When The S*** Hits the Fan

Scientists’ New Breakthrough May Have Just Solved the #Drought Problem-#water

by

 

(ANTIMEDIA) Kalpakkam, India — Indian nuclear scientists have developed a new method to remove salt from seawater, spurring hope for regions around the world ravaged by drought. In India, 13 of 29 states are currently suffering from a lack of clean, fresh water — with conditions expected to worsen — but the scientists have devised a method to make otherwise heavily salinated water safe to drink. They have also developed tools to purify contaminated groundwater to make it safe to drink.

New Delhi Television (NDTV), a popular news organization in India, recently visited Kalpakkam, a small town in Tamil Nadu that houses a pilot plant built by nuclear scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), a division of the Indian government’s Department of Atomic Energy, located in Mumbai. The plant in Kalpakkam is one of the country’s main nuclear facilities.

As their video report shows, the scientists “have quietly been working on finding solutions to desalinate sea water and to purify water laced with chemicals.” Using waste steam from one of the nuclear reactors, the scientists say they are able to successfully remove salt from the water. As the reporter for NDTV noted, “this reporter tasted the purified water – it tasted like fresh water, not saline at all.” The freshwater is currently being used at the Kudankulam power plant. Though the India Times reports the water is safe to drink, it has not yet been distributed to communities.

Though they do not offer extensive details on how the process works, BARC’s website notes they have “developed and demonstrated several types of thermal and membrane-based desalination and water purification technologies.” Further, they say BARC boasts expertise in building both small and large-scale desalination plants.

Indeed, according to Dr. Shri Kamlesh Nilkanth Vyas, Director of BARC, the desalination process at Kalpakkam has the capacity to remove salt from 6.3 million liters (over 1.6 million gallons) of seawater every day single day. They have since launched similar plants in both Punjab and West Bengal, Rajasthan.

These developments are particularly important as millions of people in India struggle to obtain clean water. They are also far-reaching; historic droughts are sweeping the globe, from California to Brazil, and South Africa to North Korea.

These dire conditions have inspired efforts to make salt water safe to drink. In 2015, for example, MIT scientists won an award for developing a low-cost, efficient process to remove salt from water using solar power. While solar power may be ultimately preferable to nuclear power, this method is currently small-scale, expensive, and requires intricate technologies to implement — in contrast to the BARC scientists 6.3 million liters per day.

In addition to using steam to desalinate water, the Indian scientists have also developed strategies to purify groundwater.

“Besides, BARC has developed several membranes, by which, at a very small cost, groundwater contaminated by uranium or arsenic can be purified and make fit for drinking,” Dr. Vyas told NDTV.

Indeed, as the outlet reported, India’s prime minister recently visited the plant. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi had pedalled a bicycle that had a water purifier installed on it. It turns dirty contaminated water into potable water. Turning the pedals produces the energy the purifier needs.”

This is particularly vital for India, considering, for example, a 2011 report by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) found as much as 70 percent of water in Delhi, India’s densely populated capital territory, was contaminated.

As BARC’s website points out, they have been able to drastically reduce the levels of harmful toxins in water. “Uranium content in groundwater of some of the wells in Punjab was reported above permissible limit of 60 ppb,” they note. “The uranium content in product water was brought down to 6 ppb using BARC developed UF-RO technology giving clean water as per IS 10500/ WHO limit.” These filtration techniques may ultimately also be useful in cleansing desalinated sea water, though it is reportedly already safe to drink; water from the ocean is, unfortunately, filled with many manmade chemicals considered unsafe for humans to consume.

The scientists have also produced household water purifiers, which are currently being marketed to residents of drought-stricken Marathwada, one of five regions in the state of Maharashtra.

Though many may rightfully balk at nuclear power — BARC is better known for producing nuclear weapons — in this situation, the scientists might have found a redeeming quality with their ability to generate clean drinking water. To its credit, BARC stresses its “commitment to the focus on cutting edge research for the unique diverse requirements of our country including the rural adaptability of the technology.”

“The demand for water in the country is increasing rapidly,” they observe. “The existing water resources are diminishing,” and, consequently, “technological intervention has become a necessity for a reliable and sustainable availability of clean water.”

