Between 2000 and 2015, at least 207,468 minors were married in the United States.
As Statista"s Martin Armstrong notes, despite an overall fall in child marriage since 2000 (25,583 to 9,247), there are still a shocking number of young children legally married in the country. Only 14 percent married other minors, meaning 86 percent wedded an adult.
As the infographic below shows, the youngest to marry since 2000 were three ten year olds.
According to Frontline, the three girls married men aged 24, 25 and 31 in Tennessee in 2001.
While certain conditions have to be met before a minor can marry, and consent from a parent or judge is usually required, every state in the U.S. allows children to marry to some extent.
In Oregon and Nebraska, for example, the lower limit is set at 17.
In 26 states, there is no minimum age for marriage.
(ANTIMEDIA) – Have you ever thought about whether future humans will live out aspects of their lives online in simulated environments, or even extend their natural lifespans by uploading their minds to a secure cloud ecosystem? It’s been a familiar idea in science fiction for decades. With news that Elon Musk was attempting to build a “neural lace,” the concept of a brain-machine interface (BMI) entered the public lexicon. Now, researchers at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa, claim to have linked a human mind to the Internet in real time — a biomedical first.
The project, dubbed the “Brainternet,” required the researchers to gather EEG brainwave signals using only an Emotiv EEG device and a simple Raspberry Pi computer. The experiment allowed the human brain to become an information node in the Internet of Things (IoT).
“Brainternet is a new frontier in brain-computer interface systems. There is a lack of easily understood data about how a human brain works and processes information. Brainternet seeks to simplify a person’s understanding of their own brain and the brains of others. It does this through continuous monitoring of brain activity as well as enabling some interactivity.”
Researchers say the project could provide valuable information for future deep learning algorithms and could even assist Musk’s endeavors in creating true BMI. Many futurists believe that as the impact and everyday importance of the Internet grows, it is inevitable that humans will merge the physical world with online virtual environments, ushering in a generation of enhanced augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and a synthesis of the two that some call Mixed Reality.
While the concept of “living” on the Internet may seem remote, we are in many ways already cyborgs dependent on the web and artificial intelligence. Linking our brains to an online “hive mind” may ultimately prove to be the most efficient way humans can both receive and transmit information, though concerns over surveillance and privacy will likely follow us all the way through the century.
Would you trust a robot to rock your baby to sleep?
The question likely elicits the chilling vision of a Terminator cradling your child. However, a new product - the Snoo - is, in fact, an automated crib, a high-tech bassinet perfectly calibrated to ‘swaddle’ infants and lull them into slumber. It’s an early entry of automated child care in an age that promises to integrate robotics into the daily fabric of human life.
So, back to the question at hand:
Would you trust a robot to swaddle your child while she sleeps?
The Snoo was developed by renowned pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp, MIT-trained engineers, and Yves Behar, who runs a tech-savvy industrial design firm. The team’s goal was to recreate the sensations of being in the womb by swaddling the infant — restricting their limb movement, a practice some have criticized — and inundating them with white noise. This is accomplished with a sleeper outfit that one mother, Samantha Murphy Kelly, referred to as a “straight jacket” that safely secures the child as the bassinet rocks her to sleep.
Samantha, who wrote about the experience of entrusting the Snoo to care for her baby, describes her trepidation disappearing as she watched her child fall asleep within minutes. However, she admits that a creeping anxiety never fully went away.
“As I became comfortable with the product — even relied on it — I found new things to worry about,”she writes.
“When the city experienced a storm in the middle of the night, I sprinted out of bed to unplug it.”
The Snoo senses when a child is stirring and modulates its speed accordingly. In this way, it is part of a new tech trend of automated devices designed to coddle children. In 2009, a Japanese company released Suima, the first fully automatic baby crib. Earlier this year, Ford, in advertising its new Max line of cars, developed a crib that simulates the ‘soothing’ vibrations of a car ride. One can imagine there will be many more products and services like these as automation in the household becomes more ubiquitous — and profitable.
But will this cottage industry be challenged by the uncanny valley? This is an aesthetics theory supposing that humans feel a kind of revulsion when faced with a human replica. It is most commonly applied to androids, robots, and dolls, humanoid manifestations that come close to approximating our form, expression, or sound — but that remain eerily incongruent.
In entrusting robotic consumer products with caring for our infants, we must overcome a feeling that something is slightly off. Even if a product has a perfect safety record, a queasy doubt will still linger. While robotics, artificial intelligence, and automation make many aspects of our lives vastly more efficient, there remains a sense that the simulacrum is untrustworthy.
Will we overcome this sense in the coming decades? Will we merge seamlessly with our new robotics creations, as Elon Musk believes? Will the 2020s bring us smart cribs and infant monitoring microchips? Or will the feeling of unease cause a Luddite rift? Only time — and money — will tell.
Elder-care company Caring.com recently conducted a study to determine the best US states to grow old in. And the winner is…
Utah.
