Researchers turned a cotton T-shirt into a capacitor by treating the shirt, then baking it. The research could lead to a wearable cellphone charger in the future.
CREDIT: T-Design | Shutterstock.com
An oven-toasted T-shirt could provide the structure for futuristic clothing that powers cellphones, tablets and other devices. The research, conducted by two engineers at the University of South Carolina, showed that a modified store-bought T-shirt could be turned into a fabric that acts as a supercapacitor, storing an electrical charge.
“By stacking these supercapacitors up, we should be able to charge portable electronic devices such as cellphones,” Xiaodong Li, one of the engineers who worked on the shirt, said in a statement.
“We wear fabric every day,” he added. “One day, our cotton T-shirts could have more functions.”
Li and a fellow researcher in his lab, Lihong Bao, bought a cotton T-shirt from a local discount store. They soaked it in fluoride, dried it, then baked it in an oven without any oxygen, to prevent the T-shirt from burning. Despite the baking, the fabric remained flexible.
The researchers examined the baked shirt and found that the cotton fibers had turned into activated carbon, similar to the carbon in water and air filters. They also found the activated carbon fabric could store electrical charge as a capacitor, an electrical component that’s found in most devices.
To improve the shirt’s electricity-storing ability, the researchers coated the T-shirt fibers with a layer of manganese oxide one nanometer thick, or about 1/1000th the thickness of a human hair. A second analysis showed the manganese oxide-covered fibers worked as a more efficient capacitor than the treated, toasted cotton alone.
“This created a stable, high-performing supercapacitor,” Li said. The fabric capacitor could charge and discharge thousands of times while losing only 5 percent of its performance, Li and Bao discovered.
Their method for making the fabric capacitor is inexpensive and doesn’t use environmentally harmful chemicals, Li said.
Li’s is just one of several labs working on creating fabric-based electronics that could turn into wearable devices. The research could lead to coat sleeves and couch arms that act as controls for electronics, such as music players and thermostats, or “smart clothes” that monitor people’s health.
Marketers take note — being first has its advantages.
New research shows people’s preferences are unconsciously and immediately guided to those options presented first, especially in circumstances when decisions must be made without much deliberation.
In three experiments, when making quick choices, participants consistently preferred people and consumer goods presented first, as opposed to similar offerings in second and sequential positions.
The study’s authors say their findings have practical applications in a variety of settings, including consumer marketing.
“Our research shows that managers, for example, in management or marketing, may want to develop their business strategies knowing that first encounters are preferable to their clients or consumers, said Dana R. Carney, the study’s co-author and assistant professor of management at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
As part of the research, the study’s participants were asked to evaluate three different groups, including two teams, two male sales associates and two female sales associates. After being presented with each group’s options, the study questioned the participants on their choices both by asking their preference up front and then having them complete a reaction-time task adapted from cognitive psychology in which participants’ automatic, unconscious preference for each option was assessed.
Regardless of whom people said they preferred, on the unconscious, cognitive measure of preference, participants always preferred the first team or person to whom they were introduced, according to the research.
To test the theory on consumer goods, the researchers asked more than 200 passengers at a train station to select one of two pieces of similar bubble gum within a second of seeing the choices. The study found that when thinking fast, the bubble gum presented first was the preferable choice in most cases.
The researchers believe several factors could be behind the study’s results, including that the preference for the initial choice has its origins in an evolutionary adaptation favoring firsts. The authors point to the example of how in most cases, humans tend to innately prefer the first people they meet, such as a mother and family members.
Carney said the historic concept of the established “pecking order” also supports their findings.
The study, “First is Best,” was co-authored by Mahzarin R. Banaji, professor of psychology at Harvard University and recently published in the journal PLoS ONE.
The Elusive Particle: 5 Implications of Finding Higgs
Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 04 July 2012
Real CMS proton-proton collisions events at the Large Hadron Collider in which 4 high energy electrons (red towers) are observed. The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of a Higgs boson but is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes.
CREDIT: CERN/CMS/Taylor, L; McCauley, T
Physicists at the world’s largest atom smasher announced today (July 4) that they are more than 99 percent sure they’ve found a new, and heavy, boson particle, that may be the Higgs boson.
Two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, show this new particle has a mass of about 125 GeV, with 1 gigaelectron volt about the mass of a proton. The LHC is the most powerful machine on Earth, capable of producing huge explosions of energy that generate new and exotic particles inside the 17-mile (27 kilometer) loop underneath Switzerland and France.
