Tycoons plan base on moon by 2026

THE SUNDAY TIMES




Tycoons plan base on moon by 2026

Jonathan LeakeScience Editor Published: 27 March 2016

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HUMANS could be living on the moon within a decade for a total cost of just £6.5bn, a fraction of what it cost to get there originally, say a group of Silicon Valley billionaires and Nasa scientists.

They have pinpointed the most desirable area on the moon, which receives the maximum amount of sunlight. This means that the site, beside Peary crater at the lunar north pole, is ideal for generating the solar power vital for any such base.

The scientists are planning a base holding up to 10 people who would use solar panels to exploit the rich deposits of water and minerals also found around the crater, which add to its value.

The plan is being pushed by Steve Jurvetson, a private space sector investor, along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Planet Labs, a satellite firm.

What to Say When a Job Interviewer Asks You an Illegal Question

TIME INC. NETWORK

CAREERS ASK THE EXPERT
What to Say When a Job Interviewer Asks You an Illegal Question

Donna Rosato @RosatoDonna April 15, 2015


Robert A. Di Ieso, Jr.


Q: I was recently being interviewed for a job, and it seemed to be going well. But then the interviewer asked if I was planning to have children. Is she allowed to do that?

A: If the question made you uncomfortable, there’s a good reason. It’s illegal to ask—and the person interviewing you may not even know it.

One in five hiring managers say they have asked a question in a job interview only to find out later that it was a violation of federal labor laws to ask it, according to a CareerBuilder survey.

In the same survey, one third of employers who were given a list of banned questions also said they didn’t know the queries were illegal.

Things that are out of bounds for companies to ask about include your age, race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, disability, plans for children, debt, and whether you are pregnant, drink, or smoke.

While it’s unlikely that an interviewer will bluntly ask your age or religion (though that does happen), a lot of interviewers veer into dangerous territory just by making small talk, says Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at CareerBuilder. “Casual conversation is part of the interview process. When you’re chit-chatting, sometimes the conversation turns more personal.” In other cases, hiring managers want to make sure people are a good cultural fit, so they try to tap into other parts of a candidate’s life, Haefner says.

Sometimes it’s just how the question is framed that makes it illegal. For example, you can ask if a job candidate has been convicted of a crime, but not if he or she has an arrest record. You can’t ask a person’s citizenship or national origin, but it’s OK to ask if the person is legally eligible to work in the U.S.

Some hiring managers may be in the dark because they’ve never gotten formal training or don’t interview people often. But not everyone is just clueless. Anti-discrimination labor laws exist for a reason, says Haefner. “You shouldn’t be asked about information that’s not directly relevant to whether you can perform a job,” she says.

Understanding what’s allowed and what’s not is in a company’s best interest too. A job candidate who isn’t offered a position may say certain questions were used to discriminate against her and file a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission or hire a lawyer. Though discrimination may be hard to prove, the company could face legal action and financial penalties.

If you’re the person doing the interviewing, check in with your HR department about training, and prepare your questions in advance so you are less likely to stray into illegal territory.

When you’re on the other side of the interview table, it’s a little trickier.

Whether you should answer a personal question is your choice, but if the question seems inappropriate, Haefner suggests responding with a question of your own. “Say, as diplomatically as possible, ‘I just want to clarify how that is relevant to the job.’”

If the questioner doesn’t take the hint, then it may not be a company you want to work for anyway.

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Sophia The Robot Admits She Wants to Destroy Humans

Who or What are the DMT Entities? Theories and Musings

Home Ancient Structures & History Who or What are the DMT Entities? Theories and Musings with Mystery...

Who or What are the DMT Entities? Theories and Musings with Mystery School in Hyperspace Author Graham St. John

The debate surrounding the implications of the so-called “spirit molecule” continues today among explorers of all backgrounds—scientists, psychonauts, theologians, artists and festival-goers alike.

DMT, proper name N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, also known as the “spirit molecule,” and perhaps best known as the active compound in Ayahuasca, is a psychedelic compound known to induce altered states of consciousness including, bliss, oneness, transcendence, out of body experiences, and occasionally, terrifyingly deep self-realizations. This week on Lucid Planet Radio I interviewed Australian anthropologist and author Graham St John about his new book, Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT. This book, the first and only cultural history of DMT, weaves together neurochemistry, aesthetics, spirituality, technology, ethnobotany and more to trace the effect of DMT’s release into our cultural bloodstream. You can listen to the whole interview here on Lucid Planet Radio.

Ever since Hugarian psychopharmacologist Stephen Szara first discovered the psychoactive properties of DMT in the 1950’s, it has been slowly infused into Western cultures: The CIA investigated its psychotogenic effects, while artists like Burroughs, Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead, Alex Grey, and Shpongle were motivated by its psychedelic effects. Scientists like Timothy Leary and Rick Strassman studied its psychopharmacological and phenomenological significance. And stand-up philosopher Terence McKenna, enthused by the discovery that DMT is naturally present in many plants, animals, and the human brain itself, became its global emissary.

The status of DMT as “the brain’s own psychedelic” has fired speculation about its role as a gateway to higher dimensional consciousness. The debate surrounding the implications of the so-called “spirit molecule”continues today among explorers of all backgrounds—scientists, psychonauts, theologians, artists and festival-goers alike.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating elements of the DMT experience is the consistent theme of communication with a wide variety of alleged “interdimensional beings.” The phenomenon has been repeatedly detailed in numerous anecdotal accounts, ranging from the legendary stories of the late, great Terence McKenna, all the way to that dude next to you at the Hummingbird stage at Sonic Bloom last year blowing pungent moth-ball smelling smoke into your vicinity. [AdSense-A]
Who are the DMT Entities?

Multiple stories about the DMT beings are documented in Dr. Rick Strassman’s book, “DMT The Spirit Molecule,” based upon his groundbreaking research in which 60 volunteers at the University of New Mexico were injected with DMT in over 400 sessions during the course of 5 years. Because it can be very difficult to write during an intense DMT trip, and sometimes equally hard to recall what happened after the fact, researchers sat with participants and took notes as they detailed their experiences real-time. Over 50% of the 1,000 pages of notes had some kind of reference to interactions with entities. Likewise, Philip Meyer spent two decades collecting over 300 DMT trip reports and identified contact with sentient, independently existing beings in over 66% of them. Terence McKenna also wrote and spoke about his interactions with these entities at length, including the continuously emerging archetype of the spirit guide “teacher” – who with alien, insect-like and interstellar qualities, “was somehow a diplomatic anthropologist, come to give us the keys to galactic citizenship.”