That"s right: In addition to being one of the top 5 fiscally responsible states in the Union, the home of Mormonism is also the most friendly state for elderly Americans to grow old and retire in. Earlier this year, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University compiled a comprehensive study, based on a number of objective financial metrics, ranking the 50 US states according to their overall fiscal condition. Utah came in third behind Alaska and Florida.
But Utah handily bested both those states on a ranking based on 13 categories including quality, cost, and availability of health care for seniors, as well as factors that speak to the state’s overall quality of life.
Here’s a breakdown of the data, courtesy of Bloomberg:
Best states: Utah/$2,950 Iowa/$3,518 South Carolina/$3,000 Washington/$4,500 Nebraska/$3,510
Worst states: Wyoming/$3,995 North Dakota/$3,340 New York/$4,136 Indiana/$3,528 West Virginia/$3,263
New York, one of the worst states for retirees, was singled out because of the extreme disparity between health-care cost and quality, as Bloomberg explains…
“New York, No. 33 in the well-being ranking, was singled out by Caring.com for its extremes. The very high cost of the state’s health care doesn’t produce results close to commensurate with that spending, according to the report. While New York ranked 46th in cost (the lower the rank, the higher the cost), its life/health care quality rank was 34 (the lower the rank, the worse the quality). Massachusetts had a similar pattern; it ranked 49th in cost and 18th in quality. That’s reflective of a larger trend in the U.S.—high spending on health care isn’t translating into longer lives, as this interactive graphic demonstrates.”
Washington State and California do a better job of translating higher costs to better-quality care…
“Higher costs show more of a payoff in Washington state and California. Washington is 38th for cost and is the top state for quality of life and health care. California has a cost ranking of 36 and quality ranking of 3 (it’s tied with Oregon for quality).”
According to Bloomberg, the lighter the color, the higher the overall ranking of the state as a place to grow old.
The study was conducted by Caring.com, which ranked states on 13 categories, including quality, cost, and availability of health care for seniors. The study’s authors used a range of data sets, including Census data and proprietary data sets from AARP.
“The ranking, which drew on data from the U.S. Census, the insurer Genworth, AARP, the Commonwealth Fund, and Gallup-Healthways, among others, also factored in 150,000 consumer reviews from Caring.com’s database of facilities and care providers for seniors. The availability, quality, and cost of care for the elderly got greater attention in the report than some of the common measures used in retirement destination rankings.”
As Tim Sullivan, vice president at Caring.com, explains, the author’s decision to name the study “The Best States To Grow Old In” instead of “The Best States To Retire In” was meant to highlight an important distinction...
“One reason we call this report the best states to grow old, versus best states to retire, is because it’s really important for people to plan out their 60s, 70s, and 80s with as much care as they plan their retirement in their 30s, 40s, and 50s,” said Tim Sullivan, vice president at Caring.com. “Your needs change as you age, and they are not always going to be driven by the sort of leisure or amenities or weather considerations that are what a lot of people think about retirement.”
The report’s greatest utility, according to Bloomberg, is helping to spark a discussion about where millennials should plan on settling down for the long haul. Unfortunately, Utah is largely devoid of the amenities – like comprehensive public transportation and quality night life – that millennials covet. But affordable health care, low taxes and the state’s overall low cost of living make a compelling case for going without.
Though Western media and much of the entire world have long forgotten about Libya, we never will. While the Nobel Peace Prize winning "humanitarian" minded architect of the 2011 US-NATO intervention (and author of Libya"s current hell) continues to pen his presidential memoir in the midst of an epic retirement tour of yachts, golf courses, and hidden celebrity islands, Libya still burns out of control.
As we"ve recently noted, the mass flow of migrants and asylum seeking refugees is not going away and remains a political flashpoint for European front line countries reeling from the immigrant wave. In an updated situation report on Libya issued earlier this summer, the United Nation"s World Food Program (WFP) published some shocking numbers:
Civilians in Libya continue to suffer as a result of conflict, insecurity, political instability and a collapsing economy. According to the 2017 Humanitarian Response Plan, 1.3 million people are in need of emergency humanitarian assistance.
July 2017 UN figures. Source: UN World Food Program (WFP)
This means 20% of the entire Libyan population (estimated at 6.4 million according to the UN) is still in dire need of basic necessities of life such as food and housing. The WFP further notes on its main Libya page that Africa"s fourth largest country enjoyed economic stability and independence until 2011 - the year Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered at the hands of NATO sponsored militants (bold emphasis is WFP"s):
At that time Libya, as one of the world’s most prolific oil-producing nations, maintained large trade surpluses. Although the country’s oil wealth did not percolate down to the wages of ordinary citizens, until 2011 the cost of food at household level was offset to some extent by a welfare state that offered free education and healthcare. Now, the country has a trade deficit and is gripped by a civil war opposing tribal groups, Islamist groups, various other militias and administration forces.
Libya’s population is suffering a major humanitarian crisis. This involves poverty, insecurity, gender-based violence, mass displacement, shortages of food and cash in banks, and frequent power cuts.
