Snoopers check we don't split atoms...

THEY can show up without notice or warrants and with 1,208 reasons to enter your home, workplace or land without your permission.

This is Gordon Brown’s new model army of snoopers, which is gaining new home invasion powers at the rate of two a week.

The Prime Minister promised a crackdown on them in 2007 but it is Conservative peer Lord Selson who is leading the fightback.

His private member’s Powers of Entry Bill has created a full list of the bizarre and obscure legislation that gives thousands of jobsworths the right to enter your home. The list, due to be published next week, would be used by a Conservative government to launch consultation with councils and Whitehall aimed at striking out scores of out-dated and unnecessary laws.

And the Tories have promised that whatever laws remain, no official will ever be able to enter your home again without obtaining a court warrant first.

From checking the energy rating on your fridge, to ensuring you are not working on an atom bomb in the kitchen – our snooper laws are as far-reaching as they are bizarre.

Officials can gain entry using the same level of powers to search for cluster bombs as they can for a clutch of eggs. Lord Selson’s third attempt at curbing these ridiculous laws could become law before Parliament breaks up.

Lord Selson has won praise from civil liberties groups for his dogged determination over two decades to rein back the snoopers.

He said: “People should not be allowed to go into someone’s home, search it and seize data without a court order or a warrant. I just believe in individual freedom.”

More information on the source.

New EU Gestapo spies on Britons

Millions of Britons face being snooped on by a new European intelligence agency which has been handed frightening powers to pry into our lives.

Europol can access personal information on anyone – including their political opinions and sexual preferences – if it suspects, rightly or wrongly, that they may be involved in any “preparatory act” which could lead to criminal activity.

The vagueness of the Hague-based force’s remit sparked furious protests yesterday with critics warning that the EU snoopers threaten our right to free speech.

It is understood the agency will concentrate on anyone thought “xenophobic” or likely to commit a crime involving the environment, computers or motor vehicles.

This could include covert monitoring of people who deny the existence of climate change or speak out on controversial issues.

Paul Nuttall, chairman of the UK Independence Party, said: “I am horrified. We thought Gordon Brown’s Big Brother state was bad enough but at least we are going to kick him out in May. These guys we cannot sack until we leave the EU.”

James Welch, legal director of campaign group Liberty, said: “We have huge concerns that Europol appears to have been given powers to hold very sensitive information and to investigate matters that aren’t even crimes in this country. Any extension of police powers at any level needs to be properly debated and scrutinised.”

More information in the source.

The trillion-dollar question is: who will now lead the climate battle?

Political and business leaders gather this week in an attempt to revive the world's faltering challenge to global warming. But they face a battle to lift the cloud of skepticism that has descended over climate science and chart a new way forward.

Some of the planet's most powerful paymasters will gather in London on Wednesday to discuss a nagging financial problem: how to raise a trillion dollars for the developing world. Those charged with achieving this daunting goal will include Gordon Brown, directors of several central banks, the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the economist Lord (Nicholas) Stern and Larry Summers, President Obama's chief economics adviser.

As an array of expertise, it is formidable: but then so is the task they have been set by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. In effect, the world's top financiers have been told to work out how to raise at least $100bn a year for the rest of this decade, cash that will be used to help the world's poorest countries adapt to climate change.

More information in the source.

A mysterious explosion sunk a South Korean naval ship

The mysterious explosion which sunk a South Korean naval ship split the vessel's hull in two, officials say.

The two halves are lying in about 40 feet of water but bad weather has prevented military divers from reaching the wreckage.

A total of 46 sailors are missing but rescuers say it is unlikely anyone could have survived three days in the near-freezing water.

More information can be found on this source

Rover spots 'strange stuff' on Martian rock

(NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell)

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity has found a Martian rock covered in weird material as its odometer hit a major milestone this week, with the long-lived robot completing equivalent to a half–marathon on the Red Planet.

Opportunity, now in its seventh year on Mars, found the odd Mars rock during the past six weeks studying investigating a crater called "Concepción."

The crater is about 33 feet (10 meters) in diameter, with dark rays extending from it, as seen from orbit, which made it a target of interest for rover inspection because they suggest the crater is young.

Source

For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken a Law of Nature

For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brook haven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.




Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.

Parity was long thought to be a fundamental law of nature. It essentially states that the universe is neither right- nor left-handed — that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates. In the early 1950s it was found that the so-called weak force, which is responsible for nuclear radioactivity, breaks the parity law. However, the strong force, which holds together subatomic particles, was thought to adhere to the law of parity, at least under normal circumstances.

Source

Star Trek-style force-field armour being developed by military scientists

A space-age "force field" capable of protecting armoured vehicles and tanks by repelling incoming fire is being developed by British military scientists.

