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Named counter-electronics high-powered microwave advanced missile. Weapon destroys electronic systems without hurting people or buildings. Champ is now an 'operational system already in [the] tactical air force.' Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range has been chosen as the delivery vehicle. From Ocean's Eleven to Star Trek, weapons that wipe out enemy electronics are a staple of science fiction films. For years, scientists have been attempting to create such a weapon as part of Champ, or the Counter-electronics High-powered microwave Advanced Missile Project. Now, the US Air Force claims it has advanced the technology, and says it can deploy it using...

I watch very little TV.  I do not like to corrupt the data flow.  But I happened to be in Las Vegas when my nephew was watching a BBC program on human smugglers in Thailand.  From BBC.com: Manit told us his district had long been used by human traffickers to transfer migrants from boats to trucks. He wanted to stamp it out. But he was getting little help from the central government, or from local law enforcement. The BBC correspondent was allowed to join a patrol off the coast.  In the video, the BBC is not shy about showing...

Natural scientists agree that the climate is changing and that humans bear some of the blame. Social scientists are now attempting to assess the economic and political price societies are likely to pay for turning up our planet’s thermostat. The security policy community is especially eager for an answer. In the academy, the debate over climate change and its security implications gained momentum after researchers from Stanford, the University of California Berkeley, New York University, and Harvard observed that civil wars were more prevalent during years that experience hotter temperatures. The chief explanation for this relationship is that higher temperatures...

Mass Killings Stopped by Armed Citizens has been my most popular article.  It was published on 16 December, 2012.  I had been collecting these incidents for a few years, ever since I noticed that the old media gave them virtually no coverage.  They received a little local coverage, but were ignored/spiked by the national media. In the original publication, there were eight incidents.  Readers quickly brought more to my attention, swelling the list to fifteen.  Over the last two years, seven more incidents have been added.  One of those, the SC Boiling Springs event, does not appear to be...

ITER, the international fusion reactor being built in France, will stand 10 stories tall, weigh three times as much as the Eiffel Tower, and cost its seven international partners $18 billion or more. The result of decades of planning, ITER will not produce fusion energy until 2027 at the earliest. And it will be decades before an ITER-like plant pumps electricity into the grid. Surely there is a quicker and cheaper route to fusion energy. Fusion enthusiasts have a slew of schemes for achieving the starlike temperatures or crushing pressures needed to get hydrogen nuclei to come together in an...

Evidence that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was informed that the assault on the Benghazi Consulate and murder of Ambassador Stevens was a planned terrorist attack before she went public with the misleading cover story of a video protest gone bad failed to dislodge her from defending it. "Sure, we knew within hours of the Ambassador's death that the attack had been planned at least 10 days in advance, but for us to have publicly acknowledged this would have put the country into even greater danger," Clinton maintained. "Remember, this attack occurred just two months ahead of a presidential...

Consisting simply of a surface and legs, the table is one piece of furniture that has remained largely the same for thousands of years. But now, a French design duo has come up with a way to turn the humble table into a means of climate control that doesn't use any electricity. Paris-based industrial designer Jean-Sébastien Lagrange teamed up with French engineer Raphaël Ménard to create the Zero Energy Furniture table, also known as the ZEF Climatic Table. The ZEF table looks like any other with the sleek design of a solid plank oak top and angled legs — but...

A few years ago, this column discussed certain disturbing findings regarding psychiatry and its relationship with the pharmaceutical industry: The major psychoactive drugs are no better than placebos; the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental illness is mostly nonsense; and psychoactive drugs are being given to children as young as two. The first finding was buried in clinical trials of antidepressants, in which side effects of real drugs (such as dry mouth) could be emulated in an otherwise non-active agent (aka removing “unblinding bias”). In these cases, there was absolutely no difference in efficacy between the antidepressant and the placebo. As...

Interstellar:Can You Do It?Circumnavigate the Many dimensions of Time, Space,Having Left Twenty Years Ago, Be Home For Dinner Tonight?http://endurance.interstellarmovie.net

One of the great physics experiments of our age looks ready to begin its quest.Scientists have held a dedication ceremony to inaugurate the Advanced Ligo facilities in the US. This pair of widely separated laboratories will be hunting for gravitational waves. These ripples in the fabric of space-time are predicted to result from extreme cosmic events, such as the merger of black holes and the explosive demise of giant stars. Confirmation of the waves' existence should open up a new paradigm in astronomy. It is one that would no longer depend on traditional light telescopes to observe and understand phenomena...

