This is 21-going-on-6-year-old Valeria Lukyanova (links to her Ukranian Facebook-y thing with literally 10,000 more photos of Little Ms. Vain). Valeria always dreamed of being a real life Barbie doll. And now, after numerous surgeries, she’s finally realized her dream AND CAN HOPEFULLY MOVE ON TO ACTUALLY DREAMING ABOUT SOMETHING WORTHWHILE. Wow, of all the dreams in the world to come true of course it’s squandered on the girl who wants to look like Barbie and not everybody hoping for a cure for cancer. “That little bitch.” *pointing* That girl said it, not me!

Source: Geekologie.

The U.S. Army is dedicating millions of research dollars into discovering building helmets to allow soldiers to telepathically communicate with one another on the battlefield.

The technology, which seems like something out of a science fiction novel, would use electrodes to pick up code words that soldiers were thinking.

Those codewords would then be transmitted back to a computer where the soldier’s position and message- telling, for instance, that it is safe to progress towards a target- which would be transmitted to their peers in the field.

Rumors that army intelligence was determined to use mind control technology to their advantage have been milling around for decades, and have been shrouded in a mix of truth and fiction.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was established in 1958 and was dedicated to expanding the Department of Defense’ technology usage, some of which included state-of-the-art, and top secret, research into the mind.

Delving more into the fiction side of things was the book, and later George Clooney movie, called The Men Who Stare At Goats which depicts the use of New Age concepts, like mind control, used during interrogation exercises in the last three decades.

Now, new details are emerging about the very real $4million research project being conducted across the country on the Pentagon’s dime.

Based largely out of University of California-Irvine, in conjunction with labs in Philadelphia and Maryland, scientists are trying to improve so-called ‘synthetic telepathy’ so that it could be used in a battlefield.

At this point, they have set their sights on 2017 as the year when their plan may turn into silent action.

So far, 45 per cent of the commands that are transmitted from one volunteer to another- like ‘call in helicopter’ or ‘enemy ahead’- are correct. That statistic is expected to improve.

According to a soldier quoted in Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, many of those people who will be the ones utilizing the technology are on board.

These days we learn warfare through video games and shoot with plastic weapons,’ the unnamed soldier said.

‘One week it’s science fiction- the next it’s on the front line. If it means I don’t have to listen to my sergeant’s voice one more day, then bring it on.’

Others, including civil rights activists, take the opposite view, bringing up concerns about a possible infringement on civil liberties if the technology were to be misused.

For the time being, the research is being focused on learning and applying the short military-based codewords, and not individuals private thoughts and deep secrets.

CONTINUED at The Daily Mail.

Russia, still bitter about the whole Cold War thing, has been secretly developing a microwave‘zombie gun’, designed to scramble people’s brains and potentially provide mind control. This…is not going to end well, but would make a pretty bitchin’ movie. “In Soviet Russia, gun zombies you.” Jesus, of course you went there.

Precise details have not been revealed but previous research has shown that low-frequency waves or beams can affect brain cells, alter psychological states and make it possible to transmit suggestions and commands directly into someone’s thoughts.

Mr Putin said the technology is comparable in effect to nuclear weapons but ‘more acceptable in terms of political and military ideology.’

Well folks, looks like it’s time to break out the tin-foil hats. Me? I lined my regular baseball cap with foil on the inside so I still look fashionable. I like to think of it as chic apocalypse. “You really do think about the dumbest shit.” Man, you ever wondered if like, the whole world used to be pyramids but most of them just eroded away?

Source: Geekologie.

An orbiting Nasa space telescope captured a dark, planet-sized object flying close to the sun on Monday – and extending what looks like a refueling tube into the star’s surface.

The black, Death Star-like, orb is briefly engulfed in light from the sun, then flies off into space.

A video edited from the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s photos inspired a wave of speculation on YouTube.

The imagery was captured by Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and edited together by a YouTube user, Sunsflare, who challenged experts to explain the strange ‘visitor.’

Naturally, the space agency has a rather more ordinary explanation for the strange, black orb.

It’s not a visitor from another solar system – or a planet being born out of the surface of the sun, as others had speculated.

Instead, it’s a solar ‘prominence’ or ‘filament’ – a feature extending out from the sun which forms over the course of a day, and can extend hundreds of thousands of miles into space.

Scientists are still puzzled as to why these features form. The ‘dark’ parts are material cooler than the surrounding solar matter.

C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre said, in a reply to Sunsflare’s video, ‘Filaments appear to be dark because they’re coolerin relation to what’s in the background. When you look at it from the edge of the sun, what you see is this spherical object and you’re actually looking down the tunnel.’

Nasa says, ‘A solar prominence (also known as a filament when viewed against the solar disc) is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun’s surface.