If the discovery can be confirmed as the Higgs boson, it will have wide wide-reaching implications. Here are five of the biggest.
1. The origin of mass
The Higgs boson has long been thought the key to resolving the mystery of the origin of mass. The Higgs boson is associated with a field, called the Higgs field, theorized to pervade the universe. As other particles travel though this field, they acquire mass much as swimmers moving through a pool get wet, the thinking goes.
“The Higgs mechanism is the thing that allows us to understand how the particles acquire mass,” said Joao Guimaraes da Costa, a physicist at Harvard University who is the Standard Model Convener at the LHC’s ATLAS experiment. “If there was no such mechanism, then everything would be massless.”
If physicists confirm that the detection of the new elementary particle is indeed the Higgs boson, and not an imposter, it would also confirm that the Higgs mechanism for particles to acquire mass is correct. “This discovery bears on the knowledge of how mass comes about at the quantum level, and is the reason we built the LHC. It is an unparalleled achievement,” Caltech professor of physics Maria Spiropulu, co-leader of the CMS experiment, said in a statement.
And, it may offer clues to the next mystery down the line, which is why individual particles have the masses that they do. “That could be part of a much larger theory,” said Harvard University particle physicist Lisa Randall.”Knowing what the Higgs boson is, is the first step of knowing a little more about what that theory could be. It’s connected.”
2. The Standard Model
The Standard Model is the reigning theory of particle physics that describes the universe’s very small constituents. Every particle predicted by the Standard Model has been discovered — except one: the Higgs boson.
“It’s the missing piece in the Standard Model,” said Jonas Strandberg, a researcher at CERN working on the ATLAS experiment. “So it would definitely be a confirmation that the theories we have now are right.” If the newly detected particle turns out not to be the Higgs boson, it would mean physicists made some assumptions that are wrong, and they’d have to go back to the drawing board.
While the discovery of the Higgs boson would complete the Standard Model, and fulfill all its current predictions, the Standard Model itself isn’t thought to be complete. It doesn’t encompass gravity (so don’t count on catching that fly ball), for example, and leaves out the dark matter thought to make up 98 percent of all matter in the universe.
“The Standard Model describes what we have measured, but we know it doesn’t have gravity in it, it doesn’t have dark matter,” said CERN physicist William Murray, the senior Higgs convener at ATLAS and a physicist at the U.K.’s Science and Technology Facilities Council. “So we’re hoping to extend it to include more.”
3. The Electroweak Force
A confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson would also help explain how two of the fundamental forces of the universe — the electromagnetic force that governs interactions between charged particles, and the weak force that’s responsible for radioactive decay — can be unified.
Every force in nature is associated with a particle. The particle tied to electromagnetism is the photon, a tiny, massless particle. The weak force is associated with particles called the W and Z bosons, which are very massive.
The Higgs mechanism is thought to be responsible for this.
“If you introduce the Higgs field, the W and Z bosons mix with the field, and through this mixing they acquire mass,” Strandberg said. “This explains why the W and Z bosons have mass, and also unifies the electromagnetic and weak forces into the electroweak force.”
Though other evidence has helped buffer the union of these two forces, the discovery of the Higgs would seal the deal. “That’s already pretty solid,” Murray said. “What we’re trying to do now is find really the crowning proof.”
4. Supersymmetry
Another theory that would be affected by the discovery of the Higgs is called supersymmetry. This idea posits that every known particle has a “superpartner” particle with slightly different characteristics.
Supersymmetry is attractive because it could help unify some of the other forces of nature, and even offers a candidate for the particle that makes up dark matter. The newly detected particle is in the low-mass range, at 125.3 or so GeV, something that lends credence to supersymmetry.
“If the Higgs boson is found at a low mass, which is the only window still open, this would make supersymmetry a viable theory,” Strandberg said.”We’d still have to prove supersymmetry exists.”
5. Validation of LHC
The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator. It was built for around $10 billion by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to probe higher energies than had ever been reached on Earth. Finding the Higgs boson was touted as one of the machine’s biggest goals.
Finding the Higgs would offer major validation for the LHC and for the scientists who’ve worked on the search for many years.
