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Neanderthal adhesives were made through a complex synthesis process

As Homo sapiens, we often consider ourselves to be the most intelligent hominins. But that doesn’t mean our species was the first to discover everything; it appears that Neanderthals found a way to manufacture synthetics long before we ever did.

Neanderthal tools might look relatively simple, but new research shows that Homo neanderthalensis devised a method of generating a glue derived from birch tar to hold them together about  200,000 years ago—and it was tough. This ancient superglue made bone and stone adhere to wood, was waterproof, and didn’t decompose. The tar was also used a hundred thousand years before modern humans came up with anything synthetic.

A transformation

After studying ancient tools that carry residue from this glue, a team of researchers from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and other institutions in Germany found evidence that this glue wasn’t just the original tar; it had been transformed in some way. This raises the question of what was involved in that transformation.

To see how Neanderthals could have converted birch tar into glue, the research team tried several different processing methods. Any suspicion that the tar came directly from birch trees didn’t hold up because birch trees do not secrete anything that worked as an adhesive. So what kind of processing was needed?

Each technique that was tested used only materials that Neanderthals would have been able to access. Condensation methods, which involve burning birch bark on cobblestones so the tar can condense on the stones, were the simplest techniques used—allowing bark to burn above ground doesn’t really involve much thought beyond lighting a fire.

The other methods involved a recipe where the bark was not actually burned but heated after being placed underground. Two of these methods involved burying rolls of bark in embers that would heat them and produce tar. The third method would distill the tar. Because there were no ceramics during the Stone Age, sediment was shaped into upper and lower structures to hold the bark, which was then heated by fire. Distilled tar would slowly drip from the upper structure into the lower one.

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Coming to a Rooftop Near You: A UFO-Spotting Spycam

An ex-spook made an incredible claim about aliens last week. David Charles Grusch, a former official with the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, told The Debrief that the feds possess what the publication described as “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.”

But there’s a catch: There’s no actual evidence to back up Grusch’s claim. No evidence that the government is sitting on a bunch of derelict alien spacecraft. And no evidence aliens even exist, for that matter. Worse for Fox Mulder-style true believers, no one’s even looking for extraterrestrials near Earth—at least not with any real scientific rigor.

That last caveat is about to change. Harvard physicist Avi Loeb and his alien-hunting startup, the Galileo Project, is building what they hope will be a global network of skyward-pointing sensors whose purpose is to scan, look, and listen for UFOs—or, to borrow the in-vogue and official U.S. government term, Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP).

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Senate committees advancing new language seeking possible secret UFO-tech programs

The Intelligence and Armed Services committees of the U.S. Senate appear to be stepping up their efforts to uncover any secret government programs that may exist to study devices or manufactured material of unearthly origin.

On June 14, 2023, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) approved an Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) for Fiscal Year 2024 that contains UAP-related language proposed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who apparently expects to win approval of compatible language in the Senate Armed Services Committee within days. Gillibrand sits on both committees.  

The texts of Gillibrand’s amendments have not yet been made public, but she revealed her general intent in an interview with Matt Laslo of WIRED, published on June 13, 2023. Laslo reported that the senator intended to seek approval on the FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of a “mandate that no money can be spent on SAPs [Special Access Programs] unless it’s been reported to Congress.” The Senate Armed Services Committee begins a series of closed-door amending sessions (called “mark ups”) on the NDAA today (June 21, 2023), which are expected to conclude on June 23. In recent years the committee’s leadership and membership have advanced into law several expansive UAP-related measures, with bipartisan support.

Laslo’s article quoted Gillibrand as saying, “So if there are SAPs out there that are somehow outside of the normal chain of command and outside the normal appropriations process, they have to divulge that to Congress.” She also said, “We need to just look into whether there are rogue SAP programs that no one is providing oversight for.  The goal for me will be to have a hearing on that at some point so that we can assess if these SAPs actually exist.”

Gillibrand has already met with success in the SSCI, although the details are not yet public. On June 14, SSCI Chairman Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) and ranking minority member Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) issued a release announcing that the SSCI had approved the FY 2024 Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA) in a closed-door session earlier that day. A summary describing provisions of the bill included this bullet point: “Increases transparency by strengthening Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) funding and reporting requirements.” This referred to UAP language offered in the committee by Gillibrand, co-sponsored by Senators Michael Rounds (R-SD), John Cornyn (R-Tx.), and Rubio. Her proposal was adopted by the 17-member committee without dissent, after which the bill was approved unanimously. The language of the amendment will not be made public until the committee-approved bill is officially filed and given a bill number.

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Why does the government keep obstructing UFO transparency efforts?

It’s been nearly 27 years since I submitted my first Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA , request on UFOs . I was 15 years old at the time. That request unearthed a four-page Defense Intelligence Agency document detailing a 1976 event in which multiple UFOs shut off the communications and instrumentation panels of two separate Iranian F-4 Phantom jets. The advanced capabilities of these UFOs sparked my interest, and through the FOIA, I quickly discovered the incident was not an isolated one. I learned that there was much more to discover within official files.

My website, The Black Vault , showcases thousands of UFO files I’ve received from the government. The documents, overall, hint at a mysterious phenomenon the U.S. military and government have struggled to identify adequately for decades. Indeed, they appear to have often kept the public in the dark using various tactics to block legally or at least severely prohibit accessing some of these records that date back to the 1940s.

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Wearing Shirt Saying ‘There Are Only Two Genders’ Not Protected Speech, Rules Obama-Appointed Judge

School administrators were not infringing on a student’s constitutional rights when they ordered him to remove a shirt that said, “there are only two genders,” a district judge ruled on June 17.

