Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”, Nasa has warned.
National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.
Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.
Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.
Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.
“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,”Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa's Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
The teen fad known as i-Dosing – an allegedly trippy state of ecstasy reached, some claim, by listening through earphones to a pair of carefully mixed audio streams – has led some parents to worry, some teachers to panic and some narcotics authorities to start monitoring the so-called “digital drug.”
Unfamiliar with the notion of getting high via audio file? Websites boast that when repetitive beats are synchronized with brainwaves, it can alter the listener's mood or simulate the feeling of being high.
But one brain expert offers a decidedly blunt, low-tech take on this i-Trend: “It’s really much B.S., honestly,” said Damir Janigro, a Cleveland Clinic neurosurgery researcher. While music has the power to change moods, the medical concept behind i-Dosing is little more than a money-making scheme – just a dose of cyber-snake oil, Janigro adds.
To get the effect, users plug into “i-Dosers” through their headphones. The MP3 downloads (often accompanied by kaleidoscopic videos) send a distinct tone into one ear while simultaneously filling the other ear with staticky, white noise or an electrical hum, allegedly changing brain waves and bathing listeners in euphoric bliss. At least one track mixed in what sounded like a woman having an orgasm.
People are suffering. But they are being told its all in the mind. Our aim is to investigate ME/CFS/PVFS (Myalgic Encephalopathy/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome) further, to put the plight of an ME sufferer in the public's consciousness and to encourage further research and health policy reform. We hope to spread the word through this website which will have videos and podcasts on ME, short virals on the ME situation delivered multi-platform, a TV documentary aimed at a prime-time audience, a worldwide theatrical release and a docu-drama dramatizing an ME sufferers struggle, based on the novel The State of Me, by Nasim Marie Jafry.
GASLAND - (2010) Directed by Josh Fox. Winner of Special Jury Prize - Best US Documentary Feature - Sundance 2010. Screening at Cannes 2010.
It is happening all across America and now in Europe and Africa as well - rural landowners wake up one day to find a lucrative offer from a multinational energy conglomerate wanting to lease their property. The Reason? In America, the company hopes to tap into a huge natural gas reservoir dubbed the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. Halliburton developed a way to get the gas out of the ground—a hydraulic drilling process called fracking—and suddenly America finds itself on the precipice of becoming an energy superpower.
But what comes out of the ground with that natural gas? How does it affect our air and drinking water? GASLAND is a powerful personal documentary that confronts these questions with spirit, strength, and a sense of humor. When filmmaker Josh Fox receives his cash offer in the mail, he travels across 32 states to meet other rural residents on the front lines of fracking. He discovers toxic streams, ruined aquifers, dying livestock, brutal illnesses, and kitchen sinks that burst into flame. He learns that all water is connected and perhaps some things are more valuable than money.
That isn't a real movie title. But filmmaker Ric Burns, who created the PBS series "The Civil War" with his brother Ken, is shooting a documentary about the Wall Street firm. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is paying for the film, has editorial control and is overseeing the project through its marketing department, a Goldman spokesman said.
Mr. Burns, who didn't return phone calls seeking comment, was approached by Goldman in 2007 and has been tackling the documentary on and off since then. The company's history goes all the way back to the day in 1869 when German immigrant Marcus Goldman opened a one-room office on Pine Street in lower Manhattan, near the firm's new headquarters.
Already in the can are interviews with numerous past and present Goldman employees. Goldman's leading man, Chairman and Chief Executive Lloyd C. Blankfein, is likely to appear in the film.
Warren Pollock reports on a rather troubling development which we can only attribute to various cost cutting measures by near-bankrupt states, as anything beyond that would be far too macabre even for us. It appears that "several drugs are in severe shortfall, drugs used to treat emergency patients that might be transported by ambulance to emergency rooms, the drugs include heart attack drugs, epinephrine, lidocain, as well as drugs used to treat shock and other conditions. These emergency care drugs are now in shortfall with alternate protocols going out to emergency services in various parts of the nation. This means that if you need emergency services, the drugs you rely upon to save your life may not be there." As WEP asks, "where have these drugs gone? It is unrealistic to suggest that a whole variety of emergency treatment drugs would go missing from the inventory all at the same time, and areas around the country all at the same time." Pollock highlights the states of TN, PA and CA may have already seen the incorporation of the "alternate protocol." Once again, we hope this is merely an interim shortage and not a widespread effort to impair the traditional operation of emergency technicians across the country.