“This discovery bears on the knowledge of how mass comes about at the quantum level, and is the reason we built the LHC. It is an unparalleled achievement,” Spiropulu said in a statement. “More than a generation of scientists has been waiting for this very moment and particle physicists, engineers, and technicians in universities and laboratories around the globe have been working for many decades to arrive at this crucial fork. This is the pivotal moment for us to pause and reflect on the gravity of the discovery, as well as a moment of tremendous intensity to continue the data collection and analyses.”
The discovery of the Higgs would also have major implications for scientist Peter Higgs and his colleagues who first proposed the Higgs mechanism in 1964.
And a Nobel Prize may be another result: “If it is found there are several people who are going to get a Nobel prize,” said Vivek Sharma, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and the leader of the Higgs search at LHC’s CMS experiment.
Physicists Ecstatic Over Possible Higgs Particle Discovery
Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor
Date: 04 July 2012
This track is an example of simulated data modelled for the ATLAS detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The Higgs boson is produced in the collision of two protons at 14 TeV and quickly decays into four muons, a type of heavy electron that is not absorbed by the detector. The tracks of the muons are shown in yellow.
CREDIT: CERN/ATLAS
Physicists are thrilled at today’s (July 4) announcement of the discovery of a new elementary particle that is likely the Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to give all other matter its mass.
“To me it’s really an incredible thing that it’s happened in my lifetime,” Peter Higgs, the leader of the group that first theorized the particle in 1964 and after whom the particle is named, said during a press conference Wednesday (July 4).
Evidence for the new particle was reported today by scientists from the world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Researchers reported they’d seen a particle weighing roughly 125 times the mass of the proton, with a level of certainty that all but seals the deal it’s the Higgs boson. The Higgs represents the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics
Physicists involved in two experiments called CMS and ATLAS taking place at the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), reported evidence of the particle at a seminar and press briefing today.
“As a layman I would say ‘We have it,’ but as a scientist I would have to say ‘What do we have?’ We have discovered a boson and now we have to discover what kind of boson it is,” CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said during the press briefing. [Top 5 Implications of Finding the Higgs Boson]
Even so, elation abounded with loud applause after the seminar talks.
Physicists at the CERN lab in Switzerland applaud news of the discovery of a new particle, likely the Higgs boson, July 4, 2012.
CREDIT: CERN
“It is a momentous event and I am proud to be living in these historic times. Our 40-year quest for solving a puzzle is almost ending,” Brown University professor of physics Meenakshi Narain told LiveScience. “Now we have to find out if this new particle really is the Higgs of the Standard Model or has properties which deviate from standard expectations and if there are other new particles to be discovered.”
Narain added in an email, “Our work is just beginning! It is a great leap for human kind and basic science.”
“We have been propelled to the future of particle physics towards the understanding of the fundamental properties of our universe in its entirety,” Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, who was in the audience at the LHC announcement, told LiveScience in an email.
Even Twitter was abuzz with terms such as #Higgs, #ICHEP2012, #CERN, Fabiola Gianotti and Joe Incandela (the names of the two scientists who presented the ATLAS and CMS findings, respectively) trending.
“5 sigma from CMS! Incredible!” tweeted @lirarandall, Harvard University theoretical physicist Lisa Randall, referring to results from two decay modes.
(To be certain they’ve made a true discovery and weren’t just seeing a fluke, physicists need to reach a level of significance of 5 sigma, which means there is only a one in 3.5 million chance the signal isn’t real. The ATLAS and CMS results reached sigma levels of 5 and 4.9, respectively.)
“The world might not change but my world (and that of a few others) certainly has,” Randall tweeted.
“This is a crucial first step in understanding mass and gravity. We have a long, long way to go. But wow, what a step. #Higgs,” tweeted @BadAstronomer Phil Plait, astronomer and author.
“We find it. WE FIND IT. Now I can cry #Higgs #Discovery,” tweeted @marcodelmastro, Marco Delmastro, LHC physicist and ATLAS researcher.
Intense heat continues to bake a large portion of the U.S. this Tuesday, with portions of 17 states under heat advisories for dangerously high temperatures. The heat is particularly dangerous for the 1.4 million people still without power and air conditioning due to Friday’s incredible derecho event, which is now being blamed for 23 deaths. The ongoing heat wave is one of the most intense and widespread in U.S. history, according to wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt. In his Sunday post, The Amazing June Heat Wave of 2012 Part 2: The Midwest and Southeast June 28-30, Mr. Burt documents that eighteen of the 298 locations (6%) that he follows closely because of their long period of record and representation of U.S. climate broke or tied their all-time heat records during the past week, and that “this is especially extraordinary since they have occurred in June rather than July or August when 95% of the previous all-time heat records have been set for this part of the country.” The only year with more all-time heat records than 2012 is 1936, when 61 cities of the 298 locations (20%) set all-time heat records. The summer of 1936 was the hottest summer in U.S. history, and July 1936 was the hottest month in U.S. history.
