Military drones have already begun edging out manned fighter jets and bombers over the past decade, and the U.S. Navy doesn't plan on being left behind. Its vision for unmanned aerial warfare includes a tailless robotic aircraft resembling a UFO that is scheduled to begin landing on aircraft carriers in 2013. As a step toward that goal, the X-47B drone recently made its first flight in cruise mode with retracted landing gear.
The Navy has enlisted the X-47B drone — a Northrop Grumman design with a stealthy profile — as more than just its very first carrier-based drone. It also wants to use the X-47B as a test platform for autonomous aerial refueling without human assistance in 2014.
"Last week's flight gave us our first clean look at the aerodynamic cruise performance of the X-47B air system … and it is proving out all of our predictions," said Janis Pamiljans, vice president and Navy UCAS program manager for Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector.
The flight test also served as a trial run for the robotic aircraft's onboard navigation hardware and software. Such robotic brains are designed to help the X-47B take off from and land on the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier.
Planned tests for the drone don't include weapon or sensor demonstrations, but there's no apparent reason why it might not carry weapons in the future. The U.S. military has already demonstrated the lethality of armed drone strikes with its Reaper and Predator unmanned aerial systems in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and the Navy has also announced plans to arm ship-based helicopter drones.
The latest test flight took place at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
On April 12, 1955, the first successful polio vaccine was administered to almost 2 million schoolchildren around the country. Its discoverer, University of Pittsburgh medical researcher Jonas Salk, was interviewed on CBS Radio that evening.
"Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" radio host Edward R. Murrow asked him.
It was a reasonable question, considering that immunity to a deadly disease that afflicted 300,000 Americans annually ought to be worth something.
"Well, the people, I would say," Salk famously replied. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
In a world where the cancer drug Avastin — patented by the pharmaceutical company Genentech/Roche — costs patients about $80,000 per year without having been proven to extend lives, Salk's selflessness has made him the hero of many medical researchers today.
One of Salk's admirers is Evangelos Michelakis, a cancer researcher at the University of Alberta who, three years ago, discovered that a common, nontoxic chemical known as DCA, short for dichloroacetate, seems to inhibit the growth of cancerous tumors in mice. Michelakis' initial findings garnered much fanfare at the time and have recirculated on the Web again this week, in large part because of a blog post ("Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice") that ignited fresh debate.
The mechanism by which DCA works in mice, Michelakis discovered, is remarkably simple: It kills most types of cancer cells by disrupting the way they metabolize sugar, causing them to self-destruct without adversely affecting normal tissues.
Following the animal trials, Michelakis and his colleagues did tests of DCA on human cancer cells in a Petri dish, then conducted human clinical trials using $1.5 million in privately raised funds. His encouraging results — DCA treatment appeared to extend the lives of four of the five study participants — were published last year in Science Translational Medicine.
The preliminary work in rodents, cell cultures, and small trials on humans points to DCA as being a powerful cancer treatment. That doesn't mean it's the long-awaited cure — many other compounds have seemed similarly promising in the early stages of research without later living up to that promise — but nonetheless, Michelakis believes larger human trials on DCA are warranted.
Like Jonas Salk, Michelakis hasn't patented his discovery. It's not because he doesn't want to, but because he can't. When it comes to patents, DCA really is like the sun: It's a cheap, widely used chemical that no one can own.
In today's world, such drugs don't readily attract funding.
Pharmaceutical companies are not exactly ignoring DCA, and they definitely aren't suppressing DCA research — it's just that they're not helping it. Why? Drug development is ultimately a business, and investing in the drug simply isn't a good business move. "Big Pharma has no interest whatsoever in investing [in DCA research] because there will be no profit," Michelakis told Life's Little Mysteries.
The long road to a cure
Pharmacologist Omudhome Ogbru, an R&D director at a New Jersey-based pharmaceutical business, The Medicines Company, notes, "Drug companies are like other companies in that they manufacture products that must be sold for a profit in order for the company to survive and grow."
Only one in 10,000 compounds studied by researchers ends up as an approved drug, Ogbru explained in an op-ed at MedicineNet. To get to the approval phase, drugs must undergo seven to 10 years of testing at a total cost averaging $500 million — all of which can be for naught if the drug doesn't receive Food and Drug Administration approval. Even if it does, "only three out of every 20 approved drugs bring in sufficient revenue to cover their developmental costs."
"Profit is the incentive for the risk that the company takes," Ogbru wrote. "Without the promise of a reasonable profit, there is very little incentive for any company to develop new drugs."
It would be nearly impossible to make a profit on a drug like dichloroacetate. "If DCA proves to be effective, then it will be a ridiculously cheap drug," Michelakis said.
Daniel Chang, an oncologist at the Stanford Cancer Center who recently began looking into DCA, concurred. "I'm sure the lack of patentability is playing a role in the lack of investigation," Chang told us in an email.
While government health organizations like the National Cancer Institute give research grants to help fund clinical trials, "those would never be enough to get DCA approved as a cancer treatment," said Akban Kahn, a Toronto doctor. "You need hundreds of millions of dollars, and a government grant is not that big."