This article (Scientists’ New Breakthrough May Have Just Solved the Drought Problem) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Elizabeth Montag and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. Image credit: Peripitus. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article at edits@theantimedia.org.

 

From theantimedia.org Team

US Government Green Lights Experiments to #Reanimate the #Brain Dead

by

 

(ANTIMEDIA) — It sounds like the logline from the recent sci-fi horror movie, The Lazarus Effect. But the story coming out of Bioquark Inc. is real. The biotechnology company is moving ahead with a groundbreaking experiment to reanimate the nervous systems of 20 clinically brain-dead patients.

With approval from the Institutional Review Board at the United States National Institutes of Health in the U.S., the ReAnima Project will begin recruiting patients who are all but clinically dead due to traumatic brain injury. With cooperation from their families, these patients will be kept alive by machines and administered a series of procedures meant to kickstart cellular regeneration.

CEO, Dr. Ira Pastor, hopes to prove the cells of human brains are as adaptable as those of salamanders, which can regrow limbs.

“This represents the first trial of its kind and another step towards the eventual reversal of death in our lifetime,” Pastor said. “To undertake such a complex initiative, we are combining biologic regenerative medicine tools with other existing medical devices typically used for stimulation of the central nervous system, in patients with other severe disorders of consciousness.”

Phase 1 of the project is a proof-of-concept study called “First In Human Neuro-Regeneration & Neuro-Reanimation.” For a six-week period in Anupam Hospital in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand India, scientists will administer peptides into the patients’ spinal cords. The next treatment will involve injecting stem cells into the brain. Then Bioquark will use transcranial laser therapy and nerve stimulation.

Researchers hope this combination of treatments will trigger cell regeneration in brains that have otherwise shut down all functioning.

But not everyone is convinced the treatment will work — or that it is even possible to regenerate dead brains. Dr. Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University’s Centre for Medical Education, made the following comment:

“While there have been numerous demonstrations in recent years that the human brain and nervous system may not be as fixed and irreparable as is typically assumed, the idea that brain death could be easily reversed seems very far-fetched, given our current abilities and understanding of neuroscience. Saving individual parts might be helpful but it’s a long way from resurrecting a whole working brain, in a functional, undamaged state.”

However, even if the treatment fails, researchers believe their findings will provide valuable knowledge. According to Dr. Sergei Paylian, founder, president, and Chief Science Officer of Bioquark Inc.:

“Through our study, we will gain unique insights into the state of human brain death, which will have important connections to future therapeutic development for other severe disorders of consciousness, such as coma, and the vegetative and minimally conscious states, as well as a range of degenerative CNS conditions, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.”

This article (US Government Green Lights Experiments to Reanimate the Brain Dead) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

 

From theantimedia.org Team

Verge of #Revolution: The Story You Aren’t Being Told About the #Brazil Uprising

by

Clarice Palmer
March 31, 2016

(ANTIMEDIA) São Paulo, Brazil — As online publications have hailed the major protests overtaking the streets of Brazil at the outset of an apparent political revolution, few discuss the problems that have been brewing for decades in South America’s largest nation.

While Brazilians are angry and tired of their economic hardships, they are also incensed at the country’s history of corruption, which now includes a massive presidential scandal carried out by politicians and lobbyists during the current and previous administrations. This misconduct has given residents of all walks of life enough incentive to take their demands to the streets.

But are the politicians listening?

The History of Brazil is a History of Corruption

Local sociologists often tout Brazil’s corruption problem as a “genetic disposition” to crookedness. But late economist Ludwig von Mises disagreed. In Human Action, the famed economist claimed that corruption is simply a consequence of government’s heavy intervention in all public matters. “Corruption is a regular effect of interventionism,” he wrote — not the root of a country’s woes.

As Brazilian newspapers and talking heads tend to focus on corruption scandals as the root of the political and economic issues the country faces, they are, in fact, some of the consequences of heavy government intervention — not the foundation of the nation’s ongoing problems.

Between 1930 and 1945, the country was under the rule of the populist tyrant Getúlio Vargas, whose rise as a dictator was also tied to a series of corruption scandals, political persecution, and oppression. Nicknamed “the Father of the Poor,” Vargas and his administration used images of hope and harmony to sell the leader as the country’s grassroots hero.