According to wunderground analysis of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) extremes database, during June 2012, 11% of the country’s 777 weather stations with a period of record of a century or more broke or tied all-time heat records for the month of June. Only 1936 (13% of June records broken or tied) and 1988 (12.5%) had a greater number of all-time monthly June records. I expect when NCDC releases their analysis of the June 2012 weather next week, they will rank the month as one of the top five hottest Junes in U.S. history.
Figure 1. Across the entire Continental U.S., 72% of the land area was classified as being in dry or drought conditions as of June 26, 2012. Conditions are not expected to improve much over the summer: the NOAA Climate Prediction Center’s latest drought outlook shows much of the U.S. in persistent drought conditions, with very few areas improving. The rains brought by Tropical Storm Debby did help out Florida and Georgia, however. Image credit: NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory.
The forecast: hot and dry
July is traditionally the hottest month of the year, and July 2012 is likely to set more all-time heat records. The latest predictions from the GFS and ECMWF models show that a ridge of high pressure and dry conditions will dominate the weather over about 80 – 90% of the country during the next two weeks, except for the Pacific Northwest and New England. This will bring wicked hot conditions to most of the nation, but no all-time heat records are likely to fall. However, around July 11, a sharp ridge of high pressure is expected to build in over the Western U.S., bringing the potential for crazy-hot conditions capable of toppling all-time heat records in many western states.
The intense heat and lack of rain, combined with soils that dried out early in the year due to lack of snowfall, have led to widespread areas of moderate to extreme drought over much of the nation’s grain growing regions, from Kansas to Indiana. The USDA is reporting steadily deteriorating crop conditions for corn and soybeans, and it is likely that a multi-billion dollar drought disaster is underway in the Midwest.
The wunderground Extremes page has an interactive map that allows one to look at the records for the 298 U.S. cities that Mr. Burt tracks. Click on the “Wunderground U.S. Records” button to see them.
Quiet in the Atlantic
There are no threat areas to discuss in the Atlantic, and none of the reliable computer models are developing a tropical cyclone over the next seven days.
Have a great 4th of July holiday, everyone, and I’ll be back Thursday with a new post.
4TH OF JULY FIREWORKS: Chances of an X-flare today are increasing as sunspot AR1515 develops a ‘beta-gamma-delta’ magnetic field that harbors energy for the most powerful explosions. The sunspot’s magnetic canopy is crackling with almost-X class flares, the strongest so far being an M5-flare at 09:54 UT. Each “crackle” releases more energy than a billion atomic bombs, so these are 4th of July fireworks indeed.
The sunspot itself is huge, stretching more than 100,000 km (8 Earth-diameters) from end to end. This movie from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the behemoth growing and turning toward Earth over the past five days:
Another picture that dramatically illustrates the size of AR1515 is this 4th of July sunrise shot from Stefano De Rosa of Turin, Italy.
If any major eruptions do occur today, they will certainly be Earth-directed. The sunspot is directly facing our planet, so it is in position to cause radio blackouts, sudden ionospheric disturbances, and geomagnetic storms.
For thousands of years, our ancestors lived in barrios, hamlets, neighborhoods, and villages. Yet in the time since our parents and grandparents were young, privacy has become so valued that many neighborhoods are not much more than houses in proximity.
Now, many activities take place behind locked doors and backyard privacy fences. The street out front is not always safe for pedestrians, and is often out of bounds for children. With families spread across the country and friends living across town, a person who doesn’t know their neighbors can feel isolated and insecure. And when the links among neighbors are weak, security relies on locks, gates, and guns, rather than a closely knit web of connections.
Building a community from scratch is daunting. But the good news is that vibrant communities can grow over time from existing neighborhoods.
Right here, right now: Ten ways to build community.
Neighbors at N Street in Davis, Calif., joined their backyards.
Photo by Ross Chapin.
