Author Archives: marcia

Sound Healing, Pipe Organs & Royal Rife

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A LITTLE FUN: ROYAL RAYMOND RIFE AND PIPE ORGANS

I don’t know about you, but as we’ve been making our way through this plandemic, I was thinking just last week that it would be nice to have a “fun” story or two to blog about. Well, lo and behold, I didn’t have to wait long as the next day our friend and colleague in this wild alternative research field, Catherine Austin Fitts, sent me a video with an interesting idea.

The idea, basically, is that pipe organs might have been intended for more than just music or “being loud”, but might have played some sort of role – perhaps intended, perhaps unintended – in healing as well. We’ll get back to that notion in a moment. Anyway, the video is a bit “preachy”, and indulges in some nonsense like modern cities being designed solely for profit, while 18th century cities weren’t, and so on. Well, maybe, maybe not. The idea of profit has been around for a very very long time, longer than pipe organs in fact, which are still in the prime of their youth being only a little older than two thousand years, give or take a couple centuries. In spite of the preachy aspects, there’s another reason I thought this video would be fun, but you have to watch and not just listen:

Now if you watched this video, you’ll probably know why I found it very interesting: all those pictures of Dr. Royal Raymond Rife and his laboratory, including his famous “tunable microscope”. Rife’s idea was to view viruses “in action”, which he claimed his microscope allowed him to do, without killing the virus under an electron microscope. Being thus able to view them, the next step in his process was to find what frequency it was resonant to, and simply “explode” the virus using sound waves resonant to that frequency. Think of that old television commercial with Ella Fitzgerald shattering a glass with a high musical note resonant to the glass’s own frequency.

Of course, the medical establishment had a problem with this, and it was a big one: what Rife was claiming for his “tunable microscope” was – and remains – physically impossible according to the standard laws of optics, for he was claiming to see – optically – far below the scale of size that was possible for any optical microscope. He was, accordingly, denounced as a fraud by the medical establishment (in spite of the numerous statements of his patients as to the effectiveness  of his treatments). Rife was stripped of his medical license, and his equipment – including his microscope – was confiscated, never to be seen again. My guess? Rife was probably successful, and his microscope probably still exists, somewhere, as an object of (very secret) research. The microscope and its operation remains a mystery. Lt. Col. Tom Bearden (US Army, Ret.), even wrote a paper once trying to come up with a hypothesis to explain what Rife had done. To make a long hypothesis very short, he maintained that Rife had somehow come up with a “quantum microscope” able to see the phase space of viruses, and that it was therefore not functioning according to the standard rules of optics altogether. But we’ll never know because the microscope is probably locked up in some “Warehouse 13” somewhere, like the television series with Saul Rubinek.

Which brings us back to the pipe organ aspect of this, because if one digs and scratches around the old doctrine of Affektenlehre – the cosmological doctrine that virtually all Baroque composers were aware of and composed in – long enough, one encounters connections to all sorts of notions that moderns find dismissibly amusing: affects of certain keys and harmonic procedures and musical intervals on human passions, connections to the idea of bodily humours and so on. In short, they were very much aware of the physiological effects of music and particular instruments in performing it. And as an organist(of sorts and a long out-of-practice one struggling to get back to where he was some forty years ago), anecdotally I can attest to a phenomenon all organists experience at the console of a pipe organ, particularly if it is large and the organ is in a “wet”, i.e., highly reverberative, space: one feels the music physiologically in a way possible on no other instrument; those longitudinal waves pulsing from the pipes literally move the air and shake the building, and anything and anyone in it, in a kind of small “musical earthquake”. Indeed, at the end of my book Microcosm and Medium (available on Lulu), I even indulged in a bit of hyper-dimensional physics speculation, for pipe organs are most often encountered in large, cruciform stone churches. It’s that cruciform part that’s intriguing here, because it is a three dimensional analogue of a four-dimensional object called a hyper-cube, or tesseract. Vibrating the one might indeed be vibrating the other, inducing all sorts of effects we know little about, simply because we haven’t studied it. And for those aware of “cymatics” and the way water responds to sound waves, or has seen those pictures of “healthy” versus “unhealthy” water molecules, I do not have much difficulty with the notion that perhaps there were medicinal and therapeutic by-products to – say – a fugue by Buxtehude or a fantasia by Mozart. The notion seems far-fetched to moderns, perhaps, but to a Bach or a Haendel or a Haydn or a Mozart, who knew the doctrine and composed for the instrument, it would not have been a surprising notion at all.

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/03/a-little-fun-royal-raymond-rife-and-pipe-organs/

Everything Old Can Get Youth Again?

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Old human cells rejuvenated with stem cell technology

Source:     Stanford Medicine
Summary:    Old human cells return to a more youthful and vigorous state after being induced to briefly express a panel of proteins involved in embryonic development, according to a new study.
Stem cells illustration (stock image). | Credit: © nobeastsofierce / stock.adobe.com
Stem cells illustration (stock image).
Credit: © nobeastsofierce / Adobe Stock

Old human cells return to a more youthful and vigorous state after being induced to briefly express a panel of proteins involved in embryonic development, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The researchers also found that elderly mice regained youthful strength after their existing muscle stem cells were subjected to the rejuvenating protein treatment and transplanted back into their bodies.

The proteins, known as Yamanaka factors, are commonly used to transform an adult cell into what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. Induced pluripotent stem cells can become nearly any type of cell in the body, regardless of the cell from which they originated. They’ve become important in regenerative medicine and drug discovery.