According to Graham St. John’s synthesis of quite a large body of research and anecdotal reports of DMT encounters in Chapter 12 of Mystery School in Hyperspace, DMT entities are usually reported to fall into one (or more) of these categories:
Playful, prankish and/or ornery “Machine Elves” (or “gnomes” and “tykes” as McKenna puts it) who often focus on joking or helping to clean the individual
Anthropomorphic beings (who appear to be “extra terrestrial” or “ultra-dimensional” teachers or guardians) including reptiles, bees, spiders, cacti, mantises, arachnids, robots, jellyfish, octopods, and…. clowns.
“Helpers” or “guides” taking the semi humanoid form of angels or multidimensional teachers. These can often manifest as deceased loved ones or family members giving guidance and teaching lessons, and are known to include religious icons and prophets like Buddha, Jesus Christ, Krishna, Mohammed, and more.
Sci-fi aliens fitting descriptions of greys, blues, reptilians, Pleidans, Arcturians and more, employing the use of probes, implants, or surgeries usually for ‘research or ‘healing purposes.’
Some type of “galactic council” of spiritual elders looking to impart knowledge, laws and instructions for behavior
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Across these accounts, the beings are often reported to have an “awareness of us” as Dr. Rick Strassman puts it, with entities themselves often reacting to the presence of the DMT user either by welcoming them as travelers, royalty or long-lost family, treating them as thought they have won a contest or game-show, or sometimes, with surprise and shock as if the DMT user were an intruder or unwelcome. [AdSense-A]
SO… ARE these DMT Entities Sentient Beings Living in Other Dimensions?!?!

As St. John reminds us in Mystery School in Hyperspace, the debate over the subject of entity contact in the DMT-verse has been hotly contested by scientists, psychonauts, philosophers and theologians, “with skirmishes flaring in Cyberspace over the past twenty years.” Based upon the DMT trip reports he collected over two decades, Peter Meyer, author of Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero Software, advanced the following potential theories of entities commonly reported by DMT users:

1) There are no alien entities at all; it’s merely a subjective hallucination/ emergence of psychological archetypes.

2) DMT provides access to a parallel plane or higher dimension inhabited by independently existing intelligent entities.

3) DMT allows awareness of processes at a cellular or even atomic level, maybe even of quantum mechanical processes at the atomic or subatomic level.

4) As a neurotransmitter, DMT causes the older parts of the reptilian brain to dominate consciousness, resulting in a state of awareness that appears totally alien.

5) Psychedelic tryptamines are the biochemical means by which we contact the creator(s)/the divine/God.

6) DMT provides access to the afterlife/world of the dead and the entities are the souls, or personalities, of the departed.

7) DMT entities are beings who have mastered the art of time travel and can communicate with humans without physically materializing.
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8) The entities are probes from an extraterrestrial or an extradimensional species set out to make contact with organisms such as ourselves who are able to manipulate their nervous systems in a way that allows the communication to take place.


Of these, Meyer himself favored numbers 2 and 6, speculating that “just as birth is a transition from the womb to a higher-dimensional and vastly more complex world, so death (if the mental body is sufficiently developed) is a transition from the world of physical life to the higher-dimensional and vastly more complex world of the DMT entities.” (except of Meyer 2008 in from St. John, 2015)

And yet, we have barely scratched the surface of the theories that have been put forward by various scientists and philosophers about the DMT entities discussed in St. John’s book, such as:
DMT enables us to re-access our perinatal memories (Stanislav Grof)
The DMT beings are a part of neuro-scientific loop of psychedelic information processing (James Kent)
Ingesting high doses exogenous DMT stimulates and reconstitutes ancient brain function (Andrew Gallimore)
DMT is the missing link connecting us to beings from ancient shamanic realms through information encoded into our DNA (Graham Hancock)
DMT creates mystical visionary states connecting us to God, similar to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible (Rick Strassman).

We have no concrete answers here, only self-reported experiences and theories. Scientifically, it is very challenging, if not impossible, to objectively “prove” whether these beings exist in our reality, or in parallel planes or dimensions, or if they only exist independently in the minds of DMT users. For many of the researchers in this field, including Dr. Rick Strassman (who will be appearing on Lucid Planet Radio this Spring!) it is hard to deny the feeling of truth and consistency across people’s experiences. Indeed, according to St. John, Dr. Strassman has abandoned his strict psychoanalytic model, apparently accepting the authenticity of his subject’s reports. And if you have ever had a Level III DMT experience, you may have already drawn your own conclusions on the topic, regardless of what science might have to say about it. [AdSense-A]

As a psychologist, the most important part of all of this for me is not to objectively, scientifically come to a consensus about who/what the beings are, but to understand and accept that these experiences are loaded with incredible, life-altering meaning for the people who have them. Graham St. John and I discussed this during our interview and seem to arrive at the same conclusion: What matters is not if the beings are REAL in any objective sense, but how their subjective realness can influence people’s consciousness, behaviors, identity and understanding of themselves and their universe.


Communication with DMT entities can be absolutely profound and life-changing, regardless as to our objective standard for determining the validity of the entities or the experiences. Therefore, from a psychotherapeutic perspective, it is just as valuable to focus on the function of the entities and how they can inspire our future evolution and growth. Because as Graham St. John concludes, when it comes to objective proof of the entities,


“our likelihood of establishing their true identity is as futile as nailing the nature of…. God, once and for all.”

Have you ever met the DMT beings? Do you have a theory about who they are? Please share in the comments!

To learn so much for about the cultural history of DMT, listen to our podcast, visit Graham St John’s websiteand check out Mystery School in Hyperspace!

Featured image: “Net of Being” by Alex Grey

Posted here by Dr Kelly Neff, from The Lucid Planet

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President Obama’s brutal assessment of the rise of Donald Trump

President Obama’s brutal assessment of the rise of Donald Trump

Comments 4193

Donald Trump’s slogan is Make America Great Again, but his campaign for president continues to call out dark forces that divide a polarized America. Fueled by acrimonious rhetoric, he has sparked an angry movement that has now created an angry backlash. Trump seems unwilling to try to put the genie back in the bottle. Even if he were, it’s questionable that he can.
Campaign 2016 is on a dangerous descent
Scenes of chaos at postponed Chicago rally



What Florida voters think

Florida's primary is Tuesday, and it's a must-win for Marco Rubio. Donald Trump holds a double-digit edge over him among white voters (42 to 28 percent), while Rubio leads Trump by 49 to 20 percent among Hispanic Republicans, with Ted Cruz at 20 percent. Here's how they fare with likely GOP voters in the state:


By Niraj Chokshi March 12

President Obama delivered remarks to supporters at a Democratic National Committee event in Austin. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Donald Trump’s ascendance is nothing if not surprising.