1. Move your picnic table to the front yard.See what happens when you eat supper out front. It’s likely you’ll strike up a conversation with a neighbor, so invite them to bring a dish to share.
2. Plant a front yard vegetable garden. Don’t stop with the picnic table. Build a raised bed for veggies and plant edible landscaping and fruit trees. Break your boundaries by inviting your neighbors to share your garden.
3. Build a room-sized front porch. The magic of a good porch comes from both its private and public setting. It belongs to the household while also being open to passersby. Its placement, size, relation to the interior and the public space, and railing height are both an art and a science. Make it more than a tiny covering under which you fumble for your keys; make it big enough to be a veritable outdoor living room.
Front yard garden at Danielson Grove, Kirkland, Wash.
Photo by Ross Chapin.
4. Add layers of privacy.Curiously, giving your personal space more definition will foster connections with neighbors. A secure space will be more comfortable and more often used, which will increase chances for seeing your neighbors—even if only in a passing nod.
But rather than achieving privacy with a tall fence, consider an approach with layers: a bed of perennial flowers in front of a low fence, with a shade tree to further filter the view. These layers help define personal boundaries, but are permeable at the same time.
5. Take down your backyard fence. Join with your neighbors to create a shared safe play space for children, a community garden, or a wood-fired pizza oven. In Davis, Calif., a group of neighbors on N Street did just that. Twenty years later, nearly all the neighbors around the block have joined in.
If that’s too radical, consider cutting your six-foot fence to four feet to make chatting across the fence easier, or building a gate between yards.
Layers of privacy at Greenwood Avenue Cottages in Shoreline, Wash.
Photo by Ross Chapin.
6. Organize summer potluck street parties. Claim the street, gather the lawn chairs, and fire up the hibachi! Take over the otherwise off-limits street as a space to draw neighbors together.
7. Put up a book lending cupboard. Bring a book, take a book. Collect your old reads and share them with passersby in a cupboard mounted next to the sidewalk out front. Give it a roof, a door with glass panes, and paint it to match the flowers below.
9. Create an online network for nearby neighbors. Expand the survey into an active online resource and communication tool. Find a new home for an outgrown bike. Ask for help keeping an eye out for a lost dog. Organize a yard sale.
Take advantage of free neighbor-to-neighbor networking tools such as Nextdoor to facilitate communications and build happier, safer neighborhoods.
10. Be a good neighbor. It’s easy to focus on your own needs and concerns, but a slight shift in outlook can make a big difference in the day-to-day lives in a neighborhood. Check in on your elderly neighbor if her curtains aren’t raised in the morning. On a hot summer day, put out a pitcher of ice lemonade for passersby, or a bowl of cool water for dogs on walks.
To be sure, grievances among neighbors are common. But when a neighborhood grows from a base of goodwill, little squabbles won’t escalate into turf fights, and neighborhoods can become what they are meant to be: places of support, security, and friendship.
Update, June 25: Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled much of SB 1070 unconstitutional, but upheld the law’s most controversial provision: the so-called “show me your papers” component, which directs police to check the immigration status of those they suspect might be undocumented. Puente and other supporters of Barrio Defense Committees say this ruling reaffirms their approach. “We never had faith in the #SCOTUS case,” the group tweeted. “We have faith in our people … WE WILL NOT COMPLY.”
Shortly after the 2010 passage of SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration bill, 20,000 people gathered in Phoenix for a May Day march to protest the new law. Instead of ending with speakers or a formal program, as political marches often do, organizers broke the crowd into small groups and asked them two questions:
How will the new law impact you and your neighbors? What can you do about it?
And with that, a new phase of the migrant rights movement, based on an age-old model of community organizing, was born.
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide very soon whether to strike down SB 1070, but few observers expect that it will choose to do so based on the Department of Justice arguments. That’s one reason local capacity development methods, such as Barrio Defense Committees, are crucial, organizers say. “We went to Congress for reform and were treated like a political football,” says Carlos Garcia, an organizer with the grassroots group Puente Arizona. “We asked the president for relief and instead got record deportations. Now even the courts may give SB 1070 the green light. It’s time we realize we have only each other and start organizing deeper in our own community.”
In the weeks and months after those small group discussions, communities across Arizona formed Barrio Defense Committees, neighborhood-based groups focused on resolving local problems, building resilience in the face of attack, and building organic leadership for broader social movements.