‘Prominences are anchored to the Sun’s surface and extend outwards into the Sun’s hot outer atmosphere, called the corona.

‘Scientists are still researching how and why prominences are formed.

‘An erupting prominence occurs when such a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing the plasma.

Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory frequently captures the phenomenon – although often as violent eruptions, rather than the eerie sphere of this week’s activity.

‘It is not uncommon for prominence material to drain back to the surface as well as escape during an eruption,’ says Holly Gilbert a Goddard solar physicist.

‘Prominences are large structures, so once the magnetic fields supporting the mass are stretched out so that they are more vertical, it allows an easy path for some of the mass to drain back down.’

Source: The Daily Mail.

Somewhere in Ireland, a burglar has the heart of a saint.

Officials at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin said Sunday they’re distraught and perplexed over the theft of the church’s most precious relic: the preserved heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, patron saint of Dublin.

O’Toole’s heart had been displayed in the cathedral since the 13th century. It was stored in a heart-shaped wooden box and secured in a small, square iron cage on the wall of a chapel dedicated to his memory. On Saturday someone cut through two bars, pried the cage loose, and made off with the relic.

“I am devastated that one of the treasured artifacts of the cathedral is stolen,” said the Most Rev. Dermot Dunne, the cathedral’s dean. “It has no economic value but it is a priceless treasure that links our present foundation with its founding father.”

Ireland’s national police force, the Garda Siochana, said detectives were studying hours of closed-circuit TV footage to try to identify the approximately 40 people who walked out the cathedral’s front doors Saturday morning.

The force said the thief may have hidden overnight in the cathedral and fled with the heart when its doors opened Saturday. Worshippers didn’t spot that the relic was missing until Saturday afternoon. Nobody was arrested.

CONTINUED at Yahoo News.

Pictures of cats dressed in wholemeal, plain and multi-seed bread are popping up across the web, being promoted by blogging sites and posted on Twitter.

It’s the latest ‘internet meme’, a term used to describe a trend which spreads quickly across the web, to emerge following last year’s planking craze.

A Facebook group has also been set up encouraging people to upload their snaps for the breading community to look at.

Thousands are discussing the new phenomenon across the internet which looks set to take off in a big way. …

Source: Metro.

We may never know what made the purple squirrel of Jersey Shore purple, but experts don’t doubt that it really was a squirrel of a different color.

“It’s not typical, but it’s not impossible,” said Harold Cole, a warden with the Pennsylvania Game Commission who investigated the case.

Percy Emert, a resident of the town in central Pennsylvania, said he and his wife caught the squirrel on Sunday in a trap, using peanuts as bait.

“At first I thought somebody around here was playing tricks,” he said. The family took pictures of the animal in its cage and posted them on Facebook. Then, on Tuesday, they set the squirrel free.

CONTINUED at MSNBC.

Katharina Henot suffered her fiery fate in Cologne in 1627 after being found guilty of practicing black magic. Arrested, and tortured to such an extent that the right-handed woman had to scrawl her last letter of defence with her left hand, she was eventually paraded through the city in an open cart before being tied to a stake and burnt.

Now the panel on the city council whose predecessors found her guilty of witchcraft hundreds of years ago will review the evidence. It is suspected that Henot, head of the city’s post office, fell foul of a deadly game of political intrigue orchestrated by her rivals and detractors.

The fact that Henot’s name has a chance of exoneration is due largely to the efforts of Hartmut Hegeler, an evangelical pastor and religious education teacher, who has championed the woman’s cause in Cologne.

“We were taking about the witch trials in class and my students asked me if whether the judgment against Henot had ever been cancelled, and the answer was ‘no’,” said Mr Hegeler.

“Katharina had her own reputation in high esteem; she would want to have it cleared.”

Source: The Telegraph.

Chinese scientists are investigating a bizarre case in which a cockerel apparently started laying eggs after all the hens were eaten.

The birds owner Huang Li, 47, kept the rooster together with seven hens on his small farm at Chumiao village, Mengcheng city, in central China’s Anhui province.

He said that his family had been gradually eating the chickens over winter until only the rooster was left – and he was amazed when he went into the cage the next day to discover an egg.

He said: “I thought it was a joke and that one of my neighbours had put the egg in there for fun. But the next day there was another egg and so on the third day I waited – and was amazed when I saw that the rooster laid an egg.”

He said word quickly spread to the local TV station which did a story on the egg laying rooster and after that scientists from the local agricultural ministry office turned up and borrowed the rooster to carry out tests.

He said: “They want to find out if it was a hen all the time that simply looked like a rooster or whether it actually changed to become a hen as a result of the fact that all the females had vanished.

“All I can say is that it did a good job waking us up every morning like every other rooster and it certainly treated the hens as if it was a rooster.” …

CONTINUED at Orange UK.