One night during dinner, your cruise ship crashes into a reef. Amid the pandemonium you must climb into a lifeboat leaving all your possessions, passport, money – even your high-heeled shoes. Then the cruise line offers you $14,000 to settle. If you take it, is it taxable?

The Costa unit of Carnival Cruises is offering uninjured passengers €11,000 ($14,460) apiece to compensate them for lost baggage and psychological trauma. Costa will also reimburse passengers for their cruise, travel and medical expenses. This deal only covers those who suffered no physical harm , not the roughly 100 people injured or families who lost loved ones.

Of course, there will be lawsuits. Passengers are free to pursue legal action on their own if they aren’t satisfied with the deal. Two U.S. law firms are said to be launching a class-action against Costa and Carnival hoping for a considerably richer recovery per passenger. …

But Is It Taxable? Maybe. Although the wreck happened in Italy, every U.S. citizen and permanent resident must report worldwide income. See New IRS Offshore Amnesty Announced: Third Time’s A Charm. What’s income? Generally everything.

Fortunately, damages for physical injuries (say, broken bones from an accident) are tax-free. What if you only suffer emotional injuries? Physical sickness is also tax-free but not physical symptoms caused by emotional distress—say, headaches. Neither the IRS nor Congress has clarified what’s physical and what’s not, so tax disputes are common.

In 2010, the U.S. Tax Court overruled an IRS decision to tax a $350,000 settlement a man received after suing his ex-employer for intentional infliction of emotional distress. See Parkinson v. Commissioner. Why? The distress led to a heart attack, the court said. See Tax-Free Physical Sickness Recoveries in 2010 and Beyond.

Still, the $14,000 cruise deal is solely for passengers with no physical injury, which could mean it’s taxable. If passengers get post-traumatic stress disorder, is PTSD physical injury for tax purposes? I argue it should be.

Property Too! What if the $14,000 covers all passenger possessions too and they were worth more? If you lost $11,000 worth of clothes, cameras, luggage and personal items you should be able to recover your basis before you have income. That could mean only the excess is taxed. What if you lost $18,000 worth of items but you accept the $14,000? You probably have no income on the settlement and perhaps can claim a $4,000 casualty loss.

Yet proof problems can be severe—who keeps receipts for personal items? For tips, see Need A Tax Receipt? How the settlement is reported to you (on IRSForms 1099) can matter. You have more flexibility to reduce taxes if you negotiate your settlement with an eye on tax rules. The IRS isn’t bound by an agreement’s wording, but it can help.

Forbes.com

http://news360.com/article/40765844

Twitter is going into the censorship business, and followers don’t like it.

The hugely popular social network, which unwittingly has helped fuel pro-democracy movements in the Middle East and elsewhere by allowing pretty much unfettered access to tweets, has decided to take down tweets that may break the law in one country but allow that same tweet to be seen in other countries. Previously, when a tweet came down it vanished from screens throughout the world. …

http://news360.com/article/40767659

Earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects — for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA — are animate, that is, alive. With its broad explanatory power, applicable to all areas of science and medicine, this novel paradigm aims to catalyze a veritable renaissance.

Erik Andrulis, PhD, assistant professor of molecular biology and microbiology, advanced his controversial framework in his manuscript “Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life,” published in the peer-reviewed journal, Life. His theory explains not only the evolutionary emergence of life on earth and in the universe but also the structure and function of existing cells and biospheres.

In addition to resolving long-standing paradoxes and puzzles in chemistry and biology, Dr. Andrulis’ theory unifies quantum and celestial mechanics. His unorthodox solution to this quintessential problem in physics differs from mainstream approaches, like string theory, as it is simple, non-mathematical, and experimentally and experientially verifiable. As such, the new portrait of quantum gravity is radical.

The basic idea of Dr. Andrulis’ framework is that all physical reality can be modeled by a single geometric entity with life-like characteristics: the gyre. The so-called “gyromodel” depicts objects — particles, atoms, chemicals, molecules, and cells — as quantized packets of energy and matter that cycle between excited and ground states around a singularity, the gyromodel’s center. A singularity is itself modeled as a gyre, wholly compatible with the thermodynamic and fractal nature of life. An example of this nested, self-similar organization is the Russian Matryoshka doll.

By fitting the gyromodel to facts accumulated over scientific history, Dr. Andrulis confirms the proposed existence of eight laws of nature. One of these, the natural law of unity, decrees that the living cell and any part of the visible universe are irreducible. This law formally establishes that there is one physical reality.

Another natural law dictates that the atomic and cosmic realms abide by identical organizational constraints. Simply put, atoms in the human body and solar systems in the universe move and behave in the exact same manner.

“Modern science lacks a unifying, interdisciplinary theory of life. In other words, current theories are unable to explain why life is the way it is and not any other way,” Dr. Andrulis says. “This general paradigm furnishes a fresh perspective on the character and meaning of life, offers solutions to protracted problems, and strives to end divisive debates.”

