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Researchers based in Norway believe that in around 10 years time cargo ships will have the technology to sail the seas without the need of a captain or crew. Marintek, part of the SINTEF group based in Norway, is one of a number of partners working on developing systems which can operate without the need for humans. The "Seatonomy" project is looking to have ships sailing without human crews in the next 10 to 20 years. The 12 million kroner ($1.9 million) research investment by SINTEF could actually improve ship safety as human error causes more than 75 percent of...

There are two 3D printing technologies that are capable of producing products that are almost indistinguishable from those created using traditional manufacturing techniques. These would be Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), and Polymer Jetting technology. The former is widely used by 3D Systems in their industrial level machines, which can cost in the $500,000+ range. The latter is currently used by Stratasys in their patented PolyJet technology, which is utilized in most of their industrial level 3D printers. These printers also cost in the 6-figure-plus range. While these 3D printing technologies are some of the best out there, the price tags...

Infidels are infidels as far as Islam is concerned: Make no difference if the sin of Christian America were over-producing greenhouse gases or being who we are, a mainly Christian nation Secretary of State John Kerry has an interesting worldview if he believes that addressing “Muslim-majority” nations with the concept that climate change is the prevalent challenge for this generation. He probably wouldn’t get much agreement among the very people he thinks we should be protecting. Frankly, if Muslims were more worried about climate change perhaps there wouldn’t be such a surge in jihad, that is, if they believed that...

Volume two of the project I started writing in 2011, titled Political Order in Changing Societies, hits bookstores later this month. It is an attempt to map out how modern states have evolved out of patrimonial ones, and tries to show how simplistic understandings of how development works can lead to disastrous policy. I have not posted to this blog in almost a year because I have been busy finishing up my book Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. The book is now complete and will be published by Farrar, Straus and...

A genetic cause for homosexuality is not scientifically possible. A homosexuality gene, if it existed, would quickly die out. However, it gradually becomes clear that liberals and progressives are poorly-educated about science. They passionately believe in evolution, yet they don’t understand it. Public discussion is driven by an assumption that one may be “born homosexual.” Being ‘born’ homosexual is a medical impossibility unless there is a specific gene causing it. That is, heterosexuals would have one genetic DNA sequence while homosexuals have a different DNA sequence in its place. I discovered something debating this topic: One central point simply escapes...

Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur that has taken the crown for largest terrestrial animal with a body mass that can be accurately determined. Measurements of bones from its hind leg and foreleg revealed that the animal was 65 tons, and still growing when it died in the Patagonian hills of Argentina about 77 million years ago. “To put this in perspective, an African elephant is about five tons, T. rex is eight tons, Diplodocus is 18 tons, and a Boeing 737 is around 50 tons,” said study author and paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara at...

Tungsten is an extremely hard, robust rare metal that has the highest melting point of all the elements, at 3422 °C (6192 °F). It also has a density that is 19.3 times that of water and about 1.7 times that of lead, which makes it comparable to uranium and gold. And now, a Philips-owned company is 3D printing it. Netherlands-based Smit Röntgen, a medical imaging parts manufacturer, has used Direct Metal Laser Sintering to 3D print tungsten parts. The company began researching the potential of 3D printing tungsten as a business opportunity over a decade ago and announced on Monday...

photo captured from Free Syrian Army video/via Military.com More at Reaganite Republican...

The supposed impact of global warming on the Gulf of Maine over the past decade has hit a multitude of media outlets. Example: takeWeather.com’s article Global Warming Is Changing the Gulf of Maine, Imperiling Its Lobster, Fish Catch. According to the article, Gulf of Maine temperatures were marching along with the global average from 1982 to 2004, but then over the past decade, starting in 2004, the Gulf of Maine began warming at a rate that was 10 times faster than the previous rate. So let’s take a look at the sea surface temperature data for the Gulf of Maine,...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Watch out, enemy drones. The U.S. military is developing laser weapons to smite you. The Office of Naval Research announced last week that it is building a laser weapon that will be able to shoot down aerial drones, spelling big trouble for any enemy who tries to target the U.S. Marines. GBAD – Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-the-Move – is a laser weapon designed to be installed on the Marines’ Humvees, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and other light tactical ground vehicles. Intended to provide an affordable alternative to traditional firepower, GBADs could prevent enemy drones from tracking and targeting...

