Video: Sun has 'flipped upside down' as new magnetic cycle begins

Video: Sun has 'flipped upside down' as new magnetic cycle begins - Science - News - The Independent: 
""A reversal of the sun's magnetic field is, literally, a big event," said Nasa’s Dr. Tony Phillips.
"The domain of the sun's magnetic influence (also known as the 'heliosphere') extends billions of kilometers beyond Pluto. Changes to the field's polarity ripple all the way out to the Voyager probes, on the doorstep of interstellar space.""

"Entire Solar Systems are Needed to Kick-Start Life"

"Entire Solar Systems are Needed to Kick-Start Life"  
"There is evidence that life on Earth could not have started without the other planets. The conditions on the prehistoric Earth would only have served to inhibit the formation of RNA. Mars, on the other hand, would have been just right. While there was some water on ancient Mars, there wouldn't have been enough to hamper the formation of RNA. Also, while the early Earth was starved of oxygen, Mars would have had enough to create oxidized molybdenum and boron, which are pivotal in the construction of RNA.
Autogenic forms are probably more widespread than life in the Universe as they can be constructed from many different materials. It's a generic type of chemistry which may be similar throughout the Universe, indicating that the process is more important that than the molecules themselves."

Cost of Living In US From 1938 To 2013

J.B.Hutto And The Hawks

How to win friends and influence people

“Bride and Boom!” - The headline - “Bride and Boom!” - was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half.  Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post.  The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those “surgical” strikes of which Washington is so proud.  As one report put it, “Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.”

It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners - “terror” or “al-Qaeda suspects” - in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them.  Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers.  Since even the New York Post wouldn’t do such a thing, let’s posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase “head of the class,” their headline was: “Dead of the Class!” (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege.  The media would descend.  The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House.  You’d hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.

And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.

read on...

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays

Greetings of the Season to all readers of Reality Zone, Pan Asian Anchor, Wolves in the City and Afghanistan War. Hopeful that normal service will be resumed on this site early in the New Year with the return of our friend, RZ.

Goodbye To The 'Nazis'

Goodbye To The 'Nazi's' | History Today:



"There are many ways in which the uncritical use of ‘Nazi’ distorts the German reality during the Hitler years. The NSDAP incorporated only a fraction of the German population. Even those in the notorious SA (Sturmabteilung) did not have to be members of the party. The career policeman who was appointed to head the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, was not even a party member. In 1933 two thirds of Germans had voted for other parties and if they had to pay lip-service to the new regime this did not necessarily make them into ‘Nazis’. There was also a clear line between the NSDAP and the state, though there were many officials, policemen and lawyers who had a foot in both camps. For many Germans who were not enthusiastic for the new regime – schoolteachers, civil servants, businessmen – membership of the party became more or less a requirement." LINK

Netanyama

Know Your Drone

US Turns Blind Eye To Saudi Funding of Syria Jihadists

Humanoid Robots

To see the potential of humanoid bots, you need only look to Atlas, PetMan's bigger brother. Atlas takes PetMan's flexible frame and puts some muscle on those metal bones. Funded by Darpa, Atlas is currently being put through its paces as a possible first-responder in disaster situations. In action here:

1000 Years of War Across The World In One 5-Minute Animation

The size of the explosion is in proportion to the number of dead.

Christmas Merchandise Offer

Cheques payable to Reality Zone. The fake peace laureate decorations are especially appropriate at this time of peace and goodwill to all (cough) men. The mini-drone decorations will be available in red and green from next week.

Chinese Land Moon Probe

Bathe in the ice-cold new light of the Chinese Moon, my friends.

Physicists discover 'clearest evidence yet' that the Universe is a hologram

Physicists discover 'clearest evidence yet' that the Universe is a hologram - Gadgets & Tech - Life & Style - The Independent: 
"The two new scientific papers are the culmination of years’ work led by Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan, and deal with hypothetical calculations of the energies of black holes in different universes.
The idea of the universe existing as a ‘hologram’ doesn’t refer to a Matrix-like illusion, but the theory that the three dimensions we perceive are actually just “painted” onto the cosmological horizon - the boundary of the known universe."

Pentagon Spending In 2012

Rare Pubic Purge In North Korea

Civilians killed in Yemen drone attack: Witnesses

Maybe the sign-language man at the Mandela Tribute was making a political point about Obama's freedom and justice rhetoric being hollow, vacuous and meaningless.
Civilians killed in Yemen drone attack: Witnesses - Region - World - Ahram Online: "Several civilians were killed and others wounded in a drone attack in southern Yemen in which a wedding party was struck on Thursday, witnesses said.
The witnesses and a tribal source said the attack was carried out by a US drone and targeted Qaifa, near the town of Radaa, but were unable to give specific casualty figures.
The US military operates all unmanned drones flying over Yemen in support of Sanaa's campaign against Al-Qaeda and has killed dozens of militants this year.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) remains active despite Yemeni military operations and the drone strikes targeting its leaders.
Yemen is the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden and the home base of AQAP, which the United States views as the global jihadist network's most dangerous franchise."

Ronnie and Maggie. When they met - it was murder....

NSA Spying on War Video Gamers

A Short History Of Political Torture - Clive Stafford Smith

During the English Civil War, in the 1640s, the Earl of Clarendon came up with a novel wheeze: rather than allow those presumed to be parliamentarian enemies to claim the benefit of the rule of law, he would establish a prison on an island off the British shoreline. Not on British soil. That way, he reasoned, they could be safely forgotten, buried along with their legal rights. Ring a bell? LINK

Interactive Map: Four Ways to Look at Carbon Footprints

Interactive Map: Four Ways to Look at Carbon Footprints

Cold-Resistant Japanese Cockroaches Invade US

A kind of Pearl Harbour scenario played out in the insect world.

Buddy Guy Classic

The best guitar playing I have heard on a blues track

Death Of Nelson Mandela

The fundamental tenet of Christ's teachings was 'love your enemIes'. In relatively recent times only Ghandi & Mandela, both religious men but members of no churches, lived that ideal. Many tributes so far say he was great because he forgave. But mostly, to my mind, he was great because he fought. Often against those are now making unconvincing tributes.

Leg bone gives up oldest human DNA

BBC News - Leg bone gives up oldest human DNA:
"The Denisovans were a sister group to the Neanderthals, with distinct genetic characteristics. Identified only by DNA extracted from a tiny finger bone and tooth, they are, as some researchers have remarked, "a genome in search of a fossil" because there are no substantial remains representative of this group.
By using missing mutations in the old DNA sequences, the researchers calculated that the Pit of Bones individual shared a common ancestor with the Denisovans about 700,000 years ago."

Where Did All The Freedom Go?

Deep Universe - Two Black Holes Appear 'Dancing'

Astronomers have spotted what appear to be two super massive black holes at the heart of a remote galaxy, circling each other like dance partners.

The two black holes are thought to be circling each other as in this artists impression. Credit: NASA

"At first we thought this galaxy's unusual properties might mean it was forming new stars at a furious rate," said Peter Eisenhardt, at NASA, "but on closer inspection, it looks more like the death spiral of merging giant black holes."

Follow-up observations revealed unusual features in the galaxy, including a lumpy tail of matter, or jet, thought to be the result of one black hole causing the jet of the other to sway.MORE

Protests in Thailand Continue

It is interesting that the Western media report the Thai unrest as violence by radical activists but the protests in Ukraine as a 'Russian Spring' uprising by a population pursuing Western freedoms.

Brightness of Black Hole Baffles Scientists

Rosa Parks Anniversary

Today in History: December 1: Rosa Parks

 "On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks also were required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation."
LINK