`We’ve had some complaints lately about Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories not being sufficiently evil. (Too many projects that are “safe” and “legal.” Blah blah blah.)
Today we’re going to fix that by helping you to turn your New Year’s Champagne into a DEADLY weapon!!!!
(Just in case you were wondering: Yes, four exclamation marks are required.)’
`The scientists who mind the Doomsday Clock moved it two minutes closer to midnight on Wednesday — symbolizing the annihilation of civilization and adding the perils of global warming for the first time.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons, advanced the clock to five minutes until midnight. It was the first adjustment of the clock since 2002.
“We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age,” the bulletin’s board of directors said in a statement.
They pointed to North Korea’s first nuclear test, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, U.S. flirtation with “bunker buster” nuclear bombs, the continued presence of 26,000 American and Russian nuclear weapons and inadequate security for nuclear materials.’
‘Residents of the Colombian town of Villa Vieja got a bit of a surprise when a calf was born with six legs, two sets of genitals and two udders.
‘The calf has six legs, two vaginas and six nipples,’ explained the animal’s owner, Salvador Vanegas.
Vanegas, who has been raising cattle for many years, said it was the first time he has seen a calf born with that many legs and vaginas.’
`Auckland University scientists have revealed that eruptions of supervolcanoes powerful enough to change the climate and cause mass-extinction can be worse than previously thought. [..]
Such large eruptions of greater than 100 cubic kilometres of magma are generally rare and random events worldwide.
But geologist Darren Gravley of Auckland University and his colleagues have shown that one of the largest supervolcano eruptions on record, at Taupo 250,000 years ago, was twice as big as previously thought.’
Maybe I’m a bit stupid, but I don’t see how much worse than mass-extinction it could get. [shrug] It’s not like we’re going to be thinking “Oh, I’m glad it wasn’t any worse” once we’re already dead. 🙂
`Unfortunately, calling me alarmist or paranoid doesn’t address what I’m saying, it does nothing but calm your fears. The existence of a “global elite” is perfectly real, although the reader is of course welcome to deny it. And a great many of the men — and it’s all men, folks — who make up this global elite are on record, again and again, in no uncertain terms, stating that they would like to remove a large portion of the humans currently living on Earth.
To make matters worse, the technology to do this exists — in fact, there is an over-abundance of methods for mass murder at this point in human history. So here we have a very dangerous and disturbing nexus, a point where several threads overlap and intertwine. We have a small group of very powerful humans who have expressed the desire for “population reduction” and have the means to accomplish that goal within their possession.’
`This threat is being compounded by the loss of permafrost which has kept river banks from eroding too quickly.
The waves are larger because there is no sea ice to diminish their intensity, slamming against the west and northern shores of Alaska, causing severe storm driven coastal erosion.
It has become so serious that several coastal villages are now actively trying to figure out where to move entire communities.’
`Could there be forbidden sequences in the genome – ones so harmful that they are not compatible with life? One group of researchers thinks so. Unlike most genome sequencing projects which set out to search for genes that are conserved within and between species, their goal is to identify “primes”: DNA sequences and chains of amino acids so dangerous to life that they do not exist.
“It’s like looking for a needle that’s not actually in the haystack,” says Greg Hampikian, professor of genetics at Boise State University in Idaho, who is leading the project. [..]’
People abseiling to the bottom of glaciers to see what’s going on. Melting, mostly, is what’s going on. 🙂
‘Fred Hickey is used to going against the crowd.
Everyone scoffed in 1999 when the veteran Nashua, N.H., stock market guru, who publishes the influential High-Tech Strategist investment newsletter, warned that the tech bubble was going to pop.
And they dismissed him as a wild alarmist early last year when he said house prices were going to slump.
What’s his view now?
“I think we’re going to have a crash, across the stock market,” he told me Friday. [..]
Think: 1929, 1987 and 1999.’
`The icecap may not be the only thing shrinking in the Arctic. The genitals of polar bears in east Greenland are apparently dwindling in size due to industrial pollutants.
Scientists report this shrinkage could, in the worst case scenario, endanger polar bears there and elsewhere by spoiling their love lives and causing their numbers to peter out. [..]
