Kraft Has a 400,000 Sq. Foot Underground Cheese Cave. UFO-Like Clouds Linked to Military Maneuvers? Three nearly identical, UFO-like cloud formations recently appeared over Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, sparking online discussions linking the features to everything from the Second Coming to recent mass bird deaths to secret military experiments. At least one scientist believes the so-called hole-punch clouds have a military explanation, though it may not be quite what conspiracy theorists expect. On January 7, IT technician Wesley Tyler was running out to his car for a computer part when he noticed the saucer-like formations.
(See other cloud pictures.) "At first we thought they were tornado clouds, but the air was so still—like mausoleum still," Tyler said. "You just knew it was unusual. I've lived on the beach for years and never seen anything like that. " Back home, he uploaded pictures of the clouds to Facebook, tagging a meteorologist friend, who later identified the phenomena as hole-punch clouds, or punch-hole clouds. Triple Hole-Punch Clouds Linked to HAARP, Heaven? China's New Super-City Will Merge Nine Urban Centers into a Single, 16,000-Square-Mile Megatropolis. If you're going to build the world's biggest megatropolis in the world's most populous country, you don't start from scratch. You take nine existing population centers and merge them. At least, that's the thinking behind the "Turn the Pearl River Delta Into One" initiative, which aims to do exactly that.
Merging nine cities, China plans to create a 16,000-square-mile urban swath populated by 42 million people in the southeast near Hong Kong. In terms of geography, the new mega-city will be roughly twice as big as New Jersey. More than 150 infrastructure projects costing some $300 billion will link the nine cities together over the next six years, reducing redundancies and bringing nearly ten percent of China's economy under a single umbrella.
The idea isn't just to create another superlative for the People's Republic, but to make things more efficient for people living in China's manufacturing heartland. [Telegraph] "Buy A Gun" Google Queries Hit All Time High, And Other Off The Grid Economic Indicators | zero hedge. In lieu of a credible macroeconomic data reporting infrastructure in America, increasingly more people are forced to resort to secondary trend indicators, most of which have zero economic "credibility" within the mainstream, yet which provide just as good a perspective of what may be happening behind the scenes in this once great country. A good example was a recent Gallup poll, which contrary to all expectations based on a now completley irrelvant and thoroughly discredited ADP number, which led some br(j)okers such as the Barclays Insane Predictions Team to speculate a 580,000 NFP number was in the books, indicated that the jobless situation barely improved in December.
Sure enough, this was promptly confirmed by the January 7 NFP number. We'll leave the interpretation of this chart to our very erudite politicians. There are a lot of economic indicators out there, and we pay attention to all of them because government decision makers have told us they shape economic policy. The Australian Floods, Before and After. Don't Worry About Those 1,000 Dead Birds that Fell From the Sky. High Water: Hottest year ends with unprecedented, “biblical” Australian floods covering an area “the size of France and Germany combined.” « Climate Progress. By Joe Romm on January 2, 2011 at 12:19 pm "High Water: Hottest year ends with unprecedented, “biblical” Australian floods covering an area the size of France and Germany combined. " 3-month rainfall totals for Queensland (1200 mm = 4 feet) One of the most basic predictions of climate science is that global warming will cause more intense precipitation.
Last year appears to have been the hottest year on record — and it saw an astonishing amount of intense rainfall from Nashville’s ‘Katrina’ to the great Pakistani deluge.” Unprecedented flooding has hit the northeast Australian state of Queensland, thanks to a week and a half of torrential rains and the landfall of Tropical Cyclone Tasha on Christmas Day. The top chart is the 3-month rainfall totals for Queensland. Rainfall in Queensland, Australia for the 7-day period ending December 29, 2010. Masters notes: Here is a photo from the NYT story, “Australia Floods Show No Signs of Retreating“: Here are two more photos: Related Posts:
The Year In Illegal Downloads. Japanese Create A Mutant Mouse That Tweets Like a Bird. A laboratory at the University of Osaka running an ongoing study on evolution has revealed that they've produced a genetically engineered mouse that tweets like a bird. They've produced more than 100 of them actually, as well as a mouse with short limbs and one with a tail like a dachshund. It's all part of a larger study into how genetic mutations drive evolutions and diverse outcomes that can come about as a result of miscopying DNA. The researchers didn't engineer the mouse to tweet, though there was some genetic tinkering that led to the singing mouse's arrival. The lab created the mouse as part of its "Evolved Mouse Project," which genetically modifies mice to be prone to miscopying DNA. According to the lead researcher at the lab, they were checking their newborn mice one at a time and one day came across a mouse that was singing just like a bird – a point that is significant beyond being both weird and interesting.
Voyager 1 Arrives at the Outward Reaches of the Solar Wind, Prepares To Enter Interstellar Space. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, now in its 33rd year on the job, has reached the very edge of our solar system and is nearing the cusp of interstellar space. How does NASA know? The wind has died down. Voyager 1 has reached a point in the heliosheath that envelopes our solar system in which the speed of the solar wind that has been at Voyager's back for three decades has dropped to zero. That point is some 10.8 billion miles from the sun, beyond the outer planets and somewhat near the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space.