The committees are based on neighbor-to-neighbor relations where people commit to support each other to mitigate the negative impacts of deportations. Families sign power of attorney so that someone is prepared to take care of kids, pay bills, and communicate with an employer in the case of being taken away and placed in detention. They develop neighbor watch efforts to watch for abusive police behavior, warn of check-points, and report abuse. Health projects, English classes, and supportive businesses weave together for self-sufficiency. In addition to survival aspects, committees grow to remedy local issues like landlords refusing to make repairs or discrimination within schools. These daily building blocks lay a foundation for dealing with big problems like the anti-immigrant laws.
“Coming out was our only option.”
That 2010 march represented a fundamental change from the way advocacy groups had been approaching immigration reform: hammering out compromises in an effort to pass an omnibus piece of Congressional legislation. After that effort failed, many concluded that the compromise effort had conceded too much ground, ushering in new anti-immigrant measures, more border militarization, and a harder road to legalization.
Migrant families in Phoenix and across the state refused to run. Instead, they responded to the new law with a groundswell of public participation in civic life and a celebration of the cultures the state was set on banning.
Diana Perez Ramirez of Puente Arizona, explains, “SB1070 was a symbol of how far to the right the needle on immigration had moved. It was a wake up call that we needed to do something big to haul it back toward something sensible.”
Francisco Pacheco, an organizer for the National Day Laborer Organizing network and a former participant in Salvadoran social movements who migrated to the US after that country’s civil war, is a driving force behind the Barrio Defense model. He explains, “The committees are built off the model of movements in Latin America where people come together to resolve their local problems and join peaceful resistance efforts. By focusing on local problems, local leadership is created. The protagonist shifts from an elected official to the mother or worker next door.”
“For a long time we would only go take the kids to school, to work, and run errands,” said Leticia Ramirez, an undocumented mother of three. “Other than that we had become prisoners hidden in our own homes. But with the laws they were passing, even that wasn’t safe anymore. We realized the only safe community is an organized one. Coming out was our only option.”
The power within
Since 2010, the harsh model of SB 1070 has spread to other states—but so has the barrio defense method of responding to it. After Georgia passed HB87, a copycat of Arizona’s law, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) responded with a series of actions to empower immigrant communities. The group partnered with day laborer networks for a “human rights summer” that included mass mobilization and the establishment of local comités populares of mutual support. They also organized businesses and institutions to publicly declare themselves “Sanctuary Zones” that would not allow law enforcement to enter to check migrants’ papers without a warrant.
How young immigrant activists are learning from the the civil rights campaigners who came before them.
In January of this year, committee members from ten Georgia towns gathered for a state-wide assembly. Together they decided that the pathway to immigration reform should be through challenging local officials who take advantage of its absence. Adelina Nicholls of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights explains that, “We don’t have to wait for Congress to stop police from mistreating our community and real reform is unlikely as long as we allow that mistreatment to continue.” In Fayetteville, outside of Atlanta, a hundred people marched to the police department to demand that daily checkpoints, erected under the guise of fighting crime and drugs but frequently used to check papers, be taken down.
As in Arizona, the committee model has turned people from a strategy of hiding in their homes to taking to the streets with clipboards and cameras to monitor and turn back abuses. The idea is to transition from challenging the powers that be, and instead cultivate the power within.
Because the process charges those affected by the laws with combating them, a new form of leadership tends to develop, says Pacheco. “Instead of asking people to attend a march, members of committees are asked to assess the moment, decide when a march is necessary, and plan accordingly. Through that process people’s political development is sharpened. They become more critical, more lucid. It makes strategists out of all of us.”
In the Puente office in Phoenix, where committees meet on a weekly basis, hangs a sign with a quote by the legendary organizer, Cesar Chavez: “Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.”
Post-2012 Earth Changes A Global Climate Change Remote-Viewing Study Multiple Realities, Timelines, and Events
Introduction: We at The Farsight Institute are currently engaged in a fascinating study using remote viewing to study climate and planetary change between the years 2008 and 2013. The initial results appear dramatic on a global scale, and our research does indeed suggest that major global change is a possibility between now and 2013. However, web site visitors are reminded that this is research, not certitude. Remember what Albert Einstein once said, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?” Web site visitors are encouraged to examine all of our results carefully, and learn with us as we complete this experiment in mid-2013. We will not fully understand these remote-viewing data until the experiment is completed at that time.