In 2010, a year before the NATO war, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) assigned a Human Development Index (HDI) ranking of 53 to Libya (out of 169 countries ranked, Libya ranked highest on the African continent). The HDI is a composite statistic which measures comparative quality of life around the world with regard to education, lifespan, wages, and general standard of living. For example, Libya ranked above Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Brazil, and South Africa for multiple years running through 2010 and was categorized as having "High Human Development". Libya has now fallen to 102 in the world according to the UN"s 2016 HDI report.
Right up until the eve of NATO"s air campaign against the Libyan state, international media outlets understood and acknowledged the country"s high human development rankings, though it later became inconvenient to present the empirical data. A February 2011 BBC report summarized as follows:
During Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year rule, Libya has made great strides socially and economically thanks to its vast oil income, but tribes and clans continue to be part of the demographic landscape.
Women in Libya are free to work and to dress as they like, subject to family constraints. Life expectancy is in the seventies. And per capita income – while not as high as could be expected given Libya’s oil wealth and relatively small population of 6.5m – is estimated at $12,000 (£9,000), according to the World Bank.
Illiteracy has been almost wiped out, as has homelessness – a chronic problem in the pre-Gaddafi era, where corrugated iron shacks dotted many urban centres around the country.
Libya went from an HDI ranking of 53 (with an HDI Value shown above) in 2010 to 102 in 2016. The UN identifies 2011 as the beginning of a continuing "mass displacement" of Libyans as the country remains in war-torn chaos. Chart source: Actualitix.
World Bank GNI numbers through 2016.
The 2011 war and aftermath essentially created a failed state with a once economically independent population now turned largely dependent on foreign aid and relief. Now considered to be at "emergency levels" of need, prior to NATO intervention Libya was not even on the WFP"s radar:
Before the crisis, the World Food Programme (WFP) had a minimal presence in Libya, with the country operating only as a logistics corridor between Sudan and Chad.
How"s that for "Arab Spring" blossoming of democracy, freedom, and prosperity courtesy of France, Britain, and the US?
Via Wiki Commons, "History of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi" Gross Domestic Product (based on Purchasing Power Parity methodology)
Not surprisingly, as of this week there are still "respected" members of the press willing to defend regime change experiments and "democracy promotion" abroad while quoting Iraq War architects like Elliot Abrams (thankfully Trump nixed him for a State Dept. position). They will perpetually live on in their own fanciful unreality while filling up columns in places like the Washington Post.
The ever-insightful Adam Curtis characterized the state of unreality under which most in the West still live when he concluded a 2012 post-mortem analysis on Libya - a very fitting conclusion to the still unfolding yet already forgotten about story of NATO"s dirty little "humanitarian" war:
The question at the heart of this whole story is - Who was the ventriloquist? And who was the dummy?
Maybe we were the dummy? By allowing perception management with its simplifications, falsehoods and exaggerations to create a simplified vision of the world - we fell into a fake universe of certainty when really we were just watching a pantomime.
And now as the Arab Spring unfolds and reveals the true chaos and messiness of the real world - above all the horror of what is happening in Syria - we find ourselves completely unable to understand it or even know what to do. So those stories get ignored while we follow others with clearer and more simplified dramas which have what seem to be obvious goodies and baddies - thank god for Iran, North Korea and Jimmy Savile.
It is unlikely that even the hard empirical data will awaken either neocons or liberal interventionists from their pantomime regime change fantasies.
(ANTIMEDIA)Puerto Rico —“Two weeks after these observations, we realized that there were some very peculiar signals in the 10-minute dynamic spectrum that we obtained from Ross 128.”
Those words were taken from a post written last week by Professor Abel Mendez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Mendez and his team are studying red dwarfs, the smallest known stars in the universe, and in sorting through recently recorded data, they found something they’ve never seen before.
On May 12, the team had the Arecibo radio telescope pointed at Ross 128, a red dwarf located about 11 light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. During the ten minutes, the star was recorded, an “almost periodic” radio transmission came from the direction of Ross 128 at a frequency previously undetected in red dwarfs.
In his post, Mendez writes that there are three main explanations for the mysterious signals. They could be emissions from solar flares occurring on Ross 128, they could be coming from objects in the field of view of the star, or they could be bursts from a high orbit satellite.
Each of these explanations has problems, however, as Professor Mendez notes. Solar flares, for instance, occur at much lower frequencies. Additionally, there are very few known celestial bodies in the field of view of Ross 128. As for satellites, Mendez writes that “we have never seen satellites emit bursts like that, which were common in our other star observations.”
All of this leads one to the obvious question: Could it be aliens?
“That’s a remote possibility,” Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center, toldThe Atlantic. “But at this point, it is indeed a possibility.”
One senior SETI astronomer, Seth Shostak, toldBusiness Insider the “chances are high” that the signals are merely “terrestrial interference” and that, in the past, “that’s always been the case.”
All astronomers can do now is spend more time studying Ross 128. The team scanned the star again on Sunday, and they’ll report their findings later this week. “Success will be to find the signal again,” he toldBusiness Insider in an email. “If we don’t get the signal again then the mystery deepens.”