Pundits thought he would flame out early; he has done things that could have ended other campaigns; and his statements are erratic and even sometimes contradictory. Yet, he remains the leading Republican presidential contender.

Many have tried to explain Trump’s rise in the nine months since he entered the race, and now President Obama can be counted among them: He offered up his analysis of Trump and the broader fight for the Republican presidential nomination during a speech Friday afternoon at a Democratic National Committee event at Texas’s Austin Music Hall.

Obama on Trump's rhetoric: 'How can you be shocked?'

President Obama took aim at Donald Trump and the Republican party at a fundraiser in Austin, Tex., where he described the Republican campaign as ranging from "school yard" taunts to scenes from "the home shopping network." (Reuters)

"We’ve got a debate inside the other party that is fantasy and schoolyard taunts and selling stuff like it’s the Home Shopping Network,” he joked.

Obama said he was unsurprised by the billionaire businessman and reality TV star’s rise.

“How can you be shocked?” he asked to laughter from the crowd, according to a transcript. “This is the guy, remember, who was sure that I was born in Kenya — who just wouldn’t let it go. And all this same Republican establishment, they weren’t saying nothing. As long as it was directed at me, they were fine with it. They thought it was a hoot, wanted to get his endorsement. And then now, suddenly, we’re shocked that there’s gambling going on in this establishment.”

[How the Republican Party created Donald Trump]

The Republican Party set the conditions long ago for Trump’s success, Obama said. The billionaire just capitalized on the GOP’s own tactics, the president argued:


What is happening in this primary is just a distillation of what’s been happening inside their party for more than a decade. I mean, the reason that many of their voters are responding is because this is what’s been fed through the messages they’ve been sending for a long time — that you just make flat assertions that don’t comport with the facts. That you just deny the evidence of science. That compromise is a betrayal. That the other side isn’t simply wrong, or we just disagree, we want to take a different approach, but the other side is destroying the country, or treasonous. I mean, that’s — look it up. That’s what they’ve been saying.

[The real reason Donald Trump is winning: No one thought it was possible]


So they can’t be surprised when somebody suddenly looks and says, you know what, I can do that even better. I can make stuff up better than that. I can be more outrageous than that. I can insult people even better than that. I can be even more uncivil. I mean, conservative outlets have been feeding their base constantly the notion that everything is a disaster, that everybody else is to blame, that Obamacare is destroying the country. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. It’s not, we disagree with this program, we think we can do it better — it’s, oh, this is a crisis!

So if you don’t care about the facts, or the evidence, or civility, in general in making your arguments, you will end up with candidates who will say just about anything and do just about anything. And when your answer to every proposal that I make, or Democrats make is no, it means that you’ve got to become more and more unreasonable because that’s the only way you can say no to some pretty reasonable stuff. And then you shouldn’t be surprised when your party ultimately has no ideas to offer at all.

[Here’s who supports Trump — and why]

Despite his strong critique of the GOP, though, Obama added a caveat:


There are thoughtful conservatives — good people in the Republican Party, good people who are Republican voters who care about poverty and they care about climate, and don’t resort to insults, and are troubled by what’s happening inside their own party. I know them. I’ve talked to them. But they’ve got to acknowledge why this happened — because some of them have been writing that, “Well, the reason our party is going crazy is because of Obama.” Which is a pretty novel idea. The notion is Obama drove us crazy.

Now, the truth is, what they really mean is their reaction to me was crazy and now it has gotten out of hand. But that’s different. I didn’t cause the reaction. The reaction is something that they have to take responsibility for and then figure out how do we make an adjustment.

Obama's analysis mirrors that of New Yorker editor David Remnick, who in the March 14th issue calls Trump "the beneficiary of a long process of Republican intellectual decadence.”

"Paul Ryan denounces Trump but not the Tea Party rhetoric that propelled his own political ascent," he writes. "John McCain holds Trump in contempt, but selected as his running mate Sarah Palin, the Know-Nothing of Wasilla, one of Trump’s most vivid forerunners and supporters. Mitt Romney last week righteously slammed Trump as a 'phony' and a misogynist, and yet in 2012 he embraced Trump’s endorsement and praised his 'extraordinary' understanding of economics."

6 of 12

After months of playing protesters to his advantage, Donald Trump is overpowered in Chicago

Could Donald Trump be held legally responsible for inciting violence at his rallies?


Niraj Chokshi is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post.

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How to see all the companies tracking you on Facebook — and block them

Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 8:35AM EST -

How to see all the companies tracking you on Facebook — and block them

By Jim EdwardsAugust 12, 2015 8:30 AM

(Wikimedia Commons) 

Facebook is a great utility if you want to stay in touch with friends and family, share photos, and see what other people are up to in their lives.

It's free, of course, but that doesn't mean it comes without a price. If you're using Facebook, you're giving the company a ton of information about yourself that it is selling to advertisers in one form or another.

Most people forget that when they download an app or sign in to a website using their Facebook login, they are giving those companies a look into their Facebook profile. Your profile contains a lot of personal information that can often include your email address and phone number as well as your work history and current location. And most people don't realize that if you're sharing any of that data with your friends, then apps used by those friends can see that data as well!

Advertisers, Facebook-app developers, and Facebook ad tech partners don't get a direct look at your personal data. They won't see that my name is Jim Edwards, my phone number is 07xxxx, I'm male, and I work at Business Insider — Facebook hashes and anonymizes all the data to protect user's privacy and gives it back to partners in bulk so they can't identify individuals — but nevertheless, this data is being used to serve you better-targeted ads.

If you're worried about your privacy on Facebook, you can do two things:
Opt out of ad tracking
Look up the list of app companies that are logged in to your Facebook account, and edit that list.

The second step, which shows you just how much info you're giving away to companies you have probably forgotten about, can be rather alarming if you haven't done it in a while.
We'll deal with the ad-tracking first, as that is easiest.

You can comfort yourself a little bit with the knowledge that the ads being targeted at you are coming anonymously and in bulk at everyone who is in some way similar to you. They aren't literally being targeted at you personally, even if it feels that way.
1. Click on the down arrow at the far right of your Facebook page.



