The bad science scandal: how fact-fabrication is damaging UK’s global name for research

John Lawless | independent.co.uk

Britain’s leading science institutions will be told on Monday that they will be stripped of many millions of pounds in research grants if they employ rogue researchers who fake the results of experiments, The Independent has learnt.

The clampdown comes as retractions of scientific claims by medical journals are on course to top 500 for the first time in 2013 – having been just 20 a year in the late 1990s, when Andrew Wakefield notoriously claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism in children. In April, the UK’s first researcher was jailed for falsifying data over a prolonged period.

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Greg Smith’s Resignation: Are Wall Street Traders Psychopathic?

Maia Szalavitz
Time

When a Goldman Sachs executive director, Greg Smith, resigned on Wednesday, he left in his wake a scathing op-ed in the New York Times excoriating the firm for its greedy values. The op-ed shook Goldman “like a bomb,” according to another story on the front page the following day. Smith claimed that Goldman’s current leadership had let the firm’s values disintegrate. Where once the Goldman culture encouraged employees to serve their clients for mutual benefit, now, Smith said, the driving force was rapacious avarice. The firm promotes “ripping their clients off,” he wrote.

To the average 99-percenter, this hardly seems like a revelation. Unethical behavior and Wall Street go hand in hand — especially at the top, right? Goldman supporters might say this perspective reflects sheer jealousy and resentment; however, a growing body of research suggests that there’s more to it than that.

One 2010 studylooked directly at the prevalence of psychopathic traits in a sample of 203 executives at seven companies who had been chosen for their leadership potential to participate in additional management training. (The researchers did not reveal the nature of the businesses that employed the managers, so the results here don’t apply only to financial firms.)

Read More: Greg Smith’s Resignation: Are Wall Street Traders Psychopathic?

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How Big Wind blows away its opponents

James Delingpole | theaustralian.com.au

SINCE 2007, household electricity prices in Australia have risen by more than 40 per cent and by next year are projected to rise by around about 30 per cent. If this bothers you then the place you should be today is Canberra, joining the people’s revolution against what Alby Schultz MP says is the “biggest government sponsored fraud in the history of our country”.

Schultz was speaking to parliament about Big Wind, an industry so rife with “intimidation, manipulation, lies and cover-up” he believes there’s enough evidence “to justify a royal commission”. So how come, you may be wondering, so many of us have been kept in the dark for so long?

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One in four young people in EU at risk of poverty, study says

Honor Mahony
EU Observer

RUSSELS – Almost a quarter of the EU’s population is at risk of poverty or social exclusion, according to statistics released Wednesday (8 February), with 13 member states recording a rise in the number of their citizens considered vulnerable.

The figures for 2010 show that 115 million Europeans, or 23.4 percent of the EU population, live in households with less than the poverty-threshold disposable income, in households where there is severe material deprivation (such as a lack of heating) or where the adults worked less than 20 percent of their total work potential.

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Cartoon: Justice?

just

Artist: pooy@

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Quote: Elvis Presley on judging

ocean

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George Orwell back in fashion as Prism stokes Big Brother paranoia

Stephen Moss | mg.co.za

The NSA Prism surveillance scandal has been good news for George Orwell, and in particular for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was originally published in 1949. Sales of the centennial edition have risen by more than 7 000% on Amazon.com . Having been languishing at 13 074 in the list, it is now up to 193 and rising.

It may not rival Caroline Barnett’s Willing to Walk on Water: Step Out in Faith and Let God Work Miracles through Your Life, which has miraculously surged from 144th to first in the past 24 hours with a 267 000% rise, but clearly many people are finding parallels between the US government’s willingness to snoop on Joe Public’s emails and phone calls and Orwell’s vision of a future in which Big Brother is everywhere.

Read More: George Orwell back in fashion as Prism stokes Big Brother paranoia

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Flower power to purge poison and produce platinum

Peter Dunn
eurekalert.org

A consortium of researchers led by WMG at the University of Warwick are to embark on a £3 million research programme called “Cleaning Land for Wealth” (CL4W), that will use a common class of flower to restore poisoned soils while at the same time producing perfectly sized and shaped nano sized platinum and arsenic nanoparticles for use in catalytic convertors, cancer treatments and a range of other applications.

A “Sandpit” exercise organised by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) allowed researchers from WMG (Warwick Manufacturing group) at the University of Warwick, Newcastle University, The University of Birmingham, Cranfield University and the University of Edinburgh to come together and share technologies and skills to come up with an innovative multidisciplinary research project that could help solve major technological and environmental challenges.