The new type of armour will use pulses of electrical energy to repel rockets, shrapnel and other ammunition that might damage a vehicle.

Researchers at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), which is the research and development arm of the Ministry of Defence, claim it is possible to incorporate material known as supercapacitors into armour of a vehicle to turn it into a kind of giant battery.

When a threat from incoming fire is detected by the vehicle, the energy stored in the supercapacitor can be rapidly dumped onto the metal plating on the outside of the vehicle, producing a strong electromagnetic field.

Source

UK has 5,700 "secret agents"

It is the first time that the number of foreign intelligence gathering officers employed by MI6, also known as the Secret Intelligence Service, has been published.

The figure was disclosed yesterday in the annual report of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.

The ISC had previously disclosed the number of domestic security service officers who work for MI5, known as “spooks” - now around 3,500 - but had never done so for spies.

Source

The world's only immortal animal

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able to reverse its aging process.


Source

General relativity passes a large scale test

General relativity, our current best understanding of gravity, has passed yet another test—this time on a much larger length scale. Ever since relativity's first confirmation in 1919, when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington observed that the light from distant stars was shifted by the mass of the sun, direct tests have been confined to length scales smaller than our solar system. No test to date has stringently probed general relativity's applicability to the length scales of the universe itself.

More information here

Tell everyone what you think about it by posting a comment.

NASA spots life under Antarctic ice

At a depth of 600 feet beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet, a small shrimp-like creature managed to brighten up an otherwise gray polar day in November 2009. Bob Bindschadler of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., remembers the day well. He and his team were on a joint NASA-National Science Foundation expedition to examine the underside of the ice sheet when they found the pinkish-orange creature swimming beneath the ice.

For the video and more information go to NASA

Tell everyone what you think about it by posting a comment.

First quantum effects seen in visible object

Does Schrödinger's cat really exist? You bet. The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed.

Aaron O'Connell and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did not actually produce a cat that was dead and alive at the same time, as Erwin Schrödinger proposed in a notorious thought experiment 75 years ago. But they did show that a tiny resonating strip of metal – only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope – can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very act of observation would take it out of superposition.

Source

Tell everyone what you think about it by posting a comment.

Mutant All-Black Penguin Found

National Geographic Traveler contributor Andrew Evans recently spotted and filmed an all-black king penguin—a very rare mutant—on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.

This all black-feathered king penguin could be ‘one in a zillion.’

The video was recorded on the Sub-Antarctic Island of South Georgia by National Geographic Traveler Magazine contributor editor Andrew Evans on his bus2Antarctica expedition.



For more information click here

Tell everyone what you think about it by posting a comment.

New Planet Found - May Be Cosmic Rosetta Stone

A newly discovered gas-giant planet with a nearly circular orbit around its parent star is the first Jupiter-like planet outside our solar system—or "exoplanet"—that can be studied in detail, a new study says.

Located about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens, the planet Corot-9b passes in front of its star every 95 days, as viewed from Earth. Each of these "transits" lasts about eight hours.

More information here

Humans could regrow body parts like some amphibians

Researchers have found that the gene p21 appears to block the healing power still enjoyed by some creatures including amphibians but lost through evolution to all other animals.

By turning off p21, the process can be miraculously switched back on.

Academics from The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia found that mice lacking the p21 gene gain the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue.

More information can be found here

Tell everyone what you think about it by posting a comment.

A Host of Mummies

In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.

More information here

Tell everyone what you think about it by posting a comment.

Cancer code is cracked

Scientists believe they have made a major breakthrough in cancer treatment after cracking the “code” behind the disease.

They have discovered the body’s immune system can kill cancer cells within a window occurring every 12 to 14 days.

By giving low-dose treatment at exactly the right time, researchers believe they have, against the odds, succeeded in halting the spread of advanced cancer.

View full article here

Saturn's Mystery Hexagon

For more then 20 years, a mysterious giant hexagon was found in Saturn, and it is still there. Until now there seems to be no credible explanation to this phenomena. Here is a brief cut on a documentary about it. See for your self:





And here is some recordings of Coast to Coast AM about it also:

















Tell everyone what you think about it by posting a comment.

Fake gold

Recently, the German television station ProSieben ran a news story covering W. C. Heraeus in Hanau, Germany, the world’s largest privately owned refinery. In the story, Wilfried Hörner, the head of the gold foundry, shows a 500 gram bar (16.0755 troy ounces) received from an unidentified bank. The bar had the right physical dimensions to be an authentic gold bar, but one of the Heraeus employees suspected something funny. After the bar was cut in half, you can see that the inside is tungsten, with only a coating of gold on the outside.

View full news article here