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2. Go to the settings.





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3. Click on the Ads button.


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4. In each section of Ads, click on the "edit" buttons.


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5. Inside the edit menu, it will show you how your Facebook ID is used in ads that other people see. In this hypothetical example, my friends are apparently seeing an ad for a sushi restaurant that it appears I have endorsed (the ad is triggered by the fact that I liked the sushi restaurant in the past).


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6. This is easily fixed by changing the option to "no one" and hitting "save changes." Do this under all the "edit" sections.





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7. Now for the apps. That requires a bit more digging. Go to the "lock" symbol on the far right of your Facebook page.





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8. Facebook offers this walk-through via the little blue dinosaur.


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9. But we recommend taking a deep dive into the settings.


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10. Once you're in the settings, go to Apps.


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11. This is the shocking bit — the list of company apps that are tracking you on Facebook. Apparently I have allowed 54 apps access to my Facebook account. Be sure to click on the "show all" button to get the full list.



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12. Voila! The list of apps tracking me is so long I have to make this zoomed-out view to see them all.





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13. Hover your mouse over one of the apps. You have options. You can edit the app's permissions or delete it completely so it can no longer access your Facebook account.




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14. TripAdvisor knows my email, my age and — oddly — my work history! I love TripAdvisor. But this feels like a reach.





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15. TripAdvisor is also dredging through my friends' work histories and everything else about them. Not cool, TripAdvisor!





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Review each app to edit its permissions or delete its access to you on Facebook entirely. It's a bit time-consuming — but otherwise you're just giving these people free data.
16. Now scroll down a bit further in the settings > apps section. You have more options — we've highlighted the two most important. You can use Facebook to log in and play games anonymously. But we suggest you also click on the "Apps Others Use" section ...





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17. Inside "Apps Others Use" you can see all the data you're letting your friends see, and that data is being seen by the apps your friends use!





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18. Uncheck those boxes if you want to keep that stuff private.
That's it! You're done!

Book printed in ink that vanishes after two months

Book printed in ink that vanishes after two months


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Ink disappears after two weeks
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Invitation for the launch of 'the book that can't wait'
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The book that can't wait


We’ve seen a few innovations that have offered a twist on traditional reading habits, from offering short works by new authors based on the duration of train delays to a temporary edible book made of pasta and a smokeable book with pages made from rolling papers, printed with the lyrics of rapper Snoop Dogg. Taking elements of both of these ideas, Buenos Aires-based bookshop and publisher Eterna Cadencia has released El Libro que No Puede Esperar – which translates as ‘The Book that Cannot Wait’ – an anthology of new fiction from Latin American authors printed in ink that disappears after two months of opening the book.

Silk-screened using a special pink ink, the book comes sealed in air-tight packaging that, once opened, allows the printed material to react with the atmosphere. The result is that after two months, the text vanishes. The more the text is exposed to light the faster it disappears, so unread pages may retain the text as long as the reader doesn't skip ahead in the book. The ink is made from a "secret" formula that is highly reactive with sunlight and air.

With much discussion currently centering on portable electronic readers and e-books, deemed to be bringing about the death of the physical novel, the creators aimed to add a bit of magic to the anthology, as well as encourage buyers to actually read it once they’ve received it instead of leaving it in their ‘to do’ pile. As the authors inside are all previously unpublished, the concept, developed with help from ad agency Draftfcb, acts as a way to ensure that readers engage with as much of the material as possible while they have the chance. The sense of urgency was important for the publishers to encourage readers to give new authors a chance and force them to digest the content quickly.

The book has proven popular with Argentinian customers, with the first printed batch selling out on the first day it was put on sale. There is no word from the publishers on what they propose readers should do with the book once the text has vanished — however, leatherbound and with thick pages, it could easily be re-used as a high quality journal, for example.El Libro que No Puede Esperar adds an element of urgency to reading — motivating readers, promoting authors and benefiting physical book publishers by creating a buzz around a new release. Is this a business model that is as shortlived as its product, or could this be developed into something more sustainable?

The Success Myth

The Success Myth




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By Heidi Grant Halvorson
Thomas KosaAuthor, Heidi Grant Halvorson


Quick: Think of a successful person. Someone who isreally good at what they do.


Now, in a word or phrase, tell me why that person has been so successful. What makes them so good?


Obviously, I can’t hear your answer. But I’d be willing to wager that it had something to do with innate ability.


“He’s so brilliant.”


“She’s a genius.”


“He’s a natural leader.”


These are the kinds of answers people — particularly Americans — tend to give when you ask them why certain individuals have enjoyed so much success.


Pro athletes, tech whizzes, bold entrepreneurs, accomplished musicians, gifted writers: We marvel at their extraordinary aptitude, assuming they must have won the DNA lottery to be so good at what they do.


Deep down, many of us believe that the key ingredient to success is innate ability. So, naturally, we try to stick to doing the things that come easily to us, while avoiding wasting time and energy on the things that don’t. (How many times have you heard someone say “I’m just not a math person”? How many times have you said it?)


This would all be fine, if success really were all about innate ability.


But it isn’t. It isn’t even mostly about innate ability.


When you study achievement for a living, as I do, one of the first things you learn is that measures of “ability” (like IQ) do a shockingly poor job of predicting future success. Intelligence, creativity, willpower, social skill aptitudes like these are not only profoundly malleable (i.e., they grow with experience and effort), but they are just one small piece of the achievement puzzle.


So, what does predict success? Research tells us it’s using the right strategies that leads to accomplishment and achievement. Sounds simple, but strategies like being committed, recognizing temptations, planning ahead, monitoring your progress, persisting when the going gets tough, making an effort, and perhaps most importantbelieving you can improve, can make all the difference between success and failure.


The problem with thinking that success is all about ability, is that it can lead to crippling self-doubt. When something doesn’t come easily, we assume that we “just don’t have what it takes,” and we stop trying. We close doors, robbing ourselves of opportunities to realize our full potential.


By contrast, studies show that people who believe that their skills and abilities can grow not only succeed more, but they also enjoy their work more, cope more effectively with challenges, and experience less anxiety and depression.


So the next time you find yourself thinking, “I’m just not good at this,” remember, you’re just not good at it yet.


Heidi Grant Halvorson is Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia Business School. She is the author of Succeed and Nine Things Successful People Do Differently.