(ANTIMEDIA) — Science fiction fans, take note. A private company, Moon Express, has just revealed its grand vision to launch the early stages of a mining operation on the lunar surface. FromArs Technica on Wednesday:
“The privately held company released plans for a single, modular spacecraft that can be combined to form successfully larger and more capable vehicles. Ultimately the company plans to establish a lunar outpost in 2020 and set up commercial operations on the Moon.”
Moon Express representatives unveiled the plans Wednesday at a hearing before Congress’ Science, Space and Technology Committee. The company got approval from the United States government to launch its first craft, the MX-1E, in August of last year.
The system is modular in that it’s based on individual pods, robots called MX-1s that remarkably resemble R2-D2. The pods, each one powered by Moon Express’ own PECO engine, can be fitted together to form a single craft that can fly as one and then separate when it reaches its target destination.
The individual MX-1s would use thrusters — again, sort of like R2-D2 — to move about the lunar surface collecting rocks. When its compartments are full, the pod would launch and head back to Earth.
The collected samples, which Moon Express hopes to have in its possession following its third mission launch in 2020, would be available to the private sector. As company co-founder Bob Richards toldArs Technica, “We absolutely intend to make these samples available globally for scientific research, and make them available to collectors as well.”
This would be after the company establishes a lunar outpost on the moon’s southern pole, where sunlight is constant. The stated purpose of this phase of the mission is to “prospect for water and useful minerals, and accommodate a variety of research instruments for our expedition partners.”
The plans fit comfortably within Moon Express’ overall goal to “open the lunar frontier for all of us, ultimately expanding Earth’s economic and social spheres to our 8th continent, the Moon,” as the company writes on its site.
A problem Moon Express will have to overcome first, however, is the “E” in MX-1E. The Electron rocket, intended to power these craft out of Earth’s atmosphere, which is also being developed by another private company, Rocket Lab, has thus far failed to deliver its payload into orbit.
(ANTIMEDIA) — On the southwestern edge of Lake Titicaca, Peru, there is an ancient 23-foot doorway known as the Aramu Muru. Local natives call it the “Puerta de hayu Marca,” the gateway to the lands of the gods and immortal life. Throughout their history, the natives have described people disappearing and appearing at this doorway.
In 1998, purported extraterrestrial contactee Jerry Wills claimed a tall blonde humanoid named Zo taught him how to access Aramu Muru and enter “another universe.” Wills further claimed that Zo illustrated to him how our universe is an experimental simulation within his species’ universe. They built it to understand their own reality, which is itself nested inside a larger universe.
The next year, in 1999, the blockbuster science fiction film The Matrix came out and forever emblazoned into our collective subconscious the idea that our existence is a simulation created by a more advanced race of beings. Incidentally, the film also made long black trench coats, black sunglasses, and my last name all the rage, but I digress…
A few years after the release of The Matrix, philosopher Nick Bostrom published the Simulation Argument, a concise paper entitled “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” It presented a trilemma, a mathematical breakdown of why at least one of three provocative scenarios must be true.
“(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a ‘posthuman’ stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”
The “posthuman civilization” to which Bostrom refers defines a period of time after which humans have merged with technology. This is sometimes referred to as post-Singularity, with the ‘Singularity’ describing futurist Ray Kurzweil’s designation of a society in which humans are post-biological, living synergistically with artificial intelligence.
The Simulation Argument presupposes the development of this posthuman civilization, at which point, Bostrom states, advanced humans or AI might develop simulations of the past in the same way that current scientists create test environments; some of the simulations would likely be for entertainment reasons, as well, in the same way humans currently create video games and movies.
In recent years, a number of high-profile figures have come out to state their belief that we are living in a simulation. Chief among them is tech magnate Elon Musk, who has stated that the video game No Man’s Sky confirmed his belief that someday simulations would approximate reality so comprehensively that they would be indistinguishable from reality. Apparently, he was sitting in a hot tub with friends when he finally converted.
Musk is the CEO and brains behind Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and OpenAI. In recent years, he has expressed bold plans for his companies that he believes will advance the human race: with Tesla, he wants to spearhead a transportation infrastructure that doesn’t rely on burning hydrocarbons; with SpaceX, he wants to assist in humanity’s gradual extraplanetary migration to Mars; and with Neuralink and OpenAI, he wants to facilitate humanity’s merger with advanced computer technology.
When he was asked about whether humans are living inside a computer simulation, Musk made headlines last year by saying he thinks the chances are one in billions that we aren’t.
“The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following: 40 years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot,” Musk stated. “That’s where we were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable.”
Here Musk is referring to the exponential growth of technology, the lynchpin of the Singularity theory. If in 40 years we’ve gone from the two-dimensional pong to the cusp of augmented and virtual reality, imagine where we’ll be in another forty, or a hundred, or 400. Provided the human race survives, one may assume we will achieve the ability to produce simulations with sentient beings. Already, the Department of Defense has created the Sentient World Simulation, a real-time “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information, such as major events, opinion polls, demographic statistics, economic reports, and shifts in trends,” according to a working paper on the system.