The adult polar bear testicles the researchers examined were on average roughly three inches across and 1.8 ounces in weight, although they could dramatically enlarge during the height of sexual activity from January to July. Their bacula, or penis bones, were on average nearly seven inches long.’
‘Poisonous mud and gas is erupting from kilometres below the earth and 8,000 people are displaced and hundreds hospitalised on the Indonesian island of Java.
The calamity has been caused by a gas exploration project near Surabaya in East Java that has gone horribly wrong, and for the past six weeks, has unleashed hundreds of tonnes of hot toxic mud. [..]
An area of 12 square kilometres has now been covered and four entire villages have been affected, displacing almost 8,000 people.’
`The ultimate death toll among humans from mad-cow disease could be massively under-estimated, according to an innovative study conducted among a cannibal tribe in Papua New Guinea. [..]
British doctors have hit on the idea of seeing whether people there fell sick long after the practice died out, the aim being to determine how long it takes for this BSE-like disease to incubate.
Their suspicions were confirmed, for they identified 11 people who were diagnosed with kuru between July 1996 to June 2004. [..]
As vCJD only surfaced as a disease little more than a decade ago, this relatively tiny toll has eased initial worries that tens of thousands of people could die, given that millions of people ate BSE-infected beef.’
`An Indonesian who died after catching the A(H5N1) bird flu virus from his 10-year-old son represents the first confirmed case of human-to-human transmission of the disease, a World Health Organization investigation of an unusual family cluster has concluded, the agency said Friday.
The W.H.O. investigators also discovered that the virus had mutated slightly when the son had the disease, although not in any way that would allow the virus to pass more readily among people.’
`The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday. [..]
He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.
“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”‘
`If you look at it just right, the universal radiation warning symbol looks a bit like an angel. The circle in the middle could indicate the head, the lower part might be the body, and the upper two arms of the trefoil could represent the wings. Looking at it another way, one might see it as a wheel, a triangular boomerang, a circular saw blade, or any number of relatively benign objects. Whatever a person’s first impression of it may be, someone unfamiliar with the symbol probably wouldn’t guess that it means “Danger! These rocks shoot death rays!”
The U.S. Department of Energy has been grappling with that problem recently, as they designed the warning markers to use at Yucca Mountain and at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) nuclear waste storage facilities. There’s no telling who might be around to exhume our radioactive sins in future centuries, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates that warnings be erected which will warn away potential intruders for the next 10,000 years, whomever those intruders may be.’
‘Mark your calendar for Sunday, April 13, 2036. That’s when a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid named Apophis could hit the Earth with enough force to obliterate a small state.
The odds of a collision are 1-in-6,250. But while that’s a long shot at the racetrack, the stakes are too high for astronomers to ignore.
For now, Apophis represents the most imminent threat from the worst type of natural disaster known, one reason NASA is spending millions to detect the threat from this and other asteroids.’
Followup to It’s called Apophis. It’s 390m wide..
`A powerful earthquake on the southern San Andreas fault, which hasn’t ruptured in over three centuries, is capable of producing prolonged periods of strong shaking in the greater Los Angeles region, a new study finds.
The study offers one of the most detailed analyses yet of what would happen if a magnitude-7.7 temblor strikes along a 125-mile stretch of the fault between San Bernardino and Imperial counties.
The southern San Andreas last snapped in 1690, unleashing a strong quake that caused relatively little damage because few people lived in the area. But as Los Angeles and neighboring cities have become populated and built up over the decades, scientists now say a Big One could be devastating.’
`A scientific study commissioned by the Bush administration concluded yesterday that the lower atmosphere was indeed growing warmer and that there was “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.”
The finding eliminates a significant area of uncertainty in the debate over global warming, one that the administration has long cited as a rationale for proceeding cautiously on what it says would be costly limits on emissions of heat-trapping gases.’
`Don’t believe the hype—The debate among scientists over the reality of global warming has come to an agreement: It’s happening right now. Given that fact, it’s time to meditate on what will happen if the status quo remains unchanged. [..]
Let’s start off with the summer months—June, July and August. Think about the drought that Europe had a couple of years ago, which resulted in tens of thousands of fatalities and major crop loss. According to analyses of the world’s climate, a European summer drought that would [currently] occur once every 20 years, can be expected to occur once every three years toward the end of the century, when carbon dioxide emissions will be roughly twice what it was in pre-Industrial Revolution times. That’s a seven-fold increase.