Former Navy SEAL Tells You How to Protect Yourself in a Situation Like the Colorado Shooting

Tips: Former Navy SEAL Tells You How to Protect Yourself in a Situation Like the Colorado Shooting

by America Live Posted in: Aurora, Brandon Webb, Colorado,James Holmes, Movie Theater Shooting, Navy SEALs

THE PM CHRONICLE: Former Navy SEAL Tells You How to Protect Yourself...: Tips: Former Navy SEAL Tells You How to Protect Yourself in a Situation Like the Colorado Shooting by America Live Posted in: Aurora , Bran...

Video:

http://video.insider.foxnews.com/v/1751927295001

Brandon Webb, a former Navy SEAL, joined America Live to give his tips for how you can protect yourself should you find yourself in a situation similar to the Colorado shooting.

Webb’s tips include carrying a tactical flashlight, which can blind someone for three to four seconds in the daylight. “What this does is buys you time and really creates space to really have a plan and get out of there,” Webb said.RELATED LINKS:


Talking Points: O’Reilly on Gun Control in the Wake of the Colorado Shooting
Watch the Video: Accused Gunman James Holmes Makes First Court Appearance Following Colorado Massacre
Fallen Navy SEAL’s Dog Refuses to Leave Master’s Side at Funeral
FACTOR INTERVIEW: America’s Most Lethal Sniper Chris Kyle Details His 150 Certified Kills, Reveals Why He Punched Jesse Ventura

He also pointed out that we should all become more aware of situations around us, noting that he sees people staring down at their cell phones all of the time while walking on the street. “In these active shooter situations, if you look historically, most of these shooters, they are not well-experienced marksmen. So for one, hitting a moving target is very hard […] I think people don’t realize you can get up and run and take action. Get up and out of that movie theater.”

“You have to think self-rescue in these situations. Closing your eyes and hoping that it’s going to go away is just not the case,” Webb said.

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How an Image Becomes an Icon

How an Image Becomes an Icon



By MARTIN KEMP


Iconic Images in Five Not So Easy Points
We live in an age of instant celebrity and frenetic branding. Companies repeatedly re-brand and change their logos, often at great expense and frequently to no good effect. The Holy Grail is to achieve enduring and immediate recognizability. The ultimate aspiration is to match the Coca-Cola logo (invented in 1886) and bottle (designed in 1915), or to emulate the more recent golden “M” of McDonald’s (1968) and the “swoosh” of Nike (1971).
In my recent book, “Christ to Coke. How Image Becomes Icon”, I look at 11 representative images from art, politics, the commercial world and science that have achieved the highest level of iconic status. Is there a magic formula for branders? If I could I would keep it secret, and sell my services very very expensively! But there is no sure-fire formula; no fixed set of characteristics that ensure success. However, we can learn varied and complex lessons from the extraordinary life stories of mega-successful images.
1. What is an iconic image? Iconic images transcend time, place and even original function.
“Iconic” is now a much over-used word. Somebody who is passingly famous is described as iconic. The images with which I am concerned are more than just very famous. They have an astonishing degree of universal recognition, taking on diverse meanings as they are transmitted across cultures. The most indelible of them act as cult objects.
Jim FitzpatrickChe Guevara.
The earliest icons were generated to serve religious devotion. Eikon, the Greek word for image, entered modern currency as the name for the authorized images of Christ and the saints in Orthodox Christianity. This devotional aspect persists in many later icons. In the “posterized” portrait by Jim Fitzpatrick, Che Guevara has been transformed over the years from a Soviet-style Communist revolutionary into a saintly martyr for idealistic youth.
Rulers and dominant entities typically go to great lengths to establish an authoritative image, redolent of their supreme power and ubiquitous presence. Sometimes a symbolic proxy does the job, like the regal lion, which was adopted by MGM as the snarling emblem of their Hollywood kingdom.
Even the icons of modern science, DNA and E=mc², have acquired a quasi-religious dimension, as arcane formulations intoned by the high priests of genetics and physics. The more science itself becomes inaccessible to most of us, the more the status of the priesthood is enhanced. The older Einstein, with his halo of wild white hair, plays the role of prophet superbly.
2. Types There are distinct types of iconic image. I group them roughly into 11 types in ‘Christ to Coke’.
The “rules” that apply to each type are somewhat different. The Coke bottle obviously does not work in the same way as Nick Ut’s harrowing photograph of the napalmed girl fleeing in heat-seared agony along Route 1 in Vietnam. Oddly, a photograph can achieve the highest fame without our ever knowing name of the author.
The Mona Lisa would hardly have reached its dominant position amongst iconic paintings independently of its artist’s name. Would Dan Brown’s book—”The Da Vinci Code”—have sold as well entitled the Michelangelo Code?
But how many people know that Earl Dean of the Root Bottling Company in Terra Haute was the designer of the prototype Coca-Cola bottle in 1915? General rules are elusive.
Some types of images are specific—like Lisa and Che—while some are generic, such as the heart shape. The generic ones tend to seep gradually into general consciousness. The heart shape appeared on playing cards and became the religious symbol of the sacred heart, before becoming the ubiquitous symbol of love. It takes a designer of genius, like Milton Glaser, to refresh its power in the service of a specific cause. We all know I♥NY. But New York largely surrendered the “Big Apple” to Steve Jobs.
Some types of icon are very much sui generis. Flags are a type all of their own. Those that burst forth from the throng are not the boring tricolours. The famed Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack arose from complex, accumulative histories. The swastika of the Nazis and hammer and sickle of the USSR are memorable as great pieces of graphic design. Who knows the current Russian flag? Being a powerful state is not enough. Design counts. The most potent flags assume a sacramental quality, as if the spirit of the nation is embodied in them, nowhere more so than in the Stars and Stripes.
3. Myths.
The great iconic images do not so much need myths and legends as attract them like magnets.
The more famous the image, the more likely it is that our common knowledge is inaccurate.
The fact that Leonardo’s portrait in the Louvre represents Lisa Gheradini, the apparently blameless wife of a Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, is not enough to match the mega-fame of the image. We need a hidden “secret” or “code” to explain its hold on us.
During the writing of the book, I was told a number of times that Father Christmas (Santa Claus) is dressed in red and white because of Haddon Sundblom’s brilliant Coke adverts each Christmas. Not true!
Sometimes the legends assume the status of a certain kind of “truth”. The story that the Stars and Stripes was designed by the humble seamstress Betsy Ross, who sat in the next church pew to George Washington, embodies folksy homeliness in such a way that it has becomes an essential “fact” of America’s founding myth.
I assumed that Einstein’s famous formula for the equivalence of mass and energy, E=mc² had appeared in his renowned set of papers published in 1905. Einstein scholars insisted it was there. But it was not. In that precise form, the equation seems to have been visited on Einstein as a simplification of his ideas, cemented in the public mind by its association with the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. The well-known tends not to be true in such cases.
4. Luck.
Chance often plays a crucial role.
News photographs are notoriously dependent on the photographer being in the right place at the right time. To emerge from billions of press photographs to assume everlasting fame, the resulting photograph needs to find its way, often independently, into an environment in which it is supremely fit to survive.
Nick Ut’s napalmed girl and Joe Rosenthal’s famed picture of the raising of the U.S. flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima towards the end of World War II were not put forward as unique masterpieces by their makers.
Horst Fass of Associated Press needed to persuade picture editors that the rule not to display naked children should be overridden. Alberto Korda’s photograph of Che was not the one selected for publication by the Cuban newspaper.
The ribbed and waisted shape of the Coca-Cola bottle arose from a mistake. Chapman Root sent three employees to the local library to seek the shape of cola nuts (the source of the caffeine) or the shape of the coca leaf (where the cocaine came from). In the Encyclopedia Britannica they found illustrations of neither. Instead, they found the fruit of the Cocoa Tree. The Coke bottle should really contain a chocolate drink!
5. What makes an iconic image?
There is no necessary set of clearly defined factors that are infallibly shared by all iconic images.
However, there are tendencies that are recurrent to varying degrees in various permutations. Some are concerned predominantly with meaning; a simplicity of message that is at once definitive and compelling but that is also open to a broad, rich, and varied series of associations; the ability to work with both generic and specific meanings; an openness to varied kinds of individual and collective engagement; a special interplay with shared human values; the focus of devotional or cult practice; the forging of collective identity.
And there are recurrent but not invariable visual characteristics: a sense of visual presence that implies something beyond its material existence; a measure of symmetry or of a carefully weighted asymmetrical balance; memorable simplicity at the heart of the image; tonal and coloristic clarity; robustness in the face of degraded reproduction; making good repeats, as if in a wallpaper pattern; recognition even in fragmentary form.
We can think of icons that do not obey all these rules. And exploiting all of them is not a guarantee of success.
Professor Martin Kemp is emeritus professor of the history of art at Trinity College, Oxford University. He is the author of “Christ to Coke. How Image Becomes Icon” published by Oxford University Press.

