Redesigning People: How Medtech Could Expand Beyond the Injured (Transhumanist ‘Terminator’ Technology)

Radical human modification is coming, like it or not, by the end of this century—if not earlier. How much are you willing to alter yourself?

This is my first column on TheAtlantic.com, which will regularly cover the interface between new discoveries in the life sciences and how it impacts people and society — and other random topics.

Last fall at the TEDMED meeting in San Diego I watched a man walk who was paralyzed from the waist down. Injured a year earlier, Paul Thacker hadn’t been able to stand since breaking his back in a snowmobile accident. Yet here he was walking, thanks to an early-stage exoskeleton device attached to his legs.

This wasn’t exactly on the level of “exos” we’ve seen in sci-fi films like Avatar and Aliens, which enable people to run faster, carry heavier loads, and smash things better. But Thacker’s device, called eLEGS — manufactured by Ekso Bionics in Berkeley, California — is one harbinger of what’s coming in the next decade or two to treat the injured and the ill with radical new technologies.

Other portents include first-generation machines and treatments that range from deep brain implants that can stop epileptic seizures to stem cells that scientists are using experimentally to repair damaged retinas.

No one would deny that these technologies, should they fulfill their promise, are anything but miraculous for Paul Thacker and others who need them. Yet none of this technology is going to remain exclusively in the realm of pure therapeutics. Even now some are breaking through the barrier between remedies for the sick and enhancements for the healthy.

Take the drug Adderall. A highly addictive pharmaceutical prescribed for patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), the drug works as a stimulant in people without ADHD — and is now used by at least one out of five college students to bump up their energy and attention when they want to perform well on tests or pull all-nighters.

Saying that college students are popping pills is like Claude Rains in Casablanca saying to Humphrey Bogart: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.” Yet the widespread use — and acceptance — of Adderall and other stimulants by students to enhance their academic performance is bumping up against something new. It’s pushing us into a realm where taking powerful pharmaceuticals that boost, say, attention or memory is becoming acceptable beyond pure recreation.

Can we be too far from a greater acceptance of surgically implanted devices that increase our ability to hear or see? Or new legs that allow us to run like cheetahs and scramble up walls like geckos?

Or that allow us to run in the Olympics like Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter who may qualify for the games in London this year despite missing his lower legs? He runs using two sleek, metallic “legs” that combine with his natural speed and skill to do far more than overcome a disability.

Which leads us to the crucial question for the approaching age of human enhancement: How far would you go to modify yourself using the latest medtech?

Would you replace perfectly good legs with artificial ones if they made you faster and stronger?

Would you take a daily pill that not only stimulated your brain to help you do your best on a test, but also bumped up your memory?

Would you sign up for a genetic alteration that would make you taller and stronger?

Let’s up the ante and declare that these fixes had no deleterious side effects, and were deemed safe by a newly appointed U.S. Agency for Human Augmentation. Would this change your mind? (As an aside, I’m trying to imagine what the candidates now vying for the Republican nomination for president would say about an Agency for Human Augmentation.)

And what if everyone else at work — or all of the rest of the kids in your child’s class at school — were taking advantage of these enhancements?

Currently, none of these hypothetical modifications would be ethical, and most are illegal. Yet one doesn’t need to spend too much time delving into the world of near-future medtech to understand that each of these possibilities are likely to occur in one form or another in the lifetime of those college kids now swallowing Adderall.

For now, the device attached to Paul Thacker’s legs is clunky. The apparatus is little more than a pair of sophisticated braces with whirring mechanics attached to a computer he wears on his back — which is guided by a technician walking behind him, holding a control box attached to the computer with a wire. But it won’t be too long until this 37-year-old former champion snowmobile jumper will be walking with ease using an advanced exoskeleton.

In a few more years, you might be wearing your own eLEGS to carry heavy loads around the house, or as a soldier on patrol in some distant corner of the world (assuming we aren’t using only drones). Flash forward a few more years, and you may have the option of permanently implanting in your legs the “eLEGS LXII,” an endo-skeletal implant that stays with you like a futuristic hip or knee implant does today.

Back at TEDMED, Paul Thacker wasn’t thinking about anything nearly as grandiose as this. When I asked him what he wishes for most using the new eLEGS technology, he smiled and said something refreshingly mundane considering he is a herald of the future.

“Right now I’d like to be able to stand up and pee,” he said. “I really miss being able to do that.”

Article Source Link:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/redesigning-people-how-medtech-could-expand-beyond-the-injured/253236/

JP

 

Hitler’s Roswell: Alien saucer crash in 1937 Nazi Germany

Ten years before an alien craft crashed onto rancher Mack Brazel’s property near Roswell, New Mexico, a flying saucer lost control and crashed onto the countryside of Nazi Germany. This incredible story—covered-up by both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. for more than 70 years—is allegedly the actual basis for the Nazi’s intense research into wingless, disc aircraft; Hitler’s and Himmler’s near obsession with exotic technology and flying saucers; and the incredible experiments by S.S. physicists that culminated with flying saucers and the ‘Bell’—a bizarre multi-dimensional motor that neutralized gravity and ripped a gash into the very fabric of the time-space continuum creating incredible and horrific effects.

Similiar saucer alleged to have crashed in USSR, 1950s

The Third Reich’s saucer

In 1937, as Nazi Germany was rising from the ashes of the old German Republic and becoming the world’s first real superpower, an incredible thing happened: aliens crashed their distressed craft into the German countryside. [Secret Treaty: The United States Government and Extra-terrestrial Entities]

The German army was there to pick up the pieces. No record exists, however, indicating whether any bodies were also retrieved.

When word of the crashed disc made ir’s way back to the German High Command and the report landed on the Führer’s desk, he immediately ordered elements of the Luftwaffe and Germany’s top aeronautical experts to sift through the remains. Ostensibly, the damaged saucer was moved into a warehouse facility under 24-hour guard near the Rhine. Some parts were also flown to a facility near the Austrian border.

Allegedly, members of the teams that worked on the advanced alien technology were from the Luftwaffe, the Speer Ministry of Arms headed by Albert Speer, and the formal research council, the “Reichsforschungrat,” composed of university professors and industrial engineers.

Horton brothers of flying wing fame were consulted

The teams were assembled to reverse engineer what was salvaged and among the experts called upon were the Horton brothers—who later designed and tested revolutionary flying wing aircraft and the world’s first stealth jet fighter-bomber. Some of their resulting technology may have been gleaned from intense study of the alien craft, although that cannot be proven.

Genius Viktor Schauberger invented the imploder vortex motor

Later, the expertise of Viktor Schauberger was tapped. He was the inventor of the revolutionary imploder motor that created an imploding vortex.

Nazi experiment with anti-gravity device, the Glocke

That motor may have been the basis for later S.S. experiments in Poland with the notorious Glocke (Bell) device that reportedly created inter-dimensional rifts in space-time. [The S.S. Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis' Incredible Secret Technology]

Renato Vesco’s books on the Nazi flying saucer research programs

Italian researcher Renato Vesco, in his classic and well-researched book, Intercept – But Don’t Shoot: The True Story of the Flying Saucers asserts that the Nazis were working on many advanced propulsion systems and rudimentary anti-gravity devices to power their disc-shaped, or lenticular, aircraft.

German schematic of an advanced disc version

Alien craft spurred German’s engineering efforts

Although vastly influenced by the capture of an actual disc, research into circular aircraft had been going on as far back as the experiments in Italy before 1920 with crude jets attached to aerodynamic discs. [Hitler's Flying Saucers]

The ET craft served to advance propulsion, electronics and provided clues to workable designs, but the scientists were at a loss regarding the metallurgy as the craft was composed of materials unknown to them and impossible to duplicate in the lab.

Some of Germany’s most advanced theoretical engineers and physicists were personally tasked by Hitler to get the technology working and make it available for the war effort. In that regards, geniuses like Ballenzo, Habermohl, Miethe and Schriever were recruited.

Artist’s interpretation of first Nazi disc built by Schriever

Documents captured by the Allies after the war ended indicate that Schriever was the first to have some success with the disc technology. His own research, augmented by what had by then been deduced from the retrieved saucer, enabled him to build a working craft powered by specially designed jet engines. The craft, however, was unstable. The first two versions ended in disasterous crashes killing the test pilots. [Man-Made UFOs, 1944-1994: Fifty Years of Suppression]

Tides of war turn, Nazis expand saucer projects

As the years advanced and the Allies began counter-attacking Germany, some Nazi officials began pressuring Schauberger to adapt a verson of his Repulsine imploder to serve as the motive force for a different type of disc craft using the vortex propulsion motor.

Viktor Schauberger’s incredible implosion motor

 

German saucer designed around the imploder motor

Although the Nazi engineers and scientists built their first experimental saucers from light steel or heavy aluminum, the steel still proved too heavy and the aluminum too soft and not tough enough to withstand the stress subjected to it when molded into a lens-shaped craft.

