Blog

The way you walk is apparently as unique as your fingerprint and the UAE wants to use it to track criminals

According to reports out of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), biometrics are gaining an ever more prominent place in local law enforcement’s activities, and the type of technology involved is also getting ever more fine-grained.

Accuracy aside – but apparently, the way you walk – as interpreted by mass surveillance technology – can now be used as an incriminating piece of evidence against you in this country.

As always with these stories, one wonders how in the world the police ever managed to do their job for centuries (as they have done) without relying on invasive and controversial technologies like this – but that is not the question most media outlets are willing to “bother” with just now.

Instead, we’re hearing from one of the Emirates, Dubai, that the thing with biometric surveillance of the population – handily justified as something positive, when there’s a criminal case that can be attached to the practice – has now gone well beyond fingerprinting, facial recognition, and such.

Keep reading

‘Slowing Rates of Disruption,’ Decline in Scientific Breakthroughs, Researchers Stumped

The rate of scientific breakthroughs has been falling over the years, especially in the fields of physics and chemistry according to a recent study, with researchers unsure what is causing the phenomenon.

In recent decades, there has been an “exponential growth” in the volume of new technological and scientific knowledge, which created conditions necessary for major advances in those fields, states the study, published in Nature magazine on Jan. 4. But contrary to such expectations, the study found that progress is slowing down in several fields.

“You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had,” said Russell Funk, co-author of the study.

The research team looked at 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents. They used a new quantitative metric called the “CD index” to identify how papers and patents “change networks of citations in science and technology.”

The team found that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to push science and technology into newer directions, a trend that is breaking away from the past.

“We link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view,” the study said.

Keep reading

WHO: Anti-Vaccine Activism Is Deadlier Than Global Terrorism

The World Health Organization shared a video on Twitter promoting the claim that anti-vaccine activism is deadlier than global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and gun violence.

Yes, really.

The video quoted Baylor College of Medicine’s Dr. Peter Hotez, who stated, “We have to recognize that anti-vaccine activism, which I actually call anti-science aggression, has now become a major killing force globally.”

Hotez went on to assert that 200,000 Americans died from COVID because they refused to get the vaccine, a claim that isn’t backed up by any source.

“And now the anti-vaccine activism is expanding across the world, even into low and middle income countries,” added Hotez.

Once again with providing any source for his dubious claims, Hotez asserted that “anti-science now kills more people than things like gun violence, global terrorism, nuclear proliferation or cyber attacks.”

The doctor went on to complain about how anti-vaccine skepticism had now become a “political movement” linked to “far-right extremism” in both the United States and Germany.

Hotez ominously called for “political solutions to address this.”

Unsurprisingly, respondents to the tweet completely savaged the WHO for sharing the video, with one pointing to stats that suggest, “Doctors and “medicine” kill more people than car accidents and guns.”

Keep reading

USDA approves first ever vaccine for HONEYBEES – it makes them immune to a deadly bacteria that was only contained by burning the hive

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved the world’s first vaccine for honeybees to protect the endangered insects from a deadly disease caused by spore-forming bacteria, Paenibacillus larva.

The disease, known as American Foulbrood, was only contained by burning the colony and hive.

The vaccine is developed with killed whole-cell Paenibacillus larva bacteria that is mixed with food fed to the queen and passed on to her offspring, which will then be immune to the disease. 

The treatment has been approved under a conditional license, which is issued to meet an emergency condition.

And for the case of honeybees, these creatures are a critical component of agriculture – one-third of the global food supply relies on pollination.

Keep reading

Appeals Court Strikes Down Bump Stock Ban in 13-3 Decision

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit handed down a 13-3 decision Friday striking down the regulatory gun control that banned bump stocks under former President Donald Trump.

Reuters reported that the court intimated that actions on guns should be taken by Congress rather than the executive branch.

Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote the majority opinion for the Fifth Circuit and also opined that the framers of the bump stock ban did not provide “fair warning that possession of a non-mechanical bump stock is a crime.”

On December 18, 2018, Breitbart News reported that the ATF finalized the language of its bump stock ban and gave people 90 days to hand the firearm accessories over.

Breitbart News possessed a copy of the DOJ’s summary of the ban at the time, and it stated:

The Department of Justice is amending the regulations of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to clarify that bump-stock-type devices-meaning “bump fire” stocks, slide-fire devices, and devices with certain similar characteristics-are “machineguns” as defined by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968 because such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.

The summary says a bump stock allows the trigger of a semiautomatic firearm to reset between the firing of each round, but describes the bump stock-equipped “semiautomatic firearm” as “self-acting or self-regulating,” and therefore a “machinegun.”

Keep reading

Pfizer has a shockingly long history of engaging in illegal activities and human experimentation

Big Pharma company Pfizer has repeatedly engaged in inhumane and illegal activities in its history, including acts of fraud, corruption and even human experimentation disguised as vaccine trials.

An investigative journalist writing about censored subjects under the pseudonym “Kanekoa the Great” noted on his Substack blog that one of the greatest cultural transformations to occur in the past nearly three years is the complete rehabilitation of the image of Big Pharma companies and their newfound glorification for supposedly being responsible for saving humanity from the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

“An industry plagued by decades of fraud, corruption and criminality managed to quickly rebrand itself as the savior of humanity during the COVID-19 crisis. But nothing inherently changed. Big Pharma still values shareholders’ profits more than people’s lives,” Kanekoa the Great wrote. (Related: Pfizer’s business model is to create the sickness and sell the “cure.”)