DCA research has moved along much more slowly than if a drug company were footing the bill. That said, grassroots funding has allowed surprisingly steady progress. "Through the website, radio, phone calls, things like that, we raised about $1.5 million in nine months" at the University of Alberta DCA Research Center, Michelakis said. This was enough to fund a detailed study of DCA treatment in five brain cancer patients.
The results were promising. The study, however, was small and lacked a placebo control, making it impossible to say for sure whether the patients' conditions improved because of the DCA treatment or because of something else. Daniel Chang, the Stanford researcher, described the study's results as interesting but inconclusive. In their paper, Michelakis and his co-authors wrote, "With the small number of treated participants in our study, no firm conclusions regarding DCA as a therapy … can be made."
Despite the dearth of clinical tests, one family practitioner, Akbar Khan of Medicor Cancer Centre in Toronto, prescribes off-label DCA to his cancer patients. (He says this can be done in Canada because DCA is already approved there for treating certain metabolism disorders. Michelakis, however, said he does not think Khan should be prescribing the drug before it is officially approved for cancer use.)
"We are seeing about 60 to 70 percent of patients who have failed standard treatments respond favorably to DCA," Khan told Life's Little Mysteries. Khan's group just published its first peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. "It's a case report of a patient with a rare form of cancer who had tried other treatments that weren't working, so he came to us for DCA. It was effective, and actually it's quite a dramatic result. He had multiple tumors, including a particularly troubling one in his leg. DCA stabilized the tumor and significant reduced his pain.
"We currently have three patients with incurable cancers who are in complete remission, and are likely cured, from using DCA in combination with conventional palliative (non-curative) treatments. We are in the process of publishing these cases," he said. [Countdown: Top 10 Mysterious Diseases]
A new drug model
Small trials and case studies won't be enough, however, to prove DCA works. Further investigation into the drug's efficacy is necessary, and without the help of Big Pharma, it will have to happen in an unusual way.
"This could be a social experiment where the public funds these trials," Michelakis said. "After discovering the effect of DCA on cancer cells, I consider this the second-biggest achievement of our work: when we showed that you can bring a drug to human trials without a lot of money. If others were inspired" — his group is beginning to establish collaborations with some prominent cancer hospitals —"this could be a major achievement. Eventually the federal bodies like the National Cancer Institute would see there is enough evidence, and then they'll help with funding."
"It represents a new attitude and a new way of thinking," he added.
Perhaps not entirely new. For inspiration and encouragement, Michelakis often recalls the story of the polio vaccine: "It succeeded in eradicating a deadly disease without making a profit."
'X-Men Origins: Wolverine' - Twentieth Century Fox
When parents pass their genes down to their children, an average of 60 errors are introduced to the genetic code in the process, according to a new study. Any of those five dozen mutations could be the source of major differences in a person's appearance or behavior as compared to his or her parents — and altogether, the mistakes are the driving force of evolution.
Sixty mutations may sound like a lot, but according to the international team of geneticists behind the new research, it is actually fewer than expected. "We had previously estimated that parents would contribute an average of 100 to 200 mistakes to their child," Philip Awadalla, a geneticist at the University of Montreal who co-led the project, said in a press release. "Our genetic study, the first of its kind, shows that actually much fewer mistakes, or mutations, are made."
That means human evolution happens more slowly than they previously thought.
The researchers analyzed the complete genetic sequences of two families that had previously been collected as part of the 1,000 Genomes Project. They looked for new mutations present in the children's DNA that were absent from their parents' genomes. "Like very small needles in a very large haystack," Awadalla said, there was only one new mutation in every 100 million letters of DNA. [Read: How to Speak Genetics]
The number of mutations that came from each parent was drastically different in the two different families. In one family, 92 percent of the mutations in the child's genes derived from the father, whereas in the other family, 64 percent came from the mother.
"This was a surprise: many people expected that in all families, most mutations would come from the father, due to the additional number of times that the genome needs to be copied to make a sperm, as opposed to an egg," said Matt Hurles, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K. More work must be done to explain the disparity.
The new techniques and algorithms developed for the research, which is detailed in the latest issue of Nature Genetics, can be used in the future to answer additional questions. For example, how does a parent's age affect the number of mutations passed to his or her offspring? How do their various environmental exposures impact mutation rates?
Geneticists will find out by comparing the number of new mutations in the children born to parents of different ages and life experiences.
Is truth stranger than conspiracy-theory fiction? A new book on Area 51 that's already generating a ton of buzz says there was no alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Instead, Stalin did it--maybe.
According to Annie Jacobsen, the reporter who authored "Area 51," the spaceship was actually a Soviet spy plane that came down during a storm. Jacobsen claims it was filled with bizarre, genetically engineered child-sized pilots. Then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was hoping, Jacobsen alleges, that the new cause widespread panic in the U.S.