Frustrated scientists finally gave up trying to unravel the mystery of the alien metal and succeeded in creating their own version with an alloy of aluminum and magnesium in 1944. The new alloy was exactly what they needed to design bigger and better craft. The metal was light, yet more durable than simple aluminum.

Primitive experimental propeller-driven disc airplane never saw production

Hitler pressed the engineers onwards with greater frenzy. Germany was now suffering nightly bombing raids and factories across the country had been moved to gigantic underground facilities. Aircraft production lines were being hampered and destroyed and the rocket facility run by Werner von Braun at Peenemünde was not back up to full capacity after being bombed in 1943.

Slave laborers, mostly Slavic, were pressed into service to produce V-2 rockets, advanced aircraft, synthetic fuel, high explosives…and incredible remote-controlled flying saucers.

Nazi Kugelblitz attack Allied bombers over Germany

The astounding Nazi Kugelblitz

According to documents and the testimony of surviving Polish slave laborers, the Germans actually created an assemblyline to manufacture a flying disc weapon called the Kugelblitz (ball lightening).

The Allied pilots called them Foo-fighters.

The Kugelblitz was the first real flying saucer ever manufactured by any nation on Earth. Several of the tests were secretly attended by Hitler and his S.S. chief, Heinrich Himmler.

Rare daylight photo of Nazi Kugelblitz trailing bomber

According to captured documents, the radio-controlled craft were made in the underground factories at Thuringia and the craft varied in size from 10 to 15-feet across. Reportedly they were amazingly manueverable and were able to achieve speeds of more than 1,250 miles per hour. They emitted a strong electo-static field designed to disrupt the electrical circuits of conventional aircraft causing enemy planes to falter, dive, and crash.

Other saucers

Prototypes of other saucers were designed and engineering mock-ups were made. Some made it as far as wind tunnel tests. A few disc craft other than Schriever’s early attempts were constructed and flown.

About 18 months before the Germans surrendered, Hitler pinned his hopes—and those of Germany—on the incredible potential of a mind-boggling array of superweapons. The greatest of the weapons were his new class of Vengeance weapons.

Germany’s planned hypersonic cruise missile V-3

The old V-weapons were the rocket plane V-1 and intracontinental missile V-2. Hitler’s dream envisioned the world’s first cruise missile: a V-3 sub-orbital, intercontinental hypersonic rocket capable of hitting New York and Washington.

Nazi Vril disc craft during test flight over undetermined German airfield

And then there were the flying saucers…

German officers at airfield with Vril saucer prototype in distance

S.S. Reichsführer Himmler recommended S. S. Grupenführer Hans Kammler to head the saucer projects and save the Fatherland. Hitler agreed.

Saucer chief: S.S. Grupenführer Hans Kammler circa 1944

Later Kammler is said to have overseen the Glocke project as well.

Undoubtedly, Germany’s superweapons—specifically those they were perfecting in the closing months of the war—would have defeated the Allies and helped Germany conquer and rule Western and Eastern Europe, suppress the U.S.S.R., and keep America neutered—even with the new atomic weapon the U.S. had developed.

But the Germans ran out of time.

Some argue that no matter what the Nazis had, they could not have staved off American atomic attacks. Yet evidence exists that in the final weeks of the war the Germans successfully detonated their own low-yield atomic bomb and that coupled with stealth aircraft, the imploder vortex motor, advanced television bombs, the hypersonic V-3 “Amerika Bomb,” and flying saucer fighters—ostensibly augmented with harvested alien technology—would have sealed the fate of the Nazi’s enemies…

…and perhaps Adolf Hitler would have attained his twisted dream of a Thousand Year Reich.

Article Source Link:
http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/02/28/hitlers-roswell-alien-saucer-crash-in-1937-nazi-germany/

“Keep your nose to the ground and your eyes to the sky.”

JP

An intestinal cell monolayer after exposure to nanoparticles, shown in green.

Abstract:
Billions of engineered nanoparticles in foods and pharmaceuticals are ingested by humans daily, and new Cornell research warns they may be more harmful to health than previously thought.

Nanoparticles in food, vitamins could harm human health

Ithaca, NY | Posted on February 16th, 2012

A research collaboration led by Michael Shuler, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Chemical Engineering and the James and Marsha McCormick Chair of Biomedical Engineering, studied how large doses of polystyrene nanoparticles — a common, FDA-approved material found in substances from food additives to vitamins — affected how well chickens absorbed iron, an essential nutrient, into their cells.

The results were reported online Feb. 12 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

According to the study, high-intensity, short-term exposure to the particles initially blocked iron absorption, whereas longer-term exposure caused intestinal cell structures to change, allowing for a compensating uptick in iron absorption.

The researchers tested both acute and chronic nanoparticle exposure using human gut cells in petri dishes as well as live chickens and reported matching results. They chose chickens because these animals absorb iron into their bodies similarly to humans, and they are also similarly sensitive to micronutrient deficiencies, explained Gretchen Mahler, Ph.D. ’08, the paper’s first author and former Cornell graduate student and postdoctoral associate.

The researchers used commercially available, 50-nanometer polystyrene carboxylated particles that are generally considered safe for human consumption. They found that following acute exposure, a few minutes to a few hours after consumption, both the absorption of iron in the in vitro cells and the chickens decreased.

But following exposure of 2 milligrams per kilogram for two weeks — a slower, more chronic intake — the structure of the intestinal villi began to change and increase in surface area. This was an effective physiological remodeling that led to increased iron absorption.

“This was a physiological response that was unexpected,” Mahler said.

Shuler noted that in some sense this intestinal villi remodeling was positive because it shows the body adapts to challenges. But it serves to underscore how such particles, which have been widely studied and considered safe, cause barely detectable changes that could lead to, for example, over-absorption of other, harmful compounds.

Human exposure to nanoparticles is only increasing, Shuler continued.

“Nanoparticles are entering our environment in many different ways,” Shuler said. “We have some assurance that at a gross level they are not harmful, but there may be more subtle effects that we need to worry about.”

The paper included Cornell co-authors Mandy Esch, a research associate in biomedical engineering; Elad Tako, a research associate at the Robert W. Holley Center for Agriculture and Health; Teresa Southard, assistant professor of biomedical sciences; Shivaun Archer, senior lecturer in biomedical engineering; and Raymond Glahn, senior scientist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service and courtesy associate professor in the Department of Food Science. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation; New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research; Army Corp of Engineers; and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Article Source Link:
http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=44525

JP

Your Next Prescription Might Be For A Microchip

A few years from now, when your doctor prescribes a prescription for you, you might not get a bottle of pills. Instead, your drugs might be delivered under your skin, from a small microchip. At least, that’s the promise of a new invention by MIT researchers Robert Langer and Michael Cima, who worked with MicroCHIPS, Inc. to develop a microchip capable of delivering prescription drugs to patients. The chip, which has been in development for over a decade, just completed its first human test, which it passed with flying colors.

Here’s how the chip works. It’s implanted underneath the skin of the patients (who, in the study, reported that they often forgot it was there.) The chip contains tiny reservoirs that the drugs are placed into. The reservoirs are sealed with a layer of platinum and titanium. When a current is applied to the seal, it melts, releasing the drugs into the patient’s bloodstream. The microchips are programmable, as well, so that the drug delivery can be automated.

In the study, the implants were used to deliver a drug to treat 7 women between the ages of 65 and 70 who suffer from osteoporosis. In all seven cases, the chip delivered the correct dose of drugs to the patients, and no adverse side effects were reported.

 

This is a huge benefit for patients with chronic diseases that require daily injections because it automates the process, thereby improving compliance. Let’s face it – most people wouldn’t be thrilled with the thought of injecting themselves with a needle every day. By vastly improving the process, people’s health will benefit.

“Compliance is very important in a lot of drug regimens, and it can be very difficult to get patients to accept a drug regimen where they have to give themselves injections,” said researcher Michael Cima in an MIT press release. “This avoids the compliance issue completely, and points to a future where you have fully automated drug regimens.”

The other benefit of using the microchip is that it can be equipped with biosensors, which means that a doctor can monitor how effectively the drug is treating the disease, and remotely program the device according to adjust to changing circumstances. Right now, the device can only be reprogrammed remotely at very short distances, but the company and researchers are working on improving that aspect.

“This trial demonstrates how drug can be delivered through an implantable device that can be monitored and controlled remotely, providing new opportunities to improve treatment for patients and to realize the potential of telemedicine,” said study co-author Robert Langer in MicroCHIPS’ press release. “The convergence of drug delivery and electronic technologies gives physicians a real-time connection to their patient’s health, and patients are freed from the daily reminder, or burden, of disease by eliminating the need for regular injections.”