The study found that inducing old human cells in a lab dish to briefly express these proteins rewinds many of the molecular hallmarks of aging and renders the treated cells nearly indistinguishable from their younger counterparts.

“When iPS cells are made from adult cells, they become both youthful and pluripotent,” said Vittorio Sebastiano, PhD, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and the Woods Family Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine. “We’ve wondered for some time if it might be possible to simply rewind the aging clock without inducing pluripotency. Now we’ve found that, by tightly controlling the duration of the exposure to these protein factors, we can promote rejuvenation in multiple human cell types.”

Sebastiano is the senior author of the study, which will be published online March 24 in Nature Communications. Former graduate student Tapash Sarkar, PhD, is the lead author of the article.

“We are very excited about these findings,” said study co-author Thomas Rando, MD, PhD, professor of neurology and neurological sciences and the director of Stanford’s Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging. “My colleagues and I have been pursuing the rejuvenation of tissues since our studies in the early 2000s revealed that systemic factors can make old tissues younger. In 2012, Howard Chang and I proposed the concept of using reprogramming factors to rejuvenate cells and tissues, and it is gratifying to see evidence of success with this approach.” Chang, MD, PhD, is a professor of dermatology and of genetics at Stanford.

Exposure to proteins:        Researchers in Sebastiano’s laboratory make iPS cells from adult cells, such as those that compose skin, by repeatedly exposing them over a period of about two weeks to a panel of proteins important to early embryonic development. They do so by introducing daily, short-lived RNA messages into the adult cells. The RNA messages encode the instructions for making the Yamanaka proteins. Over time, these proteins rewind the cells’ fate — pushing them backward along the developmental timeline until they resemble the young, embryonic-like pluripotent cells from which they originated.

During this process the cells not only shed any memories of their previous identities, but they revert to a younger state. They accomplish this transformation by wiping their DNA clean of the molecular tags that not only differentiate, say, a skin cell from a heart muscle cell, but of other tags that accumulate as a cell ages.

Recently researchers have begun to wonder whether exposing the adult cells to Yamanaka proteins for days rather than weeks could trigger this youthful reversion without inducing full-on pluripotency. In fact, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies found in 2016 that briefly expressing the four Yamanaka factors in mice with a form of premature aging extended the animals’ life span by about 20%. But it wasn’t clear whether this approach would work in humans.

Sarkar and Sebastiano wondered whether old human cells would respond in a similar fashion, and whether the response would be limited to just a few cell types or generalizable for many tissues. They devised a way to use genetic material called messenger RNA to temporarily express six reprogramming factors — the four Yamanaka factors plus two additional proteins — in human skin and blood vessel cells. Messenger RNA rapidly degrades in cells, allowing the researchers to tightly control the duration of the signal.

The researchers then compared the gene-expression patterns of treated cells and control cells, both obtained from elderly adults, with those of untreated cells from younger people. They found that cells from elderly people exhibited signs of aging reversal after just four days of exposure to the reprogramming factors. Whereas untreated elderly cells expressed higher levels of genes associated with known aging pathways, treated elderly cells more closely resembled younger cells in their patterns of gene expression.

When the researchers studied the patterns of aging-associated chemical tags called methyl groups, which serve as an indicator of a cell’s chronological age, they found that the treated cells appeared to be about 1½ to 3½ years younger on average than untreated cells from elderly people, with peaks of 3½ years (in skin cells) and 7½ years (in cells that line blood vessels).

Comparing hallmarks of aging:    Next they compared several hallmarks of aging — including how cells sense nutrients, metabolize compounds to create energy and dispose of cellular trash — among cells from young people, treated cells from old people and untreated cells from old people.

“We saw a dramatic rejuvenation across all hallmarks but one in all the cell types tested,” Sebastiano said. “But our last and most important experiment was done on muscle stem cells. Although they are naturally endowed with the ability to self-renew, this capacity wanes with age. We wondered, Can we also rejuvenate stem cells and have a long-term effect?”

When the researchers transplanted old mouse muscle stem cells that had been treated back into elderly mice, the animals regained the muscle strength of younger mice, they found.

Finally, the researchers isolated cells from the cartilage of people with and without osteoarthritis. They found that the temporary exposure of the osteoarthritic cells to the reprogramming factors reduced the secretion of inflammatory molecules and improved the cells’ ability to divide and function.

The researchers are now optimizing the panel of reprogramming proteins needed to rejuvenate human cells and are exploring the possibility of treating cells or tissues without removing them from the body.

“Although much more work needs to be done, we are hopeful that we may one day have the opportunity to reboot entire tissues,” Sebastiano said. “But first we want to make sure that this is rigorously tested in the lab and found to be safe.”

Other Stanford co-authors are former postdoctoral scholar Marco Quarta, PhD; postdoctoral scholar Shravani Mukherjee, PhD; graduate student Alex Colville; research assistants Patrick Paine, Linda Doan and Christopher Tran; Constance Chu, MD, professor of orthopaedic surgery; Stanley Qi, PhD, assistant professor of bioengineering and of chemical and systems biology; and Nidhi Bhutani, PhD, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery.

Researchers from the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, the University of California-Los Angeles and the Molecular Medicine Research Institute in Sunnyvale, California, also contributed to the study.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants R01 AR070865, R01 AR070864, P01 AG036695, R01 AG23806, R01 AG057433 and R01 AG047820), the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research, the American Federation for Aging Research and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Sarkar, Quarta and Sebastiano are co-founders of the startup Turn Biotechnologies, a company that is applying the technology described in the paper to treat aging-associated conditions. Rando is a member of the scientific advisory board.