For evidence of Pfizer’s history of engaging in illegal activity that leads to the deaths of hundreds, Kanekoa the Great said to look no further than Nigeria.

In the northern Nigerian city of Kano, Pfizer in 1996 administered an experimental drug to 200 children whose parents never knew that their kids were subjected to a clinical trial. Pfizer did not obtain consent or inform any of the children or their parents that they were the subjects of an experiment. The pharma company did not even inform the recipients that the drug has not been approved for wider use.

Eleven of the children died. Dozens more of the children suffered severe adverse effects, including brain damage and organ failure.

As a result of criminal and civil suits, Pfizer agreed to pay $75 million to the families harmed. Now, Kano’s residents are reasonably hesitant of any vaccinations.

Keep reading

Death From Above: Drones Are Changing the Landscape of War

On the third floor of an abandoned factory in Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, 39-year-old “Rem” struggles to light a cigarette while holding the remote control of his Chinese-made drone. He swears. Several feet behind him, clad in a bulletproof vest and helmet, a soldier known as “Duke” is surveying a map of the eastern approach to the city on his tablet. A dozen Russian positions have been marked with red crosses, bearing such evocative names as “mattress,” “putin,” and “machine gun.”

The ping of a notification coming from Duke’s phone finally breaks the silence. “Fire,” says Duke in Ukrainian, staring intently at the screen of his tablet. A loud bang rattles the walls and windows, followed by a whizzing sound rapidly rising above the building, getting fainter, and then stopping. A couple of seconds later, the live feed from the drone’s camera shows the shell landing right on a Russian position. “That’s perfect,” exclaims Rem, also in Ukrainian. “Exactly where we needed it.” The two men rejoice. Thanks to their store-bought DJI Matrice drone, the accurate fire from a Polish-made Krab self-propelled howitzer has silenced a Russian automatic grenade launcher.

Both from the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro, Rem and Duke have been serving in the Skala intelligence battalion since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Created and led by Iurii Skala, a veteran of the Donbas war, this battalion is made up of mostly inexperienced volunteers like Rem, who was a car dealer prior to the invasion. 

For three weeks, he and Duke have been surveying enemy movements and directing artillery fire from their position, somewhere in the center of Bakhmut. This small salt-mining town of roughly 70,000 inhabitants has been devastated by months of shelling and gruesome trench warfare that has prompted comparisons to the First World War and the battles of Verdun or Passchendaele. But even as exhausted soldiers shoot at the enemy from mud-filled trenches and men perish by the dozens every day from unending artillery fire, the ever-growing use of drones has revolutionized the nature of the fighting in Bakhmut — and in Ukraine at large.

In the basement of a residential building located a few blocks from their position, a portly officer is bent over a table, listening intently to a walkie-talkie. Facing him is a flat screen television that transmits live footage from a drone circling above the city. The air is thick with anticipation. When word of a successful strike finally comes through, the officer triumphantly throws his fist in the air before slumping back in his chair. “Now we can move easily,” he says, grinning. Guided by one of the Skala battalion’s drones, artillery fire has silenced a Russian position.

Keep reading

Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?

The ancient Romans were masters of engineering, constructing vast networks of roads, aqueducts, ports, and massive buildings, whose remains have survived for two millennia. Many of these structures were built with concrete: Rome’s famed Pantheon, which has the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome and was dedicated in A.D. 128, is still intact, and some ancient Roman aqueducts still deliver water to Rome today. Meanwhile, many modern concrete structures have crumbled after a few decades.

Researchers have spent decades trying to figure out the secret of this ultradurable ancient construction material, particularly in structures that endured especially harsh conditions, such as docks, sewers, and seawalls, or those constructed in seismically active locations.

Now, a team of investigators from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, has made progress in this field, discovering ancient concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated several key self-healing functionalities. The findings are published today in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic, former doctoral student Linda Seymour ’14, PhD ’21, and four others.

For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This specific kind of ash was even shipped all across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.

Keep reading

Russia Says It Shot Down a UFO

Amystery object described by one local news outlet as a “UFO” has been shot down in the southern Russian region of Rostov.

Vasily Golubev, the governor of Rostov oblast, wrote on Telegram that a “small-size object in the shape of a ball” had been discovered flying “in the wind” at an altitude of around one and a half miles on January 3. With the object spotted above the village of Sultan Sala in the region’s Myasnikovsky district, Golubev said “the decision was taken to liquidate it.”

“I urge everyone to remain calm. To ensure security, all forces and means are involved. The sky is covered with anti-aircraft defenses,” he added, without specifying what the object was.

In reporting his comments, local news outlet Pivyet Rostov carried a headline that said “a UFO in the form of a ball was shot down in the sky.”

Telegram channels that night described how air defense systems in Rostov had been operating. The channel Ostorozhna, Novosti (Caution, News) published a video showing a shining object flying and then exploding in the sky.

“Look, another one has gone,” someone is heard saying in the clip, which was captioned, “another video of the work of Rostov regional air defenses.” A witness told the channel how “there was a very strong explosion” and that “everything in the house shook. We realized that the air defenses were in operation.”

Keep reading