The next step for the company is to develop therapeutic regimens for the chip that can work with other diseases. The company intends to apply for regulatory approval to use the devices in 2014.

Article Source Link:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/02/19/your-next-prescription-might-be-for-a-microchip/

JP

(Terminator UPDATE) More Than Human? The Ethics of Biologically Enhancing Soldiers

Our ability to “upgrade” the bodies of soldiers through drugs, implants, and exoskeletons may be upending the ethical norms of war as we’ve understood them.

If we can engineer a soldier who can resist torture, would it still be wrong to torture this person with the usual methods? Starvation and sleep deprivation won’t affect a super-soldier who doesn’t need to sleep or eat. Beatings and electric shocks won’t break someone who can’t feel pain or fear like we do. This isn’t a comic-book story, but plausible scenarios based on actual military projects today.

In the next generation, our warfighters may be able to eat grass,communicate telepathically,resist stress, climb walls like a lizard, and much more. Impossible? We only need to look at nature for proofs of concept. For instance, dolphins don’t sleep (or they’d drown); Alaskan sled-dogs can run for days without rest or food; bats navigate with echolocation; and goats will eat pretty much anything. Find out how they work, and maybe we can replicate that in humans.

As you might expect, there are serious moral and legal risks to consider on this path. Last week in the UK, The Royal Society released its report ” Neuroscience, Conflict and Security.” This timely report worried about risks posed by cognitive enhancements to military personnel, as well as whether new nonlethal tactics, such as directed energy weapons, could violate either the Biological or Chemical Weapons Conventions.

While an excellent start, the report doesn’t go far enough, as I have been explaining to the US intelligence community , National Research Council, DARPA, and other organizations internationally. The impact of neural and physical human enhancements is more far-reaching than that, such as to the question of torturing the enhanced. Other issues, as described below, pose real challenges to military policies and broader society.

Why Enhancements?

Technology makes up for our absurd frailty. Unlike other animals, we’re not armed with fangs, claws, running speed, flight, venom, resilience, fur, or other helpful features to survive a savage world. We naked apes couldn’t survive at all, if it weren’t for our tool-making intellect and resourcefulness.

And therein lies a fundamental problem with how Homo sapiens wage war: As impressive as our weapon systems may be, one of the weakest links in armed conflicts-as well as one of the most valuable assets-continues to be the warfighters themselves. Hunger, fatigue, and the need for sleep can quickly drain troop morale and cause a mission to fail. Fear and confusion in the “fog of war” can lead to costly mistakes, such as friendly-fire casualties. Emotions and adrenaline can drive otherwise-decent individuals to perform vicious acts, from verbal abuse of local civilians to torture and illegal executions, making an international incident from a routine patrol. And post-traumatic stress can take a devastating toll on families and add pressure on already-burdened health services.

To be sure, military training seeks to address these problems, but it can do only so much, and science and technology help to fill those gaps. In this case, what’s needed is an upgrade to the basic human condition. We want our warfighters to be made stronger, more aware, more durable, more maneuverable in different environments, and so on. The technologies that enable these abilities fall in the realm of human enhancement, and they include neuroscience, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more.

While some of these innovations are external devices, such as exoskeletons that give the wearer super-strength, our technology devices are continually shrinking in size. Our mobile phones today have more computing power than the Apollo rockets that blasted to the moon. So there’s good reason to think that these external enhancements someday can be small enough to be integrated with the human body, for an even greater military advantage.

The use of human enhancement technologies by the military is not new. Broadly construed, vaccinations could count as an enhancement of the human immune system, and this would place the first instance of military human enhancement (as opposed to mere tool-use) at our very first war, the American Revolutionary War in 1775-1783. George Washington, as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, ordered the vaccinations of American troops against smallpox, as the British Army was suspected of using the virus as a form of biological warfare. (Biowarfare existed for centuries prior, such as in catapulting corpses to spread the plague during the Middle Ages.) At the time, the Americans largely were not exposed to smallpox in childhood and therefore had not built up immunity to the disease, as the British had.

Since then, militaries worldwide have used caffeine and amphetamines to keep their troops awake and alert, an age-old problem in war. In fact, some pilots are required to take drugs-known as “go pills”-on long-distance missions, or else lose their jobs. And there’s ongoing interest in using pharmaceuticals, such as modafinil (a cognitive enhancer), dietary supplements, as well as gene therapy to boost the performance of warfighters.

The Questions

Some of the issues with military enhancements echo now-familiar debates, such as: whether the use of anabolic steroids by athletes is harmful to their health; whether that would set a bad example for impressionable children; whether Ritalin use in academia is cheating and unfair to others; whether longevity would bankrupt pension plans; whether manipulating biology amounts to ” playing God“; and so on. But there are new concerns as well.

Ethical and safety issues

Established standards in biomedical ethics-such as the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and others-govern the research stage of enhancements, that is, experimentation on human subjects. But “military necessity” or the exigencies of war can justify actions that are otherwise impermissible, such as a requirement to obtain voluntary consent of a patient. Under what conditions, then, could a warfighter be commanded (or refuse) a risky or unproven enhancement, such as a vaccine against a new biological weapon? Because some enhancements could be risky or pose long-term health dangers, such as addiction to “go pills”, should military enhancements be reversible? What are the safety considerations related to more permanent enhancements, such as bionic parts or a neural implant? 

Tactical and logistical implications

Once ethical and safety issues are resolved, militaries will need to attend to the impact of human enhancements on their operations. For instance, how would integrating both enhanced and unenhanced warfighters into the same unit affect their cohesion? Would enhanced soldiers rush into riskier situations, when their normal counterparts would not? If so, one solution could be to confine enhancements to a small, elite force. (This could also solve the consent problem.) As both an investment in and potential benefit to the individual warfighters, is it reasonable to treat them differently from the unenhanced, such as on length of service and promotion requirements? On the other hand, preferential treatment to any particular group could lower overall troop morale.

Legal and policy issues

More broadly, how do enhancements impact international humanitarian law, or the laws of war? The Geneva and Hague Conventions prohibit torture of enemy combatants, but enhanced soldiers could reasonably be exempt if underlying assumptions disappear-that humans respond to a certain level of pain and need sleep and food-as I suggested at the beginning. Further, enhancements that transform our biology could violate the Biological Weapons Convention, if enhanced humans (or animals) plausibly count as “biological agents”, which is not a well-defined term. International law aside, there may be policy questions: Should we allow scary enhancements, which was the point of fierce Viking helmets or samurai masks? Could that exacerbate hostilities by prompting charges of dishonor and cowardice, the same charges we’re now hearing about military robots?

Military-civilian issues

As history shows, we can expect the proliferation of every military technology we invent. The method of diffusion is different and more direct with enhancements, though: Most warfighters return to society as civilians (our veterans) and would carry back any permanent enhancements and addictions with them. The US has about 23 million veterans-or one out of every 10 adults-in addition to 3 million active and reserve personnel, so this is a significant segment of the population. Would these enhancements, such as a drug or an operation that subdues emotions, create problems for the veteran to assimilate to civilian life? Would they create problems for other civilians who may be at a competitive disadvantage to the enhanced veteran who, for instance, has bionic limbs and enhanced cognition.

Soldier 2.0 is a Hybrid

 

The military technology getting the most public attention now is robotics, but we can think of it as sharing the same goal as human enhancement. Robotics aims to create a super-soldier from an engineering approach: they are our proxy mech-warriors. However, there are some important limitations to those machines. For one thing, they don’t have a sense of ethics-of what is right and wrong-which can be essential on the battlefield. Where it is child’s play to identify a ball or coffee mug or a gun, it’s notoriously tough for a computer to do that. This doesn’t give us much confidence that a robot can reliably distinguish friend from foe, at least in the foreseeable future.

In contrast, cognitive and physical enhancements aim to create a super-soldier from a biomedical direction, such as with modafinil and other drugs. For battle, we want our soft organic bodies to perform more like machines. Somewhere in between robotics and biomedical research, we might arrive at the perfect future warfighter: one that is part machine and part human, striking a formidable balance between technology and our frailties.

In changing human biology, we also may be changing the assumptions behind existing laws of war and even human ethics. If so, we would need to reexamine the foundations of our social and political institutions, if prevailing norms can’t stretch to cover new technologies. In comic books and science fiction , we can ignore or suspend disbelief about these details. But in the real world-as life imitates art, and “mutant powers” really are changing the world-the details matter.

Acknowledgements: This article is adapted from a research report, in progress, funded by The Greenwall Foundation, with co-investigators Maxwell Mehlman (Case Western Reserve University) and Keith Abney (Cal Poly).

Images: 1. US Marine Corps. 2. Lockheed Martin. 3. US Marine Corps. 4. US Marine Corps. Note: these images have been digitally enhanced.