Story Source::    Materials provided by Stanford Medicine. Original written by Krista Conger. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

  1. Tapash Jay Sarkar, Marco Quarta, Shravani Mukherjee, Alex Colville, Patrick Paine, Linda Doan, Christopher M. Tran, Constance R. Chu, Steve Horvath, Lei S. Qi, Nidhi Bhutani, Thomas A. Rando, Vittorio Sebastiano. Transient non-integrative expression of nuclear reprogramming factors promotes multifaceted amelioration of aging in human cells. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15174-3

Cite This Page:

Stanford Medicine. “Old human cells rejuvenated with stem cell technology.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 24 March 2020. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200324090007.htm>.
from:    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200324090007.htm

What Does David Say?

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David Icke — The Truth Behind The Coronavirus Pandemic: COVID-19 Lockdown & The Economic Crash

TOPICS:

March 18, 2020

By London Real

David Icke is an English writer and public speaker, known since the 1990s as a professional conspiracy theorist, calling himself a “full-time investigator into who and what is really controlling the world.” He is the author of over 21 books and 10 DVDs and has lectured in over 25 countries, speaking live for up to 10 hours to huge audiences, filling stadiums like Wembley Arena.

David joins us today to talk about the coronavirus pandemic, the worldwide COVID-19 lockdown, the looming global economic crash & why the coronavirus is taking a toll on countries such as China, Italy & Spain

Watch the full episode for FREE here: https://londonreal.tv/the-truth-behin…

fromL.   https://www.activistpost.com/2020/03/david-icke-the-truth-behind-the-coronavirus-pandemic-covid-19-lockdown-the-economic-crash.html

Peak Coming?

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Coronavirus going to hit its peak and start falling sooner than you think

March 8, 2020 | 8:52pm | Updated

Emergency responders load patient into ambulance outside Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington

Nations are closing borders, stocks are plummeting and a New York Times headline reads: “The Coronavirus Has Put the World’s Economy in Survival Mode.” Both political parties have realized the crisis could severely impact the November elections — House, Senate, presidency. And sacré bleu, they’ve even shuttered the Louvre!

Some of these reactions are understand­able, much of it pure hysteria. Meanwhile, the spread of the virus continues to slow.

More than 18,000 Americans have died from this season’s generic flu so far, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2018, the CDC estimated, there were 80,000 flu deaths. That’s against 19 coronavirus deaths so far, from about 470 cases.

Worldwide, there have been about 3,400 coronavirus deaths, out of about 100,000 identified cases. Flu, by comparison, grimly reaps about 291,000 to 646,000 annually.

China is the origin of the virus and still accounts for over 80 percent of cases and deaths. But its cases peaked and began ­declining more than a month ago, according to data presented by the Canadian epidemiologist who spearheaded the World Health Organization’s coronavirus mission to China. Fewer than 200 new cases are reported daily, down from a peak of 4,000.

Subsequent countries will follow this same pattern, in what’s called Farr’s Law. First formulated in 1840 and ignored in ­every epidemic hysteria since, the law states that epidemics tend to rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern or bell-shaped curve. AIDS, SARS, Ebola — they all followed that pattern. So does seasonal flu each year.

Clearly, flu is vastly more contagious than the new coronavirus, as the WHO has noted. Consider that the first known coronavirus cases date back to early December, and since then, the virus has ­afflicted fewer people in total than flu does in a few days. Oh, and why are there no flu quarantines? Because it’s so contagious, it would be impossible.

As for death rates, as I first noted in these pages on Jan. 24, you can’t employ simple math — as everyone is doing — and look at deaths versus cases because those are ­reported cases. With both flu and assuredly with coronavirus, the great majority of those infected have symptoms so mild — if any — that they don’t seek medical attention and don’t get counted in the caseload.

Furthermore, those calculating rates ­ignore the importance of good health care. Given that the vast majority of cases have occurred in a country with poor health care, that’s going to dramatically exaggerate the death rate.

The rate also varies tremendously according to age, with a Chinese government analysis showing 0.2 percent deaths below age 40 but 14.8 percent above 80. A study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association found zero deaths worldwide among children 9 and under. Zero.

Like the flu, the coronavirus is afflicting high-risk groups: the elderly, those with ­underlying health conditions like diabetes or heart disease and those with compromised immune systems. Are there exceptions? Sure. But that’s the case with almost every complex biological phenomenon of the kind.

More good news. This month, the Northern Hemisphere, which includes the countries with the most cases, starts heating up. Almost all respiratory viruses hate warm and moist weather. That’s why flu dies out in America every year by May at the latest and probably why Latin America has reported only 25 coronavirus cases. The Philippines, where I live, has about a third of the US population, but it’s so damned hot and humid here, so far we have had no confirmed cases of internal transmission.

from:    https://nypost.com/2020/03/08/coronavirus-going-to-hit-its-peak-and-start-falling-sooner-than-you-think/

Pay Attention!

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Corona Is Slowing Down, Humanity Will Survive, Says Biophysicist Michael Levitt

avatar by Ari Libsker / CTech

A member of a medical team wears a protective face mask, following the coronavirus outbreak, as he prepares disinfectant liquid to sanitize public places in Tehran, Iran, March 5, 2020. Photo: WANA (West Asia News Agency) / Nazanin Tabatabaee via Reuters.