The same calculations go for El Niño-like weather patterns in the Pacific and monsoons in Southeast Asia. Extreme flooding could make countries like Bangladesh uninhabitable and would displace thousands of environmental refugees.’
`A woman from the Country Club Park area contracted a case of bubonic plague, the first human case in Los Angeles County since 1984, county health officials said Tuesday.
The woman, who has not been identified, came down with symptoms last week and remains hospitalized.
Health officials said they believe the woman was exposed to fleas in the area around her house, although an investigation is continuing.
Public health workers set out traps Tuesday to catch squirrels and other wild animals in the area near her home. County Public Health Laboratory workers will test blood from those animals to determine if there has been any exposure to the plague bacteria.’
`In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That’s the conviction that inspired Greenpeace’s first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions — or nearly 10 percent of global emissions — of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.’
`Last year, a likable and accomplished scientist named Serguei Popov, who for nearly two decades developed genetically engineered biological weapons for the Soviet Union, crossed the Potomac River to speak at a conference on bioterrorism in Washington, DC. [..]
“When I came to Texas, I decided to forget everything,” Popov told me. “For seven years I did that. Now it’s different. It’s not because I like talking about it. But I see every day in publications that nobody knows what was done in the Soviet Union and how important that work was.”
Yet if Popov’s appearance last year at the Washington conference is any indication, it will be difficult to convince policymakers and scientists of the relevance of the Soviet bioweaponeers’ achievements. It wasn’t only that Popov’s audience in the high-ceilinged chamber of a Senate office building found the Soviets’ ingenious applications of biological science morally repugnant and technically abstruse. Rather, what Popov said lay so far outside current arguments about biodefense that he sounded as if he had come from another planet.’
`The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.
The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.
“That’s the name they’re using,” the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.
A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that “this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war.”‘
`The Bush administration Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation’s decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.
The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation’s massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War.
Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it says will no longer be reliable or safe.
Under the plan, all of the nation’s plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area, could not repel a terrorist attack.’
Yet at the same time they’re gonna chuck a hissy fit if Iran or North Korea do the same thing. Fuckwits.
`Talk radio and blogs are taking aim at a University of Texas biology professor because of a published report suggesting he advocates death for most of the human population as a means of saving the Earth.
However, Eric Pianka says his remarks about his beliefs were taken out of context, that he was just raising a warning that deadly disease epidemics are a threat if population growth isn’t contained.
“What we really need to do is start thinking about controlling our population before it’s too late,” he said Monday. “It’s already too late, but we’re not even thinking about it. We’re just mindlessly rushing ahead breeding our brains out.”‘
Followup to Meeting Doctor Doom.
`Recently citizen scientist Forrest Mims told me about a speech he heard at the Texas Academy of Science during which the speaker, a world-renowned ecologist, advocated for the extermination of 90 percent of the human species in a most horrible and painful manner. Apparently at the speaker’s direction, the speech was not video taped by the Academy and so Forrest’s may be the only record of what was said. Forrest’s account of what he witnessed chilled my soul. Astonishingly, Forrest reports that many of the Academy members present gave the speaker a standing ovation. To date, the Academy has not moved to sanction the speaker or distance itself from the speaker’s remarks.’
`So rapid is the rise of the US national debt, that the last four digits of a giant digital signboard counting the moving total near New York’s Times Square move in seemingly random increments as they struggle to keep pace.
The national debt clock, as it is known, is a big clock. A spot-check last week showed a readout of 8.3 trillion — or more precisely 8,310,200,545,702 — dollars … and counting.
But it’s not big enough.
Sometime in the next two years, the total amount of US government borrowing is going to break through the 10-trillion-dollar mark and, lacking space for the extra digit such a figure would require, the clock is in danger of running itself into obsolescence.’
`Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.’
`Humans have provoked the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65m years ago, according to a UN report that calls for unprecedented worldwide efforts to address the slide.
The report paints a grim picture of life on earth, with declining numbers of plants, animals, insects and birds across the globe, and warns that the current extinction rate is up to 1,000 times faster than in the past. Some 844 animals and plants are known to have disappeared in the last 500 years.’
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