sleeps. He shrugs off these indignities. “After all, it’s their cave too,” he says. I hunker down near a nest of scorpions, which crawl up the canyon walls, ignoring me.

… What about starvation? He’s never gone without a meal (friends in Moab sometimes feed him). What about getting deadly ill? It happened once, after eating a cactus he misidentified—he vomited, fell into a delirium, thought he was dying, even wrote a note for those who would find his corpse. But he got better. That it’s hard is exactly the point, he says. “Hardship is a good thing. We need the challenge. Our bodies need it. Our immune systems need it.

…   “Gold is pretty but virtually useless. Somebody decided it has worth, and everybody accepted this decision. The natives in the Americas thought Europeans were insane because of their lust for such a useless yellow substance.”

He sautés the watercress, mustard leaves, and wild onions, mixing in fresh almonds he picked from a friend’s orchard and ghee made from Dumpster-dived butter, and we eat out of his soot-caked pans. From the perch on the cliff, the life of the sadhu seems reasonable. But I don’t want to live in a cave. I like indoor plumbing (Suelo squats). I like electricity. Still, there’s an obvious beauty in the simplicity of subsistence. It’s an un-American notion these days. We don’t revere our ascetics, and we dismiss the idea that money could be some kind of consensual delusion. For most of us, it’s as real as the next house payment. Suelo doesn’t take public assistance or use food stamps, but he does survive in part on our reality, the discarded surfeit of the money system that he denounces—a system, as it happens, that recently looked like it was headed for the cliff.

Suelo is 48, and he doesn’t exactly have a 401(k). “I’ll do what creatures have been doing for millions of years for retirement,” he says. “Why is it sad that I die in the canyon and not in the geriatric ward well-insured? I have great faith in the power of natural selection. And one day, I will be selected out.” Until then, think of him like the raven, cleaning up the carcasses the rest of us leave behind.

via COULD YOU SURVIVE WITHOUT MONEY?MEET THE GUY WHO DOES: DETAILS Article on men.style.com.

I’m getting news of pay cuts at work. No layoffs yet. But as times get tougher for everyone, I think this story may comfort some people. It seems rather difficult, at this time anyway, for a sane able bodied person to die of starvation in America. There are so many steps from where most of us are now to where this man “Suelo” still survives.

WHO moves forward in secrecy to accomplish forced vaccination and population agenda?

Jane Bürgermeister believes plans are afoot to depopulate.

The WHO has refused to release the Minutes of a key meeting of an advisory vaccine group – packed with executives from Baxter, Novartis and Sanofi – that recommended compulsory vaccinations in the USA, Europe and other countries against the artificial H1N1 “swine flu” virus this autumn.

In an email this morning, a WHO spokesperson claimed there are no Minutes of the meeting that took place on July 7th in which guidelines on the need for worldwide vaccinations that WH0 adopted this Monday were formulated and in which Baxter and other pharma executives participated.

Under the International Health Regulations, WHO guidelines have a binding character on all of WHO’s 194 signatory countries in the event of a pandemic emergency of the kind anticipated this autumn when the second more lethal wave of the H1N1 virus — which is bioengineered to resemble the Spanish flu virus — emerges.

In short: WHO has the authority to force everyone in those 194 countries to take a vaccine this fall at gunpoint, impose quarantines and restrict travel.

There is verifiable, clear and unambiguous proof that WHO supplied the live bird flu virus to Baxter’s subsidiary in Austria, which was used by Baxter to manufacture 72 kilos of vaccine material in Febuary.

Baxter subsequently sent this material out to 16 labs in four countries under a false label designating the contaminated product as vaccine material, so nearly triggering a global pandemic.

Because Baxter must adhere to strict biosafety level 3 regulations when handling a dangerus virus such as the bird flu virus, the production and distribution of so much pandemic material cannot have been an accident but must have been done by Baxter with criminal intent.

The Austrian police are now investigating after I filed criminal charges in April.

It is increasingly clear that WHO and Baxter are just elements in a much bigger criminal organisation that is moving forward in a synchronised and coordinated way to fulfil the “elite” agenda of global population reduction in the coming months and years while putting in place a global government of which WHO will be an arm.

via WHO moves forward in secrecy to accomplish forced vaccination and population agenda.

Solar eclipse in Asia brings millions out into streets and onto rooftops

It was billed as the best place to see the eclipse and as this astonishing picture shows the tiny Indian village of Taregna in eastern India sure drew in the crowds.

Shoulder to shoulder the masses ranks of eclipse hunters gathered to witness the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century.

At 6.24 am (0054 GMT) live TV pictures were beamed from the location, 300 miles north-west of Calcutta, where assorted scientists, including Nasa, had said it would be the best place to watch the eclipse.

The eclipse – caused when the moon moves directly between the sun and the earth, covering it completely to cast a shadow on earth – lasted almost 4 minutes in India. In some parts of Asia it lasted as long as 6 minutes and 39 seconds.

In Taregna, thousands had gathered a day in advance but thick clouds and overnight rains provided no spectacle, just a cloudy darkness.

‘It was still a unique experience with morning turning into night for more than three minutes,” said Amitabh Pande, a scientist with India’s Science Popularization Association of Communicators and Educators, who was there.

via Solar eclipse in Asia brings millions out into streets and onto rooftops | Mail Online.