The researchers pooled their knowledge of how to use plants and bacteria to soak up particular elements and chemicals and how to subsequently harvest, process and collect that material. They have devised an approach to demonstrate the feasibility in which they are confident that they can use common classes of flower and plants (such as Alyssum), to remove poisonous chemicals such as arsenic and platinum from polluted land and water courses potentially allowing that land to be reclaimed and reused.

Read More: Flower power to purge poison and produce platinum

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The lead vaccine developer comes clean so she can sleep at night: gardasil and cervarix don’t work are dangerous and weren’t tested

Sarah Cain | healthwyze.org

Dr. Diane Harper was the lead researcher in the development of the human papilloma virus vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix.  She is the latest to come forward and question the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines.  She made the surprising announcement at the 4th International Public Conference on Vaccination, which took place in Reston, Virginia on Oct. 2nd through 4th, 2009.  Her speech was supposed to promote the Gardasil and Cervarix vaccines, but she instead turned on her corporate bosses in a very public way.  When questioned about the presentation, audience members remarked that they came away feeling that the vaccines should not be used.

Read More: The lead vaccine developer comes clean so she can sleep at night: gardasil and cervarix don’t work are dangerous and weren’t tested

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The Ego is Sneaky: 5 Ways to Know When It’s In Charge

Christina Sarich | Waking Times

If you are reading this article, it’s probable that you have read dozens, if not hundreds of books and articles on spirituality. You may have studied numerous traditions, and sought the help of a master from any number of traditions. Or, maybe you’ve stuck with just one, diligently. The truth is that you have probably succumbed to the amazing maneuvers of your mystical ego, and fallen right into some of the spiritual pits you have been trying to avoid. Sometimes no matter how hard we try, we get upset, judgmental, lazy, mean, or even angry. We forget so easily, that whatever we see ‘out there’ is just reflecting what’s ‘in here.’ Damn, it can be exasperating!

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Cartoon: The cage

Artist: Unknown

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Homo Evolutis: The Demise of Humanity

Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda

home-evolutisCan there be evolution when humans will turn into robotic beings without the capacity to reproduce or to have free will? The problem is, this process has already begun, and no one seems to notice.

The most effective tactics for invasion always start from the inside. It happened in Troy and it worked. Now, the same practice is being used by technocrats and its minions in the nano-tech and biotech worlds to change the nature of humanity. A massive effort is now underway not only to change what the biosphere looks like, but also to change what humanity looks like.

The trojan horse used to carry out this Troy-like invasion and re-engineering of the human race is a phenomenon that is familiar to millions of people around the world: Chemtrails. Until not too long ago, chemtrailing was thought of as a way to geo-engineer the planet, but spraying aerosolized materials into the lower atmosphere in order to limit the amount of sunlight that reaches the living areas of the planet is not the only purpose of Chemtrails. Researchers have discovered that the process of geo-engineering goes way beyond man-made planetary weather modification. What scientists and bioethicists are proposing is turning homo sapiens into human androids, not for the sake of progress, but to more easily control us.

In the last few weeks, articles have popped out in Medical Journals and media reports which address human extermination and engineering. In their proposals, scientists and academics talk about how humanity should deal with global warming and climate change. Among the “solutions” presented, they suggest after-birth abortions or infanticide, euthanasia, and more recently engineering the human body from the inside out. The latest article comes from S. Matthew Liao, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University, who during an interview with the Atlantic talked about his vision to carry out “particular human modifications, or even human engineering generally, to introduce human engineering as one possible, partial solution to climate change.”

Previous to Mr. Liao’s interview, ethicists such and academics Francesca Minerva and Alberto Giubilini called for the use of afterbirth abortion as a solution to avoid the burden of child bearing. The writers suggested that abortion should be considered even if a baby is born completely healthy. The base for such suggestions, according to them, is the thought that neither fetuses not new-born babies are persons, and that therefore, they don’t have the right to life. In their paper published in the Journal for Medical Ethics, both Minerva and Giubilini took the moral ground when advocating for Infanticide. They consider that since neither a fetus nor a new-born have the moral standing of a person, it is not possible to damage a newborn by preventing his or her birth or from preventing the development or the potential of this being to become a fully developed person in the moral sense.