One debate swirls around the scientific merit of James Lovelock’s popular Gaia hypothesis. By showing that Earth is theoretically synonymous with life, Dr. Andrulis’ paradigm substantiates the Gaian premise that all organisms and their surroundings on earth are closely integrated to form a single self-regulating complex system. …

via Radical theory explains the origin, evolution, and nature of life, challenges conventional wisdom.

Wait, this is on sciencedaily? So… When will the planet earth reproduce?

After years of relative somnolence, the sun is beginning to stir. By the time it’s fully awake in about 20 months, the team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., charged with researching and tracking solar activity, will have at their dispoal a greatly enhanced forecasting capability.

Goddard’s Space Weather Laboratory recently received support under NASA’s Space Technology Program Game Changing Program to implement “ensemble forecasting,” a computer technique already used by meteorologists to track potential paths and impacts of hurricanes and other severe weather events.

Instead of analyzing one set of solar-storm conditions, as is the case now, Goddard forecasters will be able to simultaneously produce as many as 100 computerized forecasts by calculating multiple possible conditions or, in the parlance of Heliophysicists, parameters. Just as important, they will be able to do this quickly and use the information to provide alerts of space weather storms that could potentially be harmful to astronauts and NASA spacecraft.

“Space weather alerts are available now, but we want to make them better,” said Michael Hesse, chief of Goddard’s Space Weather Laboratory and the recently named director of the Center’s Heliophysics Science Division. “Ensemble forecasting will provide a distribution of arrival times, which will improve the reliability of forecasts. This is important. Society is relying more so than ever on space. Communications, navigation, electrical-power generation, all are all susceptible to space weather.” Once it’s implemented, “there will be nothing like this in the world. No one has done ensemble forecasting for space weather.”

The state-of-the-art capability, which Hesse’s group is implementing now and expects to complete within three years, couldn’t come too soon, either.

Sun Growing Restless

Since the sun reached its solar minimum in 2008 — the period when the number of sunspots is lowest — it has begun to awaken from its slumber. On Aug. 4, the sun unleashed a near X-class solar flare that erupted near an Earth-facing sunspot. Although flares don’t always produce coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — gigantic bubbles of charged particles that can carry up to ten billion tons of matter and accelerate to several million miles per hour as they erupt from the sun’s atmosphere and stream through interplanetary space — this one did.

The CME overtook two previous CMEs — all occurring within 48 hours — and combined into a triple threat. Luckily for Earthlings, the CMEs produced only a moderate geomagnetic storm when solar particles streamed down the field lines toward Earth’s poles and collided with atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere. Even so, “it was the strongest storm in many years,” said Antti Pulkkinen, one of the laboratory’s chief forecasters.

However, the repercussions could be far worse in the future. As part of its 11-year cycle, the sun is entering solar maximum, the period of greatest activity. It is expected to peak in 2013. During this time, more powerful CMEs, often associated with M- and X-class flare events, become more numerous and can affect any planet or spacecraft in its path. In the past, solar storms have disrupted power grids on Earth and damaged instrumentation on satellites. They can also be harmful to astronauts if they are not warned to take protective cover.

“No one knows exactly what the sun will do, Pulkkinen said. “We can’t even tell in a week, let alone a year or two, what the sun will do. All we know is that the sun will be more active.” …

via NASA – Space Weather Center to Add World’s First ‘Ensemble Forecasting’ Capability.

Good luck, planet Earth.

A gang of heavily insulated scientists has wrapped up its Antarctic expedition, with its members thawing out from the experience, but pleased to have bagged more than 300 space rocks.

They are participants in the Antarctic Search for Meteorites program, or ANSMET for short. Since 1976, ANSMET researchers have been recovering thousands of meteorite specimens from the East Antarctic ice sheet. ANSMET is funded by the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation.

According to the ANSMET website, the specimens are currently the only reliable, continuous source of new, nonmicroscopic extraterrestrial material. Given that there are no active planetary sample-return missions coming or going at the moment, the retrieval of meteorites is the cheapest and only guaranteed way to recover new things from worlds beyond the Earth.  …

via Hundreds of Meteorites Uncovered in Antarctica | Space.com.

… Meteorites have been found in Antarctica since the continent was first explored. The first one was found in 1912, by a member of an expedition from Australia.

So what happens when a team member spots a meteorite?

The collection process starts by using the meteorite hunter’s toolkit, a relatively simple collection of gear: sterile bags to contain the rocks, numbered tags to label them, tape to close and seal the bags, a notebook to take down any distinguishing features of the sample, and scissors to cut the tape or the bags open.

Great care is taken not to touch the meteorite or even breathe on it. Above all, a dripping nose hovering over a specimen is a no-no!

The meteorite is placed in a sterile bag as quickly as possible, usually by putting the bag over it. The meteorite is measured and sometimes photographed, and its size and color and possible classification are noted.

A small aluminum tag with an ID number is also inserted into the bag, and the whole thing is then sealed up tight.

At the end of a good day, a hunter’s backpack can be full of these meteorite samples.

via Meteorite Hunters Undaunted by Antarctica’s Challenges

The active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms decreases brain activity, possibly explaining the vivid, mind-bending effects of the drug, a new study finds.