 Article Source Link:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/more-than-human-the-ethics-of-biologically-enhancing-soldiers/253217/

 

JP

Test tube burgers could hit kitchens this year after scientists create meat with taste of quarter-pounder

Prototype burger will cost £220,000 to produce

The world’s first test-tube burger will be ready to eat within months.

It will look, feel and, it is hoped, taste, like a regular quarter-pounder, its creator Mark Post told the world’s premier science conference.

He plans to unveil the hamburger in October – and hopes celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal will cook it, although he has yet to approach him.

Tasty: A small sample of the lab-grown ‘meat’ which Dutch stem cell scientist Dr Mark Post believes everyone will want to eat

The ‘ethical meat’ will would be kinder to the environment than the real thing, reduce animal suffering and help feed the world’s burgeoning population.

But it will be far from cheap with the prototype burger costing £220,000 to produce.

Professor Post says that ‘everyone’ will want to eat the burgers, which, despite their vast initial cost could eventually be priced to match that of real meat.

However, it remains to be seen whether a public that likes to think of its chops, steaks and sausages as having their roots in nature will take to meat made in test-tubes.

The Maastricht Univeristy professor has spent the last six years trying to turn stem cells – ‘master cells’ with the power to turn into all other cell types – into meat.

Real thing: But the new meat  could be an ethical alternative to beef

He first attempts involved mouse burgers. He then tried to grow pork in a dish, producing strips with the rubbery texture of squid or scallops, before settling on beef.

A four-step technique is used to turn stem cells from animal flesh into a burger.

First, the stem cells are stripped from the cow’s muscle.

Next, they are incubated in a nutrient broth until they multiply many times over, creating a sticky tissue with the consistency of an undercooked egg.

This ‘wasted muscle’ is then bulked up through the laboratory equivalent of exercise – it is anchored to Velcro and stretched.

Finally, 3,000 strips of the lab-grown meat are minced, and, along with 200 pieces of lab-grown animal fat, formed into a burger.

The process is still lengthy, as well as expensive, but optimised, it could take just six weeks from stem cell to supermarket shelf.

Yesterday, Professor Post told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference in Vancouver that he has so far made a strip of beef measuring 3cm by 1.5cm by 0.5cm.

This beef is ‘pinkish to yellow’ in colour – but he is confident of having a full-sized and properly coloured burger by the autumn.

The professor, who is funded by an anonymous but highly-successful benefactor, said: ‘It’s not quite ready, it’s going to be presented in October.

‘We are going to provide a proof of concept, showing that out of stem cells you can produce a product that looks like and feels like and hopefully tastes like meat.

‘Seeing and tasting is believing.’ Sausages and other processed meat products could swiftly follow, although pork chops and sirloin steaks will be much more problematic.

Other possibilities include synthetic versions of the meat from are animals such as pandas and tigers.

 

Choice: Professor Post hopes experimental chef Heston Blumenthal will have a go at cooking his new invention

Meats could also be made extra-healthy by boosting their content of ‘good’ fats.

Far fewer animals would have to be kept to satisfy the appetite for meat.

The stem cell’s extraordinary ability to grow and multiply means that a cells taken from a single cow could produce a million times more burgers than if the animal was slaughtered for meat.

Researchers say they realise that many will find the idea of eating lab-grown meat unnatural – but point out that the livestock eaten at the moment is often kept in cramped conditions and dosed with chemicals or antibiotics.

However, the fact that the source material comes from animals who will likely have slaughtered means that not all vegetarians will be happy with the product.

The fledgling technology was highlighted in discussion paper about current and future demands on livestock production published recently by the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific body.

The paper’s author, Professor Philip Thornton, of the International Livestock Research Institute in Edinburgh, wrote: ‘This is one example of something that could happen in the future that could have a very big impact on agriculture and livestock production.

‘There are some advantages to the idea. For example, you could reduce the number of live animals substantially and that would reduce greenhouse gas production.

‘There might be human health benefits because the health and safety issues associated with meat could be much better controlled.

‘But are people going to eat it? People’s tastes have changed a lot over the years and eventually this may be something that is widely taken up.’

Cautioning about the economic impact on farmers, the professor said: ‘If you are talking about large-scale reductions in numbers of livestock, there are large-scale implications and we’d have to look very carefully to see if the benefits would outweigh some of the problems that might arise.’

It will be at least ten years before the artificial meat is produced on an industrial scale and has satisfied the safety testing necessary for it be placed on supermarket shelves.

Article Source Link:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2103472/Test-tube-burgers-hit-kitchens-year-scientists-create-meat-taste-quarter-pounder.html

 

JP

Project Avatar: U.S. military researches ways for soldiers to control robot ‘surrogates’ using just their minds

The U.S. military is researching ways for its troops can use their minds to remotely control androids who will take human soldiers’ place on the battlefield.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon’s hi-tech research arm, has earmarked $7million for research into the project, nicknamed Avatar.

The ultimate goal of the project sounds, bizarrely, much like the fantastical plot of the the film of the same name.

Science following fiction: In Avatar, pictured, human soldiers use mind control to inhabit genetically engineered proxies

In the James Cameron movie, set far in the future, human soldiers use mind control to inhabit the bodies of human alien hybrids as they carry out a war against the inhabitants of a distant world.

According to the Darpa’s 2013 budget: ‘The Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.’

The report, released this week and seen by wired.com, says the remote controlled androids will be capable of doing everything that a human soldier can.

They should be able to perform all the duties expected of a human soldier, including ‘room clearing, sentry control [and] combat casualty recovery,’ all via remote control.

The means in which this man-machine mind-meld are to be achieved are unclear, but Darpa’s description of the project notes ‘key advancements in telepresence and remote operation of a ground system’.

The agency has reportedly already funded successful attempts to control robots with thought – albeit using monkeys – raising the terrifying prospect that wars may in the future be fought by machine proxy.

The initiative seems like the next logical step in the U.S. military’s robotics and remote warfare research.

Remote-controlled drones have, controversially, been in use for some time, and have been a key, if sometimes clumsy, weapon in the U.S.’s operations against Islamic extremists.

At ground level, the agency has also investigated autonomous, lifelike robots, including headless humanoid Petman, and AlphaDog, a four legged machine designed to carry equipment.

Last week Darpa released a new video of AlphaDog and noted that they wanted the machine to interact with soldiers in a way similar to the relationship between a trained animal and its handler.

Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2102559/Project-Avatar-U-S-military-researches-ways-soldiers-control-robot-surrogates-using-just-minds.html#ixzz1mvd540qC

Rise of the ‘intelligent advert’ that scans a reader’s face before tailoring its message to men or women

A street advert which uses facial-recognition technology to tell men from women is to be used for the first time.

The electronic hoarding, to be unveiled on a bus stop in London’s Oxford Street this week, plays a 40-second advertisement – with a different message depending on the gender of who is looking at it.

Only women will be able to view the full message, which is for a charity promoting female education worldwide. Men will just be directed to its website.

Intelligent ad: A unique new advert which deciphers your gender before relaying a message accordingly will appear at a bus stop shelter like tis in Oxford Street

The advert echoes 2002 Tom Cruise thriller Minority Report, in which billboards directly targeted individuals.

According to the Independent on Sunday it will guess their gender based on the distance between their eyes, the width of their nose and the shape of their jawline.

A spokesman for the charity, Plan UK, said: ‘We’re not giving men the choice to see the full ad – so they get a glimpse of what it’s like to have basic choices taken away.’

Privacy campaigners condemned the advert as ‘creepy’ and experts said it marked a future of personal advertising with ‘no boundaries’.

Neil Chapman, the head of the creative team behind the ad at Clear Channel UK, defended claims by campaigners at The Open Rights Group that the idea was ‘creepy’ – and told the Independent that it would not store any personal details.

Digital marketing consultant Steven Hess added that such technology marked the ‘beginning of a shift from essentially dumb advertising to intelligent advertising’ and that it meant that in the future there would be ‘no boundaries’.

Educating: The new campaign, which aims to get girls all over the world in to education, will target more women than men

As part of the charity’s ‘Because I Am A Girl’ campaign’, the advert – which will have a two-week trial – will use a high-definition camera to scan the multitude of shoppers in the busy street.

The campaign highlights that at least 75 million girls around the world are not in school.

It points out that educated girls are less likely to marry and to have children whilst still children themselves and that they are more likely to be literate, healthy and survive into adulthood.

Charity: Bintou from Mali is one of the young girls used to promote Plan UKs ‘Because I Am A Girl’ campaign

Neil Chapman, the head of the creative team behind the ad at Clear Channel UK, defended claims by campaigners at The Open Rights Group that the idea was ‘creepy’ – and told the Independent that it would not store any personal details.