In recent years, other scientists have conducted research and even experimentation in attempts to show actual evidence of the Simulation. Heads turned last year when theoretical physicist S. James Gate announced he had found strange computer code in his String Theory research. Bound inside the equations we use to describe our universe, he says, is peculiar self-dual linear binary error-correcting block code.
A team of German physicists has also set out to show that the numerical constraints we see in our universe are consistent with the kinds of limitations we would see in a simulated universe. These physicists have invoked a non-perturbative approach known as lattice quantum chromodynamics to try to discover whether there is an underlying grid to the space/time continuum.
So far their efforts have recreated a minuscule region of the known universe, a sliver of a corner that is but a few femtometers across. But this corner simulates the hypothetical lattice of the universal grid, and their search for a corresponding physical restraint turned up a theoretical upper limit on high-energy particles known as the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin, or GZK cut off. In other words, there are aspects of our universe that look and behave as a simulation might.
With news that there are two anonymous tech billionaires working on a secret project to break us out of the Matrix, it’s hard to know whether we should laugh or scream in horror. Simulation talk is great epistemological fun and metaphysical amusement of the highest order, but it may speak to an underlying anxiety regarding the merging of our reality with machines, or an underlying existential loneliness. It’s even been posited as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. Why haven’t we met aliens? Well, because we live inside a world they built.
Our earth is marooned in a cosmic void so vast it would take our current Deep Space I propulsion system an astonishing 81,000 years to reach the nearest star — in a galaxy of hundreds of billions, which is, itself, just one of hundreds of billions. The thought that it’s all 1s and 0s rendered by a futuristic microprocessor is philosophically sexy but, perhaps, sociologically lazy.
That there is anxiety about reality being manufactured in a society obsessed with simulated pleasure and mediated experience isn’t altogether surprising. It’s the ultimate, though perhaps accidental, expression of resistance to a culture steeped in consumerism and artificial growth.
(ANTIMEDIA) — Providing further evidence that the day of the gas-powered car is all but done, one of the old guard members of the auto industry just announced that within two years, all its new vehicle models will be based on emerging technologies. From a Reuters report on Wednesday:
“All Volvo car models launched after 2019 will be electric or hybrids, the Chinese-owned company said on Wednesday, making it the first major traditional automaker to set a date for phasing out vehicles powered solely by the internal combustion engine.
“The Sweden-based company will continue to produce pure combustion-engine Volvos from models launched before that date, but its move signals the eventual end of nearly a century of Volvos powered solely that way.”
Volvo has plans to launch five new models from 2019 through 2021. Three of those models will be produced by Volvo itself, while two will be developed by Polestar, a subsidiary of the automaker that’s currently being reshaped to focus solely on electric vehicles (EVs) in an effort to compete with Elon Musk’s Tesla.
Speaking to Reuters about his company’s future investments, Volvo Cars CEO Hakan Samuelsson said that at this point, dumping tons of cash into the development of fossil fuel-based technologies just doesn’t make sense.
“We of course will not be developing completely new generations of combustion engines,” he said, adding that part of Volvo’s strategy is to join the race to produce the fully-functional self-driving car. “This means that there will in future be no Volvo cars without an electric motor.”
One of the primary obstacles to the reality of roads full of EVs — and, eventually, self-driving cars — has been infrastructure. But as Anti-Media reported last week, this obstacle may not exist for much longer. From a June 30 article:
“Chargepoint, the company that maintains the largest network of EV charging stations on the planet, published press release Thursday announcing it had just secured $43 million in funding from Siemens, a corporation Chargepoint calls a ‘global powerhouse in electrical engineering and electronics.’
“The funding comes in addition to money provided by other investors with a stake in the game and brings the total for this latest round of Chargepoint’s financing to $125 million”
Additionally, it was reported last week that Chargepoint also just purchased all of General Electric’s EV charging stations, bringing the company’s total number of independently-owned spots to 36,000.
(ANTIMEDIA) – You don’t have to look far to find outlandish theories on the nature of the cosmos and human consciousness. These days, notions once relegated to science fiction are finding their way into esoteric academic journals, and from there, into mainstream discourse. One example of this is the Simulation Argument, recently championed by Elon Musk; another is ‘time crystals,’ a tantalizing non-linear phase of matter. The newest symphony of mind jazz being broadcast across the Internet posits new ideas about the embattled theory of “panpsychism,” or the belief that mind is a fundamental property of the physical universe and is imbued into all states of matter.
A new paper, published by physicist Gregory Matloff, has brought the idea back into scientific discussions, promising experimental tests that could “validate or falsify” the concept of a ubiquitous “proto-consciousness field.” Matloff also pushes the controversial idea of volitional stars, suggesting there is actually evidence that stars control their own galactic paths.
As absurd as the theory sounds, it has several prominent adherents, including British theoretical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, who introduced panpsychism three decades ago. Penrose believed consciousness arises from the properties of quantum entanglement. He and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff authored the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) hypothesis, which asserts, among other things, that consciousness results from quantum vibrations inside microtubules.
In 2006, German physicist Bernard Haisch took the idea further and proposed that consciousness arises within a “quantum vacuum” any time there is a significantly advanced system through which energy flows.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, another proponent of panpsychism, approaches it from a different angle, using integrated information theory to argue that consciousness is not unique to biological organisms.