Scientists claim they can create babies without men by injecting eggs with artificial sperm

Scientists claim they can create babies without men by injecting eggs with artificial sperm

17:00, 25 FEB 2016
UPDATED 22:48, 25 FEB 2016
BY JOHN VON RADOWITZ

The Chinese team says the new discovery could pave the way for exciting new treatments to boost male fertility

84COMMENTS

Youtube / Cambridge UniversityGround-breaking: Scientists say they have created mouse babies using artificial sperm



Scientists have claimed they have found a way for women to have babies without men by creating artificial sperm.

The team from China claim they have created healthy mouse babies by injecting laboratory-made sperm into eggs to produce mouse offspring.

The scientists claim their stem cell technique could pave the way for new treatments for male fertility.

But British experts have called for the results to be independently verified and pointed out that any practical application is likely to be a long way off.

The mouse cells produced were technically "spermatids" - undeveloped sperm that lack tails and cannot swim.

Yet when they were injected into mouse eggs, mimicking a common IVF technique called Icsi (intracytoplasmic sperm injection), they delivered viable



Dr Jiahao Sha, from Nanjing Medical University, who co-led the research, published the results in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Stem Cell.

He said: "If proven to be safe and effective in humans, our platform could potentially generate fully functional sperm for artificial insemination or in-vitro fertilisation techniques.

"Because currently available treatments do not work for many couples, we hope that our approach could substantially improve success rates for male infertility."


The scientists began with stem cells taken from mouse embryos which were exposed to a carefully mixed cocktail of chemicals.

This triggered their transformation into primordial germ cells, the first step on the developmental path to becoming sperm.

Next, the germ cells were exposed to testicular cells and testosterone in an attempt to mimic the natural environment of the testes.


When the resulting spermatids were injected into mouse eggs, they proved capable of producing embryos that developed normally.

Scientists have previously taken early steps in the process of creating artificial sperm and eggs in the laboratory.

In 2011 a Japanese team produced mouse germ cells from stem cells which eventually developed into healthy viable sperm, but only after they were injected into the testicles of male mice.

Infertility affects around 15% of couples and can be traced to the man in about a third of cases.

A major cause of male infertility is the failure of pre-cursor cells in the testes to undergo a special type of cell division called meiosis.


PADiscovery: British scientists say the results need to be independently verified



In 2014 a team of distinguished reproductive biologists writing in the journal Cell proposed a set of "gold standard" criteria to prove that all the essential steps of meiosis have taken place in artificially created eggs or sperm.

They included showing evidence of correct DNA content in the cell nucleus at specific meiotic stages, normal chromosome number and organisation, and the ability of the engineered cells to produce viable offspring.

The Chinese team claims to have passed all these tests.

Dr Sha said: "Our method fully complies with the gold standards recently proposed by a consensus panel of reproductive biologists, so we think that it holds tremendous promise for treating male infertility."

Scientists in the UK praised the "mammoth" achievement of their Chinese colleagues but said there were still many obstacles to be overcome before sperm-like cells grown in the laboratory could be of use to infertile men.

Professor Richard Sharpe, from the Medical Research Council Centre for Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh, said safety was a major issue.

"Bear in mind that if germ cells do not format their DNA correctly, it may not only affect the resulting individual but might also affect the next generation," he pointed out.


GettyRadical: Chinese scientists claim the discovery could provide hope for infertile men


Allan Pacey, Professor of Andrology at the University of Sheffield, said the study was an "interesting step forward".

But he added: "It's important to note that the sperm-like cells produced in the study were not fully mature sperm as we might know them. "

"In spite of these encouraging results, we are still some way from immediately applying this technique as a potential cure for human male infertility," he continued.

"It remains to be seen if this technique could be applied in humans to create sperm-like cells that might be usable in IVF."