Digital marketing consultant Steven Hess added that such technology marked the ‘beginning of a shift from essentially dumb advertising to intelligent advertising’ and that it meant that in the future there would be ‘no boundaries’.

‘This will in turn move people from a life of poverty to a future with opportunity.

‘Everyone has a role to play, including boys and men.’

Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103389/The-intelligent-advert-Scanners-determine-gender-sending-messages-according-sex.html#ixzz1mvbFGgf9

JP

Scientists confirm Extraterrestrial genes in Human DNA (Prelude to the Great Deception)

Research findings continues work of DNA Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Francis Crick

by Peter Jiang and Jenny Li

	Artist representation of Semjase who Exo-scientists indicate is a Pleiadian woman. Reference: Billymeier.com.

Collaborative research from a gathering of exo-scientists postulate that there are genes from over 20 extraterrestrials civilizations in Human DNA. These exo-scientists have continued the work of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Frances Crick, and other scholars in this area. Current findings are consistent with reports of Professor Sam Chang, who discreetly released information on his own apparent findings, in association with the Human Genome Project. Scientists are beginning to complain more and more about political attempts to compromise the integrity of their important work for humanity. The discreet releasing of findings, is one apparent way in which scientists try to cope with scientific peer pressures to conform to prevailing political pressures.

Details of findings have been published in part, by Dr. Michael Salla, who is a learned scholar on extraterrestrial research. Exo-scientists and other researchers base their findings, in part, on carefully collecting data, which includes well corroborated documented observations by contactees and “whistleblowers”, as well as other documentation. These verified reliable sources have come into contact with representatives of non-Earth Human civilizations living in human populations at-large, and also in official capacities.

Francis Crick and partner, James Watson, startled the academic world in 1953 when they deciphered the structure of the DNA molecule.

“Exo-science” is the study of extraterrestrial phenomenon. “Exo-science” is further associated with “exopolitics” which embraces the need for humanity to have open contacts with Extraterrestrials on a representative democratic basis, that respects Earth’s sovereignty.

In today’s “global economy” an “official science” which denies the analytical study of spiritual phenomena, as a legitimate context for understanding human reality, has been created over time. The “science” which is legitimated by institutions that are closely linked to this “global economy”, tends to seek to analyse only certain aspects of ‘materiality’. Priorised subjects by this “official science” are limited to areas which complement the agenda of constituencies of individuals who seek to manipulate the “recognized” body of human knowledge for power and control. That scientific priorisation context, has notably sought to exclude extraterrestrial relationships to humanity, in order to keep humanity ignorant of its apparent potential “locked” heritage within its own DNA.

	Dr. Francis Crick concluded Extraterrestrial orgins in the Human Genome, in relation to his well renown DNA research.

Indeed, efforts to seek a scientific context for the appreciation of spiritual phenomena, has also been frowned upon by the elites of institutionalized religions, which like “official science”, seek to control humanity within systems of accepted doctrine and dogma.

Collaborative exo-scientific research efforts inspired by Dr. Michael Salla, suggest that within the estimated over 20 types of extraterrestrial genes within human DNA, lies psycho-kinetic abilities associated with the genetic memories of ancient extraterrestrial races. These apparent psycho-kinetic abilities are associated with the focusing of the creative collective consciousness of be-ing in the universe.

These psycho-kinetic abilities, for example, could be viewed to manifest from time to time, when human beings in the process of trying to save another life, for example, have been recorded as executing, “great physical and other acts” which seem to go beyond the realm of understanding by “official science”. The recorded healing abilities which individuals, for example, in aboriginal communities across the world have demonstrated in relation to their spirituality, which had also been recorded of Jesus, could be viewed to be associated with accessing this DNA “memory”. “Official science” which seeks to complement the interests of various companies who seek to commercially profit from drugs and other therapies, has apparently sought to deny the awesome potentials of humanity for an elevated quality-of-living, by accessing an apparent E.T. DNA memory.

Does Earth represent a genetic frontier, to some Extraterrestrials?

There have been eyewitness accounts globally, including the broadcasted video footage of professional broadcasters, by millions of people of apparent extraterrestrial spacecraft. Exo-scientists indicate that this is because “these Extraterrestrials have sought to observe, or intervene on Earth, as a result of human beings having the genetic footprints of their ancient forbearers.” It is important to note that exo-scientists do not claim that all extraterrestrials observed by humanity, do so because of a genetic association with humanity, although “genetics” is a reported prime motivation.

Earth, therefore, appears to represent a “strategic genetic frontier”, between scientifically ascertained extraterrestrials who “seeded”, Earth, and other extraterrestrials with varying genetic agendas.

Further visible indications of apparent Extraterrestrial contact in Human DNA

The existence of diverse ethno-racial communities of humanity on Earth, perhaps, provides a further visible appearance of extraterrestrial (E.T.) ‘genetic communities’. African tribes, including the Dogon, notably, cite evidence of having origins from races of “supernatural creatures that came down from the sky.”

Evidence and testimony on the original “seeding” of Earth by spiritually-inspired, ethical Extraterrestrials

Exo-scientists indicate that ‘ethical’ Extraterrestrials inspired the communalistic and environmental protection oriented philosophies of Native-Canadian, African, and other tribes.

The knowledge of astrological facts within diverse tribal communities is associated with claims of extraterrestrial contact long before modern astronomy, further corroborates exo-scientific claims of evidence of extraterrestrial contact in Human DNA.

Aboriginal tribes in the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere embraced the “animistic” spirituality of the original reported spiritually and technologically advanced human and other extraterrestrials who “seeded” Earth. These tribes were apparently inspired by original constituents of human and other extraterrestrials to be custodians of “Mother Earth”, and to live in harmony and balance with nature.

.Then came reported genetic and cultural manipulation by competing extraterrestrial interests

Exo-scientists suggest that subsequent interventions on Earth by other extraterrestrials, largely sought to manipulate Earth humans genetically, technologically, and also by dysfunctionally inspiring religious dogma, and accompanying rituals. Apparently, these extraterrestrials performed ‘great feats’ in order to be worshipped as ‘gods’. The reported next step was to provide technology to these Earth humans so that these humans could create impressive looking “rich” structures of religious worship, laid with gold and other mined mineral resources, of religious worship to these extraterrestrial ‘gods’. This corrupting of human spirituality, would further dysfunctionally inspire crass materialism. This apparent influence is shown in structures which include the Great Pyramids, Temples, and into other religious structures which include Churches. Dr. Salla’s and other exo-scientific work, further attests to this milieu.

“…Hopi Indians [in the western U.S.] speak of how the ‘Star Beings’ could travel about the skies in beams of light like the sun, but in the blackness of night. Stories like these are identical to what I’ve personally heard an African medicine men (shaman) claim. Same exact scenario, that before the missionaries came onto the scene, it was also common place among all tribes and shaman that our orgins were from “out there”…” . Reference: Netscientia.com

These religious structures became centres in the creation of competing rituals and dogma between different “E.T. cult” groups. As these religious structures became of increasing importance as centres of communities, bigotries in turn, were cultivated by the elite emissaries of the manipulative “Extraterrestrial gods” and were used to successfully pit one group of humanity against the other.

According to collaborative exo-scientific research, led by Dr. Salla, alleged manipulative E.T. groups provided Earth Humans with advanced technology, to further instil an agenda of control against willing Earth elites, who were indoctrinated by these “gods”. The creation of technology would also be used to inspire the creation of weapons of war, in which wars would be waged in the name of defending “religious” systems, in turn guided by Extraterrestrial “gods” who sought to “divide and rule”. The manipulative Extraterrestrials sought to create false gods in their own image.

“The purpose of these “false gods” was to repress the development of a collective consciousness among Earth Humans, based upon the founding universal conventions.” Also according to the collaborative research of exo-scientists, “the purpose of the creation of systems of religious dogma was designed to instil petty hatreds and antagonisms that would repress “the conventions of peace, love, and wisdom, (which was attributed to the creation of our universe), and which would have otherwise protected Earth Humans from being exploited, as a genetic and overall planetary resource.”

Some of these Extraterrestrials, which apparently included Human Extraterrestrials who rebelled against the communal spirituality and “free will” ethic of original Human Extraterrestrials who had “seeded” Earth, reportedly simply sought to exploit the Earth for its mineral resources. According to the exo-scientific research findings of Dr. Salla, “Other rebelling materialistic-oriented working groups of Human and other E.T., viewed Earth Humans to be useful specimens to be incorporated in genetic experimentation programs.”

Apparently, socially conscientious Extraterrestrials, according to the collaborative research findings of Dr. Salla and exo-scientists “fearing the implications to manipulative Extraterrestrials genetically influencing Earth humans into becoming barbarians like Genghis Khan or Adolf Hilter, sought to “seed” “star children”.” These “star children” were “seeded” into humanity without the apparent knowledge of the Earth humans they came into contact with, to help, in the apparent view of Extraterrestrials to “elevate and inspire the socially creative potentials of humanity.”