CTech – Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist who teaches structural biology at Stanford University and spends much of his time in Tel Aviv, unexpectedly became a household name in China, offering the public reassurance during the peak of the country’s coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. Levitt did not discover a treatment or a cure, just did what he does best: crunched the numbers. The statistics led him to the conclusion that, contrary to the grim forecasts being branded about, the spread of the virus will come to a halt.

The calming messages Levitt sent to his friends in China were translated into Chinese and passed from person to person, making him a popular subject for interviews in the Asian nation. His forecasts turned out to be correct: the number of new cases reported each day started to fall as of February 7. A week later, the mortality rate started falling as well.

He might not be an expert in epidemiology, but Levitt understands calculations and statistics, he told Calcalist in a phone interview earlier this week.

The interview was initially scheduled to be held at the fashionable Sarona complex in Tel Aviv, where Levitt currently resides. But after he caught a cold — “not corona,” he jokingly remarked — the interview was rescheduled to be held over the phone. Even though he believes the pandemic will run its course, Levitt emphasizes his support of all the safety measures currently being taken and the need to adhere to them.

Levitt received his Nobel prize for chemistry in 2013 for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” He did not in any way intend to be a prophet foretelling the end of a plague; it happened by accident. His wife Shoshan Brosh is a researcher of Chinese art and a curator for local photographers, meaning the couple splits their time between the US, Israel, and China.

When the pandemic broke out, Brosh wrote to friends in China to support them. “When they answered us, describing how complicated their situation was, I decided to take a deeper look at the numbers in the hope of reaching some conclusion,” Levitt explained. “The rate of infection of the virus in the Hubei province increased by 30 percent each day — that is a scary statistic. I am not an influenza expert but I can analyze numbers and that is exponential growth.” At this rate, the entire world should have been infected within 90 days, he said.

But then, the trend changed. When Levitt started analyzing the data on February 1, Hubei had 1,800 new cases each day and within six days this number reached 4,700, he said. “And then, on February 7, the number of new infections started to drop linearly and did not stop. A week later, the same happened with the number of the deaths. This dramatic change in the curve marked the median point and enabled better prediction of when the pandemic will end. Based on that, I concluded that the situation in all of China will improve within two weeks. And, indeed, now there are very few new infection cases.”

Levitt compared the situation to bank interest — if on the first day a person receives an interest rate of 30 percent on their savings, the next day of 29 percent, and so forth, “you understand that eventually, you will not earn very much.”

The messages his friends translated quickly made waves in China and people wanting to make sure he did indeed write the information attributed to him started contacting Levitt. “That is how I knew I needed to continue,” he said. “I could have said, yes, that’s what I said,’ and left it at that.”

New numbers were being reported every day by various entities, such as the World Health Organization (WHO). Levitt started sending regular reports to his Chinese friends, and their popularity led to interviews on Chinese television, for example on CNN-equivalent CGTN. Based on the diminishing number of infection cases and deaths, he said, the virus will probably disappear from China by the end of March.

Initially, Levitt said, every coronavirus patient in China infected on average 2.2 people a day — spelling exponential growth that can only lead to disaster. “But then it started dropping, and the number of new daily infections is now close to zero.” He compared it to interest rates again: “even if the interest rate keeps dropping, you still make money. The sum you invested does not lessen, it just grows more slowly. When discussing diseases, it frightens people a lot because they keep hearing about new cases every day. But the fact that the infection rate is slowing down means the end of the pandemic is near.”

There are several reasons for this, according to Levitt. “In exponential growth models, you assume that new people can be infected every day, because you keep meeting new people. But, if you consider your own social circle, you basically meet the same people every day. You can meet new people on public transportation, for example; but even on the bus, after some time most passengers will either be infected or immune.”

Another reason the infection rate has slowed has to do with the physical distance guidelines. “You don’t hug every person you meet on the street now, and you’ll avoid meeting face to face with someone that has a cold, like we did,” Levitt said. “The more you adhere, the more you can keep infection in check. So, under these circumstances, a carrier will only infect 1.5 people every three days and the rate will keep going down.”

Quarantine makes a difference, according to Levitt, but there are other factors at work. “We know China was under almost complete quarantine, people only left home to do crucial shopping and avoided contact with others. In Wuhan, which had the highest number of infection cases in the Hubei province, everyone had a chance of getting infected, but only 3 percent caught it,” he explained. “Even on the Diamond Princess (the virus-stricken cruise ship), the infection rate did not top 20 percent.” Based on these statistics, Levitt said, he concluded that many people are just naturally immune to the virus.

The explosion of cases in Italy is worrying, Levitt said, but he estimates it is a result of a higher percentage of elderly people than in China, France, or Spain. “Furthermore, Italian culture is very warm, and Italians have a very rich social life. For these reasons, it is important to keep people apart and prevent sick people from coming into contact with healthy people.”

China did great work and managed to gain complete control of the virus, Levitt said. “Currently, I am most worried about the US. It must isolate as many people as possible to buy time for preparations. Otherwise, it can end up in a situation where 20,000 infected people will descend on the nearest hospital at the same time and the healthcare system will collapse.”

Israel currently does not have enough cases to provide the data needed to make estimates, Levitt said, but from what he can tell, the Ministry of Health is dealing with the pandemic in a correct, positive way. “The more severe the defensive measures taken, the more they will buy time to prepare for needed treatment and develop a vaccine.”

Levitt avoids making global forecasts. In China, he said, the number of new infections will soon reach zero, and South Korea is past the median point and can already see the end. Regarding the rest of the world, it is still hard to tell, he said. “It will end when all those who are sick will only meet people they have already infected. The goal is not to reach the situation the cruise ship experienced.”

