Grand IllusionsWith Rumsfeld and Powell gone, and Cheney’s power diminished, this is Condoleezza Rice’s moment. Can she salvage America’s standing in the Middle East—and ...
June 2007 Atlantic Monthly With Rumsfeld and Powell gone, and Cheney’s power diminished, this is Condoleezza Rice’s moment. Can she salvage America’s standing in the Middle East—and defuse the threat of a nuclear Iran? Behind the curtain in Washington and Jerusalem with the secretary of state by David Samuels Grand Illusions http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200706/condoleezza-rice
Reuters Photo: Zahi Hawass, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, stands near the Pyramids of Giza... Back to Story -http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070820/sc_nm/egypt_antiquities_dc Egypt discovers what may be oldest human footprint Mon Aug 20, 12:24 PM ET http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070820/sc_nm/egypt_antiquities_dc
Egyptian archaeologists have found what they said could be the oldest human footprint in history in the country's western desert, the Arab country's antiquities' chief said on Monday.
"This could go back about two million years," said Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. "It could be the most important discovery in Egypt," he told Reuters.
Archaeologists found the footprint, imprinted on mud and then hardened into rock, while exploring a prehistoric site in Siwa, a desert oasis.
Scientists are using carbon tests on plants found in the rock to determine its exact age, Hawass said.Khaled Saad, the director of prehistory at the council, said that based on the age of the rock where the footprint was found, it could date back even further than the renowned 3-million year-old fossil Lucy, the partial skeleton of an ape-man, found in Ethiopia in 1974.
Most archaeological interest in Egypt is focused on the time of the pharaohs.
Previously, the earliest human archaeological evidence from Egypt dated back around 200,000 years, Saad said.
"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."
Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Mon Aug 20, 1:49 AM ET
Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer.
Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."
"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."
That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you'll have to look in a microscope to see it.
"Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."
And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.
Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:
• A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.
• A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.
• A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.
One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a cell membrane — is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.
Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over."We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.
In Gainesville, Fla., Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) — molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could "run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.
"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."
(This version CORRECTS Bedau quote to "shed new light")
A Brief Introduction to Geomagnetism The Earth's magnetic field is both expansive and complicated. It is generated by electric currents that are deep within the Earth and high above the surface. All of these currents contribute to the total geomagnetic field. In some ways, one can consider the Earth's magnetic field, measured at a particular instance and at a particular location, to be the superposition of symptoms of a myriad of physical processes occurring everywhere else in the world. The challenge is to untangle the rich information content of the magnetic field so that we can better understand our planet and the surrounding space environment in which it resides. Obviously, it would be a daunting task to try to summarize every single aspect of the subject of geomagnetism. Indeed, the necessity for brevity here means that our exposition will omit some relatively enormous details. Therefore, in this review for our website, we choose to concentrate on the specific phenomena that can be monitored and studied with data collected from a ground-based magnetic observatory network, such as that operated and maintained by the USGS Geomagnetism Program. The material presented here should be comprehensible by anyone having taken introductory college-level physics classes, although, having said that, we imagine that some review on the part of the reader might be required! Readers having additional curiosities about the magnetic field should consult the list of references, and the references in those references, given in our page of Further Reading. Those having specific questions are referred to our page of Frequently Asked Questions.
Sections
Magnetic-Field The Spatial Form of the Geomagnetic Field The Geodynamo Field Variation Over Historical Timescales The Earth's Ionosphere and Diurnal-Field Variation The Earth's Magnetosphere Magnetic Storms
Kerry is basically saying that the building was intentionally demolished to prevent a random collapse from damaging nearby buildings, but that premise has never been explicitly admitted, with officials clinging to the notion that the collapse was expected but was not aided by means of explosive charges, because to admit to a controlled demolition would be to expose foreknowledge of 9/11 itself.
Whether Kerry is basing his response on inside knowledge or hearsay is largely irrelevant, the fact that a sitting United States Senator is openly contradicting the official 9/11 story as well as a multi-billion dollar insurance lawsuit strikes at the root of the controversy surrounding Building 7.
In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties won $861 million from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties' estimated investment in WTC 7 was $386 million. This building's collapse alone resulted in a payout of nearly $500 million, based on the contention that it was an accidental event caused by the fall of the twin towers. http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2007/230407building7.htm
[PDF] 26 Top Anomalies of 9/11 2.File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML Why did WTC Building 7 collapse into a cloud of dust. if no plane hit it, nor any large pieces .... Rumsfeld, Cheney, Jeb Bush, Paul Wolfowitz and 21 other ... globaloutlook.ca/pdfs/26TopAnomalies.thestory.pdf
ZEITGEIST, The Movie - Official Release - Part 3 of 3 All time views: 29,875 » Views Rank « All time 29,875 38,605 Yesterday • 1,007 999 by email 33 107 by embed 216 2,411 ZEITGEIST, The Movie - Official Release - Full Film All time views: 906,750 » Views Rank « All time 906,750 712 Yesterday • 29,732 12 by email 96 21 by embed 17,433 3
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