TV Gameshow - Who Wants To Convert From Atheism?

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What happens when you put a Muslim imam, a Christian priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk in a room with 10 atheists?

Turkish television station Kanal T hopes the answer is a ratings success as it prepares to launch a gameshow where spiritual guides from the four faiths will seek to convert a group of non-believers.

The prize for converts will be a pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen religion — Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists.

But religious authorities in Muslim but secular Turkey are not amused by the twist on the popular reality game show format and the Religious Affairs Directorate is refusing to provide an imam for the show.

“Doing something like this for the sake of ratings is disrespectful to all religions. Religion should not be a subject for entertainment programs,” High Board of Religious Affairs Chairman Hamza Aktan told state news agency Anatolian after news of the planned program emerged.

The makers of “Penitents Compete” are unrepentant and reject claims that the show, scheduled to begin broadcasting in September, will cheapen religion.

“We are giving the biggest prize in the world, the gift of belief in God,” Kanal T chief executive Seyhan Soylu told Reuters.

via Turkish TV gameshow looks to convert atheists | Entertainment | Reuters.

Top Obama Advisors Say Time for Israel To Surrender Jerusalem

A Washington-based think tank that is viewed as one of the primary sources of foreign policy advise for US President Barack Obama is recommending that Israel surrender control of Jerusalem to an international body.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) correctly determined that the issue of Jerusalem is the primarily obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

As such, in order to move forward with the land-for-peace process as a whole, CAP has suggested that a third party administer and police the city while both Israel and the Palestinians maintain their claims to sovereignty until an agreement can be reached.

CAP expects that agreement would take a very long time to reach, if ever, but that in the meantime the rest of the conflict could be concluded.

There are concerns in Israel that Obama will adopt the recommendation considering his close ties to CAP and his overriding determination to oversee an Israel-Palestinian peace agreement.

Bloomberg News reported that “CAP has been an incubator for liberal thought and helped build the [Democratic party] platform that triumphed in the 2008 campaign.”

It was also noted that Obama adopted many of CAP’s policy recommendations while he was still president-elect.

via Source

Israel Must Attack Iran, Insists Bolton

Former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton told The Washington Post on Thursday that the only way left to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons is to support an Israeli military strike on the Islamic Republic.

Bolton said the soft approach taken by US President Barack Obama had only hastened the Iranian nuclear threat, and that today the only options that remain are to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons or intervene militarily.

With Obama almost certain to never order a military strike on Iran, that leaves only Israel.

Bolton urged Israel to decide quickly whether or not it will strike.

“Israel’s decision of whether to use military force against Tehran’s nuclear weapons program is more urgent than ever,” said Bolton, adding that he is confident new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fully grasps the gravity of the situation and will respond accordingly.

via Source

Scientists Locate ‘God Spot’ in Human Brain

The brain of every human being, from believers to atheists, has been revealed to contain at least three “god spots”, all linked to religious beliefs and thoughts.

A team of U.S. researchers has obtained strong evidence that religiosity is managed by the same parts of the brain that are used every day to interpret other people’s moods and intentions and to analyze experiences.

Moreover, the spots exist in the brains of ordinary people, not just those whose extraordinary religious experiences have been triggered by brain injury or neurological conditions like epilepsy.

Scientists, philosophers and theologians have long argued about whether religious belief is a biological or a sociological phenomenon. Britain’s controversial evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins contends that religion is essentially a cultural virus, spread from brain to brain.

Others argue that it arises from the structure of the brain itself.

The new findings by researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland — obtained by non-invasive brain scans of 26 Americans — have gone far to resolving the debate.

Jordan Grafman and his colleagues wrote in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the evolution of the brain networks that handle religious thoughts “was likely driven by their primary roles in social thinking, language and logical reasoning”.

According to University of NSW evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks, the study shows that religion taps into existing parts of the brain that evolved to handle complex social interactions.

via FOXNews.com - Scientists Locate ‘God Spot’ in Human Brain - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News.

I’m going to let the scientists in on a little secret… The real God spot is not in the brain, it’s in the heart.

Life As We Know It Nearly Created in Lab

One of life’s greatest mysteries is how it began. Scientists have pinned it down to roughly this:

Some chemical reactions occurred about 4 billion years ago — perhaps in a primordial tidal soup or maybe with help of volcanoes or possibly at the bottom of the sea or between the mica sheets — to create biology. Read more

Venus and Jupiter To Form Triangle ‘Capstone’ With Moon

Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets, have been marching toward each other for more than a month in the southwestern sky at dusk. As they’ve drawn closer together, the sight has been catching more people’s eyes, and now the show is reaching its climax.