“The only dominant theory we have of consciousness says that it is associated with complexity — with a system’s ability to act upon its own state and determine its own fate,”Koch argues. “Theory states that it could go down to very simple systems. In principle, some purely physical systems that are not biological or organic may also be conscious.”
Matloff and other scientists are moving the argument into a new phase: experimentation. Matloff intends to study the behavior of stars, specifically analyzing an anomaly in stellar motion known as Paranego’s Discontinuity. Matloff wants to know why certain cooler stars appear to emit jets of energy pointed in one direction, a characteristic that seems oddly and inexplicably ubiquitous in the galaxy. In 2018, he plans to use results from the Gaia star-mapping space telescope to show that the anomaly may be a willful stellar action.
Meanwhile, as Matloff studies cosmic activity on the grandest scale, Koch approaches the experimental phase of the theory using brain-impaired patients. He wants to know if their information responses match underlying neurochemical foundations of consciousness. He plans to test this by wiring the brains of mice together to see if their minds merge into a larger information system.
“Panpsychism gives consciousness a curious status. It places it at the very heart of every physical entity yet threatens to render it explanatorily idle. For the behavior of subatomic particles and the systems they constitute promises to be fully explained by physics and the other physical sciences. Panpsychism offers no distinctive predictions or explanations. It finds a place for consciousness in the physical world, but that place is a sort of limbo.”
The quote expresses a general sense that panpsychism oversimplifies the hard problem of consciousness in the universe, an opinion many scientists share. However, Matloff, Penrose, and other proponents continue undertaking the job of venturing outside the margins of accepted science to try reconciling intractable contradictions and anomalies exposed by quantum theory.
(ANTIMEDIA) — It may soon be possible to erase traumatic events from the brain, new research suggests. Scientists have discovered that the proteins used for storing memories in nerves are entirely distinct — meaning they can be pharmaceutically targeted and eliminated.
The research, conducted by scientists at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and McGill University, focused on why incidental memories associated with trauma can trigger anxiety on their own. The team found that the process the brain uses for storing long-term memory is separate from the one it uses to encode incidental memory.
“The example I like to give is, if you are walking in a high-crime area and you take a shortcut through a dark alley and get mugged, and then you happen to see a mailbox nearby, you might get really nervous when you want to mail something later on,” neuroscientist Samuel Schacher of CUMC said while explaining the research.
Long-term memories are formed by neurons reinforcing the synapses that link them together. But the synaptic tagging-and-capture hypothesis states that weak stimuli — such as the mailbox in Schacher’s example — can still cause anxiety if they are associated with a traumatic event.
The research found that the strength of synaptic connections is the result of stimulation by two distinct versions of a protein called a kinase. By blocking kinases associated with a bad memory — even if it’s something innocuous, like the mailbox — scientists say we could literally erase trauma from the brain with a pill.
While the reality of that pill is still far down the road, Jiangyuan Hu, one of the researchers from CUMC, says his team’s findings have opened a very big door:
“Memory erasure has the potential to alleviate PTSD and anxiety disorders by removing the non-associative memory that causes the maladaptive physiological response.”
(ANTIMEDIA) — Date rapists often prey on those who fail to see their drink has been spiked, but three high school students in Florida may have just developed a tool to outfox the predators. Their Smart Straw exposes the most common date rape drugs that would otherwise be invisible.
Three girls attending Gulliver Preparatory School near Miami, Florida, recently won the Miami Herald’s Business Plan Challenge with their drug-detecting innovation, which they call Smart Straws. Unlike other test kits, these straws are easily carried and don’t attract much attention from those unaware of their true purpose.
Carolina Baigorri, Susana Cappello, and Victoria Roca competed against around 300 other competitors, but their work isn’t done yet. They plan to continue developing the straws, which currently test for GHB and ketamine, the most common date rape drugs. The devices have two test strips that turn blue if either substance is present in either alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks.
In addition to expanding the test to include other drugs, the girls told A Plus that they may pursue a patent and even change the product’s name.
“We might have to change the name to Safety Straw since McDonald’s came out with a ‘smart straw’ last month that is good for drinking shakes,” Cappello told A Plus.
It remains to be seen how profitable such an instrument could be, but the girls found that 85 percent of Northwestern University students said they would use such a straw, the Miami Herald reported. Half of the respondents knew somebody who had been drugged at a party.
The team is in negotiations with a drug test kit maker over the manufacture of Smart Straws, but in the meantime is raising funds through crowdsourcing, according to the Herald.
However, not everyone is excited about the new potentially protective commodity. Dr. Elizabeth Yuko, who has a Ph.D. in bioethics, wrote on the SheKnows blog — where she is the health and sex editor — that “the more ‘tools’ we have to assist us in our own rape prevention, the more we’re blamed when something goes wrong.”
(ANTIMEDIA) As the United States and the world draw lines in the sand over Trump’s new immigration policies, Muslims, Jews, and people from all walks of life are banding together for peace — both for themselves and the planet.