The story gets even stranger: The leader of the USSR had apparently been inspired by the 1938 radio adaptation radio broadcast of the HG Wells story "War of the Worlds," produced by Orson Welles. The broadcast triggered panic in some listeners who tuned in and mistook it for a real-life alien invasion. (Though later students of the episode claim that the media of Welles' day vastly exaggerated the scale of public alarm over the broadcast.)
And those ET-looking aviators? They were scientific experiments created by the "Angel of Death," Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, for the USSR after the war. The flight was piloted remotely, according to accounts in the book, and was filled with a crew of "alien-like children."
According to Jacobsen's source, a retired engineer who was put on the project in 1978, the look of the human experiments could explain the alien conspiracy theories: "They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes."
Is any of this true? There's no way to prove it. Documents surrounding the Roswell incident are still classified--as is virtually all information related to the mystery spot.
Still, lack of proof hasn't exactly stopped the book from sparking speculation on the media circuit and on the Web. In the last day, Yahoo! searches skyrocketed 3,000 percent for "area 51 book." And the tome is penned not by a crackpot conspirator, but a respected journalist.
Even the New York Times gives her credence, writing in its review: "Although this connect-the-dots UFO thesis is only a hasty-sounding addendum to an otherwise straightforward investigative book about aviation and military history, it makes an indelible impression. 'Area 51' is liable to become best known for sci-fi provocation."
But sci-fi provocation may be all the book generates. After all, without the government coming out and saying what happened back in 1947, even if there was no conspiracy, the stories of the "Roswell Incident" will remain just that.
Kaewong Boy: This is the funniest so far. "Genetically engineered child-sized pilots & they were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes." I mean, come on.... who is she kidding. And by the way, if there is really nothing to hide over the what happened at Roswell then why do they keep the documents as classified until now, why keep it a secret in the first place.
NEW YORK — All the stars, planets and galaxies that can be seen today make up just 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is made of stuff astronomers can't see, detect or even comprehend.
These mysterious substances are called dark energy and dark matter. Astronomers infer their existence based on their gravitational influence on what little bits of the universe can be seen, but dark matter and energy themselves continue to elude all detection.
"The overwhelming majority of the universe is: who knows?" explains science writer Richard Panek, who spoke about these oddities of our universe on Monday (May 9) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) here in Manhattan. "It's unknown for now, and possibly forever."
In Panek's new book, "The 4 Percent Universe" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), Panek recounts the story of how dark matter and dark energy were discovered. It's a history filled with mind-boggling scientific surprises and fierce competition between the researchers racing to find answers. [Strangest Things in Space]
Dark Matter
Some of the first inklings astronomers had that there might be more mass in the universe than just the stuff we can see came in the 1960s and 1970s. Vera Rubin, a young astronomer at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, observed the speeds of stars at various locations in galaxies.
Simple Newtonian physics predicted that stars on the outskirts of a galaxy would orbit more slowly than stars at the center. Yet Rubin's observations found no drop-off at all in the stars' velocities further out in a galaxy. Instead, she found that all stars in a galaxy seem to circle the center at roughly the same speed.
"It means that galaxies should be flying apart, should be completely unstable," Panek said. "Something's missing here."
But research by other astronomers confirmed the odd finding. Ultimately, based on observations and computer models, scientists concluded that there must be much more matter in galaxies than what's obvious to us. If the stars and gas that we can see inside galaxies are only a small portion of their total mass, then the velocities make sense.
Astronomers nicknamed this unseen mass dark matter.
Where is it?
Yet, in the nearly 40 years that followed, researchers still haven't been able to figure out what dark matter is made of.
A popular hypothesis is that dark matter is formed by exotic particles that don't interact with regular matter, or even light, and so are invisible. Yet their mass exerts a gravitational pull, just like normal matter, which is why they affect the velocities of stars and other phenomena in the universe. [Video: Dark Matter in 3D]
However, try as hard as they might, scientists have yet to detect any of these particles, even with tests designed specifically to target their predicted properties.
"I think on the dark matter side there is some discouragement among the people who are kind of mid-career," Panek said. "They went into this field thinking, 'OK, we're going to solve this problem and then we'll build from there.' But 15, 20 years later, they're saying, 'I've invested my career in this and I don’t know if I'm going to find anything in my lifetime.'"
Still, many hold out hope that we're getting close and that experiments such as the newly built Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in Geneva may finally solve the puzzle.
Dark Energy
Dark energy is possibly even more baffling than dark matter. It's a relatively more recent discovery, and it's one that scientists have even less of a chance of understanding anytime soon.
It all started in the mid-1990s, when two teams of researchers were trying to figure out how fast the universe was expanding, in order to predict whether it would keep spreading out forever, or if it would eventually crumple back in on itself in a "Big Crunch."
To do this, scientists used special tricks to determine the distances of many exploded stars, called supernovas, throughout the universe. They then measured their velocities to determine how fast they were moving away from us.
When we view very distant stars, we are viewing an earlier time in the history of the universe, because those stars' light has taken millions and billions of light-years to travel to us. Thus, looking at the speeds of stars at various distances tells us how fast the universe was expanding at various points in its lifetime.