But the individual behind the facade and popular image was the first of many political leaders to promise — though never deliver — peace and prosperity. Vargas also maintained an amicable relationship with Germany prior to World War II, prompting the United States to wonder whether Brazil would enter the Axis orbit. The Vargas administration even aided Nazi Germany by sending Jewish refugees back to their home country, such as the revolutionary militant, Olga Benário Prestes, a German Jew who ultimately died in a concentration camp.

brazilian propaganda

Propaganda by the Getulio Vargas administration teaching children to love country first.

Getúlio Vargas is particularly relevant because Brazil’s last president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva, who held office between 2003 and 2011, is often remembered by many as the second coming of the 20th century dictator. Lula is currently implicated in the high-level scandals currently plaguing Brazil.

Long before Lula took office, however, the anti-communist “Red Scare” mindset — the culture of fear tied to communism that existed between 1919 the late 1950s in America — finally settled in Brazil. The country began to fear the possibility that communist agitators would take over the country. With the help of democratically-elected president, João Goulart (Brazilian Labour Party), the country’s military leaders took over, replaced Congress with the National Constituent Assembly, deposed opposition members, and drafted a new Constitutional Charter. The 1964 military coup lasted until 1985.

Once Brazilians had the chance to elect a new president, they put young Fernando Collor de Mello in power, a right-wing politician who froze thousands of Brazilian savings accounts and converted them into government bonds, inciting a wave of anger across the nation.

It was only when Collor was accused of having played a role in an influence-peddling scheme that many started paying attention.

Afraid of what Congress could do to his presidency, Collor allegedly paid $2 million for falsified documents, an act that, once discovered, prompted Congress to vote for his impeachment. Only three senators voted in Collor’s favor. Seventy-three voted for his removal.

Whether or not this was a sign of things to come, Brazil’s first democratically-elected president after the military rule became the first to be impeached.

As privatization policies were put in place by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the 1990s, the country’s economy picked up steam. People suddenly believed they had a good, competent administration in place, despite issues with the ongoing drug war. The many years of privatization and inflation-taming measures, however, prompted younger Brazilians to become attached to the ideology behind progressive politics. Enter Lula.

In 2003, young Brazilians cheered the the election of the Workers Party’s Lula. After all, they believed a “man of the people” had been picked as the country’s president. He was the same man who would go on to become the country’s “lobbyist in chief.”

After Lula’s two terms, the Workers Party managed to get Dilma Rousseff elected. Her rise to the presidency was mostly due to her proximity to Lula. She has often referred to him as  “[her] president and leader.”

Unemployment, Poverty, Inflation, and High Taxes: Brazilians are Fed Up

Brazilians experienced an economic miracle in the 1990s. But as the Rousseff administration upped sales and consumption taxes while relying on inflation, the increase in the money supply. As the country hosted the World Cup in 2014, businesses and consumers began to suffer. The first ones to feel the consequences were the poor.

Currently, Brazilians pay about 36 percent in sales taxes on most goods and services — a regressive tax that ends up hurting the poor the most. Brazilians give up about 28 percent of their income yearly. With the increase in taxes on large net gains and the country’s protectionist policies, many believe investors will begin to flee the country.

Tension built up due to the economic difficulties consumers face only worsened when the country’s judiciary launched an investigation into Rousseff’s embezzlement and crony capitalist scheme, which has made global headlines.

“Car Wash” Corruption Scheme and Its Investigation: the Beginning of the End for Dilma Rousseff

The “car wash” investigation is the largest probe of its kind in Brazilian history.

Its name comes from the network of laundromats, gas stations, and currency exchange businesses participants in the scheme used to launder money.

From Brazilian writer Alice Salles at FreedomWorks.org:

“Trouble began to brew when authorities launched an investigation into a network of currency exchanging businesses connected to Alberto Youssef. He was accused of forging contracts and moving billions of Brazilian Reais domestically and abroad using front companies and foreign bank accounts.”

Once the investigations were deepened, authorities “learned that Youssef had business relationships with Paulo Roberto Costa, the former director of the state-controlled oil giant Petrobras, major contractors and their lobbyists, and other Petrobras servicers. On March 2014, both Costa and Youssef were arrested.” Once Costa agreed to take part in the investigations in August of 2014, “Brazilians learned that he and several other directors of Petrobras received bribes and passed them along to politicians for their campaigns.” In a few weeks time, the authorities convinced Youssef to join Costa, “and revelations about one of the largest embezzlement schemes in the history of the country started flooding the news.”