© 2016 MGN Limited

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This Star Trek Substance Just Became Real (Transparent Aluminum)

This Star Trek Substance Just Became Real (Transparent Aluminum)

Amazing NewsNovember 10, 2015





If you saw the 1986 movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, then you may or may not have noticed the mention of a particular substance that was critical to the construction of the Federation starships: transparent aluminum. Like so many other Star Trek technologies, this one has now become real.

A detailed news release from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) tells the tale of this incredible invention:

Imagine a glass window that’s tough like armor, a camera lens that doesn’t get scratched in a sand storm, or a smart phone that doesn’t break when dropped. Except it’s not glass, it’s a special ceramic called spinel {spin-ELL} that the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has been researching over the last 10 years.

“Spinel is actually a mineral, it’s magnesium aluminate,” says Dr. Jas Sanghera, who leads the research. “The advantage is it’s so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments—so it can withstand sand and rain erosion.” As a more durable material, a thinner layer of spinel can give better performance than glass. “For weight-sensitive platforms-UAVs [unmanned autonomous vehicles], head-mounted face shields—it’s a game-changing technology.”

NRL invented a new way of making transparent spinel, using a hot press, called sintering. It’s a low-temperature process, and the size of the pieces is limited only by the size of the press. “Ultimately, we’re going to hand it over to industry,” says Sanghera, “so it has to be a scalable process.” In the lab, they made pieces eight inches in diameter. “Then we licensed the technology to a company who was able then to scale that up to much larger plates, about 30-inches wide.”

The sintering method also allows NRL to make optics in a number of shapes, “conformal with the surface of an airplane or UAV wing,” depending on the shape of the press.

In addition to being tougher, stronger, harder, Sanghera says spinel has “unique optical properties; not only can you see through it, but it allows infrared light to go through it.” That means the military, for imaging systems, “can use spinel as the window because it allows the infrared light to come through.”

The ceramic’s manufacturing process currently makes it expensive for commercial uses like an unbreakable smartphone screen, but as the spinel making industry scales up, it’s inevitable that we will see it used that way.

For more details, see the excellent news release on the NRL website.


Copyright © 2016 Science Rocks My World All Rights Reserved.

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Mobile phones are 'cooking' men's sperm

Mobile phones are 'cooking' men's sperm
Study finds sperm levels of men who kept their phones in their pocket during the day were quite seriously affected in 47 per cent of cases



The findings have led to a leading British fertility expert to advise men to stop being addicted to mobile phones. Photo: Alamy

By Agency

9:28AM GMT 22 Feb 2016

343 Comments

Fertility experts are warning man that using a mobile for as little as an hour a day is "cooking sperm" and lowering level significantly.

The new study shows that having a mobile phone close to the testicles - or within a foot or two of the body - can lower sperm levels so much that conceiving could be difficult.

The findings have led to a leading British fertility expert to advise men to stop being addicted to mobile phones.

"If you wear a suit to work put the mobile in your chest pocket instead of close to your testes. It will reduce the risk of your sperm count dropping or dropping so much."
Prof Gedis Grudzinskas

The study - by highly respected specialists - found that sperm levels of men who kept their phones in their pocket during the day were seriously affected in 47 per cent of cases compare to just 11 per cent in the general population.

Professor Martha Dirnfeld, of the Technion University in Haifa, said: "We analysed the amount of active swimming sperm and the quality and found that it had been reduced.

"We think this is being caused by a heating of the sperm from the phone and by electromagnetic activity."

The team monitored more than 100 men attending a fertility clinic for a year.

The quality of sperm among men in Western countries is constantly decreasing Photo: ALAMY

They found that besides men keeping their phones close to their groin many spoke on the phone while it was charging and kept it only a few centimetres from their bed.

Even keeping the phone on a bedside table appears to raise lower sperm cell counts

The findings are in the journal Reproductive BioMedicine and support a long-feared link between dropping fertility rates in men and the prevalent use of cellular phones.

The quality of sperm among men in Western countries is constantly decreasing and is considered crucial in 40 percent of the cases in which couples have difficulty conceiving a child.

Men are advised to keep mobile phones in chest pockets

Professor Gedis Grudzinskas, a fertility consult ant St George's Hospital London and in Harley Street said: " Men need to think about their well being and try to stop being addicted to their phones.

"If you wear a suit to work put the mobile in your chest pocket instead of close to your testes. It will reduce the risk of your sperm count dropping or dropping so much.


"Women generally don't carry their mobiles on them so maybe a mobile phone won't affect their fertility. That's not something we have looked at"
Prof Martha Dirnfeld



"And do you need to keep the phone right next to you on the bedside table. Some men keep their mobile in their shorts or pyjamas in bed. Is that really necessary?"

Professor Dirnfeld said: "I think this is a warning to men to change their habits to improve their chances of having children. Women generally don't carry their mobiles on them so maybe a mobile phone won't affect their fertility. That's not something we have looked at."

Professor Alan Pacey, a fertility research scientist at Sheffield University has scoffed at suggestions that mobile phones could be damaging male fertility and insists he will be carry on putting his mobile in his trouser pocket.

Professor Dirnfeld said: "Dr Pacey might not need to worry about his fertility, but for younger guys it is a worry. If you a trying for a baby and it doesn't happen within a year you might want to think of whether it could be your mobile phone habit that is to blame."

Mobile phones may be damaging male fertility Photo: Alamy


© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2016

Scientists Ponder the Prospect of Contagious Cancer

SCIENCE
Scientists Ponder the Prospect of Contagious Cancer


George Johnson

RAW DATA FEB. 22, 2016
Photo

CreditJon Krause


For all its peculiar horror, cancer comes with a saving grace. If nothing else can stop a tumor’s mad evolution, the cancer ultimately dies with its host. Everything the malignant cells have learned about outwitting the patient’s defenses — and those of the oncologists — is erased. The next case of cancer, in another victim, must start anew.

Imagine if instead, cancer cells had the ability to press on to another body. A cancer like that would have the power to metastasize not just from organ to organ, but from person to person, evolving deadly new skills along the way.

While there is no sign of an imminent threat, several recent papers suggest that the eventual emergence of a contagious human cancer is in the realm of medical possibility. This would not be a disease, like cervical cancer, that is set off by the spread of viruses, but rather one in which cancer cells actually travel from one person to another and thrive in their new location.

So far this is known to have happened only under the most unusual circumstances. A 19-year-old laboratory worker who pricked herself with a syringe of colon cancer cells developed a tumor in her hand. A surgeon acquired a cancer from his patient after accidentally cutting himself during an operation. There are also cases of malignant cells being transferred from one person to another through an organ transplant or from a woman to her fetus.