Astronomers predicted two possibilities: either the universe has been expanding at roughly the same rate throughout time, or that the universe has been slowing in its expansion as it gets older.
Shockingly, the researchers observed neither possibility. Instead, the universe appeared to be accelerating in its expansion.
That fact could not be explained based on what we knew of the universe at that time. All the gravity of all the mass in the cosmos should have been pulling the universe back inward, just as gravity pulls a ball back down to Earth after it's been thrown into the air.
"There's some other force out there or something on a cosmic scale that is counteracting the force of gravity," Panek explained. "People didn't believe this at first because it's such a weird result."
Fierce Competition
Scientists named this mysterious force dark energy. Though no one has a good idea of what dark energy is, or why it exists, it is the force that appears to be counteracting gravity and causing the universe to accelerate in its expansion.
The lack of a good explanation for dark energy hasn't seemed to dampen scientists' enthusiasm for it.
"What I hear again and again is how excited people are to be working in this field right now, when this revolution is going on," Panek told SPACE.com. "The problems are so great and profound, they're actually rather thrilled with it."
Overall, dark energy is thought to contribute 73 percent of all the mass and energy in the universe. Another 23 percent is dark matter, which leaves only 4 percent of the universe composed of regular matter, such as stars, planets and people.
This bizarre, but apparently true, conclusion was reached at about the same time by the two groups working to measure the expansion of the universe. The competition between the groups became very contentious, Panek said, and they grew to dislike each other quite a lot.
Ultimately, though, members of both teams should reap the rewards of finding one of the biggest surprises in the history of science.
"I think that it's kind of assumed the dark energy will win the discoverers the Nobel," Panek said. "There certainly is that assumption that it's just a matter of years."
When an Airbus 380 from Dubai came in for landing at Heathrow Airport on a recent stormy night in London, it was struck by a giant bolt of lightning. The event was caught on camera, giving the world a rare glimpse of what's actually a common occurrence.
The average commercial airliner gets struck by lightning a little more than once a year. By analyzing the few videos that exist of such incidents — it's not often that people happen to record airplanes right at the moment they are struck — atmospheric scientists have figured out how and why it happens.
According to Vlad Mazur, a leading lightning expert with the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA), the majority of lightning strikes to planes are actually triggered by the planes themselves. The metal bodies of the planes intensify the electric field of storm clouds as the aircraft pass through them; this can sometimes lead to an electrical breakdown.
Artificial Trigger
"In the video, this is without a doubt a triggered flash," Mazur told Life's Little Mysteries. "You can see it's a dark sky, so you have rain and other evidence of a recent thunderstorm. Natural lightning had most likely ended already, but in decaying storms you have a very high electric field. It's enough to support the development of lightning, but there is no natural mechanism for initiating lightning discharge. When an airplane comes in, it acts as an artificial trigger."
The metallic (mostly aluminum) body of the plane acts as a conductor, he said. Amid the electric field of the storm cloud, positive charge builds up on one side of the conductor and negative charge on the other side. "The charge accumulates at places where the curvature [of the plane] is very sharp, like the nose and the tips of the tail and wings," Mazur explained. "These charged extremities intensify the ambient electric field. Then you have a leader (a spark), which initiates the development of a plasma channel." Voila: lightning.
According to Bill Rison, an electrical engineer and lightning physicist at New Mexico Tech, two plasma channels, which are the paths electric charge moves along during a lightning strike, can clearly be seen in the video traveling out from opposite points on the airplane.
"A negative leader leaves one tip and a positive leader leaves a different tip, usually at opposing ends of the plane. In the [video] you can see two channels, one from the nose of the plane going upward, and the other from the tail of the plane going downward. I expect that the upward leader from the nose is positive (going up into the negative charge in the cloud), and the downward leader from the tail is negative," Rison said.
Most often, planes weather lightning just fine. Electricity passes around it, not through. Of the 140,000 aviation accidents on record in the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) database, only 24 were lightning-related. Most of those involved small private planes or helicopters, and only five incidents involved fatalities. By far the worst plane crash ever caused by lightning happened in 1963,when a strike ignited the fuel tank of a plane over Elkton, Md. Though passengers were shielded from the electricity in the strike, the fuel tank explosion forced the plane to crash, killing all 81 passengers and crew members.
Smooth Curves
State-of-the-art engineering like that of the Airbus 380 prevents such disasters today. How do the planes handle a 30-million volt bolt of electricity?
The fuselage of the plane shown in the video, like that of most planes, is made mostly of aluminum. When lightning strikes the wingtip, nose or tail of a plane, electricity courses over its smooth aluminum shell without building up on any edges or penetrating inside. "In this case it sweeps above the top of the fuselage," Mazur said.
Furthermore, fuel tanks are tested to ensure they can withstand a lightning strike without producing dangerous sparks, and all on-board electronics and navigation equipment are grounded and protected from electrical surges. [How Are Plane Electronics Grounded?]