That boundary is defined by the heliosphere, which reaches outward from the sun as far as the charged particles given off by our anchoring star can reach. Those charged particles hurtle outward at supersonic speeds until they cross what is known as the termination shock. That's where Voyager 1 is now. [NASA via Bad Astronomy] Man Officially Cured of HIV.
About:blank. Americans are now spending as many hours online as they do in front of their TV screens, according to a survey released by Forrester on Monday. The average American now spends roughly 13 hours per week using the Internet and watching TV offline, Forrester finds, based on its survey of more than 30,000 customers. The Internet has long captivated the attention of younger Americans to a greater extent than TV and is now proving more popular to Gen X (ages 31 to 44) for the first time ever. Younger Baby Boomers (ages 45 to 54) are spending the same amount of time per week using both media. While the amount of time Americans spend watching TV has remained roughly the same in the past five years, Internet use has increased by 121% in the same time frame. Regular Mashable readers will not be surprised to learn that Internet-connected mobile devices have aided this growth in Internet use.
So what are Americans doing online? Image courtesy of Flickr, San Jose Library. The 10 Most Destructive Hacker Attacks In The Past 25 Years. From a computer virus named for a stripper to swarming botnet attacks on the Pentagon and Microsoft, The Daily Beast lists the 10 most infamous hacks, worms, and DDoS takedowns in the last 25 years. The unending cyber assault executed last week by a group of anonymous “hacktivists” instilled fear and loathing in the hearts of network administrators at some of the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. It was unprecedented in its scope—attracting thousands of amateur users willing to do battle in the name of free speech on the web. But amongst the real hackers out there is a feeling of indifference. These “script kiddies”—as those using software to attack Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal are being called—weren’t the cyber warriors the media set them out to be, but amateur, talentless teens launching assaults with the click of a mouse. 10.
June, 1990: Kevin Poulsen Vs. 9. Adrian Lamo is making headlines these days for being the hacker Pfc. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. The Real Da Vinci Code Discovered. The Reaction of Governments to Wikileaks Should Scare the Hell Out of You. How Secure Is Julian Assange's "Thermonuclear" Insurance File?
Once your leader has been compared to a Bond villain, you might as well go all the way, right? A few months back, Wikileaks released a giant file that's been referred to as the "thermonuclear" option, should the organization's existence be threatened: A huge compendium of some of the most damaging secrets Wikileaks has collected, protected with an intense brand of secure encryption--for use as insurance. With Assange now in police custody on sex crimes charges, the "poison pill" is on everyone's mind.
The pill in question is a 1.4GB file, circulated by BitTorrent. It's been downloaded tens of thousands of times, no mean feat for what, at the moment, is a giant file with absolutely no use whatsoever. It's waiting on the hard drives of curious Torrenters, Wikileaks supporters, and (you can bet) government agents worldwide, awaiting the password that'll open the file to all. Advanced Encryption Standard An AES encryption doesn't work like, say, a login. Possible Attacks. Enzymatic Plaque Inhibitor Could Put an End to Cavities. Humans have invented all kinds of high-tech fixes to deal with plaque in the heart, but when it comes to battling tooth decay, a manual scrubbing with a bristle-brush is still our primary line of defense. But Dutch researchers may have just bested the toothbrush by characterizing and deciphering the structure of the enzyme responsible for plaque sticking to teeth.
By adding an inhibitor to toothpaste or even to the food we eat, tooth decay and cavities could soon become a rarity. Glucansucrase, the enzyme that allows bacteria to convert sugars into long, glue-like sugar chains and stick themselves to our teeth, is a close evolutionary cousin to amylase enzymes found in our saliva. And because we need amylase to break down starches, its previously been impossible to exterminate the glucansucrase in our mouths because doing so would also neutralize our amylase.
[Science Daily] iFive: Interpol Chases Assange, Twitter's Value, Blackberry OS Beats iOS, iPad Whups Kindle, Bing, Google Go Hard on Social. Iranians Furious After Finding Jewish Symbol Hidden In Plain View. Cable Viewer. Wikileaks. Chinese Telecom Company Hijacked 15 Percent of Internet. For about 18 minutes in April, a Chinese telecommunications company hijacked 15 percent of the Internet, redirecting U.S. government and military traffic through Chinese servers.
The misdirection affected NASA, all four branches of the military, the office of the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Senate. We don't yet know what this means — the U.S. -China Economic and Security Review Commission, which released report on the incident today, says it is unclear whether it was intentional or just an accident — but at the very least, it's one more piece of disturbing evidence showing the U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattack. The hijacking was reported when it first happened, but this is the first acknowledgement that American government sites were affected.
It's not clear what happened to the data once it was rerouted through China Telecom, which is denying any hijack of Internet traffic. From the report: "This level of access could enable surveillance of specific users or sites. Banking on a Bailout. Apple Passes Microsoft to Become the World’s Biggest Tech Compan. Oil firms challenge Obama deepwater drilling ban.