The Diamond Princess was the worst case scenario, according to Levitt. “If you compare the ship to a country — we are talking 250,000 people crowded into one square kilometer, which is horribly crowded. It is four times the crowding in Hong Kong. It is as if the entire Israeli population was crammed into 30 square kilometers.” Furthermore, he said, the ship had a central air conditioning and heating system and a communal dining room. “Those are extremely comfortable conditions for the virus and still, only 20 percent were infected. It is a lot, but pretty similar to the infection rate of the common flu.”

As with the flu, most of those dying as a result of coronavirus are over 70 years old, Levitt said. “It is a known fact that the flu mostly kills the elderly — around three-quarters of flu mortalities are people over 65.” To put things in proportion: “there are years when flu is raging, like in the US in 2017, when there were three times the regular number of mortalities. And still, we did not panic. That is my message: you need to think of corona like a severe flu. It is four to eight times as strong as a common flu, and yet, most people will remain healthy and humanity will survive.”

from:     https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/03/13/corona-is-slowing-down-humanity-will-survive-says-biophysicist-michael-levitt/

Larger Entanglement Experiments?

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QUANTUM TUNNELING AND OPENING PORTALS

This article is a bit of fun, but also quite serious, and it seems apropos of the season that when Christians are celebrating the ultimate “portal opening” that scientists are  trying to come up with their own version. This story was spotted and shared by J.K. (thank you), and since we’ve discussed such topics many times in our vidchats and occassionally in public blogs on this site, it seems appropriate to do so again.

The fun part of this article comes from the fact that it’s a tabloid newspaper, The NY Post, that’s reporting it from last July:

Scientists are trying to open a portal to a parallel universe

In spite of the headline here, that scientists are trying to open a “portal”, the experiment involves, I rather suspect, something else entirely, namely, quantum tunneling. Here’s what’s said about the experiment:

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in eastern Tennessee are trying to open a portal to a parallel universe.

The project — which has been compared to the Upside Down in the Netflix blockbuster “Stranger Things” — hopes to show a world identical to ours where life is mirrored.

Leah Broussard, the physicist leading the experiment, told NBC the plan is “pretty wacky” but will “totally change the game,” ahead of a series of experiments she plans to run this summer.

Broussard’s experiment will fire a beam of subatomic particles down a 50-foot tunnel. The beam will pass a powerful magnet and hit an impenetrable wall, with a neutron detector behind it.

If the experiment is successful, particles will transform into mirror images of themselves, allowing them to burrow right through the impenetrable wall. (Emphasis added)

Now why do I suspect that this is about quantum tunneling and not “opening portals”? Because quantum tunneling is the phenomenon whereby small atomic or sub-atomic particles somehow burrow their way through impenetrable barriers, usually very thin ones. In classical pre-quantum mechanical era physics, they should not be able to do this. What’s interesting here, however, is that the “wall” appears to be thicker, and that the experiment is predicated on a hypothesis that many have thought to be the reality behind the phenomenon: the creation of “mirror images” of the particle impacting the barrier emerging on the other side of it. In other words, the particle doesn’t really burrow through the barrier, but rather, knocks a particle in the barrier – a mirror image of itself – loose. In a way, it’s a kind of entanglement. What  the article is suggesting is that this experiment is being conducted on much larger levels and scales than previous tunneling experiments, perhaps to see if the tunneling phenomenon itself can occur at much larger scales than hitherto thought. If so, then it would dovetail nicely with recent experiments demonstrating that entanglement itself can occur at much larger scales than previously thought.

But at the very end of the article, there’s a statement that forms the matrix for today’s high octane speculation:

However, there wouldn’t be an alternate version of you. Current theory, the outlet explains, only hypothesizes that mirror atoms and mirror rocks are possible — and perhaps even mirror planets and stars.

It’s that statement that I take is the clue for the idea that the tunneling phenomenon may work at larger scales than once thought. But it’s that statement that “there wouldn’t be an alternate version of you,” that really sent my high octane speculation motor into overdrive, for what it suggests is that there’s no reason to expect that conscious intention has anything to do with the tunneling phenomenon.

Here I beg to differ, and strongly suspect that the exact opposite might be true. After all, at the heart of quantum mechanics is the Uncertainty Principle that one cannot measure the position and momentum of an electron at the same time, one must choose one or the other. And it’s that act of choosing one or the other than put the Observer squarely in the center of modern physics,for before an  experiment is even performed, one has already determined the quality of its outcome based on that choice. This has led to a whole new focus on the Observer not only within physics, but within scientific studies of “the paranormal” (for want of a better expression). Anyone familiar with the work of retired materials science professor at the University of California, Dr. William Tiller, will be familiar with the astonishing results of his experiments in the ability of mere human intention to alter material or chemical states with measurable results. Similar experiments were performed during the USA’s  covert and highly classified “remote viewing” experiments of the 1970s and 1980s.

Now apply that idea to the tunneling phenomenon: could it be rendered more, or less, efficient by human intentionality? I suspect so, and if I can think of it, rest assured, they have too, but we’ll probably never hear about the results of those experiments…

See you on the flip side…

from:      https://gizadeathstar.com/2019/12/quantum-tunneling-and-opening-portals/

Boycotting Self-Checkouts

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People Are Refusing To Use Self-Checkout Because It Will “Kill Jobs”

Do you envision a future filled with nanotechnology, robots, and faster, smarter computers?

Dreams for this type of future may be slowed to a halt, as groups of concerned citizens resist the increasingly present self-checkout. Fear of economic downturn and job loss ward off shoppers from using such automated tellers.

