Some high res moon footage recovered in Pink Floyd video vault

... Back in 1979, Clifton was working on a Pink Floyd video... to go along with the smash-album "Dark Side of the Moon." He wanted some footage of Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon... so he sent away $180 and got back a half-hour reel of 16-millimeter film from the Smithsonian.

"I had this idea that I could take segments out of Dark Side of the Moon and make them into a TV special," said Mr Clifton to Australia's The Age. "On a visit to Washington, I went to Smithsonian and asked if they had any shots of rocket ships travelling. He said, 'well, we can give you highlights of the moon shot.' Clifton never finished the Pink Floyd video... and the film sat in his vault for years.

"I didn't think another thing about it until a few nights ago when I was watching television and it came on the news," said Clifton. "And I thought 'I have got that stuff'." It turns out Clifton has a copy of only a small fraction of the missing footage... but the fact that he got it from the Smithsonian has put investigators on the trail. Clifton is again going through his vault to find the original canister in which the film arrived... hoping information under the NASA logo will help investigators track down up to 700 missing tapes... before it's too late. - more

For you who follow the moon conspiracy theory: Here are some nice pics of the models of the moon they used to fake the landings. Wink wink. It will be very interesting to see any high res footage of the Apollo missions.

Britain cracked WW2 secret “dress code”

German spies hid secret messages in drawings of models wearing the latest fashions in an attempt to outwit Allied censors during World War Two, according to British security service files released on Monday. Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings. They posted the letters to their handlers, hoping that counter-espionage experts would be fooled by the seemingly innocent pictures.But British secret service officials were aware of the ruse and issued censors with a code-breaking guide to intercept them. The book -- part of a batch of British secret service files made public for the first time -- included an example of a code hidden in a drawing of three young models.

"Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly," reads a message disguised as a decorative pattern in the stitching of their gowns, hats and blouses. The files reveal other ingenious ways spies tried to send coded notes through the post.

Invisible ink, pinpricks and indentations on letters were all used to convey details of troop movements, bombing raids and ship-building. They hid codes in sheet music, descriptions of chess moves and shorthand symbols disguised as normal handwriting. Postcards were spliced in half, stuffed with wafer-thin notes and resealed." - yahoo

Humans ‘hardwired for religion’

The battle by scientists against "irrational" beliefs such as creationism is ultimately futile, a leading experimental psychologist said today. The work of Bruce Hood, a professor at Bristol University, suggests that magical and supernatural beliefs are hardwired into our brains from birth, and that religions are therefore tapping into a powerful psychological force."I think it is pointless to think that we can get people to abandon their belief systems because they are operating at such a fundamental level," said Prof Hood. "No amount of rational evidence is going to be taken on board to get people to abandon those ideas." - guarduk

Nutty muggles.

Doctor leads time travel research

Experiments aimed at unlocking secrets of time travel are being led by Aberdeen University.

Researchers are examining the fabric of space time and what science fiction authors refer to as the fourth dimension. Dr Charles Wang will study the microscopic movement of atoms, which can be affected by the earth spinning. He said: "This is a very interesting possibility which cannot entirely be ruled out by physics." ...

He told BBC Scotland: "If you have curved space time, the time circles and you might just travel in time. "If we can slow down the atom and isolate it and guide into the fluctuation then there's a possibility it's there." - bbc

Phone telepathy: You knew it was true

NORWICH, England (Reuters) -- Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy. Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails.

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone. "The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

"The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed. However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some skepticism.

Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages. - cnn

No fowl play for four-legged chicken

It looks like an experiment gone wrong but the owner of a four-legged chicken denies fowl play. Ryan Dickey, 10, found the four-legged wonder legging it around an incubator at his Te Uku home on Monday.

Mum, Marlene, breeds 14 types of chickens and said it was the first time she'd seen one hatch with four legs. The little clucker is a Barnevelder chicken, a Dutch breed, and Mrs Dickey said other lesser legged chicks had accepted it without a problem. "He looks really robust and strong, he's good, he's just cruising along." The chick uses its bottom two legs to walk on.

She had noticed nothing out of the ordinary with the rooster and hen leading up to the lay and neither appeared to be feeling particularly clucky yesterday, she said.

A battery of researchers have found four-legged chickens are not unheard of but Poultry Industry Association executive director Mike Brooks said they were as rare as hens' teeth and were something he had heard of but never seen. Other four-legged chickens had been reported in Romania and Saudi Arabia.

Hamilton vet Keith Houston said in the Dickey's chick case, stem cells in the egg had divided into four instead of two, meaning an extra pair of legs. The family intend keeping the chicken as a pet..." - stuff

Robotic Frisbees of Death

I told you the UFOs were coming and that they'd really be the US military, not aliens. This shows that, as I've been saying for years, the man-made technology for stable circular winged aircraft exists.