However, all that engineering doesn't mean pilots are nonchalant about flying into thunderstorms: NTSB reports are littered with accidents caused by severe turbulence, icy conditions and nasty crosswinds. The lightning strike didn't endanger passengers in this Airbus, but they're lucky to have landed safely, nonetheless.
While much of America celebrated the dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden, the Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists still had questions. For them and a growing number of skeptics, the plot only thickened.
Could the public trust bin Laden’s DNA samples? Where was bin Laden’s body? Why was the most wanted mujaheddin on Earth buried in an undisclosed location in the northern Arabian Sea? Why was the news announced mere weeks after President Obama’s campaign kickoff and just days after his birth certificate was released? Why so late on a Sunday night?
Within minutes of the news of bin Laden’s funeral at sea, Facebook, Twitter and e-mail lighted up with conspiracy theories from around the globe, asking questions, pointing out discrepancies, motives, counter-motives, coverups and counter-coverups, comparing photos and videos, voice recordings and FBI most-wanted pinup posters.
“This has not put a single of the 9/11 questions to bed,” said Steven Jones, a retired Brigham Young University physics professor and contributor to the 9/11 Truth Movement. Jones, along with other members of the movement, a loose coalition of people who distrust Washington’s version of the attacks, say the collapse of the twin towers is best explained as controlled demolition.
“As a scientist, I try to look at the evidence I can get,” Jones said.
It started with the “9/11 truthers,” who, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, wondered why 110-story towers crashed and military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. They formed organizations. They held rallies. They filed many Freedom of Information Act requests.
They wrote books and studied the physics of the towers crumbling.
“I don’t know how you can have closure, when there are hundreds of contradictions to the stories that you were told. The story doesn’t end here because we are told bin Laden is dead,” said Mike Berger, who works with 911Truth.org, an organization founded to examine facts around the attack. “We are living in an endless war of trillions of dollars being spent without any responsibility.’’
Alex Jones, a radio personality out of Austin, who gives voice to the 9/11 Truth Movement and runs the Web site Infowars.com, sent out a Web headline that screamed, “Red Alert. Inside Sources: Bin Laden Corpse Has Been on Ice for Nearly a Decade.”
The “king of conspiracy,” as he is known by the media, pointed out discrepancies that went instantly viral. He lists FBI officials and counterintelligence leaders from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan who have said for years that bin Laden was dead. Former Council on Foreign Relations member Steve R. Pieczenik even told Jones on the air in 2002 that bin Laden had been dead for months.
“Obama just relaunched his election bid, and nabbing bin Laden is the main kickoff campaign rally. Things aren’t going well. So they are bringing back an old staple. They need a hero. It’s the Orwellian archtypical bearded scary bad guy who is going to get us, so don’t worry, the government got the bad guy,’’ said Jones in a telephone interview after his syndicated self-titled afternoon radio show. “This isn’t Elvis, man. The government lied to us about WMDs.”
But Elvis didn’t die during the Facebook era, when Web pages such as “Osama bin Laden NOT DEAD” go up instantly. “There’s something fishy in the waters where they supposedly dropped him. A picture of him dead wouldn’t have hurt,” reads an entry by one contributor.
“They saved Che Guevara’s fingertips to prove it was him,” said Ted Goertzel, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University at Camden, N.J., who has written extensively on psychology and terrorism. “But Muslim tradition says you bury the body right away. The issue is, our society goes through a traumatic event of 9/11, and this comes 10 years later, so it’s not timed very well for our national mourning or anger. But the conspiracy reaction is a way of thinking that’s much more common today, and people are accustomed to it because of the Internet. There’s no screening process. People may also be going into an automatic response.”
At different moments in American history, such as after the deaths of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, the country becomes more prone to conspiracy theories because there’s so much hurt and anger, Goertzel said.
Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, who became a symbol of the opposition to the war, went on her Facebook page today to broadcast her theory.
“I am sorry, but if you believe the newest death of OBL, you’re stupid,” Sheehan writes. “Just think to yourself — they paraded Saddam’s dead sons around to prove they were dead — why do you suppose they hastily buried this version of OBL at sea? This lying, murderous Empire can only exist with your brainwashed consent — just put your flags away and THINK!”
Conspiracy. Just saying the word in conversation can make people politely edge away, looking for someone who won’t corner them with wild theories about how Elvis, John F. Kennedy, and Bigfoot are cryogenically frozen in an underground bunker.
Yet conspiracies do exist. In the corporate world, major companies we buy products from everyday have been found guilty of conspiring to fix prices and reduce competition. Just about any planned criminal act committed by more than one person could be considered a conspiracy, from simple murder-for-hire to the Watergate break-in.
Many conspiracy theorists go much further, though, and see a hidden hand behind the world’s major events. While some of the theories have a grain of truth to them, conspiracy theories are impossible to disprove, because the hardcore believers will find some way to rationalize away evidence that contradicts their beliefs. Eyewitnesses who dispute their conclusions are mistaken—or part of the conspiracy.
