World’s 'doomsday' clock will stay at three minutes to midnight. In its symbolic look at the likelihood of armageddon, members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced today that they are keeping the world's so-called Doomsday Clock at three minutes to "midnight" — a metaphor for the end of the world as we know it. The clock has been set at 11:57PM since January 2015, when it was moved down from five minutes to destruction. It's the closest the clock has been to midnight since the Cold War in the 1980s. The Bulletin scientists cited a number of reasons why the clock is staying right where it is.
Notably, tensions between the United States and Russia are fairly high, reminiscent of their Cold War-era levels; the Bulletin is concerned that the two nations are unlikely to discuss any future arms control measures. And while President Obama signed a major, if controversial, deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon of its own earlier this month. The decision is "not good news" The symbol of the Swastika and its 12,000-year-old history. The swastika is a symbol used by of one of the most hated men on Earth, a symbol that represents the slaughter of millions of people and one of the most destructive wars on Earth. But Adolf Hitler was not the first to use this symbol. In fact, it was used as a powerful symbol thousands of years before him, across many cultures and continents.
For the Hindus and Buddhists in India and other Asian countries, the swastika was an important symbol for many thousands of years and, to this day, the symbol can still be seen in abundance - on temples, buses, taxis, and on the cover of books. It was also used in Ancient Greece and can be found in the remains of the ancient city of Troy, which existed 4,000 years ago. The ancient Druids and the Celts also used the symbol, reflected in many artefacts that have been discovered. The word ‘swastika’ is a Sanskrit word (‘svasktika’) meaning ‘It is’, ‘Well Being’, ‘Good Existence, and ‘Good Luck’. A Sanskrit scholar P. By John Black Related Links. Declassified Cold War files reveal America’s extensive nuclear target list. Newly declassified documents reveal the extent of America’s nuclear target list during the Cold War, showing the U.S. military was prepared to hit thousands of sites in the communist world stretching from Beijing to Moscow to East Berlin. The 800 pages of documents from a 1956 plan known as the “Atomic Weapons Requirements Study” were released by the National Archives and published this week for the first time by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
“As far as can be told, no comparable document has ever been declassified for any period of Cold War history,” the organization said, while calling the Strategic Air Command study a “chilling” document depicting plans to attack population centers filled with civilians. The study includes thousands of targets or “designated ground zeros” -- spanning 1,200 cities. According to the study, the goal was to undermine if not destroy Soviet air power and that mission was “paramount to all other considerations.”
8 things you didn't know about mistletoe. Mistletoe is a staple of holiday decorating, and we all know what to do when we find ourselves standing beneath it. But how did this plant become associated with holiday celebrations? And why are we expected to pucker up in its presence? Read on to learn a few things you might not know about this traditional holiday plant. 1. It has a long history. Mistletoe plays a prominent role in Norse mythology. The Druids also thought mistletoe was special. However, it wasn’t until the 18th or 19th centuries that the plant began to make its way into our homes for holiday celebrations. 2.
While mistletoe doesn't always kill its host tree, it often reduces the tree's growth and can kill the branch where it resides. Mistletoe is a hemiparasitic plant because while it’s able to perform photosynthesis, the majority of nutrients it absorbs are from the tree or shrub where it has taken root — and that act can kill the host. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. There are 1,300 mistletoe species, and 20 of them are endangered. 8. The Most Important Financial Meeting Since JFK’s Death Just Took Place. Gold, gold, gold. The world is soon to return to an asset-backed financial system…and one that is no longer controlled by dark forces. Neil Keenan (pictured above) is helping to once and for all open the Global Collateral Accounts for humanity’s benefit. If you have not heard of Neil Keenan or the Global Collateral Accounts, you soon will.
The Global Collateral Accounts is the most prized financial secret of the banking cabal on this planet. These accounts were originally intended for true humanitarian projects to revolutionize and transform our world for the better, but have been fraudulently abused by this banking cabal. JFK signed the Green Hilton Memorial Agreement along with President Soekarno of Indonesia to use these accounts as a way to expose and legally end The Federal Reserve as well as the CIA by issuing gold-backed Treasury Notes, among other legal actions.
These accounts hold much more gold than has ever officially been reported. I hope you enjoy the news: We will evolve. History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. “Enough shovels to go around”: Ars looks back at the lies of the Cold War. In the fall of 1971, I got my first taste of what the Cold War was really about. I was in the second grade at Coram Elementary School. As an alarm sounded, my teacher, Mrs. Cohen, led us out of the classroom into the school's brick-lined central hallway and told us to kneel with our heads down in the "duck and cover" position. "Why are we doing this? " She replied, "It's what we do if there's a bomb. " I pictured Boris Badenov lobbing a bomb toward our school and wondered what kneeling in a hallway would do to protect us from that. As a former military officer from the Reagan and Bush eras, I'm Ars Technica's unofficial Cold Warrior in Residence.
