Islam watchers blogged all weekend about news that a secret archive of ancient Islamic texts had surfaced after 60 years of suppression. Andrew Higgins’ Wall Street Journal report that the photographic record of Koranic manuscripts, supposedly destroyed during World War II but occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies, reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail. The Da Vinci Code offered a silly fantasy in which Opus Dei, homicidal monks and twisted billionaires chased after proof that Christianity is a hoax. But the story of the photographic archive of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, now ensconced in a Berlin vault, is a case of life imitating truly dreadful art. It even has Nazis. ‘I hate those guys!’ as Indiana Jones said. No one is going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave three days after the Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to believe or not that God revealed Himself in this fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God’s self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor […]
1. Do not sign the back of your credit cards. Instead, put ‘PHOTO ID REQUIRED.’ 2. When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card Accounts, DO NOT put the complete account number on the ‘For’ line. Instead, just put the last four numbers. The credit card company knows the rest of the number, and anyone who might be handling your check as it passes through all the check processing channels won’t have access to it. 3. Put your work phone # on your checks instead of your home Phone. If you have a PO Box use that instead of your home address. If you do not have a PO Box, use your work address. Never have your SS# printed on your checks. You can add it if it is necessary. But if you have It printed, anyone can get it. 4. Place the contents of your wallet on a photocopy machi ne. Do both sides of each license, credit card, etc. You will know what you had in your wallet and all of the account numbers and phone numbers to Call […]
What if I told you,’ Joel Weinstock said, ‘there were countries where the doctors had never seen hay fever?’ It is another piece of evidence, another ‘aha’ moment in the global medical mystery that Weinstock – the chief of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts-New England Medical Center – has narrowed down to one chief suspect: the worms. Weinstock, 59, specializes in studying why immunological diseases – everything from hay fever and asthma to diabetes and multiple sclerosis – are on the rise in developed countries but remain relatively uncommon in undeveloped countries. He believes these diseases, many of which were almost unheard of 100 years ago, are because of changes in our environment, a lack of exposure to something. And he thinks that something may be the worms. ‘We realized that one thing people always had was intestinal worms,’ he said. ‘But in the mid-20th century we started deworming children in developed countries. So we’ve developed a theory that perhaps deworming was helping these diseases.’ This theory – which is currently being tested in laboratory trials on how parasitic worms, known as helminths, regulate response to disease – has earned Weinstock the title of ‘Best and […]
Ministers are planning to implant ‘machine-readable’ microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails. Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals. But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record. The tags, labelled ‘spychips’ by privacy campaigners, are already used around the world to keep track of dogs, cats, cattle and airport luggage, but there is no record of the technology being used to monitor offenders in the community. The chips are also being considered as a method of helping to keep order within prisons. A senior Ministry of Justice official last night confirmed that the department hoped to go even further, by extending the geographical […]
Medicine’s dream of growing new human hearts and other organs to repair or replace damaged ones received a significant boost Sunday when University of Minnesota researchers reported success in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory. Experts not involved in the Minnesota work called it ‘a landmark achievement’ and ‘a stunning’ advance. But they and the Minnesota researchers cautioned that the dream, if it is ever realized, was still at least 10 years away. Dr. Doris A. Taylor, the head of the team that created the rat heart, said she followed a guiding principle of her laboratory: ‘give nature the tools, and get out of the way.’ ‘We just took nature’s own building blocks to build a new organ,’ Dr. Taylor said of her team’s report in the journal Nature Medicine. The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. Within two weeks, the cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood. With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