At least that's what they want you to think ...
The 9/11 Conspiracies
The evidence is overwhelming that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were indeed the result of a conspiracy. There's no doubt about it: A close (or even cursory) look at the evidence makes it clear that it was carefully planned and executed by conspirators. The question, of course, is who those conspirators were. Osama bin Laden and the crew of (mostly Saudi) hijackers were part of the conspiracy, but what about President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney? Did top Bush advisors, including Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, either collaborate with bin Laden, or intentionally allow the attacks to happen? Put another way, was it an inside job? Conspiracy theorists believe so, and point to a catalog of supposed inconsistencies in the "official version" of the attacks. Many of the technical conspiracy claims were debunked by Popular Mechanics magazine in March 2005, while other claims are refuted by simple logic: If a hijacked airplane did not crash into the Pentagon, as is often claimed, then where is Flight 77 and its passengers? Are they with the Roswell aliens at Hangar 18? In many conspiracy theories, bureaucratic incompetence is often mistaken for conspiracy. Our government is so efficient, knowledgeable, and capable—so the reasoning goes—that it could not possibly have botched the job so badly in detecting the plot ahead of time or responding to the attacks. I find that hard to believe.
Princess Diana's Murder
Within hours of Princess Diana's death on Aug. 31, 1997, in a Paris highway tunnel, conspiracy theories swirled. As was the case with the death of John F. Kennedy, the idea that such a beloved and high-profile figure could be killed so suddenly was a shock. This was especially true of Princess Diana; royalty die of old age, political intrigue, or eating too much rich food; they don't get killed by a common drunk driver. Unlike many conspiracy theories, though, this one had a billionaire promoting it: Mohamed Al-Fayed, the father of Dodi Al-Fayed, who was killed along with Diana. Al-Fayed claims that the accident was in fact an assassination by British intelligence agencies, at the request of the Royal Family. Al-Fayed's claims were examined and dismissed as baseless by a 2006 inquiry; the following year, at Diana's inquest, the coroner stated that "The conspiracy theory advanced by Mohamed Al Fayed has been minutely examined and shown to be without any substance." On April 7 of this year, the coroner's jury concluded that Diana and Al-Fayed were unlawfully killed due to negligence by their drunken chauffer and pursuing paparazzi.
Subliminal Advertising
Ever been watching a movie and suddenly get the munchies? Or sitting on your sofa watching TV and suddenly get the irresistible urge to buy a new car? If so, you may be the victim of a subliminal advertising conspiracy! Proponents include Wilson Bryan Key (author of "Subliminal Seduction") and Vance Packard (author of "The Hidden Persuaders"), both of whom claimed that subliminal (subconscious) messages in advertising were rampant and damaging. Though the books caused a public outcry and led to FCC hearings, much of both books have since been discredited, and several key "studies" of the effects of subliminal advertising were revealed to have been faked. In the 1980s, concern over subliminal messages spread to bands such as Styx and Judas Priest, with the latter band even being sued in 1990 for allegedly causing a teen's suicide with subliminal messages (the case was dismissed). Subliminal mental processing does exist, and can be tested. But just because a person perceives something (a message or advertisement, for example) subconsciously means very little by itself. There is no inherent benefit of subliminal advertising over regular advertising, any more than there would be in seeing a flash of a commercial instead of the full twenty seconds. Getting a person to see something for a split-second is easy; filmmakers do it all the time (watch the last few frames in Hitchcock's classic "Psycho"). Getting a person to buy or do something based on that split-second is another matter entirely. (The conspiracy was parodied in the 1980s television show Max Headroom, in which viewers were exploding after seeing subliminal messages called "blipverts.")
The Moon Landing Hoax
In the 1978 film Capricorn One, American astronauts and NASA faked a Mars landing. Though a mediocre film, it was an interesting idea, and one that would endure for decades. In 2001, Fox television aired the program "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?," which rehashed many discredited "discrepancies" between the official version of the moon landing and photographs of the landing. (Curiously, they never explain why NASA would distribute photographs that would "prove" that they had faked the moon landing.) Web sites such as BadAstronomy.com have pages and pages of point-by-point, detailed refutations of the Fox claims. Of course, even if there was some credible evidence showing that the 1969 Apollo moon landing was a hoax, conspiracy theorists must also account for later moon missions, involving a dozen astronauts. And there's the issue of the hundreds of pounds of moon rocks that have been studied around the world and verified as of extraterrestrial origin… how did NASA get the rocks if not during a moon landing? Many astronauts have been offended by the implication that they faked their accomplishments. In fact in 2002, when conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel confronted Buzz Aldrin and called him a "coward and a liar" for faking the moon landings, the 72-year-old punched Sibrel in the jaw.