This evening, weather permitting, you will see Venus and Jupiter blazing about a finger’s width apart at arm’s length. Look early enough and, far to their lower right, you can find the crescent moon just above the horizon.

Tomorrow evening, the two planets will be slightly closer together, and the moon will be hanging higher and nearer them.

Monday night brings the peak of the show. The two planets will remain as close as ever, and the moon will form a compact, extraordinary triangle with them.

Then on subsequent evenings, things fall apart. The moon will move farther off to the upper left, and Jupiter starts pulling away to Venus’s right.

Although the three objects look close together, looks are deceiving. The moon is 252,000 miles away. Venus is currently 370 times farther than the moon, at 94 million miles. And Jupiter, at 540 million miles, is nearly six times as far away as Venus.

To put it another way: The moon is currently 1.4 light-seconds distant, Venus is 8.4 light-minutes distant, and Jupiter is 42 light-minutes away. That’s how long the light from each has been traveling through space before it hits your eye.

Source

The Disappearing Male

“We are conducting a vast toxicological experiment in which our children and our children’s children are the experimental subjects.” Dr. Herbert Needleman

The Disappearing Male is about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system.

The last few decades have seen steady and dramatic increases in the incidence of boys and young men suffering from genital deformities, low sperm count, sperm abnormalities and testicular cancer. baby Some researchers say that declining male fertility rates could be the first sign of extinction.

At the same time, boys are now far more at risk of suffering from ADHD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, cerebral palsy, and dyslexia.

The Disappearing Male takes a close and disturbing look at what many doctors and researchers now suspect are responsible for many of these problems: a class of common chemicals that are ubiquitous in our world.

Found in everything from shampoo, sunglasses, meat and dairy products, carpet, cosmetics and baby bottles, they are called “hormone mimicking” or “endocrine disrupting” chemicals and they may be starting to damage the most basic building blocks of human development.

Article

Deadly Dozen Diseases Could Have Dire Consequences

It listed the ‘deadly dozen’ as avian flu, tick-borne babesia, cholera, ebola, parasites, plague, lyme disease, Read more

Japan Prepares For Flu Pandemics

The National Police Agency released an action plan this week for dealing with outbreaks of new types of influenza to which people have little immunity.

Health experts fear that new types of influenza, such as bird flu, could soon hit large portions of the world population. The action plan lays out specific measures for the NPA and prefectural police to take if an outbreak becomes a pandemic.

As soon as an outbreak is suspected, a special task force will be set up at the NPA and the prime minister’s office, where NPA officials will be dispatched.

Police will then be equipped with masks and other protective gear while working with medical institutions so vaccines can be given to health care officials and others most likely to be exposed to a new flu outbreak.

Source

Astronomers Baffled by Mysterious Light in Sky

It’s not a supernova. Nor is it a galaxy, or a black hole.

In fact, astronomers have no idea what the mysterious object that in February 2006 suddenly flared up in an otherwise barren patch of sky might be, or even what it’s made of.

Researchers working on something called the Supernova Cosmology Project had pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a very distant star cluster, 8.2 billion light-years away or more than halfway across the universe.

But they noticed something else — a point of light where there hadn’t been one before.

Over the next three months, the object got brighter and brighter until it was 120 times its initial luminosity.

Then it slowly got dimmer again, at about the same rate, until by the end of the year it was gone.

Astronomers led by U.C. Berkeley astrophysics grad student Kyle Barbary put the light coming from it through a mass spectrometer to see what it was made of — but couldn’t get signatures for any known elements.

“Because we can’t see anything we recognize in the spectrum, we can’t tell if it’s even in [our] galaxy or in another galaxy,” Barbary told New Scientist magazine in an article posted Tuesday morning.

It’s not a supernova, which would have flared up much more quickly, then died out even more quickly.

All the scientists know is that it’s no closer to Earth than 130 light-years away — and no further than 11 billion light-years away.

As Sky and Telescope magazine noted last week, “that leaves a lot of leeway.”

“We are hoping someone else might have seen something similar,” Barbary told New Scientist, “or might be able to shed some light on it.”

Full Article

End Of The Road For Plastic Credit Cards

Britain’s biggest credit card provider Barclaycard is to boost its contactless payment system which it believes will mean the physical plastic credit card will die out in the foreseeable future.

Barclaycard, owned by Barclays Plc, introduced its first contactless credit card as the OnePulse product one year ago, in which a microchip allows customers to pay for goods by touching the card against a reader without having to remove it from their wallet or purse.

The group now plans to issue over one million contactless cards by the end of this year. Barclaycard then plans to make it possible to put the chip into a mobile phone or key fob, meaning the need to carry a plastic credit card will disappear.