The EcoMe Center, currently located at the junction of Jericho and Almog, was founded in December of 2010 by a group of Israeli friends who attended the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a program that includes Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, and other international students.
Though the founders are Israeli, they wanted to establish an “ecovillage” run by both Israelis and Palestinians. The ongoing divide between Palestinians and Israelis is one of the longest-running conflicts in the world and continues to inspire vitriol and protest from both sides, with many around the world criticizing Israel for illegally confiscating and occupying the land of Palestinians. Indeed, the relationship is lopsided, with Israeli Defense Forces controlling Palestinians and often committing staggering human rights violations.
Amid this seemingly insurmountable conflict, the group of friends established EcoMe in the hopes of healing these historical and current divisions. According to Arnon Shomer, a spokesman for EcoMe:
“Some of these people never met a person from ‘the other side’ not through military engagement (Israelis as soldiers and Palestinians meet them as soldiers).This creates a very deep impact on everyone who comes to these workshops. For me, the first people that I could call Palestinian friends, I met through the center, and this is one of the only places where we can meet each other on the human level, and not as political entities.”
Seeking to alter this paradigm while also helping the earth, the founders began by “contacting local people and leaders and creating events of music [and] gathering.” They “started to build permaculture structures in the place from local materials.”
EcoMe has successfully created an environmentally-conscious, sustainable community. Shomer says EcoMe has compost toilets and a water reuse system (there is no sewage system at the facility). They construct buildings from “local materials, such as palms and garbage – tires, plastics of greenhouses and anything we can find.”
The center practices recycling and has a seasonal garden where attendees grow vegetables, which are used in EcoMe’s vegetarian communal kitchen. They also have a free range chicken house, projects to help sustain beehives, and permaculture workshops that teach “biodynamic beekeeping, recycled art, and permaculture gardening.”
These efforts are all maintained by visitors to the center, who are primarily Israeli and Palestinian but come from around the world. Though most international visitors come from Europe and North America, Shomer says they have had guests from countries like Japan, Brazil, Iran, Jordan, Kenya, and Colombia. As he explains, “the ones holding the space for the workshops are living in it as a community and do a lot of community work and sharing.”
And that’s what makes EcoMe especially unique. In addition to working with the land and environment, the center places a strong emphasis on healing relations between Palestinians and Israelis who visit the center.
Rather than accepting those tensions, EcoMe seeks to help them interact with each other in a peaceful way to foster friendship, understanding, and tolerance. One of the key methods they employ in this effort is the practice of nonviolent communication (NVC). NVC was developed by Marshall Rosenberg, an American psychologist, and is rooted in finding common ground and empathy.
“Through the practice of NVC, we can learn to clarify what we are observing, what emotions we are feeling, what values we want to live by, and what we want to ask of ourselves and others. We will no longer need to use the language of blame, judgment or domination. We can experience the deep pleasure of contributing to each others’ well-being.”
The communication method is rooted in listening and compassion, allowing those with grievances to express their frustrations without overtly blaming or lashing out at the other person but still requesting acknowledgment and action to resolve the conflict at hand. NVC has been used for everything from marriage counseling to resolving political conflicts. In fact, in his book on the method, Rosenberg recalled his experience mediating between an Israeli and Palestinian, who were eventually able to find common ground despite their seemingly diametrically opposed views. Rosenberg also worked with individuals who are now members of EcoMe.
As one Palestinian woman, Amal Hedwah, has said of Rosenberg and her experience with him:
“It was an asset for me. He made a shock in my mind and in my soul and in my body – and now I am a new person.”
EcoMe holds an annual NVC workshop that lasts between ten and twelve days and invites Palestinians, Israelis, and other international visitors a chance to communicate with each other. “This creates a wide community of people who are now friends, and sometime partners, and committed to continue [working] for peace,” Shomer says.
“I know many of us are working on the peace process as a political process, but for me, it’s looking beyond the political process. How can we engage in peace work as people who live in this land, coming from different identities, different cultures, different religions, but understanding that within all of these identities there are people who want peace, and within these ideas there are people who don’t want peace…for me, it is about the right people…being here who want to work for peace – and how we can work together.”
One of the best examples of this was the group’s recent efforts to help Palestinians clean up the remains of a tent they were living in that had been ravaged by the Israeli military for the third time in a year.
EcoMe does not seek to avoid or gloss over the historical division between Israelis and Palestinians — or Israel’s own role in it. Shomer describes the “normalization” of occupation:
“It is a ‘negative’ aspect of our work since, for Palestinians, meeting Israelis without dealing in ending the occupation is normalizing the situation of privileged citizens and underprivileged occupied people who have no rights.’
Noting the challenges of running a center that brings Israelis and Palestinians together, he continued:
“To acknowledge this is a very basic need for the Palestinian people, and many Israelis do not see it this way, and so, when meeting with each other on the human level, but neglecting the political issue, [it] creates normalization of the situation.”
The center is currently located on a Jewish settler’s land, a region EcoMe chose because, as Shomer explains, “it is the occupied territories, and we are here because we want to be accessible for Palestinians who can not come to Israel because of the separation.” Nevertheless, he says their location has drawn concerns that the center itself engages in normalization.