Paul McCartney's Death
According to many stories and conspiracy theories that circulated in the late 1960s, Beatles guitarist Paul McCartney died in 1966. The remaining members of the Beatles—along with their manager and others—conspired to keep McCartney's death a secret, going so far as to hire a look-alike and sound-alike to take his place in the band. Well, kind of: In a case of seriously twisted logic (even by conspiracy theory standards) the conspirators in this case took great pains to keep the press and public from finding out about McCartney's demise—yet they also wanted fans to know about it, and placed clever clues in album covers and music giving details about McCartney's death. For example, on the cover of the Abbey Road album, all four Beatles are photographed striding across a zebra crossing, but only McCartney is barefoot, and out of step with the other three. This must mean something, right? Despite public denials by the band, fans couldn't just let it be, and came together to look for more clues.
John F. Kennedy’s Assassination
John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963 in a Dallas motorcade. Who killed Kennedy? Most (though not all) conspiracy theorists acknowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from a book depository. Beyond this fact lies a vast area of conspiracy theory that has spawned endless speculation and hundreds of books, articles, and films. Was there a second assassin, perhaps one at a nearby "grassy knoll"? And if Oswald did act alone, who gave him the orders? Activists against Fidel Castro? Organized crime bosses? A jealous husband upset with Kennedy's philandering? Though the Warren Commission report concluded that Oswald acted alone, a 1979 report by The House Select Committee on Assassinations suggested that there was in fact a conspiracy, and likely more than one shooter. In such a complex and sensational case, the conspiracy theories will live on.
The Roswell Crash Cover-Up
There is one fact that almost all skeptics and believers agree on: Something crashed on a remote ranch outside of Roswell, NewMexico in 1947. The government at first claimed it was some sort of saucer, then retracted the statement and claimed it was really a weather balloon. Yet the best evidence suggests that it was neither a flying saucer nor a weather balloon, but instead a high-altitude, top-secret military balloon dubbed Project Mogul. As it turns out, descriptions of the wreckage first reported by the original eyewitnesses very closely match photos of the Project Mogul balloons, down to the silvery finish and strange symbols on its side. The stories about crashed alien bodies did not surface until decades later and in fact no one considered the Roswell crash as anything extraterrestrial or unusual until thirty years later, when a book on the topic was published. There was indeed a cover-up, but it did not hide a crashed saucer, instead it hid a Cold War-era spying program.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
"The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" is a hoaxed book that purported to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination. It first appeared in Russia in 1905, and described how Christians' morality, finances, and health would be targeted by a small group of powerful Jews. The idea that there is a Jewish conspiracy is nothing new, of course, and has been repeated by many prominent people including Henry Ford and Mel Gibson. In 1920, Henry Ford paid to have half a million copies of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" published, and in the 1930s, the book was used by the Nazis as justification for its genocide against Jews (in fact, Adolph Hitler referred to the "Protocols" in his book "Mein Kampf"). Though the book has been completely discredited as a hoax and forgery, it is still in print and remains widely circulated around the world.
Satanic Cults
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, a rash of child abuse cases horrified America. Children accused adults of ritual rapes, torture, and abuse, and the news media reported the sensational stories. Often the accusations included charges of Satanism. The pinnacle was Geraldo Rivera's infamous NBC special "Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground," which aired on Oct. 28, 1988. Rivera relied on self-proclaimed "Satanism experts," misleading and inaccurate statistics, crimes with only tenuous links to Satanism, and sensationalized media reports. In what was the largest viewership for a documentary in television history, Rivera claimed that an organized, Satanic conspiracy was at work killing babies, murdering innocents, and conducting ghastly rituals. "There are over one million Satanists in this country," Rivera said, adding that "The odds are, [they] are in your town." Rivera presented no proof; the lack of evidence was seen as proof of how well organized and shrewd the Satanic conspiracy really was. Yet little evidence supports claims about Satanic cults or conspiracies. In a 1992 report on ritual crime, FBI agent Kenneth Lanning concluded that the rampant rumors of ritual murders, cannibalism, and kidnapping were unfounded. Phillips Stevens, Jr., associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said that the widespread allegations of crimes by Satanists "constitute the greatest hoax perpetrated upon the American people in the twentieth century."
Big Pharma
Almost everybody (except investors) loves to hate the drug companies. Drugs cost too much, drug company profits are obscene, and it seems that every few months some drug once claimed to be safe is yanked off the shelf after patients die. It's little wonder that the drug industry ("Big Pharma") is looked upon with suspicion. But some proponents of "alternative medicine" believe that drug companies actually conspire to keep people sick to reap profits. For example, Kevin Trudeau (bestselling author of “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About”) claims that important medical information is being kept hidden by a conspiracy between the medical establishment and big drug companies. According to Trudeau, "There are certain groups, including... the drug industry... that don’t want people to know about cures for diseases..." Actress and model Jenny McCarthy appeared recently on "Larry King Live," accusing doctors and the pharmaceutical industry of conspiring to suppress evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism.
Kaewong Boy: 'Big Pharma' really are not interested to cure sickness & diseases. That is not where the money is. Think about it. If they cure all the sickness & all the diseases in the world, what will be left for them in the end? Nothing! And that is exactly what they are doing, one part of the business is to keep on creating new kind of bacteria & viruses while the other part is to invent & introduce the drugs to fight it to the market. It is an ongoing process with the main objective of accumulating wealth, it is never about helping us, it is never for humanity.