Native-Canadian Art.

Notwithstanding this, ‘ethical Extraterrestrials’ according to representation by contactees, abide by strict “Galactic community” directives of non-interference on Earth, including the non-execution of “genetic experiments”. However, Exo-scientists indicate that the “crop circles” phenomena is a notable example of mostly “ethical Andromedans” seeking to inspire humanity in the form of crop circle messages.

Modern Earth Human DNA therefore reportedly has the genetic memories which are associated with origins of Humanity in the universe as part of a diaspora of “over 130 billion human beings”, and a subsequent millennia of uncoerced biological contact, and also the coerced biological experimentation with a mix of Extraterrestrials. These are some of the understandings at which one arrives, as a result of the pioneering work of some diligent researchers. These researches notably includes Francis Crick.

The work of Nobel Laureate Dr. Francis Crick, and other on ET contact in Human DNA

DNA Double Helix illustrated in one of Dr. Francis Crick’s book.

Exo-scientists are critically inspired by the work of Dr. Francis Crick. In his book Life Itself: Its Origins and Nature (1981), Crick — a Nobel prize-winner and the co-founder of the shape of the DNA molecule — claimed an advanced civilisation transported the seeds of life to Earth in a spacecraft. Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Crick who posits an extraterrestrial origin for life on Earth, is not alone in this viewpoint within the scientific community. The same year that Life Itself was published (1981), Sir Fred Hoyle authored Life from Space, in which he took essentially the same position. In fact, in an article that year in Nature, he wrote:

“The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate mater is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it…. It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.” (Hoyle: 1981, 294:148).

Dr. Hoyle opted for a kind of pantheistic intelligence that created life spores in other parts of the Universe, with these spores ultimately drifting to Earth to begin life as we know it. Because of the tremendous (and impressive) complexity of life-and the obvious design behind it — other scientists who challenge “official science” supported by political elites, are beginning to endorse this conclusion as well. Leslie Orgel, one of the well-researched heavyweights in origin-of-life experiments, is also on record as advocating this scientific position (1982, pp. 149-152).

Like the issue of Global Warming, and on-going Ozone Layer depletion, non-dogmatic scientists have blamed political elites for ignoring clear evidence of the Non-Earth origins of human beings.

Dr. Francis Crick was one of the two scientists who discovered the structure of DNA during the 1950s. Certainly an important discovery in the history of science, this came after lengthy research and a great pooling of information and expertise. Crick won the Nobel Prize for his work. Dr. Crick applied the same rigorous disciplinary standards to his Extraterrestrial origins findings.

In his book Life Itself, Dr. Crick said that creatures from another solar system brought the seeds necessary for life to lifeless planets and, thanks to their kind intervention, life began here.

Nobel Laureate Dr. Crick’s work, is consistent with the apparent findings of “Professor Sam Chang” of the Human Genome Project, who has been credited for seeking to release scientific findings concerning evidence of Extraterrestrial contact in Human DNA.

Exo-scientific representation on the origins of the universe

Dr. Michael Salla, and other associated extraterrestrial researchers make representation that our universe was born as an expression of a “collective consciousness”. Dr. Michael Salla specifically documents that ‘black holes’ were an entry point for beings and other entities who came together to spawn our universe. Furthermore, Dr. Salla’s exo-scientific documentation also indicates that these beings and other entities, sought to inspire ‘the universe’ into existence, as an ‘experiment’, based on principles of “Free Will”. That is to say, all beings and other entities are represented as having sought to be a part of the genesis of ‘the universe’ without any coercion. The collective consciousness of the universe is deemed to have manifested in the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of be-ings, who spawned ‘the universe’. Therefore, the universe would expand as an expression of this consciousness.

The genetic-cultural origins of Earth Humans

Exo-scientists indicate that the Pleiadians are from a star system called Pleiades. This star system is a small cluster of seven stars located in the Constellation of Taurus the Bull. This star system is a small cluster of seven stars located in the Constellation of Taurus the Bull; it is 500 light years from planet Earth. Exo-scientists claim that Pleiadians are a humanoid race that visits Earth often and whom exo-scientists also claim we share a common ancestry. Billy Meier indicates that he maintains contacts with the Pleiadians. He has provided corroborated evidence of having extraterrestrial contact to scientists. Mr. Meier indicates that ‘Pleiadians’ call themselves Plejaren (pronounced pleh-yar-en) according to their system, which bears the name Plejaren. Reference: Burlingtonnews.net, and Galactic-server.net.

“In the beginning, Earth was colonized by E.T. races, including human, insectual, botanical and reptilian species interests.” Dr. Salla’s collaborative team of exo-scientists indicate. Land continents first supporting advanced human colonies were Lemuria and Poseidia (Atlantis) “which sank over 23,000 years ago.”

Many African tribes have linked their origins with Lemuria.

Dr. Salla’s accounts indicate that “Each Universe is represented as a kind of living organism.” The collective consciousness of this particular universe is represented is having been inspired by principles of peace, love, and wisdom, associated with “Free Will”. But, because of the other polarity of fear which the original beings and other entities allegedly agreed to experience, the universe has also experienced “extremes of war, hate, and destruction.”

The critical exo-scientific study of the universe, thus requires a holistic sensitivity to contexts of analysis associated with consciousness, which has been divested from “official science”. Therefore, prevailing scientific paradigms on Earth retard the body of human knowledge from a full appreciation of the complexity of human experiences, in the broader context of the universe.

If spirituality is indeed a real phenomenon in the universe, then a critical context for science must endeavour to appreciate it, into a potential integral part of human knowledge and understanding.

Exo-scientific research testifies to Earth Humans having originated in the Lyra system of the universe. Lyrans apparently grew into Sirian, Arcturian, Antarian, Pleaidian, Andromedan, Cignus Alphan, Alpha Centauri, Sagittarius A & B, and Cassiopia.

Photo of Pleiadian spacecraft that Billy Meier had examined by apparently confounded, and formerly sceptical scientific reseachers. Reference: Billymeier.com.

“One of the first ‘contactees’ to describe Lyra was Billy Meier who received much public attention as a result of his alleged visits from Pleiadians from 1975 to 1986, Mr. Meier supported his representation with material evidence that continues to confound those sceptical of Mr. Meier’s claims.”

“Comprehensive investigations by a number of individuals and organizations found that Meier’s evidence was not fabricated and therefore constituted significant support for his testimony of extraterrestrial contact.” Dr. Salla, and other researchers document. Due to the amount of physical evidence he had provided over the years, Meier has gained great credibility, and the consistency and coherence of his testimonies suggest that he is indeed an important spokesperson for an extraterrestrial race.

Dr. Salla and other associated researchers also document that, “In a 1998 interview, Clifford Stone, a retired US army Sergeant who served in the US Army for 22 years, in association with other interviews, confirms the existence of extraterrestrials, who are ‘human’ and “can easily integrate with human society”; and are visibly “indistinguishable from the rest of humanity”. These officials also indicated that “These races are described to be from star systems such as Lyra, Pleiades, Sirius, Procyon, Tau Ceti, Ummo, Andromeda and Arcturus, and who have provided some of the genetic material for the seeding of humanity on Earth.”

Exo-scientists claim that the Pleaidians are our far distant first cousins and ancestral forbearers of some of our races. The Pleaidians are also descendants of the Lyrans who came from Lyra in spacecraft. The Lyrans would send down scout teams consisting of scientists and engineers and agricultural specialists to explore the surface of possible habitable planets and to explore them and return data and information to the mothership. One of these planets apparently included Earth. Each planet was explored and based upon its unique nature, colonies were then sent down to settle. It is in this way that the Pleaidians are so interested in our world and humanity on Earth. Exo-scientists claim that Pleaidians have been visiting Earth for at least 79,743 years.

Exo-scientists also further claim that they are very similar in many ways to humans beings on Earth, however, they are emotionally and spiritually more evolved than Earth humans are at this time. But Dr. Salla’s and other associated exo-science researchers indicate that “they too have gone through their growing pains, as Earth humans are going through them right now.” Dr. Salla and other learned exo-scientists in association with contactee further claim “Pleaidians have made attempts to share with us the benefits of their experience. So we ourselves don’t have to experience the same kinds of setback and possible destructions, but at present, not enough people on Earth are listening.”

“As the human race fragmented in the universe, genetic clusters of humanity moved, travelled, and settled many different planets in many systems as space travel evolved. Humans became aware of other planetary civilizations in these systems. Different cultures meet and grew. Belief systems clashed or spread. New thoughts of philosophy or technologies came into being. Humanity was evolving. A very strong social community developed between all in the Lyra System. Exo-scientists also further testify that “The Lyrans were a very peaceful race on the whole,” Dr. Salla and associated exo-scientists further document.