"... Robotic frisbees. Heavily armed robotic frisbees. The Air Force recently tapped Triton Systems, out of Chelmsford, Mass, to develop such a "Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munition."

"The 3-D maneuverability of the Frisbee-UAV [unammned aerial vehicle] will provide revolutionary tactical access and lethality against hostiles hiding in upper story locations and/or defiladed behind obstacles," the company promises.

The circular drones will be lanuched "from munitions dispensers or by means of a simple mechanism similar to a shotgun target (skeet) launcher," Triton adds. Once in the air, they'll be tele-operated by soldiers on the ground. Or, if needed, the fightin' frisbees will pilot themselves as they hunt for guerrillas.

Once they catch up to the baddies, the drones will use a series of armor-piercing explosives, shooting jets of molten metal, to eliminate their targets. And these MEFP [Multiple Explosively Formed Penetrator] "warheads will be controllable so as to provide a single large fragment (bunker-buster) or tailorable pattern of smaller fragments (unprotected infantry or light utility vehicles)." The decision of whether to go bunker-buster or infantry-annihilator mode can either be determined by the drones' human operators, "or autonomous target classification routine built into the UAV."

Now, Triton's Frisbee-UAV concept isn't the first time roboticists have looked into disc-shaped drones. From 1992 to 1998, the Navy experimented with a set of unmanned, 250-pound, six-foot-diameter flying saucers. In 2002, Norweigan researchers showed off plans for a circular flying robot "inspired at least partly by the design of Star Trek's USS Enterprise," New Scientist noted. Around the same time, at the University of Manchester, Jonathan Potts studied how best to control UAVs "based on the Frisbee TM sports disc shape." - detch

I think they completely missed the point of Star Trek.? Ever hear of the Borg?

Probe Crashes into Moon, Returns Pictures: SMART-1 impact update

This beautiful image of the lunar surface was taken on 2 September 2006 by the AMIE camera on board SMART-1 during the last few orbits prior to Moon impact, and shows a heavily cratered region of the Moon. This view was captured during the imaging session which took place bewteen 15:19 and 17:34 CEST (17:19 - 19:34 UT). - more

Man Lives to 112 Despite Junk-Food Diet

"His favorite meal, which he often ate twice a day, was "an Oscar Mayer wiener and an Eggo waffle." - sfgate

"George Johnson, considered California's oldest living person at 112 and the state's last surviving World War I veteran, had experts shaking their heads over his junk food diet. "He had terrible bad habits. He had a diet largely of sausages and waffles," Dr. L. Stephen Coles, founder of the Gerontology Research Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Friday.

The 5-foot-7, 140-pound Johnson died of pneumonia Wednesday at his Richmond home in Northern California. "A lot of people think or imagine that your good habits and bad habits contribute to your longevity," Coles said. "But we often find it is in the genes rather than lifestyle." Johnson, who was blind and living alone until his 110th birthday when a caregiver began helping him, built the Richmond house by hand in 1935. He got around using a walker in recent years.

Johnson was the only living Californian considered a "supercentenarian," a designation for those ages 110 or older, Coles said. His group is now in the process of validating a Los Angeles candidate who claims to be 112 years old. Coles participated in an autopsy Thursday that was designed to study Johnson's health.

"All of his organs were extremely youthful. They could have been the organs of someone who was 50 or 60, not 112. Clearly his genes had some secrets," Coles said. "Everything in his body that we looked at was clean as a whistle, except for his lungs with the pneumonia," Coles said. "He had no heart disease, he had no cancer, no diabetes and no Alzheimer's. "This is a mysterious case that someone could be so healthy from a pathology point of view and that there is no obvious cause of death." - southflor

The crocodile hunter is dead, long live the crocodile hunter.

Steve Irwin, the ebullient Australian TV personality and conservationist known as the Crocodile Hunter, was killed by a stingray barb to the heart during a diving expedition, police and his wildlife park said. Irwin, 44, was filming an underwater sequence for a television series on remote Batt Reef off the far northeast coast of Australia when he encountered the ray and was stung about 11 a.m. (0630 IST), Australia Zoo, Irwin's park, said in a statement. - more

Free Music MP3: Xeno covers Paul Simon, who is a rock or something.

see later post. this was updated.

Live Music: Xenophilia Reunion Show: Sept 9th, Luna’s Cafe

Secret Inside Info: Xenophilia (Xeno, AmyAnne of the AmyAnne band, and Hence formerly of the Jackie Greene band) will perform a short five song reunion set this coming Saturday night, Sept 9th at Luna's Cafe in downtown Sacramento. (Directions)

Sat 9/9: JOHN FARIAS C.D. RELEASE, WILLIAM MYLAR, AMY ANNE (Secretly with Xenophilia). 9 PM. $6

Humor from Censored News

Here's another example of that cool software that lets you animate still photographs, this time with a political slant. Pretty funny, some of it anyway.