Massachusetts middle-schooler Liam Morrison’s lawyers said the order violated his First Amendment rights to free speech and his Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process, but U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said the violations have not been proven.

The school “permissibly concluded that the Shirt invades the rights of others,” Talwani, an Obama appointee, said.

Schools can bar speech that is in “collision with the rights of others to be secure and be let alone,” Talwani said, quoting from the 1969 ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. School Dist.

That means the administrators appropriately exercised their discretion when concluding the statement “may communicate that only two gender identities–male and female are valid, and any others are invalid or nonexistent, and to conclude that students who identify differently, whether they do so openly or not, have a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities,” she added.

Talwani’s ruling rejected a request from the boy for a temporary restraining order that would have stopped administrators from prohibiting the student from wearing the shirt at John T. Nicholas Middle School.

The case has not been thrown out and Talwani could ultimately rule in the boy’s favor.

Tyson Langhofer, senior counsel and director of the Center for Academic Freedom at Alliance Defending Freedom who is helping defend the plaintiff, said that the ruling was disappointing.

“Public school officials cannot censor a 7th grader’s free speech by forcing him to remove a shirt that states a scientific fact,” Langhofer told The Epoch Times via email. “Doing so is a gross violation of the First Amendment and we will be appealing this ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Lawyers for the defendants, which include acting principal Heather Tucker and Middleborough Public Schools Superintendent Carolyn Lyons, did not return an inquiry.

First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh said the ruling does not appear to be consistent with the Tinker ruling, which held that school officials in Iowa illegally ordered students to remove armbands amid protests against the Vietnam war. Lawyer Hans Bader, who is not involved in the case, said the ruling was wrong, noting that previous cases have upheld students’ rights to convey messages “as long as they weren’t vulgar or likely to cause a disruption,” including a ruling in favor of wearing a shirt that said “Be Happy, Not Gay.”

“The judge suggested that the T-shirt interfered with other students’ ‘right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking their identities,’” Bader said. “But other courts have refused to recognize a right to attend school without being confronted by messages attacking one’s identity, when the messages don’t disrupt school, and don’t involve ‘independently tortious speech like libel, slander or intentional infliction of emotional distress.’”

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FDA warns stores to stop selling Elf Bar, the top disposable e-cigarette in the US

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday said it has sent warning letters to dozens of retailers selling fruit- and candy-flavored disposable e-cigarettes, including the current best-selling brand, Elf Bar.

It’s the latest attempt by regulators to crack down on illegal disposable vapes that have poured into U.S. stores in recent years.

Last month, the FDA issued orders allowing customs officials to seize shipments of Elf Bar, Esco Bar and two other brands at U.S. ports. None of the products have received FDA authorization and they come in flavors like cotton candy, which regulators say can appeal to teenagers.

In the latest action, the FDA said it issued warnings to 189 convenience stores, vape shops and other retailers.

“We’re not going to stand by as bad actors are profiting off the sale of illegal products that are addicting our nation’s youth,” Brian King, the FDA’s tobacco center director, said in an interview. “Today’s action is just part of our long-standing efforts to address those products, particularly flavored disposable products.”

The FDA has tried for years to regulate the multibillion-dollar vaping industry, but separate data released by government researchers Thursday shows unauthorized e-cigarettes continue to launch.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis showed the number of e-cigarette brands in the U.S. grew from 184 in early 2020 to 269 by late 2022.

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LEXISNEXIS IS SELLING YOUR PERSONAL DATA TO ICE SO IT CAN TRY TO PREDICT CRIMES

THE LEGAL RESEARCH and public records data broker LexisNexis is providing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with tools to target people who may potentially commit a crime — before any actual crime takes place, according to a contract document obtained by The Intercept. LexisNexis then allows ICE to track the purported pre-criminals’ movements.

The unredacted contract overview provides a rare look at the controversial $16.8 million agreement between LexisNexis and ICE, a federal law enforcement agency whose surveillance of and raids against migrant communities are widely criticized as brutal, unconstitutional, and inhumane.

“The purpose of this program is mass surveillance at its core,” said Julie Mao, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, which is suing LexisNexis over allegations it illegally buys and sells personal data. Mao told The Intercept the ICE contract document, which she reviewed for The Intercept, is “an admission and indication that ICE aims to surveil individuals where no crime has been committed and no criminal warrant or evidence of probable cause.”

While the company has previously refused to answer any questions about precisely what data it’s selling to ICE or to what end, the contract overview describes LexisNexis software as not simply a giant bucket of personal data, but also a sophisticated analytical machine that purports to detect suspicious activity and scrutinize migrants — including their locations.

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Snopes Self-Immolates Taking A Shot At Musk

The folks at Snopes, whose whore mongering (and allegedly rapey) co-founder was fired for mass plagiarism, have once again illustrated why the world of ‘fact checkers’ are nothing more than otherwise-unemployable partisan hacks.

On Tuesday, Snopes took a shot at Elon Musk in a hit-piece titled “Was the Missing Titanic Submersible Using Satellites from Elon Musk’s Company?“

The article is of course meant to imply that the OceanGate Titanic exploration submersible, which lost contact with its surface support vessel on Sunday, went missing due to a Starlink failure.

After Snopes’ account tweeted the article, a scorching Twitter community note tore the article to shreds – noting that while OceanGate has used StarLink services, they’re used for their surface vessels, not their submersibles. Idiots. The note also clarifies that radio frequencies such as StarLink’s do not work underwater.

“Starlink operates in the 10.7 to 12.7 GHz band. [radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/wp-content/upl…] Penetration depth of 2.45GHz in water is <8cm and falls off with increasing frequency. [cober.com/wp-content/upl…] Therefore, Starlink cannot be used to communicate with an underwater submarine,” the note states.

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