How we obtain these results is a bit complicated, but it is worth the effort to understand our methods. The actual types of global change is discussed in the second part of the video presentation below, but the first part of this presentation is absolutely essential to understand how these results were obtained. Web site visitors should watch both parts of the video presentation. This presentation was given during the 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration in Boulder, Colorado in June 2010.
This is the most carefully collected set of professional-grade remote-viewing data involving this time span that currently exists. This experiment is potentially one of the most significant experiments ever attempted using remote viewing as a data-collection platform.
Principal Investigator: Courtney Brown
Remote Viewers: HRVG viewers led by Glenn Wheaton and CRV viewers led by Lyn Buchanan.
Initial Results:
This project describes change between the years 2008 and 2013 across nine geographical locations with a global spread. The locations are
Vaitupu, Tuvalu
Fort Jesus, Mombasa Kenya
Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia
Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
United States Congress Building, Washington, D.C.
Malé International Airport, Malé, Maldives
KITV Building, Honolulu, Hawaii
The Vehicle Assembly Building at Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida
Key West, Florida
In general, these remote-viewing data suggest the following types of physical changes across many of the above geographical locations by mid-2013:
Impacts from what appear to be large meteors leading to tsunamis and possible volcanism
Extensive and forceful flooding of coastal areas
Excessive solar radiation
Storms and other severe weather
In terms of the effects of these changes on humans, these data also suggest:
Massive self-organized relocation from coastal areas (refugees)
The breakdown of rescue or other notable governmental functioning
The breakdown of the food supply system
The breakdown of the vehicular transport system
Extensive loss of buildings near coasts
Oddly, these results largely parallel recent warnings being issued by NASA relating to the dangers of severe solar storms anticipated around the years 2012 and 2013 that would threaten the global long-term use of electricity. NASA is not currently explaining exactly why these unprecedented and severe storms are anticipated, but the warnings themselves could not be more clear. Meteor impacts are not included in the current set of NASA warnings.
For this project, all targets are assigned two timelines for the date 1 June 2013. This allows us to attempt to use remote viewing to describe alternative futures by specifying characteristics of future timelines. Web site visitors who are not familiar with our research into multiple realities might want to view this introductory video presentation on the subject.
The two 2013 timelines examined in this study are
Timeline A: 1 June 2013, 12 noon target local time, following the timeline in which the leadership of the mainstream global scientific establishment continues to ignore or deny (1) the reality of the remote-viewing phenomenon, and (2) the existence of life not originating from Earth.
Timeline B: 1 June 2013, 12 noon target local time, following the timeline in which by the end of 2009 leaders of the mainstream global scientific establishment publicly recognize (1) the reality of the remote-viewing phenomenon, and (2) the existence of life not originating from Earth.
The results of this study do suggest that there is a difference between the two timelines. These data suggest that the impact of planetary change is less severe for Timeline B as compared with Timeline A. This suggests that having the mainstream scientific community openly acknowledge the reality of remote viewing and life (even microbial) not originating on Earth may help ameliorate the impact of severe planetary change, perhaps by giving people a greater chance to prepare for the changes. The Key West target was added late in the study to explore a timeline in which the scientific community recognizes the reality of remote viewing and the existence of extraterrestrial life by 2011.
Here are links to some of the data and analyses for the current project.
Predicting any event on a single timeline may involve (1) using remote viewing to examine alternate timelines to check for unusual events, and (2) looking for clues in a given present to see if anything that is currently happening suggests that the future events perceived in the alternate timelines might be possible for our most likely future. Thus, if the above results are indeed correct for the two specified timelines (Timelines A and B), then it is natural to ask if the results are relevant for our most likely future timeline. Since it seems likely that major governments would be aware in advance of most near term global threats, then it also seems likely that they would take some actions that would reflect their anticipation of those events. These actions would likely not be explained to the masses to avoid panic. Below is a list of largely anomalous governmental actions that may indicate an awareness of a near term global threat that is suggested by these remote-viewing data. Again, these are only speculations, none of which “prove” anything. But considered collectively, they are exceptionally odd.
The U.S. Space Shuttle will launch its last mission in mid-2011. At that time, NASA is entirely abandoning its government-funded manned spaceflight program. Given the investment that the U.S. has made in launching humans into space since the 1960s, this is odd, especially since private efforts to launch humans into space are years away, and currently unproven. It is as if the government does not anticipate being able to launch humans into space in the near future for reasons not currently stated.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is being sealed in 2011. This will allow the world to restart agriculture given a global catastrophe. The United Nations formally inspected the facility, which might seem odd for a Norwegian project. The timing of this project seems like a strange coincidence.
