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“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence.”—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

In the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

Indeed, at a time when we are all viewed as suspects, there are so many ways in which a person can be branded a criminal for violating any number of laws, regulations or policies. Even if you haven’t knowingly violated any laws, there is still a myriad of ways in which you can run afoul of the police state and end up on the wrong side of […]

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Image of an atom
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The world of quantum mechanics is weird. Objects that are far apart can influence each other in what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”, and cats can potentially be dead and alive at the same time. For decades, scientists have tried to prove that these effects are not just mathematical quirks, but real properties of the physical world.

And they are getting somewhere. Researchers have finally proven in a new study that the link between particles at a distance reflects how the universe behaves, rather than being an experimental artefact. Meanwhile, another team of researchers have set out to show that a living creature, albeit a bacterium, can be in two different quantum states at the same time – just like the cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment.

Bell’s inequality test

But let’s begin with the paper, published in Nature, which proves that the world is inherently spooky. All systems described by quantum mechanics can display so-called entanglement. For example an […]

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Credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Monsanto has cleared a regulatory hurdle for the release of a new type of genetically modified corn, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture signing off on the seeds.

The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services announced Friday that it would deregulate Monsanto’s MON 87411 maize after the agency’s review concluded it did not pose a significant threat to other crops, plants or the environment, Reuters reports. The corn was developed to fight rootworms and be tolerant to glyphosate herbicides. The seeds must still be assessed by the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. and other regulators in other countries.

St. Louis-based Monsanto is planning a full commercial launch of a line of products featuring the corn by the end of the decade if all necessary regulatory approvals are received, Reuters reports.

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