Soon enough, the authorities learned the names of contractors involved in the scheme, which happened to be the country’s two top construction companies: Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez. André Estevez, owner of Latin America’s largest investment bank, BTG, was also involved.

By March of 2015, authorities learned 53 politicians had participated in the scheme. Even José Dirceu, the former prime minister under President Lula, was “accused of receiving payments from Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez.” Lula’s close friend, the farmer José Carlos Bumlai, and Senator Delcídio Amaral of the Workers Party, known as PT, were arrested. The President of the Chamber of Deputies, Eduardo Cunha, a member of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) was also targeted, along with several other PMDB party leaders.

According to what the investigations have unearthed thus far, the embezzlement scheme benefitted political parties in charge of Petrobras’s leadership appointments.

Salles reported that “as federal judge Sérgio Moro showed signs he believed former president Lula had profited from the scheme, prosecutors from the state of São Paulo added insult to injury by accusing Lula of ‘hiding his ownership of a beach-front condominium.’” But the rumors about his future finally hit the news, and Rousseff decided to appoint her predecessor as her chief of staff. The Economist claimed Lula is a “canny political operator,” which may have helped Rousseff make the decision to bring him on board to boost her reputation. However, as Salles noted, “what the cabinet position means to Lula may have served as the sole incentive.”

As the country’s call for impeachment intensifies, a strong opposition movement in Congress is taking shape. The country’s top association of lawyers, Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil, has also announced it will present an impeachment proposal to Congress, making matters worse for Rousseff.

The proposal claims the current president has “authorized … the country to delay its payments,” and it also accuses the president of unilaterally lifting tax obligations tied to the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) during the 2014 World Cup. OAB attorneys also claim Rousseff may have “interfered with the ‘car wash’ probe, which includes her appointment of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as chief of staff.”

Unclear Future: Impeachment Alone is Not the Solution

As the “car wash” probe unveils that billions of taxpayer dollars have been tied to investments abroad that didn’t benefit Brazilians — and that members of most Brazilian political parties were involved — many of the county’s residents are showing signs of fatigue.

Impeaching President Rousseff may offer momentary relief to Brazilians under pressure, but unless a cultural change takes shape, the expulsion of Rousseff from Brasília, the nation’s capital, won’t make a difference.

According to activist Kim Kataguiri, a key figure in the anti-Rousseff protests, “the smokescreens used by the Brazilian government to disperse the population are finally gone.” He believes impeachment will come — no matter what. Even so, Rousseff says she has enough friends in Congress to avoid her downfall. Only time will tell whether Brazilians will find a way to restrict government’s interference in the country, helping to keep corrupt politicians from finding reasons to steal from the taxpayer.

This article (Verge of Revolution: The Story You Aren’t Being Told About the Brazilian Uprising) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Clarice Palmer and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.

From theantimedia.org Team

The Video Game that Made Elon Musk Question Whether Our Reality is a Simulation

by

Jake Anderson
February 22, 2016

(ANTIMEDIA) In June, a team of programmers will release a ground-breaking new video game called No Man’s Sky, which uses artificial intelligence and procedural generation to self-create an entire cosmos full of planets. Running off 600,000 lines of code, the game creates an artificial galaxy populated by 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets that you can travel to and explore.

Though this artificial universe is realistic down to the dimensions of a blade of grass, faster than light-speed travel is available in order for players to bridge the unfathomable distances between stars.

Chief architect Sean Murray says No Man’s Sky is different than most games because the landscapes and distances aren’t faked. While most space-based games utilize a skybox that simply rotates between different modalities, No Man’s Sky is virtually limitless and employs real physics.

“With [our game],” Murray said in an interview with The Atlantic, “when you’re on a planet, you can see as far as the curvature of that planet. If you walked for years, you could walk all the way around it, arriving back exactly where you started. Our day to night cycle is happening because the planet is rotating on its axis as it spins around the sun. There is real physics to that. We have people that will fly down from a space station onto a planet and when they fly back up, the station isn’t there anymore; the planet has rotated. People have filed that as a bug.”