“This is why we decided to have a meeting about this issue with our Palestinian friends, and the main conclusion was that we need to find another place for the center that is not on settlement land,” he said, adding they are currently searching for a new location to resolve the issue.
As they work to solve this fundamental problem, however, they offer a variety of classes and methods to help those who attend find peace. In addition to NVC, EcoMe offers art workshops and yoga and meditation classes. Both practices are increasingly shown to promote well-being and reduce stress.
The center also offers language classes, “teaching Arabic, Hebrew, and English, as language is one of the barriers for understanding each other.”
Though the world currently appears to be in upheaval and citizens of the world seem increasingly polarized, EcoMe is effectively working to alter this trend one person at a time — driven and sustained by individuals who are truly becoming the change they wish to see in the world.
(ANTIMEDIA) — Forget flying cars. Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is going underground as soon as next month, the billionaire teased on Twitter this week. Inspired by Los Angeles’ car congestion, his enthusiasm for tunnels has grown since meeting with President Donald Trump.
“Exciting progress on the tunnel front,” Musk tweeted Wednesday morning. “Plan to start digging in a month or so.”
Known for chasing seemingly unattainable goals, the innovator who upturned the mobile finance industry by helping develop PayPal is now sounding quite serious about burrowing underneath L.A. and building new tunnels to alleviate the gridlock above.
Musk may not have to dig too deep into his own pockets, however. Last November, Californians voted in favor of big infrastructure spending, while much of the rest of the country elected President Trump, who has vowed to approve some $1 trillion for shovel-ready jobs.
In 2015, L.A. drivers spent an average of 81 hours idling on freeways, making the city the worst in the country for traffic jams, according to Inrix.
“Traffic is driving me nuts,” Musk tweeted in December. “Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.”
At the time, Musk declared his future tunneling business to be named The Boring Company. He didn’t come up with the idea out of boredom, though. He just wanted to get to the airport sooner, and who doesn’t? Responding to other tweets, he said his initial project would run from “across from my desk at SpaceX,” to “Crenshaw and the 105 Freeway, which is 5 mins from LAX.”
Musk met with Trump on Monday and praised the anticipated new secretary of state Rex Tillerson the following day on Twitter. Is Musk, a clean energy entrepreneur, making good with an old school oil tycoon? With Trump promising to allocate $1 trillion of taxpayer funds towards infrastructure programs, it’s not a far cry to assume Musk is interested.
Indeed, tunneling largely depends on government spending, which makes up 69.5 percent of the industry’s revenue, USA Todayreported.
However, there are still issues of regulation, especially in California and particularly Los Angeles, where permits can be hard to come by. That may be the determining factor as to whether there will be any light at the end of Musk’s tunnel vision.
(COMMONDREAMS) Underscoring once again the dangers of America’s unreliable fossil fuel infrastructure, a significant U.S. oil pipeline has been shut down after a leak was reported Monday morning.
Enterprise Products Partners said Monday it had shut its Seaway Crude Pipeline, a 400,000-barrel per day conduit that transports crude oil from Cushing, Oklahoma to Gulf coast refineries. The leak occurred Sunday night in an industrial area of Cushing. The company did not provide an estimate of the volume spilled, but said there was no danger to the public.
“Seaway personnel continue to make progress in cleaning up the spill, substantially all of which has been contained in a retention pond at Enbridge’s facility,” the company said in a news release (pdf), explaining that the pipeline is a “50/50 joint venture” between Enterprise and Enbridge Inc. “Vacuum trucks are being used to recover the crude oil and return it to storage tanks on-site.”
“The impacted segment of the legacy pipeline has a capacity of 50,000 barrels,” the release added, “however the actual amount of crude oil released will be significantly less and won’t be determined until recovery efforts are complete.”
The incident comes after another pipeline rupture in Pennsylvania early on Friday, where 55,000 gallons of gasoline poured into the Susquehanna River, and about one month after a major gasoline pipeline run by Colonial Pipeline Co. had to halt pumping for a couple of weeks due to a spill in Alabama.
Meanwhile, UPIreports that “[t]he release from the Seaway pipeline is the second associated with the Cushing storage hub in less than a month. Plains All American Pipeline reported problems with infrastructure from Colorado City [Texas] to Cushing earlier this month.”
Environmentalists, Indigenous people, and energy companies are in the midst of a heated debate over pipeline safety. Water protectors and their allies along the proposed route of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) have been saying for months that the project threatens their right to safe drinking water.
“Oil pipelines break, spill, and leak—it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of where and when,” 13-year-old Anna Lee Rain YellowHammer, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, wrote in a recent appeal.
“With such a high chance that this pipeline will leak,” she wrote of the Enbridge-backed DAPL, “I can only guess that the oil industry keeps pushing for it because it doesn’t care about our health and safety. The industry seems to think our lives are more expendable than others’.”
Indeed, referring to the Cushing leak, one observer tweeted on Monday: “That’s why we’re screaming #NoDAPL! They always break!”