Benjamin Jasper Carter In a previous essay, I mentioned that we do not know what proportion of unsolved homicides are justified homicides.  The reason is that most homicides are violent criminals killing other violent criminals, and that because a person is a criminal, they are reluctant to report a self defense shooting to police.  From the previous essay: In the United States, about 37.5% of the homicides are unsolved.   In Chicago in 2013, the number was 75% unsolved.   Most homicides involve criminals killing other criminals.  How many of those would be justifiable if solved is unknowable; but clearly some...

LifeNews has repeatedly chronicled cases of people who were prematurely declared dead or said to be in supposedly persistent vegetative states who ultimately recovered. We have also covered miraculous cases where an act of God appears to be the only reason or only answer as to why a patient has recovered. File this story under “act of God” or “answered prayers.” Taylor Hale, then 14, suffered traumatic brain injury when she fell off hood of car while horsing around with friends in 2011. She spent a week in medically induced coma to help her brain heal, but she suffered a...

Yup, spaceships again. Between Star Citizen, the new Halo, the new Star Wars, a couple of key mods for Sins of a Solar Empire that I keep up with and have done some voice work on, and Destiny, my mind has been buzzing with them. I’m a huge nerd who thinks of things in my free time like “if I were a shinigami what kind of Zanpakutō would I have?” and “I wonder if I’d rather be a ranger or a mage” and “ff I were a Jedi in the New Jedi Order, what kind of ship would I have?”...

It’s no secret that uncurbed climate change and population growth are going to (and already have) put stress on the planet. But the situation is getting so bad that one prominent NASA scientist says we have to start thinking about terraforming Mars and that, in order for the human race to survive at current levels, we will eventually “need at least three planets.” “The entire ecosystem is crashing,” Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist of NASA’s Langley Research Center said Thursday. “Essentially, there’s too many of us. We’ve been far too successful as the human animal. People allege we’re short 40-50 percent...

* Nasa is thought to have successfully tested a revolutionary power source * Claimed it could fly for eons at the equivalent of 450 million miles an hour * It is powered by a device similar to that found in a microwave oven * Invented by now retired British scientist Roger Shawyer a decade agoAnyone who has ever watched an episode of Star Trek or a Star Wars film will know how it works. The good guys are minding their business in outer space when suddenly the Klingons or the Dark Empire bear down on them out of nowhere. There...

With rising obesity, America faces an increased number of type 2 diabetes cases. With an aging Baby Boom generation, the country is bracing for an increase in Alzheimer's disease. Could the two be related? Previous studies have hinted at such a link. But researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis say they have nailed down the connection. Their study, using mice, found that elevated glucose in the blood – a primary consequence of diabetes -- can rapidly increase levels of amyloid beta, which shows up in brain plaques in Alzheimer’s patients. The buildup of these plaques is...

n a Mediterranean beach 10 miles south of Tel Aviv, Israel, a vast new industrial facility hums around the clock. It is the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country’s households. Built for the Israeli government by Israel Desalination Enterprises, or IDE Technologies, at a cost of around $500 million, it uses a conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis (RO). Thanks to a series of engineering and materials advances, however, it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved. Worldwide, some 700 million people don’t...

“Man Made” has always been faith based. The Catholic Church Now enters the fray, The UN dictating What the Pope has to say; God pushed aside, Left in the wings, As the UN puppet masters Pull the Pope’s strings.

3-D printing, or additive manufacturing, is likely to revolutionize business in the next several years. Often dismissed in the popular mindset as a tool for home-based “makers” of toys and trinkets, the technology is gaining momentum in large-scale industry. Already it has moved well beyond prototyping and, as I explain in a new HBR article, it will increasingly be used to produce high-volume parts and products in several industries. Since I prepared that article, new developments have only strengthened the case for a 3-D future – and heightened the urgency for management teams to adjust their strategies. Impressive next-generation technologies...

Yes, well, sort of – and they have for some time now. It’s relatively old news, but a recent Times report and an upcoming book from the Hoover Institute’s Peter Schweizer have refocused attention on a 2008 blockbuster uranium deal involving Russia, the United States, and a Canadian company Uranium One. Pushing connections and presidential candidacies aside – the Clintons’ complicity is still very much speculation at this point – lets return to the deal and take a look at the US nuclear industry and, globally, the rise of Rosatom. The saga begins in 2009 when, after roughly a year...