U.S. and global debt. It is as if various governments are not expecting to have to pay back their debts, perhaps anticipating a global economic reset due to reasons not currently stated.
The devaluing of the U.S. dollar seems to be a trend that will stay. Moody, Standard and Poor, and Fitch have announced that they may be devaluing the rating of U.S. Treasury bonds (see NY Times article, 15 March 2010, as well as the editorial on 20 March 2010), and there have been discussions within the United Nations of the International Monetary Fund phasing out its dependency on the U.S. dollar. The governments seem to be acting as if the U.S. dollar will be replaced as the global currency.
Digging, digging is everywhere. The U.S. has no nuclear enemies, yet it is digging huge underground facilities in inhospitable regions difficult for the masses to reach. Why? On the other hand, the Chinese tend to think collectively, and China is digging extraordinary subway complexes under most of its major cities in a crash program that seems odd in terms of timing and scope. See, for example, the NY Times article by Keith Bradsher, 27 March 2009. Subways are, of course, conveniently located underground tunnels, and such tunnels could house millions of people in an emergency. Russia announced in 2011 that it is adding 5,000 new nuclear bomb shelters in Moscow, enabling it to protect all of Moscow’s residents. The program is to be rushed so that it is finished in 2012. Why? Russia has no nuclear enemies. Russia’s new subway systems have also been placed deeper than needed so that they can be used as deep emergency shelters. Again, why? Why all these preparations, and why the rush?
NASA is now predicting that the Sun may generate unprecedented solar storms for a lengthy period in 2012-13. We cannot accurately predict Earth’s normal weather a week in advance, and it is by no means clear how NASA can do this with respect unprecedented weather on the Sun years in advance. They are saying that we are more dependent on vulnerable computer technology now. But we had similar dependencies in 2001 and 1990 when previous 11-year solar cycles hit. What is different about the current cycle? Some might suggest that NASA is acting as if it has some extra information that is not currently stated.
Project Overview for the 1 June 2008 and 1 June 2013 Experiments:
The remote viewers participating in this study have remote viewed various geographically determined targets during two time periods: 1 June 2008 and 1 June 2013. This five-year gap will allow us to look for planetary change that may occur over that period. We are also aware that popular culture views the year 2012 as potentially significant, and some people may be interested in following our results because of this. (No reason scientific studies can’t be fun!)
From our past research we know that the future is probabilistic. (See also, the Multiple Universes Project.) If multiple realities emerge from every moment of now, then there is no single future timeline. Thus we hope that by specifying certain timeline conditions with our remote-viewing tasking, it is possible to perceive a specific future (for a specific timeline) correctly. For this reason, our participating remote viewers have perceived the 2013 targets along two separate timelines, with each timeline offering the potential for significant differences in future events given specific possible actions taken by the mainstream scientific community. Thus, we are hoping to discern what the future looks like if the mainstream scientific community pursues one policy as compared with a future in which the mainstream scientific community pursues a different policy. In the former case, the policy is a continuation of a current policy. In the latter case, the policy is an alternate policy that might produce a significantly different future. We are attempting to learn if the publication of information about two future timelines based on differences in current policies can change the future that our current now evolves into.
The various 2008 targets establish a baseline set of criteria by which the accuracy of the remote-viewing results in general may be evaluated. Thus, if the 1 June 2008 targets are perceived accurately by the remote viewers participating in the study, then it is reasonable to assume that the results for the future dates for those same targets will be comparably accurate. Since each geographically determined target is evaluated three times (once in 2008, and twice in 2013 — once for each future timeline), there are three times as many total targets as there are geographically determined targets in this study.
The remote-viewing sessions were conducted prior to the targets being assigned to those sessions by a truly random process (explained in “Experiment Details” below as well as in the video presentation that appears at the top of this page) that took place on Wednesday, 4 June 2008. It was not possible for a remote viewer (or anyone else) to know the identity of a target at the time the target was being remote viewed since the remote-viewing sessions were conducted before 4 June 2008. Thus, the targets are assigned in the future with respect to when the sessions were done, and the remote-viewing data describe the future target assignments.