“The Lyrans learned to adapt to virtually all of the planetary environments that they settled. They learned to live in complete harmony with their respective planets. They developed agricultural communities that were literally awesome. They were not only efficient and could feed billions of beings, but it was actually enhancing the planet itself and creating an even wealthier environment. All aspects of life seem to benefit from the Lyran’s commitment to be at one with their home planets.”

At the same time, the life expectancy living in planets without the kind of pollution, and social oppression on Earth is represented by exo-scientists as apparent “being much higher than on Earth.”

These particular communities of Human Extraterrestrials represented themselves to exo-scientists as having economic systems that “were not in service of self, and having a community-ethic “beat as one heart, and shared and moved in the same direction as a whole and would try to make sure that none of their race would lag or fall too far behind the whole.” In other words, “The needs of the many, out weigh the needs of the few.” They were an incredible role model for all humanity that followed to this present moment.

Earth scientists who have sought to collaborate with the prevailing capitalist system of selfishness and greed, inherited by manipulative Extraterrestrials, would not seek to make humanity aware of such a cultural-genetic lineage. In the view of these scientists who have been co-opted from the dogma of political economic power, such awareness would inspire Earth humans into alternatives to capitalism, which would better facilitate their pursuit of an elevated quality-of-living for all.

Such Establishment scientists are not genuine searchers for critical information, but instead seek to spread a disinformation agenda. They have also been deployed to execute an apparently useful tactics by manipulative extraterrestrial “gods”.

“The Pleaides is an open star cluster consisting of 254 stars and many times that planetary bodies. Many of the stars are very young. This is located in the constellation of Taurus”, exo-scientists say.

Three of the star systems have human life as we know it, the most advanced is the system of Taygeta. And the other is the system of Taro which circles Alcyone. Most of the Pleaidians look like us in both size and stature, build, colour of hair, and in other ways.

Exo-scientists indicate that Pleaides life spans specifically also apparently far exceed human beings on Earth. Pleaides technology has made it possible to travel anywhere in our Universe at speeds faster than the speed of light. “They are capable of using the Earth’s oceans for undersea operations,” Dr. Salla documents, in association with other extraterrestrial researchers.

Apparently Pleaidians are very concerned about our misuse for our sciences today on Earth, and are correspondingly concerned “that we have completely lost our spiritual center or harmony with our sciences.” They have no use for money, politics and religious rituals and doctrines, which are used my manipulative elites on Earth. The Pleaidians “as our most benevolent races who have visited Earth, are worried, that we will destroy our planet and ourselves.”

All Earth’s languages are derived from an ancient Pre-Sumerian language which Exo-scientists report “was spoken in Lyra and in the Pleaides. The Pleaidians as well as other groups have left descendants on the Earth in the past.” They have said they are willing to help us but not to the point of changing our own evolution and then therefore becoming responsible for us as a race. They say we create our own future as we go, and that we need to correct our own mistakes ourselves or suffer because of them.

Humanity and the origins of the universe associated with creative collective consciousness

The original Lyran extraterrestrials who apparently “seeded” Earth, were inspired by a consciousness associated with a spirituality, that grounded their sciences into humanistic dimensions of service to the “greater good”, in contrast with elite-driven greed on Earth. Lyrans apparently refer to the collective consciousness of love, peace, and wisdom which inspired the universe as the Isness (G-d).

The “worship” of the Isness (G-d) is silent and solitary; free from all self seeking. There are no priests nor “saviours” authorized to come between a human being as a ‘soul’ and our collective consciousness in the universe. In the Lyran documented existential context, “each experience is personal, different than another and should not in any way be meddled with or judged. Each soul should become conscious of the divinity that is itself. “The Lyrans sought to create no shrines, no temples except nature itself, and the process of humankind caretaking nature, as an infinitely spiritual exercise of being. Be a real, natural, human beings,” Dr. Salla and other colleagues document. In the Lyran system of social ethics and spirituality, real faith may not be formulated in creeds, as have been taught by manipulative extraterrestrials who have sought to condition humanity as servants associated with systems of repressive dogma. These Lyrian social ethics apparently include according the alleged representations between Adromedans and Alex Collier, the rejection of “saviours”, and “messiahs” who have been used by “manipulative ETs to undermine the vital sense of social and environmental responsibility among Earth humans, for each other. The apparent idea in the undermining system, was to get Earth humans to throw their arms in the air waiting to be saved or liberated by a saviour, as elites oppressed and pillaged.

“In the Lyran apparent scientific appreciation of our universe the “Isness” as the expression of the collective consciousness of the universe, is only interested in your intent, the path of your heart,” Dr. Salla also documents. A civilization of beings can, for example, choose a relative path of evolution associated with an affirmed quality-of-living for all, accompanied with spiritual renewal, or pursue a ‘regressive’ “de-evolutionary” path of greed, and oppressive power, as Earth’s elites, which eventually results in self-destruction.

Indeed, The work of Erich von Däniken and former NASA research consultant and scientist Richard C. Hoagland reveals definitive proof of apparently self-destroyed civilizations on Mars. The surface of Mars shows Great Pyramid structures similar to Earth.

Humanity on Earth realising potentials for elevating quality of living from a course of on-going self-destruction, can be potentially achieved by OUR coming to grips with apparent evidence of Extraterrestrial contact in Human DNA. Humanity on Earth apparently needs to vitally re-integrate spirituality as a component in the scientific appreciation of the universe, that in turn, is vital to “unlock” the hidden potential for an elevated quality-of-living.

Humanity on Earth, also apparently needs to use the core spirituality of its own be-ing, to overcome any genetic contact with apparently competing manipulative interests, who according to Dr. Salla and other colleagues, have sought to sabotage human potential.

Recommended Readings on elevating human quality-of-living:

Human Development and the Quality-of-Life, ISBN: 1897035353; Quantuum Economics: Wage Slavery or the Quality-of-Life, ISBN: 1894839609; and Capitalism is Not Democracy, Part I, ISBN: 1894934636; Babylon and Beyond, ISBN: 9780745323909. Get these books from The Canadian National Newspaper Book Café.

 

Other research on Extraterrestrial genes in Human DNA was done by Zecharia Sitchin [excerpted]

	Zecharia Sitchin

Humbling was the prevalent adjective used by the scientific teams and the media to describe the principal finding that the human genome contains not the anticipated 100,000 – 140,000 genes (the stretches of DNA that direct the production of amino-acids and proteins) but only some 30,000+ — little more than double the 13,601 genes of a fruit fly and barely fifty percent more than the roundworms: 19,098. What a comedown from the pinnacle of the genomic Tree of Life!

Moreover, there was hardly any uniqueness to the human genes. They are comparative to not the presumed 95 percent but to almost 99 percent of the chimpanzees, and 70 percent of the mouse. Human genes, with the same functions, were found to be identical to genes of other vertebrates, as well as invertebrates, plants, fungi, even yeast. The findings not only confirmed that there was one source of DNA for all life on Earth, but also enabled the scientists to trace the evolutionary process how more complex organisms evolved, genetically, from simpler ones, adopting at each stage the genes of a lower life form to create a more complex higher life form culminating with Homo sapiens.

The Head-scratching Discovery

It was here, in tracing the vertical evolutionary record contained in the human and the other analyzed genomes, that the scientists ran into an enigma. Thehead-scratching discovery by the public consortium, as Science termed it, was that the human genome contains 223 genes that do not have the required predecessors on the genomic evolutionary tree.

How did Humankind acquire such a bunch of enigmatic genes?

In the evolutionary progression from bacteria to invertebrates (such as the lineages of yeast, worms, flies or mustard weed which have been deciphered) to vertebrates (mice, chimpanzees) and finally modern humans, these 223 genes are completely missing in the invertebrate phase. Therefore, the scientists can explain their presence in the human genome by arather recent (in evolutionary time scales)probable horizontal transfer from bacteria.

In other words: At a relatively recent time as Evolution goes, modern humans acquired an extra 223 genes not through gradual evolution, not vertically on the Tree of Life, but horizontally, as a sideways insertion of genetic material from bacterial

An Immense Difference

Now, at first glance it would seem that 223 genes is no big deal. In fact, while every single gene makes a great difference to every individual, 223 genes make an immense difference to a species such as ours.

The human genome is made up of about three billion neucleotides (the letters A-C-G-T which stand for the initials of the four nucleic acids that spell out all life on Earth); of them, just a little more than one percent are grouped into functioning genes (each gene consists of thousands of “letters”). The difference between one individual person and another amounts to about oneletter in a thousand in the DNAalphabet. The difference between Humankind and Chimpanzee is less than one percent as genes go; and one percent of 30,000 genes is 300.