CDC Senior Scientist William Thompson has alleged that a 2004 study he co-authored omitted key data that would have revealed a link between autism and a commonly-required childhood vaccine, MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella). “I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism,” said Thompson in a statement issued through his attorney Wednesday.

Kevin LoriaAugust. 26, 2014 Monosodium glutamate, more commonly known as MSG, gets a bad rap. People claim that it's a toxin that causes headaches and sweating, and that it leaves you feeling lethargic and flushed. The thing is, most research shows that that's not true at normal dietary levels. Despite its umami flavor boosting power, rumors have given MSG a reputation so bad that many Chinese restaurants frequently put up "No-MSG" signs to assuage customer's fear. Some customers then put soy sauce on their food, adding the missing MSG in after the fact. Because it's delicious. The folks at the...

[snip]So why would the USAF build a hangar tall enough to house a jumbo jet? Maybe they are hedging their investment to accommodate presently unknown future projects, or there is something in the works that has a fairly massive, and very much un-stealthy vertical tail.

Dark Winter: How the Sun is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell Have you noticed how much earthquake and volcanic activity has been occurring lately? There was a major earthquake in Napa, California on Sunday, August 24th as well as considerable volcanic activity from Iceland to Papua, New Guinea. August was also a month that set records for colder U.S. temperatures. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there were some 1,097 “low max” temperature records broken in the U.S. between August 1 and August 23, meaning that the maximum temperature during that time period was the lowest it...

Progress in robotics, from drones to medical applications, is starting to come at a fast clip. Do you want your robot to cook your food, or just deliver it?The days of drones filling the sky and robots roaming in our streets are not far removed from reality anymore, and scenes from movies like Star Wars, Minority Report and I, Robot will be common soon. Just consider some of the ways that robots have started to permeate our lives. Start with Amazon, which is taking to drones in a big way. The online shopping giant started a new phase in high-tech...

Meanwhile, has anyone noticed how the sound of the chirping crickets has suddenly changed to the snorting of pigs at the trough? With Barack Obama now firmly in place as their ex officio leader, the United Nations pooh-bahs have come up with a surefire way to stick it to the taxpayers of the world, while feathering their nests for all time. It’s called making global warming/climate change a health issue at their very next summit in November 2015. Christiana Figueres, the top UN climate official, said upcoming negotiations on an international global warming accord should be viewed as a health...

The mind of an animal is a far richer, more complex thing than most people know — as a new TIME book reveals.Let’s be honest, you’d probably rather die than wake up tomorrow morning and find out you’d turned into an animal. Dying, after all, is inevitable, and there’s even a certain dignity to it: Shakespeare did it, Einstein did it, Galileo and Washington and Twain all did it. And you, someone who was born a human and will live your life as a human, will end your life that way too. But living that life as an animal —...

Published on American ThinkerBy Enza Ferreri You may often see articles in the media claiming that "research has shown" that children of same-sex couples are thriving, in fact are physically and psychologically doing just as well as, or even better than, children of couples who are - let me use this currently underused word - normal. Are these works reliable? In July such a study, carried out in Australia, was much trumpeted by that pillar of "progressive" thinking, The Washington Post, under the headline "Children of same-sex couples are happier and healthier than peers, research shows". Researcher Simon Crouch...

Submitting the U.S. to the international community’s will — without the consent of Congress In yet another demonstration of contempt for the Constitution, President Obama and his administration are pursuing what the New York Times characterizes as a “sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions”—absent any input from Congress. The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority approval by the Senate to ratify any legally binding treaty. The Obama administration plans to sidestep that requirement by calling the agreement a “politically binding” deal that would substitute for an actual treaty. It would consist of...

A new sun rose over the United Nations today and it's got the Barack Obama logo on it. In one of the most significant transitions of our lifetime, a mantle was passed today, yet most of humanity remains blissfully unaware of it. It couldn’t be worse because just as the late and lamented author Henry Lamb predicted back in 1997, aging, health-hampered Global Warming/Climate Change Godfather Maurice Strong has been replaced by Barack Obama. “The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratifications...