'China is not just standing still'

'Religious liberty'

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Australian Digital ID Law (Digital ID Bill 2024), which already passed the Senate, was adopted by Australia’s House of Representatives in an 87-56 vote. Australia is joining the EU and several countries who seek to get rid of people’s physical IDs and replace them with digital schemes that pool the most sensitive personal information into massive, centralized databases. This is considered by opponents as a security and privacy catastrophe in the making, with many purely political (ab)uses possible down the road. In Australia, the goal is to get government services, health insurance, taxes, etc, all linked. And to do this, the governments will spend just shy of $197 million to launch the scheme. MPs from the parties who voted against the bill – the Liberal-National Opposition – said that their constituents were worried about privacy, their freedoms in general, and government intervention. Once again, arguments such as “convenience” – clearly a lopsided trade-off considering the gravity of these concerns – are offered to assuage them, and the point is made that participation is not mandatory. At least not yet, and not explicitly. Liberal Senator Alex Antic touched on precisely this point – an example being that the bill allows people to open bank accounts without digital IDs “by going to the nearest branch.” But then – physical bank branches are now closing at a quick rate, Antic remarked. Even more taxpayer money is being spent in Australia in order to shore up the Online Safety Act, and the eSafety program. The censorship effort, which, like so many, refers to its purpose allegedly being merely to “protect the children” is in reality set up to hunt down whatever the government decides qualifies as “harmful content.” Now the federal budget is earmarking millions for several projects, including a pilot worth $6.5 million that is supposed to produce an online age verification method (this is referred to as “age assurance technology”). Meanwhile, “emerging online threats” will get a share from the total of $43.2 million set aside in the budget’s communications package. The eSafety Commissioner’s office will get $1.4 million over the next two years. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Digital ID Laws Pass in Australian Parliament As Government Allocates Millions for Online Digital ID Implementation appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

NEW: Defense Rests, Trump Won't Take the Stand in Manhattan Clown Show

As you read these words, do you hear them being narrated inside your head? If so, whose voice are you listening to?Chances are you probably do experience each word as though it were literally being read to you by some miniature being who lives inside your brain. Research has shown that the majority of people have what’s known as an “inner reading voice” (IRV), although not everyone shares this characteristic and the nature of this internal bookworm can vary from person to person.The two most significant studies on this subject were conducted by New York University Professor of Psychology Ruvanee Vilhauer, who first began to unravel the nature of IRVs after scanning the internet for reports of people’s reading experiences. Based on a series of 136 posts, she determined that 82.5 percent of people do hear a voice when they read, and that these IRVs almost always “have the auditory qualities of overt speech, such as recognizable identity, gender, pitch, loudness and emotional tone.”Around half of those who experienced IRVs heard only one voice – typically their own – although some people claimed to have multiple narrators inside their head. For instance, when reading dialog, the imagined voices of different characters would sometimes take the mic, while letters, emails and other written communication from friends or family can be read internally using the sender’s voice. In a subsequent paper, Vilhauer used questionnaires to assess the phenomenon in 570 volunteers, around four-fifths of whom reported always or sometimes hearing IRVs when reading. Curiously, however, the remaining 20 percent said they simply “understood words being read without hearing an inner voice.”Of those who did have an IRV, 34.2 percent said they heard this voice every time they read something, while 45 percent heard their inner reader “often”. Interestingly, 19 percent said they could choose whether to activate their IRV or keep it muted while reading.Almost three-quarters of respondents claimed to be able to control certain aspects of their IRV, with 35.6 percent saying they could choose whose voice was heard, while 36.5 percent could alter the volume. A separate study has indicated that people typically hear an internal voice that shares their own accent when reading, which can sometimes make a big difference to the quality of the text. For example, poems and limericks may or may not rhyme depending on how a person pronounces certain vowels, and silent reading can therefore influence the delivery of these art forms in the same way as vocal performance.On a related note, online discussion has recently highlighted the fact that not everyone possesses an internal monologue, which means that while some people silently narrate some or all of their thoughts using language, others have a less verbose way of thinking. Strangely, this topic has received very little scientific attention and remains largely under-studied, probably because most people assume that everyone thinks like they do, which means it simply hasn’t occurred to many researchers to actually study this phenomenon.

General anesthesia has been performed countless times since it was first developed in the late 1840s. Its introduction into medicine was revolutionary, allowing surgeons to perform increasingly complicated procedures on patients who no longer had to endure painful surgery while awake. However, would you believe me if I told you that, 180 or so years since they were first developed, we're still not completely sure how anesthetics work?To be sure, we know a lot about their workings and how they make us lose consciousness, but there are still questions about the finer details. But this may be about to change, at least according to the results of a new study. The researchers found that anesthetic drugs seem to only affect certain parts of the brain associated with keeping us alert and awake.  While examining fruit flies, a team of researchers from the University of Queensland, Australia, found that anesthetic drugs interact with specific neurons in our brains.Humans have around 86 billion neurons in their noggins, but not all of them are the same. This is the mechanism that allows general anesthetics to work.In essence, we have two types of neurons in our brains – excitatory and inhibitory neurons. The former are responsible for keeping us alert and active, while the latter regulate and control the excitatory ones. Throughout our days, the two types are working to balance one another out until it is time to go to sleep.This is why we become increasingly tired as the day goes on. The inhibitory neurons gradually start to quieten down their excitatory counterparts which would otherwise keep us awake.General anesthesia operates in a similar way. It speeds up the process by silencing the excitatory neurons – when you’re told you’ll be “put to sleep” by the anesthetist, that’s basically what is happening.But this is only part of the explanation. As Adam D. Hines, one of the study’s authors, recently wrote in The Conversation, “[w]hile we know why anaesthetics put us to sleep, the question then becomes: 'why do we stay asleep during surgery?'. If you went to bed tonight, fell asleep and somebody tried to do surgery on you, you’d wake up with quite a shock.”This is the piece of the puzzle that has eluded explanation. At the moment, there is no general consensus as to why anesthesia keeps people asleep. The best explanation to date has been that the drug stops neurons from communicating with one another.But the research presented by Hines and his colleagues suggests that only excitatory neurons are muted by anesthetics, not inhibitory ones. Although this is not a completely new discovery, the team’s work has added evidence explaining why it is only these neurons that are affected.How neurons talk Neurons communicate by way of neurotransmitters that essentially serve as chemical messengers. These neurotransmitters – such as dopamine, adrenalin, and serotonin - are released from neurons by certain proteins that come into play as needed.It seems general anesthesia limits the ability of these proteins to release neurotransmitters in the excitatory neurons. To test this mechanism, Hines and his colleagues observed fruit flies through a super resolution microscope which allowed them to directly see how general anesthesia affected their proteins at a molecular level.Although excitatory and inhibitory neurons both produce proteins that are very similar, there are subtle differences between them.“This is kind of like having two cars of the same make and model, but one is green and has a sports package, while the other is just standard and red. They both do the same thing, but one’s just a little bit different,” Hines explained.“Neurotransmitter release is a complex process involving lots of different proteins. If one piece of the puzzle isn’t exactly right, then general anaesthetics won’t be able to do their job.”Ultimately, the teams work shows that anesthetic drugs cause global and successive bouts of inhibition across the brain by reducing neuroexocytosis from excitatory neurons and by silencing arousal systems through specific potentiation (the persistent strengthening of synapses based on recent patterns of activity).The next steps will involve figuring out exactly why this occurs in only excitatory communication.The paper is published in The Journal of Neuroscience.[H/T: The Conversation]

A single brain implant has been used to help recover the speech of a paralyzed man in both his native Spanish and English. Even though he learned English much later in life, the brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to pick up which language he was trying to speak without having to program it in advance – and it’s possible this could work even better in people who have been bilingual for much of their lives.The 36-year-old participant in this study had become quadriplegic after a stroke affecting part of the brainstem. Incredibly, it was at age 30 – after the stroke – that he achieved fluency in English, his second language. This is despite a speech-language pathologist’s diagnosis of anarthria. His cognitive functions were unaffected, but he had retained only a small amount of control of his vocal tract, enough to produce grunts and moaning sounds but not words.The man had been communicating using an interface that let him spell out words using small movements of his head, but the implantation of a BCI had the potential to improve this substantially.We’ve seen in previous research the transformative impact this technology can have. Just recently, researchers unveiled early work on a system that can help return speech to people who have no physical control over their voices. Other systems can help people type on a computer by imagining that they’re hand-writing. Even Elon Musk's company Neuralink is on it, recently implanting its first BCI device that is said to work like “telepathy”.  The fact that the participant in this trial was bilingual added another layer of interest.   “[T]he extent to which bilingual speech production relies on unique or shared cortical activity across languages has remained unclear,” the authors write in their paper. This means they didn’t know whether a single device would be able to decode neural activity in the same way when the man was attempting to speak in both English and Spanish.The successful implantation surgery took place over three years ago. The device contains a lattice of 128 electrodes and was attached to the surface of the left hemisphere of the patient’s brain, over regions that are known to be important in speech production. A connector embedded in the skull allows the device to hook up to a computer system.The idea behind the implant is that it translates the neural activity that would ordinarily signal to the muscles of the face and vocal tract that you’re trying to say a particular word. There’s some evidence that when you learn a second language, the brain effectively maps that onto all the speech patterns you already have from your native language – the authors hypothesized, therefore, that shared characteristics between English and Spanish in the man’s brain might allow the implant to reproduce either language.Implanting the hardware, though, is only one piece of this. The software had to be trained too. They started with a limited vocabulary of 51 English words, 50 Spanish words, and three that were identical across both languages – like the man’s nickname, Pancho. During training, the participant would be shown words one by one on a screen, and would then have to attempt to say them so that the system could learn to translate his brain activity correctly.To help things along, the researchers leveraged the advances we’ve seen in large language models by feeding the system’s output into GPT2. This helped reduce the error rate.After all this training, the big test was whether the participant could actually use the system to have a conversation using this pre-trained vocabulary. This was indeed possible, as the authors show in Supplementary Video 3, and he was able to switch between the languages at will.Despite the limitations of the small vocabulary and the need for ongoing training to recalibrate the system at regular intervals – although this system lasted longer than some others, at 48 days – it’s an exciting window into what might be achievable as this technology develops. It also adds to our knowledge about how bilingualism works in the brain.Ideally, such a system would have even greater flexibility, to allow users to switch between languages even within the same sentence. The authors are optimistic about their technology, concluding that it has “the potential to restore more natural communication to the many bilinguals with paralysis who may benefit.”The study is published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.[H/T: Ars Technica]

Behold, the tiny arms of a new species of abelisaurid dinosaur, Koleken inakayali. Retrieved from La Colonia Formation in Patagonia, it dates back 70 million years and has an impressively miniature set of arms. Think T. rex’s were mini? You ain’t seen nothing yet.The new tiny-armed species looks similar to the iconic “meat bull” Carnotaurus, made famous from Jurassic World and that love scene in Prehistoric Planet. Koleken is different, however, both in having unique skull features and a small size, and lacking the frontal horns seen on Carnotaurus.Where it stands up to the meat bull is in its ridiculously tiny arms, a common trait among the abelisaurids. Carnotaurus was an efficient predator that’s thought to have used its bizarre tiny arms and specially adapted shoulder girdle to twirl flashes of blue when trying to impress a mate, but we don't yet know what Koleken used theirs for.The partial Koleken skeleton retrieved from La Colonia Formation included several skull bones, almost all of its back bones, a complete hip, some tail bones, and two almost-complete legs. It’s not a bad haul considering that scientists recently described what might have been one of the largest animal ever to live from just a bit of jaw. The new species name is derived from the language of the Tehuelche people of Central Patagonia, with Inakayal being the name of one of the last Tehuelche leaders. It lived around 70 million years ago, putting it in the same timeline as the miniature titanosaur Titanomachya gimenezi that was announced last month.The discoveries were unearthed as part of a project looking into the end of the “age of dinosaurs” in Patagonia, which is funded by the National Geographic Society. The project is focusing on the last 15 million years of the Cretaceous Period, a period of geological time that’s historically been better studied in northern locales.The partial Koleken inakayali skeleton retrieved in Patagonia.Image credit: © Gabriel LioAlready, the project is providing insights into the landscape of dinosaurs in Patagonia during the Late Cretaceous Epoch, and this discovery adds to the argument that La Colonia Formation is of global significance as a dinosaur-bearing rock.“This finding sheds light on the diversity of abelisaurid theropods in Patagonia right before the mass extinction event,” said Explorer Diego Pol in a statement emailed to IFLScience. “Our study also analyzes the evolution of abelisaurids and their relatives through time, and identifies pulses of accelerated rates of skull evolution in the Early Cretaceous. It expands what we know about abelisaurids living in this area during the Cretaceous Period and shows that they were more diverse than previously understood.”The study is published in the journal Cladistics.

The Vatican has always been an institution shrouded in mystery. Recently, it has made headlines by deciding to issue new guidelines on aliens and how it will deal with potential encounters in the future. This sudden move has raised many questions about why the Vatican is choosing to address this topic now and what hidden meaning it might have for our understanding of extraterrestrial life and supernatural phenomena. Historical Context and Recent Developments Historically, the Vatican has maintained a cautious stance on the topic of extraterrestrial life. The last time the Vatican’s doctrinal office issued norms for evaluating alleged apparitions and reports of supernatural events was in February 1978. At the time, the prefect, Cardinal Franjo Seper, said the norms were necessary given how news of alleged apparitions spreads rapidly thanks to the mass media. However, in recent years, there have been notable shifts in this approach. For instance, in 2008, Father José Gabriel Funes, the director of the Vatican Observatory, openly stated that the belief in extraterrestrial life does not contradict the Catholic faith. This was a significant departure from traditional views and suggested a more open-minded approach within the Church. The Vatican Observatory is headquartered in Italy at Castel Gandolfo, where the Pope has a summer villa. But it also operates a telescope at the Mount Graham International Observatory at the University of Arizona. The AFP asked Funes about NASA’s recent announcement, which he said was “great news.” “It is probable there was life and perhaps a form of intelligent life,” Funes said. But, he cautioned: “I don’t think we’ll ever meet a Mr. Spock.” Funes has said for years that there’s no conflict between the possibility of alien life — even intelligent life — and the teachings of the Catholic Church. “Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on Earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God,” Funes said in 2008. “This is not in contrast with our faith because we can’t put limits on God’s creative freedom.” “To say it as St. Francis [of Assisi], if we consider some earthly creatures as ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’ why couldn’t we also talk of an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? He would also belong to creation,” he said. One of the primary reasons the Vatican might be addressing the issue now is the growing credibility of UFO reports. Governments around the world, including the United States, have begun to declassify documents related to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). The Pentagon’s establishment of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) and the subsequent release of videos showing unexplained aerial encounters have added a layer of legitimacy to the discussion. The Vatican, aware of these developments, may feel compelled to provide guidance to its followers on how to interpret these events within a theological framework. Vatican Scientific and Technological Advancements Advances in technology and space exploration have brought humanity closer to potentially discovering extraterrestrial life. Missions to Mars, the study of exoplanets, and the search for microbial life in our solar system are increasingly pointing to the possibility that we are not alone. The Vatican, which has its own observatory and engages in scientific research, is likely aware of these advancements and the likelihood of significant discoveries in the near future. Pope Francis seems to be quite interested in the topic of aliens. In comments that he made near the end of 2023, Pope Francis seemed to suggest that aliens could actually be baptized… He said: “That was unthinkable. If, for example, tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here… Martians, right? Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them…And one says, ‘But I want to be baptized!’ What would happen?” He didn’t answer his own question, but added: “It was never the ministry of the closed door, never.” The Vatican’s new guidelines could be seen as a way to prepare the faithful for potential future encounters with extraterrestrial beings. From a theological perspective, the discovery of alien life would raise profound questions about creation, salvation, and the uniqueness of human beings. By addressing these issues proactively, the Vatican aims to provide a coherent framework that integrates these potential discoveries with Catholic doctrine. In addition to UFOs and aliens, the Vatican’s guidelines reportedly also address apparitions and supernatural phenomena. The Church has a long history of investigating and sometimes validating such events. By issuing guidelines, the Vatican seeks to standardize its approach to these occurrences, ensuring that any claims are thoroughly vetted and understood within a religious context. This move might also be a response to the increasing interest in paranormal phenomena and the need to provide a clear stance on these matters. Nave of St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, Rome Do They Know Something We Don’t? Speculation is rife that the Vatican might have access to information that is not publicly available. Throughout history, the Vatican has been a repository of vast amounts of knowledge, including secret archives that are not accessible to the general public. It is conceivable that the Church might be privy to information regarding extraterrestrial life or supernatural occurrences that it deems necessary to prepare the faithful for. The producer of a new documentary entitled “God Versus Aliens” seems to believe that the Vatican wants to prepare us for the day when humanity finally makes contact with such beings… The documentary is to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and reveal the Vatican’s secrets about UFOs. The award-winning filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee says that the Vatican publishing new guidance on apparitions means that full disclosure about the UFO phenomenon is getting closer. He said: “The Vatican has been studying UFOs for decades and even has its own Cardinal appointed to deal with first contact. From my research I believe that this new guidance on apparitions is proof that they know that UFOs are more than just physical crafts from other worlds and that they have a paranormal side to them.” However, it’s also important to consider that this move could be a strategic response to the changing landscape of public opinion and scientific discovery. By taking a proactive stance, the Vatican ensures it remains relevant and authoritative on matters that captivate and concern its followers. Whether motivated by new information or a strategic response to ongoing developments, the Vatican is positioning itself to provide guidance on some of the most intriguing and potentially transformative issues of our time. The post Why Is the Vatican Addressing UFOs, Aliens, and Apparitions Now? appeared first on Anomalien.com.

This Ranch Pasta Salad is one you will make over and over again. It is super versatile and a wonderful favorite year round. The homemade dressing is a game changer! If you love pasta salads you will want to try this Bow Tie Pasta Salad! It’s loaded in vegetables and perfect for any gathering. ❤️WHY...