The decreases were focused in regions that serve as crossroads for information in the brain, meaning that information may flow more freely in a brain on mushrooms. The findings could be useful in developing hallucinogenic treatments for some mental disorders.

“There is increasing evidence that the regions affected are responsible for giving us our sense of self,” study author Robin Carhart-Harris, a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“In other words, the regions affected make up what some people call our ‘ego.’ That activity decreases in the ‘ego-network’ supports what people often say about psychedelics, that they temporarily ‘dissolve the ego.’”

Quieting the brain

Psilocybin, the chemical that gives mushrooms their trippy properties, has long-lasting effects beyond the initial high. A recent Johns Hopkins University study found that a single experience with psilocybin in a controlled environment can alter personality long-term, making people more open to new experiences.

“Healthy people given psilocybin often describe their experiences as among the most meaningful of their whole lives, comparable to such things as the birth of their first child or getting married,” Carhart-Harris said. “We wanted to know what is going on in people’s brains to produce such profound effects.”

The researchers asked 15 people who had used mushrooms in the past to lie in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fRMI) scanner, which measures blood flow in the brain to determine brain activity in different regions.

After a few minutes, the researchers injected either psilocybin or a placebo into the participants’ veins. (Each volunteer participated in two scans, so everyone had one experience with the hallucinogen and one with the placebo.) They then continued the scan to find out what changes occurred in brain activity.

A promising treatment?

The scans revealed a surprise: Psilocybin never increased activity in the brain, but only decreased activity in places, especially information transfer areas such as the thalamus, which sits smack in the middle of the brain.

“‘Knocking out’ these key hubs with psilocybin appears to allow information to travel more freely in the brain, probably explaining why people’s imaginations become more vivid and animated and the world is experienced as unusual,” Carhart-Harris said.

via Magic mushrooms trip up brain activity – Technology & science – Science – LiveScience – msnbc.com.

The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit is an advanced military aircraft that has unique capabilities that are far-ranging. Introduced in 1997 (with an alleged first flight in 1989) there are just 22 of them in the world. They incorporate low observable stealth technology. Some have speculated that they may even utilize anti-gravity technologies or that they possess other exotic features that are kept from public view.

But it may not always be possible to keep such features from outside detection. One officially released film of the B-2 Bomber in flight that is very “revealing” may have somehow escaped the scrutiny of US Air Force censors. A recently-discovered segment of this video appears to show another of the B-2 Stealth’s capabilities: The ability to Morph.

This brief clip seems to demonstrate the craft’s “morph” of the metal skin of its outer hull. This would allow it to “intelligently” perform critical functions (and perhaps to “self-heal” if damaged by enemy action.)

WHERE THE FILM COMES FROM

The remarkable film shown below comes from a broadcast by the Military Channel. The Military Channel is a distinguished specialty cable station that is owned by the media corporation that also owns the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet (as well as the “How Stuff Works” video series.) Started in 1999, the Military Channel is known to maintain a cooperative relationship with historical societies and with the US Government in obtaining original footage that relates to the military, warfare and military history. The “legitimacy” of their programming and the authenticity of their broadcast information is without question.

Re-broadcast on YouTube, the footage is entitled “B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber” and simply shows views of the Stealth on the ground and in flight from various angles for about 4 minutes. It is a “PR” film. But despite its garnering over 1,800,000 views, nobody appears to have made any mention in the “comments” section about the morphing metal hull.

View on Youtube

… At approximately the 2:40 second mark (and for a duration of about three seconds) one can clearly observe a “gape” or “opening” on the topside front of the craft that seems to “self-close” in a seamless and almost surreal way. If one looks very closely it appears as though the skin of the craft is “self-directed” and “intelligent” as if it were “remembering” its original shape, like Roswell’s memory metal or a Nitinol actuator!

read the rest on http://bragalia.blogspot.com/

Here is a view of the vents on top which seem to self-heal in the YouTube video.

More on the B-2 here:

“…GAO spokeswoman Laura A. Kopelson said the office’s investigation…stemmed from a meeting in October between Schiff and GAO Controller General Charles A Bowsher. Schiff complained then that the Defense Department had been ‘unresponsive’ to his inquiries about the 1947 incident…’I was getting pretty upset at all the running around,’ Schiff said, adding that at his meeting with GAO officials, ‘they made an offer to help.’… ‘Generally, I’m a skeptic on UFOs and alien beings, but there are indications from the runaround that I got that whatever it was, it wasn’t a balloon. Apparently, it’s another government cover-up,’ Schiff said. He called the Defense Department’s lack of response ‘astounding,’ and said government accountability was an issue ‘even larger than UFOs.’…He added, ‘If the Defense Department had been responsive, it wouldn’t have come to this.’”

As a result of Schiff’s efforts, (A) the GAO duly launched an investigation and on 28 July 1995, a report surfaced from its National Security and International Affairs Division that disclosed the results of that same investigation; (B) the Air Force trotted out its controversial “Mogul Balloon” theory for Roswell; and (C) the UFO research community was faced with more data, more questions, but still no hard evidence of what it really was that happened at Roswell…

Read the rest at desertdarkness.blogspot.com