Even the animals on the game’s planets have unique behavioral profiles, created with a “procedural distortion of archetypes” that requires a sequence of algorithms categorized as a “computerized pseudo-randomness generator.”

The game’s Artificial Intelligence programmer, Charlie Tangora, says,

“Certain animals have an affinity for some objects over others which is part of giving them personality and individual style. They have friends and best friends too. It’s just a label on a bit of code—but another creature of the same type nearby is potentially their friend. They ask their friends telepathically where they’re going so they can coordinate.”

Playable characters include astronauts separated from each other by millions of light years. According to The Guardian:

“The overarching goal for players is to head toward the centre of the universe. This common destination will increase the chance that people will encounter one another on their journey (even if the game sells millions of copies, when your playground consists of 18 quintillion planets, a single encounter is statistically unlikely).”

This presents a degree of existentialism to the game, as it does not shy away from the mind-numbing vastness. Rather, it embodies and celebrates the wonders of the universe, even imitating fractal geometry in an homage to the repeating patterns found at every level of existence.

“If you look at a leaf very closely,” Murray explained, “there is a main stock running through the center with little tributaries radiating out. Farther away, you’ll see a similar pattern in the branches of the trees. You’ll see it if you look at the landscape, as streams feed into larger rivers. And, farther still—there are similar patterns in a galaxy.”

The similarities between the real cosmos and the game cosmos presented by No Man’s Sky have actually provoked philosophers and scientists to ask whether a simulation like this, or perhaps one even more vast, could also be a repeating pattern in the universe.

To discuss this as it relates to the game, writer Roc Morin interviewed philosopher Nick Bostrom, the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and the author of the now legendary “Simulation Theory,” a controversial paper that has garnered a cult following in the last several decades. The Simulation Theory hypothesizes that since advanced civilizations throughout the universe are almost certain to have created vast numbers of cosmic simulations, statistically speaking it is quite possible that we are living in one — that in fact, our universe and our reality exist within a computer simulation created by an extraterrestrial or future humans (or posthuman AI).

Bostrom’s paper starts with the following abstract:

“This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is 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.”

In other words, the Matrix.

Incredibly, in recent years, scientists have actually sought to prove the Simulation Theory, running experimental computer tests that look for anomalies in the laws of physics. In a piece for The Ghost Diaries, I wrote about a team of German physicists using lattice quantum thermodynamics to try to discover whether there is an underlying grid to the space/time continuum in our universe. Though they have only recreated a tiny corner of the known universe, a few femtometers across, they have simulated the hypothetical lattice and are now looking for matching physical limitations.

One well-known constraint involves high energy particles. It turns out our universe does in fact have a physical limitation that is not fully understood. It is known as the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin or GZK cut off. And this limitation is eerily similar to what physicists predict would exist in a simulated universe.

Additionally, in the last couple of years, theoretical physicist S. James Gate has discovered something rather extraordinary in his String Theory research. Essentially, deep inside the equations we use to describe our universe, Gate has found computer code. And not just any code, but extremely peculiar self-dual linear binary error-correcting block code. That’s right, error correcting 1’s and 0’s wound up tightly in the quantum core of our universe.

Remarking on the incredible verisimilitude of No Man’s Sky, Murray recalls a query by none other than the creator of Tesla and SpaceX.

“Elon Musk questioned me about this. He asked, ‘What are the chances that we’re living in a simulation?’ ”

Murray’s answer:

“Even if it is a simulation, it’s a good simulation, so we shouldn’t question it. I’m working on my dream game, for instance. I’m more happy than I am sad. Whoever is running the simulation must be smarter than I am, and since they’ve created a nice one, then presumably they are benevolent and want good things for me.”

Of course, the game isn’t 100% realistic, as Murray did take some creative liberties. For example, he defied Newtonian physics by allowing for closer moon orbits (presumably to facilitate more cinematic landscapes featuring giant skyward moons). He also had his programmers reconfigure the periodic table to allow for varying atmospheric and particle light diffraction. The purpose: so that some planets could have green skies.

Being the God of a simulated universe does have its perks.

This article (The Video Game that Made Elon Musk Question Whether Our Reality is a Simulation) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jake Anderson and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.

From theantimedia.org Team