[youtube]CYMUmANLEzE[/youtube]

PS, for some more political humor, try these 2DTV cartoon videos.

1000 Virtual Cars

Watch 1000 virtual cars racing at the same time on the same track. Crazy.

(Click pic for video)

Afghanistan Opium Harvest: Highest Levels Ever Recorded

"Afghanistan?s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul," reports Carlotta Gall in Sunday's edition of The New York Times."He described the figures as 'alarming' and 'very bad news' for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001," the article continues. ... ?This year?s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium ? a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent,? Mr. Costa said at a news briefing. - rawstory

Mike Ruppert, a conspiracy theoriest and former LAPD narcotics officer, says the US economy rests on the massive international drug trade controlled secretly by our government. That assertion makes it interesting that we invaded and continue our military presence in Afghanistan, yet drug output is at an all time high. Could we just destroy the fields? What is our stated mission over there? The DoD lists conternarcotics as one of several goals and says it is working with the Afghan government on this. Our military mission also includes farming:

"By supporting land titling efforts, development of irrigation and other infrastructure ... we will help the Afghan agriculture sector raise its productivity and provide viable livelihoods to rural families." - dodmission

Is some of our military help with agriculture accidentally benefiting the poppy crop? One wonders.

Up So Close

Here's a closeup of my finger taken recently at an exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The faint round impressions on the flat raised parts are sweat glands.

Father with cancer just wanted to see daughter’s wedding, now he’s cured.

Is there a cure for cancer? You bet. This latest one enhances the body's own immune system, and so far it gives a 2 in 17 chance of complete recovery. Scientists remove normal white blood cells, infect them with a retrovirus which delivers DNA to the cells. These genes enable the white blood cells to make T cell receptors which stick to the cancer cells. The white blood cells are reintroduced to the patient and they kill the cancer cells. One challenge is getting enough of these new cells to sick around in the patient's body in order to kill the cancer. Difficult, but it has now worked and the methods can be improved. (See diagram).

"The NCI team managed to isolate T-cells produced by cancer patients that could recognize cancer. They extracted these special T-cells and enhanced their ability to find cancer cells through genetic manipulation." - ctv

Mr Origer was diagnosed with melanoma ? the most aggressive form of skin cancer ? in 1999. A cyst which grew on the same area of his back in 2002 was found to have malignant cells and the cancer continued to spread until, in June 2004, it was found in his liver. He underwent various chemical and surgical treatments, but none was found to stop the spread of cancer.

In December 2004, he was given the gene therapy and was discharged the same month. By January 2005, his tumours had shrunk by half and by last September, when he attended his daughter Katie's wedding, one small spot remained in his liver which surgeons removed.

Last week, doctors pronounced him completely clear of cancer cells.

Of the 17 patients with advanced skin cancer who underwent gene therapy, the treatment worked only on Mr Origer and "Thomas M", aged 39, clearing the disease from liver, lymph node and lung.

But scientists believe they can improve the response and adapt it to fight other cancers, notably breast, colon and lung. The success using the patients' genetically modified white blood cells is reported today in the journal Science by a team at the US National Cancer Institute led by Dr Steven Rosenberg, a pioneer in the field. He said: "Both patients are still free of the disease, after 18 months."

One might look carefully at who is telling us not to believe this is a cure: "Don't be deluded that this is the cancer breakthrough". Don't drug companies lose billions per year if cancer is cured with gene therapy? Don't worry about the cure being surpressed for another 50 years. The unbiased experts at quackwatch tell us there IS no conspiracy. Whew! Glad to hear that.

Soldier Vs. Ram

While we are on the topic of heads, check out this funny video. No Rams or Soldiers were injured.

[googlevideo]7873314177109677533[/googlevideo]

Risking Paralysis for Life, Man Spins on Head 124 turns.

Amazing to watch, but don't try this at home:

[googlevideo]246459498664593769[/googlevideo]

"In the worst injury reported, Efrain Arreola, 25 years old, broke his neck trying a difficult stunt with no training, said Nadine Filipiak, a spokesman for St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago. Mr. Arreola was left paralyzed after attempting a flip to a handstand, followed by a headspin." - nyt

Top 10: Weirdest cosmology theories

1. Clashing branes
2. Evolving universes
3. Superfluid space-time
4. Goldilocks universe
5. Gravity reaches out
6. Cosmic ghost
7. It's a small universe
8. Fast light
9. Sterile neutrinos
10. In the Matrix