So, 223 genes is more than two thirds of the difference between me, you and a chimpanzee!

An analysis of the functions of these genes through the proteins that they spell out, conducted by the Public Consortium team and published in the journal Nature, shows that they include not only proteins involved in important physiological but also psychiatric functions. Moreover, they are responsible for important neurological enzymes that stem only from the mitochondrial portion of the DNA the so-called “Eve DNA” that humankind inherited only through the mother-line, all the way back to a singleEve. That finding alone raises doubt regarding that the “bacterial insertion” explanation.

A Matter of Extreme Significance

Unless further scientific research can establish, beyond any doubt, that the only possible source of the extra genes are indeed bacteria, and unless it is then also determined that the infection (horizontal transfer) went from bacteria to Man and not from Man to bacteria, the only other available solution will be that offered by the Sumerian texts millennia ago.

Until then, the enigmatic 223 alien genes will remain as an alternative and as a corroboration by modern science of extraterrestrial civilizations, and their apparent genetic participation in the Human Genome.

A Shaky Theory

How sure are the scientists that such important and complex genes, such an immense human advantage, was obtained by us — rather recently– through the courtesy of infecting bacteria?

It is a jump that does not follow current evolutionary theories, said Steven Scherer, director of mapping of the Human Genome Sequencing Centre, Baylor College of Medicine.

We did not identify a strongly preferred bacterial source for the putative horizontally transferred genes, states the report in Nature. The Public Consortium team, conducting a detailed search, found that some 113 genes (out of the 223)are widespread among bacteria though they are entirely absent even in invertebrates. An analysis of the proteins which the enigmatic genes express showed that out of 35 identified, only ten had counterparts in vertebrates (ranging from cows to rodents to fish); 25 of the 35 were unique to humans.

It is not clear whether the transfer was from bacteria to human or from human to bacteria, Science quoted Robert Waterson, co-director of Washington University’s Genome Sequencing Center, as saying.

But if Man gave those genes to bacteria, where did Man acquire those genes to begin with? Zecharia Sitchin concludes that Human Genome was manipulated by Extraterrestrials.

Reference: Original report documented by the Public Consortium is in Nature, Feb 15, 2001 and of Celera Genomics in Science of Feb 16th, 2001.

Example of Report on an ‘ethical’ Extraterrestrial sighting in Africa

On 14th September 1994, a UFO streaked across the sky over Southern Africa.

Two days later, something landed in a schoolyard in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, with three or four things beside it, according to investigator Cynthia Hind. The primary witnesses were 62 schoolchildren, who had little or no exposure to TV or popular press accounts of UFOs.

Cynthia Hind interviewed them the day after the encounter and made them draw pictures of what they had seen. Below is one actual photographs of what the children drew and some of their statements. OTHER PHOTOS.

The door opened, and a little man go out that had on a black suit. He was very slim, and the suit was black. It was silver and the ring around it was red… lights along the edge.

I saw one over here, they had eyes like that. They were kind of, like, looking at us. They were, like, kind of astonished.

Many of the children received the same telepathic message from the beings…. to take care of the planet or civilization will be doomed.

“I think they want people to understand that we’re actually making harm on this world and we have the responsibility to restore balance between our technological and spiritual growth. As I see things, as a civilization, we r more advanced technologically, than spritually and tp bring the balance back, we need to operate from our love centres where truth & forgiveness reign!!” – SAUFOR

Zimbabwe UFO report screened on South African TV Channel 1 Program Agenda:

Zimbabwean children witnessed UFO together.

“Tonight at 8.30 SA time we were treated to the rare spectacle of a half a dozen CHILDREN AGED 8-12 attesting ON tv to the fact that a group of them had seen a group of four or five UFOs. Sentients with large eyes, long black hair wearing shiny black one piece suits had made themselves known. The ships had then departed. The witnesses to this encounter are a group of schoolchildren at the Areal School in a town called Ruwa not far from the capital of Harare. The date is 16 September 1994. Cynthia Hind, Southern Africa’s most well known UFOlogist had a few words to say, but the children stole her show with their innocent and honest faces. They had all drawn crayon pictures of the craft. The pictures were all the same.. This I saw with my own eyes. We had Dr. John Mack on the same show. What is he doing in Africa? But the star of the show was the South African Sangoma Wiseman CREDO MUTWA. He is well known for his disturbingly correct prophecies. One of these was the prediction of Hendrik Verwoerds assassination. Credo Mutwa stormed the program with figurines of aliens looking exactly like the various races we suspect to co-inhabit our planet with us. These figurines have long been in the possession of the African nations. He attested to the fact that the African nations co-exited with aliens in Africa for hundreds if not thousands of years. He made the disturbing allegation that the Europeans who first ‘colonised’ Africa were mistaken for these ‘other,’ star people. Credo Mutwa has also said that AIDS can be cured by a SONIC SCAN or AUDIO FREQUENCY scan of some kind. This does not harm the person, only the virus. Surely this is worth investigating?…”

Reference: “SAUFOR XPLoReS Ruwa, Zimbabwe – 16 September, 1994.”

Article Source Link: http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/01/26/01340.html

(Author’s Note: The ‘seeds’ of the Great Deception lie are in full gear at the moment.  They are coming to proclaim themselves our saviours, our creators, our gods, if only we follow them and their ‘agenda’ then we will ascend to become like them!! 

DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE!!!!  It’s a lie!!!!!

Receiving them and their ‘Mark’ will eternally damn you.  Don’t give in to it!!)

“Keep your nose to the ground and your eyes to the sky.”

JP

Race to keep a lid on labs creating ‘artificial life’ amid boom in DIY ‘biohackers’

• Labs need to be monitored, says American institute
• No framework in place to monitor projects
• Free labs in New York, Boston and San Francisco for ‘DIY’ biology
• Government ‘should assess’ DIY community

A system for keeping an eye on potentially dangerous ‘artificial life’ laboratories around the world is essential, say leading experts.

The Woodrow Wilson Centre, in Washington, US, warns that there is no way of monitoring labs tinkering with ‘synthetic biology’ to ensure that anything created is safe.

The field ‘synthetic biology’ came into being in 2010 when a scientist added synthetic DNA to a bacteria cell to create a ‘new’ life form. An Oxford ethicist warned that it opened the door to ‘the most powerful bioweapons imaginable’.

The Centre’s Synthetic Biology project has recommended a ‘score card’ to ensure laboratories adhere to guidelines laid down by a Presidential Commisision in 2010.

Billionaire entrepreneur Dr Craig Venter-a controversial figure known as ‘Darth Venter’ to his colleagues- created a life form two years ago

President Obama was presented with a report from the Commission’s 13 scientists in 2010, after billionaire entrepreneur Craig Venter created the world’s first artificial life form.

Since then, the field has changed. Worryingly, enthusiasts calling themselves ‘biohackers’ – and calling the field DIYBio – have begun experimenting with their own ‘synthetic biology’ projects, such as MIT graduate Kay Aull’s reprogramming of E Coli’s genome.

Free ‘Genspace’ biology labs have opened in New York, Boston and San Francisco, where scientists are provided with equipment to run their own experiments without regulation.

‘As the field progresses, the government should continue to assess specific security and safety risks of synthetic biology research in settings including the ‘do-it-yourself’ community,’ the report advised.

Valerie Bonham, executive director of the Commission, said, ‘In the report, the members emphasized the need for transparency, dialogue, and accountability around synthetic biology.’

Craig Venter, President of the Celera Genomics Corporation, announces the completion of the initial sequencing of the human genome in the East Room of the White House

President Obama requested the Commission’s report almost two years ago in response to the first ‘artificial life form’

Billionaire entrepreneur Craig Venter only created ‘artificial life’ for the first time in 2010, christening his life form ‘Synthia’.

Professor Julian Savulescu, an Oxford University ethicist, said of Venter’s discovery: ‘Venter is creaking open the most profound door in humanity’s history, potentially peeking into its destiny.This could be used in the future to make the most powerful bioweapons imaginable. The challenge is to eat the fruit without the worm.’

Could ‘artificial life’ pose a threat to humanity?

‘The Commission’s report was a landmark document and lays out a framework, but, like many reports of this type, no mechanisms were put in place to track progress,’ David Rejeski, director of the Wilson Centre’s Synthetic Biology Project, said.

‘Our goal is ensure that this report — and others like it – can drive change.’

The centre recommends a web-based ‘score card’ to highlight rogue synthetic biology projects.

‘The Scorecard, unveiled today, monitors the progress made toward implementing the recommendations in the report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.’

The report contains 18 recommendations covering a range of topics from risk assessment to ethics education and public engagement.’

Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2098222/Race-regulate-synthetic-biology-research.html#ixzz1ltWge5mM