Canadians Proudly Resist Self-Checkout

Canadians Proudly Resist Self Checkout

A Canadian university, sharing results from a national grocery shopping study, was the first to raise the red flag on mounting consumer worries of the rapidly multiplying self-checkout kiosks.

Of Canadians surveyed in the study, more than 1/4 said they had never used the self-checkout stall, not even for a small purchase at the grocery store. Their motivations for avoiding the machines?

The primary mission of these Canadians is to save cashier jobs.

One northern shopper, Dan Morris, told CBC, “They’re trying to basically herd everyone in, get everyone used to the self-checkouts to continuously cut down on staff”.

Some Canadians have taken additional action against the self-checkouts, starting petitions and sharing memes on social media, to get the word out: “never use a self-checkout – they kill jobs.” (1)

Shopping In America

Federal data shows that store cashier is the second most common job in the U.S., employing about 3.5 million Americans. (2)

Despite the significant number of cashiers nationwide, it is surprisingly not all doom and gloom in the U.S. on the self-checkout front.

In fact, the self-checkout concept is spreading and growing at a rapid pace. Sure there have been setbacks, as seen with Wal-mart’s Scan & Go services, but Stores like Sam’s Club and Amazon Go have already presented a working model for completely cashier-less stores.

A few Americans dislike the prospect of job downturn due to automation, but it has not been as pronounced as in Canada or stopped the momentum of the movement. (3)

Shoppers seem to enjoy the experience at these automated stores, marveling at the technology, and they still see a few humans during their visit. For example, cashier-less stores employee ‘Hosts’ who offer in-store assistance to shoppers and software developers.

Overall, embracing technology can reduce your time needed to shop and still bring you in contact with dedicated employees who will meet your customer service needs. (1, 4)

Fighting Automation – An Uphill Battle?

The grocery store is not the only place of business modernizing and automating redundant jobs with machines.

Roles like the bank teller and payroll clerk, as per the World Economic Forum, are “expected to become increasingly redundant” over the next four years.

Are the many people staving off self-checkouts fighting ATM use too? (5)

Ultimately, increasing competition with online stores and mounting labor costs (increasing minimum wage) challenge the financial success of nearly all brick-and-mortar stores.

Automatic tellers could keep the doors open longer, and among more grocery businesses in small cities across America, who already work on thin profit margins.

As evidenced by other technological advances of the past, there is a strong reason to believe that more jobs will be created in the same or other sectors as automation increases.

Ultimately, no machine can replace the services provided by one human for another. (1)

By Crystal Phyllis Mcleod, Guest writer

from:   https://humansarefree.com/2020/01/people-are-refusing-to-use-self-checkout-because-it-will-kill-jobs.html

Puerto Rico – Hit Again

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A Major Earthquake Knocked Out Power Across Puerto Rico This Morning

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It was the largest yet in a series of quakes to impact the island.

Debris from a collapsed wall litters the ground in Ponce, Puerto Rico following the Jan. 7 earthquake.

Debris from a collapsed wall litters the ground in Ponce, Puerto Rico following the Jan. 7 earthquake.
(Image: © Carlos Giusti/AP/Shutterstock)
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake shook southwestern Puerto Rico this morning (Jan. 7), according to the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS); this is the largest yet in a series of quakes that have hit the region.

At least one person died as walls collapsed around the area, and eight more people were injured, according to NPR. Electricity went out across Puerto Rico as automated systems shut down the island’s power plants, recalling power outages that lasted 11 months after Hurricane Maria, which caused the worst blackout in US history. The North American and Caribbean tectonic plates meet in this area, but the quake doesn’t appear to be the result of those plates grinding together, according to USGS. Instead, a release of energy and stress inside the Caribbean plate seems to have caused the shaking.

A day earlier, a smaller, 5.8 magnitude quake in the same area destroyed a natural rock archway along the coast known as the Punta Ventana, NPR reported. Since a 4.7 magnitude earthquake struck the area on Dec. 28, 2019, more than 400 quakes of at least magnitude 2 have hit Puerto Rico’s southwest region. Eleven have been magnitude 4 or greater, according to USGS.

(The numbers used to measure quakes are nonlinear. A magnitude 3 quake is 10 times as powerful as a magnitude 2 quake, and a magnitude 4 quake is 10 times as powerful as a magnitude 3 quake and so on.)

Puerto Rico’s governor, Wanda Vázquez, suspended work for the day for public sector workers who aren’t first responders.

from:    https://www.livescience.com/major-earthquake-puerto-rico-january-7.html

Climate Triage

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Climate change is increasing flooding caused by seasonal ‘king tides’ in Florida and other coastal areas. AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

We can’t save everything from climate change – here’s how to make choices

Authors

  1. Senior Policy Researcher; Program Director, Infrastructure Resilience and Environmental Policy, Pardee RAND Graduate School

  2. Research Fellow, Climate Adaptation, Griffith University

Disclosure statement

Benjamin Preston currently receives funding from the California Hospital Association, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Ford Motor Company, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Previously, he has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Commonwealth of Australia.

Johanna Nalau receives funding from Australian Research Council and Griffith University.

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Griffith University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Recent reports have delivered sobering messages about climate change and its consequences. They include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C; the fourth installment of the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment; and the World Meteorological Organization’s initial report on the State of the Global Climate 2018.

As these reports show, climate change is already occurring, with impacts that will become more intense for decades into the future. They also make clear that reducing greenhouse gas emissions from human activities to a level that would limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or less above preindustrial levels will pose unprecedented challenges.