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El artículo en español

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Zoning vs. Eminent Domain: How Ventura County Shut Down The Pine Mountain Inn

Reason TV

In the northernmost reaches of California’s Ventura County, a two-lane rural road called Highway 33 runs into the rugged and mostly undeveloped Transverse Mountain Range. Though it’s mostly raw wilderness, a few businesses catering to adventurous explorers have long existed there, some for more than a century.

But now the local government is shutting those businesses down, one by one, using arcane zoning and building-code laws to get the job done. Read More

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Six Degrees of Separation

Documentary unfolding the science behind the idea of six degrees of separation.

Originally thought to be an urban myth, it now appears that anyone on the planet can be connected in just a few steps of association.

Six degrees of separation is also at the heart of a major scientific breakthrough.

That there might be a law which nature uses to organize itself and that now promises to solve some of its deepest mysteries. (Source: bbc.co.uk)

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Put disabled babies out of our misery, say Dutch doctors

Michael Cook | bioedge.org

Distress felt by parents of a dying newborn can justify the child’s euthanasia, says Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG), which represents doctors in the Netherlands.

In a new policy document, “Medical decisions about the lives of newborns with severe abnormalities” (in Dutch only) the KNMG explains why it is acceptable, and perhaps even necessary, to euthanase children. This is no longer headline news in the Netherlands, as newborn euthanasia is allowed under the so-called Groningen Protocol, drafted by Dr Eduard Verhagen in 2004.

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Sugar Overload Can Damage Heart

Science Daily

Too much sugar can set people down a pathway to heart failure, according to a study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

A single small molecule, the glucose metabolite glucose 6-phosphate (G6P), causes stress to the heart that changes the muscle proteins and induces poor pump function leading to heart failure, according to the study, which was published in the May 21 issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association. G6P can accumulate from eating too much starch and/or sugar.

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Infant Formula Manufacturers Refuse To Remove GMO And New Research Now Links Formula To Chronic Disease

Natasha Longo | preventdisease.com

Nestle and Mead Johnson Nutrition recently dismissed calls to remove genetically-modified organisms (GMO) from their infant formula products in the US and now evidence is coming forth on long-term risks related to infant formulations. Epidemiological research has indicated a relationship between infant formula feeding and increased risk of chronic diseases later in life including obesity, type-2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Researchers stated that the comprehensive metabolic implications of formula vs breast-feeding play a role in long-term health risks.

Read More: Infant Formula Manufacturers Refuse To Remove GMO And New Research Now Links Formula To Chronic Disease

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Heading for the G8 summit – with your Sherpa

DW

They prepare for the G8 summit, bargaining and fighting for their bosses. Because they carry the weight of the summit’s work, they’re called “Sherpas,” like those most famous of Himalayan baggage bearers.

When on Monday (17.06.2013) the heads of state and government of the world’s eight leading industrialized countries meet for their yearly summit - this time in North Irish Lough – everything is ready to go. The closing statements have already been prepared, to nearly the last detail – only a few points about global economics and foreign policy end up being discussed.

Read More: Heading for the G8 summit – with your Sherpa

Related: G8/G20 Sherpa list

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Wake Forest University | Organ manufacturing

Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence

The field of regenerative medicine is moving from the realm of science fiction to science fact. From fingers and ears to complex organs like livers or hearts, scientists at Wake Forest University are making headway into growing human body parts in a laboratory.

Read More: Wake Forest University | Organ manufacturing

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Radioactive Waste Dumped Into Rivers During Fukushima Clean Up

theintelhub.com

As the fallout from the Fukushima disaster continues to deepen, more information is being uncovered about the negligence and dishonesty on the part of the government and other responsible agencies.

According to The Asahi Shimbun:

“Cleanup crews in Fukushima Prefecture have dumped soil and leaves contaminated with radioactive fallout into rivers. Water sprayed on contaminated buildings has been allowed to drain back into the environment. And supervisors have instructed workers to ignore rules on proper collection and disposal of the radioactive waste.

Decontamination is considered a crucial process in enabling thousands of evacuees to return to their homes around the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant and resume their normal lives.  But the decontamination work witnessed by a team of Asahi Shimbun reporters shows that contractual rules with the Environment Ministry have been regularly and blatantly ignored, and in some cases, could violate environmental laws.”

Just afew weeks ago we reported that A former worker at the Fukushima nuclear plant has filed a lawsuit against TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company for downplaying the danger and severity of the disaster.

Read More: Radioactive Waste Dumped Into Rivers During Fukushima Clean Up

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