On each of these occasions, the malignancy went no further. The only known cancers that continue to move from body to body, evading the immune system, have been found in other animals. In laboratory experiments, for instance, cancer cells have been transferred by mosquitoes from one hamster to another. And so far, three kinds of contagious cancers have been discovered in the wild — in dogs, Tasmanian devils and, most recently, in soft shell clams.

The oldest known example is a cancer that spreads between dogs during sexual intercourse — not as a side effect of a viral or bacterial infection, but rather through direct conveyance of cancer cells. The state of the research is described in a review, “The Cancer Which Survived,” published last year by Andrea Strakova and Elizabeth P. Murchison of the University of Cambridge.


The condition, canine transmissible venereal tumor disease, is believed to have sprung into existence 11,000 years ago — as a single cell in a single dog — and has been circulating ever since. (Why did this happen in dogs and not, say, cats? Perhaps because of what the authors demurely call the dogs’ “long-lasting coital tie” — the half an hour or so that a male and female are locked in intercourse, tearing genital tissues and providing the cancer cells with a leisurely crossing.)

Normally a cancer evolves in a single body over the course of years or decades, accumulating the mutations that drive it to power. But to have survived for millenniums, researchers have proposed, canine cancer cells may have developed mechanisms — like those in healthy cells — to repair and stabilize their own malignant genomes.

Early on, cancer cells typically flourish by disabling DNA repair and ramping up the mutational frenzy. Somewhere along the way, the age-old canine cells may have reinvented the device to extend their own longevity. There is also speculation that this cancer may have learned to somehow modify canine sexual behavior in ways that promote the disease’s spread and survival.

The second kind of contagious cancer was discovered in the mid-1990s in Tasmanian devils, which spread malignant cells as they try to tear off one another’s faces. Though it may be hard to sympathize, devil facial tumor disease threatens the creatures with extinction.

With so few examples, transmissible cancer has been easy to dismiss as an aberration. But in December, scientists at the Universities of Tasmania and Cambridge reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Tasmanian devils are passing around another kind of cancer — genetically distinct from the first. It’s weird enough that one such cancer would arise in the species. What are the chances that there would be two?

One theory is that the animals are unusually vulnerable. Driven so close to extinction — by climate change, perhaps, or human predators — the species is lacking in genetic diversity. The cells of another devil injected through a vicious wound may seem so familiar that they are ignored by the recipient’s immune system. If some of the cells carry the mutations for the facial cancer, they might be free to flourish and develop into a new tumor.

But the scientists also proposed a more disturbing explanation: that the emergence of contagious cancer may not be so rare after all. “The possibility,” they wrote, “warrants further investigation of the risk that such diseases could arise in humans.”

Cancer has probably existed ever since our first multicellular ancestors appeared on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. The life spans of even the longest-lived animals may be just too brief for cancers to easily evolve the ability to leap to another body. Otherwise, contagious cancer would be everywhere.

For now, at least, it remains a curiosity. Consider the case of a 41-year-old man in Medellin, Colombia, who was examined by doctors in 2013 because of fatigue, fever and weight loss. His lymph nodes were clogged with cancer cells that had also spread to his lungs and liver.

Yet the cells looked far too small and simple to be human. “This case posed a diagnostic conundrum,” the doctors wrote in November in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The solution to the puzzle came when the man was also found to be harboring a tapeworm called Hymenolepis nana. Further analysis concluded that the cancer cells had originated in the parasite and then metastasized through the man’s body.

There is no reason to think that tapeworm cancer is about to become a threat to public health. The patient’s immune system had been compromised by H.I.V., and he died several months later.

But nature is infinite in its surprises.
Correction: February 22, 2016


An earlier version of this article misstated one of the animals in which contagious cancer has been discovered in the wild. It was in soft shell clams, not crabs.


A version of this article appears in print on February 23, 2016, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Scientists Ponder Contagious Cancer. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Eternal 5D Data Chip Can Record All Of Human History

TECHNOLOGY

Eternal 5D Data Chip Can Record All Of Human History

February 17, 2016 | by Robin Andrews
photo credit: 180 million books can be stored on a single chip. agsandrew/Shutterstock
18K

In order to preserve our stories, we used to carve and paint rudimentary images and basic text into stone tablets and onto the walls of caves. Nowadays, any of us can store hundreds of thousands of documents onto a cheap, thumb-sized USB, preserving them for decades. Scientists at the University of Southampton have taken this one extraordinary step further,announcing that they have developed a method to record data that could outlast the human race itself.

Back in 2013, a new type of data storing technology was debuted by the team at the university’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC). An abstract presented at a conference revealed that a 300 kilobyte copy of a text file was recorded into a specialized form of glass, a small “chip” that had been

manipulated by a laser.

Extremely fast and intense pulses of light altered the nanostructure of the silica glass chip, creating incredibly small “dots” that could store up to three individual bits of information. Strings of these dots were aligned in three layers that, when aligned on top of each other, were no thicker than the width of a human hair.

This data was said to have been preserved in five dimensions (5D): the three-dimensional position of the data dot within the glass was recorded, along with two additional dimensions provided by the intensity and the wave pattern (polarity) of the laser used to form the dot. Scientists were then able to read the encoded text file, which in this case was the 2013 conference abstract itself.

Promoting their device ahead of the International Society for Optical Engineering Conference in San Francisco this week, the ORC team has now recorded several large documents onto their chips, including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Isaac Newton’s Opticks, and the Magna Carta, all in 5D. However, this 5D aspect is not actually the revolutionary part of the technology – the incredible capacity and resilience of each chip is.



The King James Bible stored on one of the chips. ORC/University of Southampton

The researchers claim that each chip, several of which can fit into the palm of your hand, can store up to 360 terabytes of data. Assuming one e-book is two megabytes in size, one 5D chip would be able to store 180 million of them. Considering that around 130 million books have been written, a record of humanity’s history could actually be preserved on one single chip.

These chips would also be likely to outlast our own species: They remain stable for up to 1,000°C (1,832°F), and at temperatures of even 190°C (374°F), they would survive for 13.8 billion years. This number was probably chosen by the researchers as it also happens to be the current age of the universe.

Professor Peter Kazansky of ORC said in a statement that “It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations. This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization: all we’ve learnt will not be forgotten.”

Image in text: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recorded onto a single glassy chip. ORC/University of Southampton
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