Today, however, there is a large and growing gap between what countries say they’d like to achieve and what they have committed to do. As scholars focused on climate risk management and adaptation, we believe it is time to think about managing climate change damage in terms of triage.

Hard choices already are being made about which risks society will attempt to manage. It is critically important to spend limited funds where they will have the most impact.

Annual average temperature over the continental United States has increased by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit relative to 1900. Additional increases ranging from 3 degrees Fahrenheit to 12 degrees Fahrenheit are expected by 2100, depending on global greenhouse gas emission trends. USGCRP

Triaging climate change

Triage is a process of prioritizing actions when the need is greater than the supply of resources. It emerged on the battlefields of World War I, and is widely used today in fields ranging from disaster medicine to ecosystem conservation and software development.

The projected global costs of adapting to climate change just in developing countries range up to US$300 billion by 2030 and $500 billion by mid-century. But according to a recent estimate by Oxfam, just $5 billion to $7 billion was invested in projects specific to climate adaptation in 2015-2016.

Triaging climate change means placing consequences into different buckets. Here, we propose three.

The first bucket represents impacts that can be avoided or managed with minimal or no interventions. For example, assessments of how climate change will affect U.S. hydropower indicate that this sector can absorb the impacts without a need for costly interventions.

The second bucket is for impacts that are probably unavoidable despite all best efforts. Consider polar bears, which rely on sea ice as a platform to reach their prey. Efforts to reduce emissions can help sustain polar bears, but there are few ways to help them adapt. Protecting Australia’s Great Barrier Reef or the Brazilian Amazon poses similar challenges.

Clare Mukankusi breeds beans for a gene bank in Kawanda, Uganda, with properties including drought resilience to help farmers cope with extreme conditions. Georgina Smith, CIAT, CC BY-NC-SA

The third bucket represents impacts for which practical and effective actions can be taken to reduce risk. For example, cities such as Phoenix, Chicago and Philadelphia have been investing for years in extreme heat warning systems and emergency response strategies to reduce risks to public health. There are a variety of options for making agriculture more resilient, from precision agriculture to biotechnology to no-till farming. And large investments in infrastructure and demand management strategies have historically helped supply water to otherwise scarce regions and reduce flood risk.

In each of these cases, the challenge is aligning what’s technically feasible with society’s willingness to pay.

What triage-based planning looks like

Other experts have called for climate change triage in contexts such as managing sea level rise and flood risk and conserving ecosystems. But so far, this approach has not made inroads into adaptation policy.

How can societies enable triage-based planning? One key step is to invest in valuing assets that are at risk. Placing a value on assets exchanged in economic markets, such as agriculture, is relatively straightforward. For example, RAND and Louisiana State University have estimated the costs of coastal land loss in Louisiana owing to property loss, increased storm damage, and loss of wetland habitat that supports commercial fisheries.

Valuing non-market assets, such as cultural resources, is more challenging but not impossible. When North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras lighthouse was in danger of collapsing into the sea, heroic efforts were taken to move it further inland because of its historic and cultural significance. Similarly, Congress makes judgments on behalf of the American people regarding the value of historic and cultural resources when it enacts legislation to add them to the U.S. national park system.

The next step is identifying adaptation strategies that have a reasonable chance of reducing risks. RAND’s support for the Louisiana Coastal Master Plan included an analysis of $50 billion in ecosystem restoration and coastal protection projects that ranked the benefits those projects would generate in terms of avoided damages.

This approach reflects the so-called “resilience dividend” – a “bonus” that comes from investing in more climate-resilient communities. For example, a recent report from the National Institute of Building Sciences estimated that every dollar invested in federal disaster mitigation programs – enhancing building codes, subsidizing hurricane shutters or acquiring flood-prone houses – saves society $6. Nevertheless, there are limits to the level of climate change that any investment can address.

The ‘Resilience Dividend Valuation Model’ provides communities with a structured way to frame and analyze resilience policies and projects.

The third step is investing enough financial, social and political capital to meet the priorities that society has agreed on. In particular, this means including adaptation in the budgets of federal, state, and local government agencies and departments, and being transparent about what these organizations are investing in and why.

Much progress has been made in improving disclosure of corporate exposure to greenhouse gas reduction policies through mechanisms such as the Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures, a private sector initiative working to help businesses identify and disclose risks to their operations from climate policy. But less attention has been given to disclosing risks to businesses from climate impacts, such as the disruption of supply chains, or those faced by public organizations, such as city governments.

Advocates say corporate disclosure of climate risks would help investors to make informed decisions, and would allow corporations to prepare for climate change and have a strategy to deal with it.

Finally, governments need to put frameworks and metrics in place so that they can measure their progress. The Paris Climate Agreement calls on countries to report on their adaptation efforts. In response, tools like InformedCity in Australia are emerging that enable organizations to measure their progress toward adaptation goals. Nevertheless, many organizations – from local governments to corporate boardrooms – are not equipped to evaluate whether their efforts to adapt have been effective.

There are many opportunities to manage climate risk around the world, but not everything can be saved. Delaying triage of climate damages could leave societies making ad hoc decisions instead of focusing on protecting the things they value most.

from:    https://theconversation.com/we-cant-save-everything-from-climate-change-heres-how-to-make-choices-108141

How The Past Has Changed

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The Mandela Effect’ is the perfect film for our age of distrust and doubt

Author

  1. PhD Candidate in the Study of Religion, University of California, Davis

Disclosure statement

Aaron French does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

You’ve likely used the internet to help you remember something, like a quote from a movie, only to discover the answer differed from what you had anticipated. Maybe you shrugged, telling yourself your memory was faulty, and went on with your life.