So, to bring everyone a bit of perspective of what to be thankful for this holiday weekend, we've thrown together a collection of comforting reminders from our Cold War past of the sorts of things the government did to make us stop worrying and learn to love (or at least tolerate) the idea of a survivable nuclear war. Duck and cover. This Is What The Rich And Powerful Don't Want You To Know About Nikola Tesla - Higher Perspectives. At the end of his life, Nikola Tesla died penniless. The United States government confiscated his journals. He was largely forgotten until the last few years.
But why was Tesla so suppressed? Did the government want to steal his technology? Some of Tesla's most famous inventions deal with energy, one of the most important, and most valuable, resources. Tesla believed, and was able to demonstrate, that energy could be pulled from the air and that we don't need any fancy nuclear power plants or polluting coal power plants. Tesla had hundreds, if not thousands of other ideas for inventions that we simply do not know of. How Railroad History Shaped Internet History. Council Bluffs is a mid-sized town in Iowa, right on that state’s border with Nebraska. Although better known for cultivating presidential candidates than server racks, Iowa is a pretty popular site for data centers, especially new data centers built by major tech companies.
Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have all built custom data centers in the state over the past seven years, and all three are expanding in the region. Many forces have come together to shape Iowa’s data-center industry (which will be discussed in further detail in another story), but it’s the state’s history as a junction for another major network—railroads—that put it at the top of my list for Cloud sightseeing. My favorite part of looking for network infrastructure in America is really all the ghosts. Networks tend to follow networks, and telecommunications and transportation networks tend to end up piled on top of each other. Iowa is no exception. Google’s Iowa data centers aren’t entirely designed to be ignored.
De Beers myth: Do people spend a month's salary on a diamond engagement ring? Some say you should spend three months' salary on an engagement ring. Or perhaps two. Or maybe even one. Over the years these ring-wallet equations have come to be regarded as a tradition. Why? When actor George Clooney presented Amal Alamuddin with a diamond engagement ring reportedly costing £450,000, celebrity-watchers might have had a familiar water-cooler conversation. Did that ring really represent a month's salary? But where did this calculation come from? The short answer is no. Prior to the 1930s, presenting a woman with a diamond engagement ring was not the norm. In the 1930s, at the start of the De Beers campaign, a single month's salary was the suggested ring spend. Another did away with the woman, the pout and the finger, leaving only a diamond ring against a black background and the question: "How can you make two months' salary last forever?
" The real breakthrough was created by a team at the advertising firm NW Ayer and Son. History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. The Unlikely Struggle Of The Family Whose Neighbor Is Area 51. By the Reflection of What Is. Plate 2. Unknown photographer, July–August 1843. John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd | Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American| Liveright | Nov. 2015 | 22 minutes (5,654 words) The following excerpt appears courtesy of Liveright Publishing. Get the book Frederick Douglass was in love with photography. During the four years of civil war, he wrote more extensively on photography than any other American, even while recognizing that his audiences were “riveted” to the war and wanted a speech only on “this mighty struggle.”
He frequented photographers’ studios and sat for his portrait whenever he could. It may seem strange, if not implausible, to assert that a black man and former slave wrote more extensively on photography, and sat for his portrait more frequently, than any of his American peers. Douglass’s passion for photography, however, has been largely ignored.
Plate 19 (cat. #22). Plate 41 (cat. #84). Plate 1 (cat. #1). History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. The Best Productivity Tricks Used By Evil Dictators. History. Interspecies breeding (sometimes called cross breeding1) is the act of creating offspring from two different species. It should not be confused with the chimera which involves more of a Frankenstein-type process of gene splicing, cell modification, implantation, and embryo modification. While the creation and study of hybrid plants has been ongoing for hundreds of years, this writeup deals with hybrid species created by cross breeding in the animal kingdom - specifically mammals, however the concepts themselves cross these borders. Interspecies breeding is a very complex subject.
Obviously it is not possible to mate any animal with any other animal to produce a strange new creature. If you've learned anything from South Park, you will know that "pig and elephant DNA just won't splice". In general, cross bred animals are sterile. Most cross breeding occurs between animals in the same Genus. There are many examples of two species of animals that have/can/do produce offspring. Heroin: A Hundred-Year Habit. In 1898 a German chemical company launched a new medicine called ‘Heroin’.
A hundred years later, this drug is flooding illegally into Britain in record amounts. The latest Home Office figures show a 40 per cent increase in police seizures of heroin. The National Criminal Intelligence Service believes that up to 80 per cent of the heroin currently entering Britain is controlled by Turkish organised criminals based in London and the South-East. How, then, did nineteenth-century science come to bequeath this notorious drug of abuse to twentieth-century crime? In 1863, a dynamic German merchant called Friedrich Bayer (1825-76) set up a factory in Elberfeld to exploit new chemical procedures for making colourful dyes from coal-tar. Synthetic chemical medicines were something new. As part of the Prussianisation of Alsace-Lorraine following the Franco-Prussian War, a well-equipped institute was built in Strasbourg in 1872 for the eminent German pharmacologist Oswald Schmeideberg (1838-1921).
Heroin: A Hundred-Year Habit.