“In time you won’t have to carry a plastic credit card around with you if you don’t want to, although some people will chose to for nostalgic reasons,” Barclaycard Chief Executive Officer Antony Jenkins said in a statement on Monday.

“If I had said to you 10 years ago that you couldn’t pay with a cheque at the supermarket, you wouldn’t have believed me. That is now the reality, and we see plastic cards going the same way eventually,” Jenkins added.

Source

Large Hadron Collider - Could The World End Next Wednesday, Scientists Ask

Two nightmare scenarios, two ends of the world. In the first, there is little warning. For maybe a month there would be no sign that life was about to come to an abrupt and nasty end for all living things on Earth.

Then, earthquakes would start unexpectedly, alerting geologists that something terrible, unimaginable, was amiss.

After a few days, these seismic disturbances would reach catastrophic proportions.

Cities would be levelled, the oceans would rise and wash in a series of mega-tsunamis that would attack the world’s coasts, killing millions.

The fact that the earthquakes were striking randomly, not along well-known geological faultlines, would be proof that something devastating was afoot.

Finally, the end would come, in a disaster of Biblical scale. The Earth would literally start to crack up.

Molten lava would wash over the land and the seas would start to boil.

Mega-hurricanes would level buildings and forests the world over. Eventually, mountains would crumble as the Earth’s crust continued to disintegrate.

The fabric of the planet itself would start to disappear, trillions of tonnes of rock, water, air and life sucked into a whirlpool of unimaginable force.

From space, our blue-and-white home would appear to vanish down a plughole in a flash of light.

At least in this scenario we would have a little time, perhaps, to come to terms with the end.

However, a second doomsday scenario is even more terrifying. There would be no warning at all.

In an instant - about one-twentieth of a second - the entire Earth would simply vanish from space.

Less than two seconds later, the Moon would follow suit. Eight minutes later, the Sun would be ripped apart, followed by the rest of the planets in the solar system and onwards, a wave of destruction caused by a rent in the fabric of space itself, spreading out from our world at the speed of light.

Any extra-terrestrials out there would die too, in due course. And there would be nothing technology could do about it.

But why should we now be worrying about such possible causes of Armageddon?

The answer is a gargantuan machine - the largest, most expensive scientific experiment in history, the ‘Large Hadron Collider’, to be turned on next Wednesday.

Although it was designed to answer the fundamental questions of life, some people have claimed that it could end up destroying the entire cosmos.

This gigantic £4 billion-plus atom-smasher has been built under the Swiss-French border near Geneva, and is the most powerful device ever built for probing the secrets of the atom and the forces and particles which make up our Universe.

It is a staggering device, occupying a train-sized tunnel 18 miles long, buried 300ft underground, studded with gigantic, cathedral-sized ring-shaped detectors where collisions between packets of ‘heavy’ subatomic particles, ‘hadrons’, will take place in the hope that the innermost workings of matter and energy will be revealed.

The LHC is, arguably, the most impressive machine ever built by Mankind.

MICHAEL HANLON: Are we all going to die next Wednesday? | Mail Online

HIV Spreading in NYC at Triple National Rate

A study released this week finds that the virus that causes AIDS is spreading in New York City at three times the rate in the United States. Health officials say New York has long been the epicenter of the U.S. AIDS epidemic because the city is home to sizable populations considered most at-risk for contracting the virus.

New York City’s Department of Health and Human Hygiene said the report is the “most precise estimate yet” of annual infections of the HIV virus in New York City.

The report says in 2006, nearly 4,800 New Yorkers contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This means there were 72 new infections per 100,000 people. That number is three times higher than the national rate, in which the incidence of new infection is 23 per 100,000 people. Overall, an estimated 100,000 New Yorkers are known to be HIV positive.

Dr. Monica Sweeney, the Health Departments Assistant Commissioner for HIV Prevention and Control, said New York City has long been considered the epicenter of the U.S. epidemic.

Source

Scientists Discover New Virus Invading US Honeybees

The invading bee virus newly discovered in the U.S. is called Varroa Destructor Virus -1 VDV-1. First definitively identified in Europe in 2006, VDV-1 is carried by both honeybees and the tiny varroa mites that affect them. VDV-1 is related to a family of paralytic viruses that causes a breakdown of some membranes.

In silkworms the virus causes flaccid disease, which causes the worms to digest themselves internally.
The virus was discovered using a technology developed for battlefield detection of viruses. This technology, called Integrated Virus Detection System / Proteomic Mass Spectrometry, reveals virus by size and peptide information contained in a sample and compares that information against known genetic sequences.

Source

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