But what if you found thousands of people online had this same experience about this same movie quote – and misremembered it in exactly the same way?

Could all these people be wrong? What if their memories were actually correct, and someone – or something – had slightly altered the past?

That’s the theme of the new film “The Mandela Effect.” The movie’s title refers to a real internet phenomenon – some might call it a conspiracy theory – that has become increasingly popular over the past few years.

The trailer for ‘The Mandela Effect.’

Those who believe in the Mandela Effect are convinced that small details from the past are being altered.

As a scholar of religion, I see the growing interest in the Mandela Effect as one offshoot of a larger trend in conspiratorial and alternative thinking. But it also signals a change in the way people are experiencing history and a general distrust of the collective historical narrative.

The origin story

The phrase appears to have been coined around 2009 by a paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome.

On her website, Broome explained how, during a science fiction and fantasy convention, someone mentioned to her that former South African president Nelson Mandela was still alive. And yet Broome was convinced that he had died in prison in the 1990s. She even remembered watching his funeral on TV. Of course, Nelson Mandela was very much alive at the time.

During the convention, she probed others about commonly misremembered historical details. The phrase “the Mandela Effect” was born.

The Mandela Effect caught my attention in 2012 after I read a blog post about one of the better-known examples of it: the spelling of the popular children’s book series “The Berenstain Bears.”

The blogger, “Reece,” was convinced it had always been spelled “Berenstein.” To explain the change, the post floated the idea that our reality had been altered. According to Reece, in the past, the name actually had ended with “–ein.” But in this new reality, it had always been “–ain.” The blog concluded by proposing that we are living in a parallel universe.

Before Reece wrote this post, the spellings were already being discussed on the online message board 4chan, and many others also remembered it as “Berenstein.” As the idea migrated to YouTube, it took off, with one video garnering almost 10 million views.

If you build it…he will come?

Since then, hundreds of examples of the Mandela Effect have been documented. People are convinced that Darth Vader’s quote from “The Empire Strikes Back” – “No, I am your father” – was originally “Luke, I am your father.”

‘No, I am your father’ or ‘Luke, I am your father’?

Some claim that in “Field of Dreams,” the line “If you build it, he will come” was changed from “If you build it, they will come.” And they’re certain that the Queen’s famous quote from “Snow White” – “Magic mirror on the wall” – was, at one point, “Mirror, mirror on the wall.”

It isn’t just movie quotes. Proponents of the Mandela Effect are convinced that “Sex and the City” was once actually titled “Sex in the City.” They also claim logos and product names, from Ford to Froot Loops, have changed, and that Rich Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly once wore a monocle but now no longer does.

Among adherents, several explanations for this phenomenon have emerged.

Some theorize that the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research has been distorting the fabric of reality with its experiments, launching us into an alternative dimension. Others have interpreted it through a religious lens; to them, it’s a sign that the end times are imminent.

Cognitive scientists tend to give a more straightforward, psychological explanation: they’re examples of “schema driven errors,” which refer to distortions in the way memories are packaged and then recalled.

Still, the forces behind the widespread interest in this phenomenon are not fully understood. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that, over the past several years, more people seem to have embraced alternative and conspiratorial ways of thinking.

The internet has oversaturated the world with information, and it’s also radically democratized content to an extent we haven’t seen since the invention of the printing press. For this reason, people are more likely to question conventional ways of thinking – as Goethe once wrote, “We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases.”

But this has also created an environment for conspiracy theories to thrive.

Some are adamant that Rich Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly once wore a monocle. John Gomez/Shutterstock.com

History’s metanarratives are malleable

Not everything about the Mandela Effect can simply be discounted as conspiracies or false collective memories.

For example, some proponents of the Mandela Effect claim that historical events continue to crop up that no one has heard of, for example, the explosion on Black Tom Island, when German agents blew up a munitions facility in New York Harbor in 1916. They allege that details from famous historical events, such as the JFK assassination and the Tiananmen Square protests, have changed. There are even claims that new animals have emerged out of thin air, like the dumbo octopus and coconut crab.

In such cases, people are actually confronting something that historians have long grappled with – namely, an understanding that the historical narrative is, in part, a human construct, not an objective reality. There tend to be gaping holes and inconsistencies in the way history and science are formed, taught, learned, and understood.

The expression “history is written by the winners” highlights this issue, as does French writer Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s 1758 description of history as “une fable convenue,” or “a fable agreed upon.”

Accounts of the past – just like memories – are recreated, usually from a sparse number of available facts and often with politically or intellectually biased motives.

Most people typically don’t concern themselves with the question of whether history is real. Yet they go through life with assumptions narrated by the powers that be, whether it’s a cultural trope like the American dream or the idea that capitalism arose through a natural progression of mercantile economics, rationalization and human nature.

Such metanarratives are manifest; all contain an element of truth. But all are human creations, and because they have been created, they can be changed.

In the movie “The Mandela Effect,” the main character descends into a world where nothing can be trusted and reality is constantly in flux.

As we plunge toward an unknown future that feels increasingly unstable, it’s a fitting parable for our time. Questioning the shared understanding of reality and history might provoke instability. But it may also induce answers to questions we never thought to ask.

from:    https://theconversation.com/the-mandela-effect-is-the-perfect-film-for-our-age-of-distrust-and-doubt-127903

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