While humans have been a spacefaring species for more than 50 years, it's quite possible we have yet to perform that most basic of acts — sex — beyond terra firma. Yet.
Rumors have long swirled that astronauts may have hooked up in orbit, perhaps even as part of secret sex-in-space experiments run by the Russian or American governments. But those stories are likely the product of overactive — and overheated — imaginations, experts say.
A Russian space official, for example, has categorically denied any such weightless shenanigans by his countrymen, the news agency AFP reported Friday (April 22).
"There is no official or unofficial evidence that there were instances of sexual intercourse or the carrying out of sexual experiments in space," Valery Bogomolov, the deputy director of the Moscow-based Institute of Biomedical Problems, told the news agency Interfax, AFP reported. "At least, in the history of Russian or Soviet space exploration, this most certainly was not the case." [10 Surprising Sex Statistics]
What about NASA astronauts?
Bogomolov also addressed the rumors of American hanky-panky, though with considerably less authority.
"As for American space exploration, well, I just don't have the information to categorically deny that," Bogomolov told Interfax, according to AFP. "There are just anecdotal rumors, which are not worth trusting."
But those in the know say NASA astronauts have likely been as chaste as their Russian counterparts while zipping around Earth at 17,500 mph (28,164 kph). While NASA apparently doesn't explicitly forbid sex in orbit, its astronaut code of conduct calls for "relationships of trust" and "professional standards" to be maintained at all times.
"I'm not aware of an official NASA policy on this," said former astronaut Leroy Chiao, a veteran of four space missions between 1994 and 2005. "It was not discussed when I was there, it was simply understood. Nobody brought it up — it simply wasn't a consideration."
Despite the advent of mixed-gender crews in 1983, NASA astronauts seem to have behaved themselves in orbit, according to Chiao.
"As for any couple having had sex in space, I seriously doubt it," Chiao told SPACE.com in an email interview.
Chiao, who spent more than 229 days in space, explained some of his reasoning in a blog post for the tech website Gizmodo back in 2009.
"Guys are guys. If a guy had sex in space, he would not be able to stand not bragging about it," Chiao wrote. "Sorry to disappoint you, but there it is. We would all know about it. Or, I should say, we will all know about it when it happens."
Other astronauts have backed Chiao's viewpoint, saying that NASA's spaceflyers have thus far been too focused on their missions to risk any romantic entanglements in orbit.
That's not to say that such entanglements don't unfold back on Earth, however, as the messy love triangle involving then-astronauts William Oefelein and Lisa Nowak demonstrates. Nowak was arrested in 2007 for allegedly attacking a woman she viewed as a rival for Oefelein's affections. She ultimately received probation.
It will happen
Sex in space will happen eventually, if it hasn't already. It's one thing for a space shuttle crew to contain themselves for a few weeks, or astronauts aboard the station to remain chaste for five or six months. But manned missions to Mars would last years, so abstinence for that long would be a tall order for most people.
And sex would likely be a natural part of life at a lunar or Mars base, especially if the aim is to one day establish a self-sustaining colony.
The rise of private spaceflight should open the door even more to sex in space. Space tourists would not be bound by NASA's code of conduct, or as restricted by the demands of a complicated mission.
And some people will probably even fly to space just to join the "220-mile-high club." Virgin Galactic, which hopes to start flying tourists to suborbital space as early as next year, has already turned down a $1 million offer from an unidentified party to aid in the production of a sex-in-space movie.
Adapted from Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.
The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.
This insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (Lanza) was walking through the woods. Looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. There the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. The spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. The human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. Yet there was something kindred: We humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.
Is the web possible without the spider? Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?
Figuring out the nature of the real world has obsessed scientists and philosophers for millennia. Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.
For centuries, scientists regarded Berkeley’s argument as a philosophical sideshow and continued to build physical models based on the assumption of a separate universe “out there” into which we have each individually arrived. These models presume the existence of one essential reality that prevails with us or without us. Yet since the 1920s, quantum physics experiments have routinely shown the opposite: Results do depend on whether anyone is observing. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the famous two-slit experiment. When someone watches a subatomic particle or a bit of light pass through the slits, the particle behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities—including somehow passing through both holes at the same time.
Some of the greatest physicists have described these results as so confounding they are impossible to comprehend fully, beyond the reach of metaphor, visualization, and language itself. But there is another interpretation that makes them sensible. Instead of assuming a reality that predates life and even creates it, we propose a biocentric picture of reality. From this point of view, life—particularly consciousness—creates the universe, and the universe could not exist without us.
MESSING WITH THE LIGHT
Quantum mechanics is the physicist’s most accurate model for describing the world of the atom. But it also makes some of the most persuasive arguments that conscious perception is integral to the workings of the universe. Quantum theory tells us that an unobserved small object (for instance, an electron or a photon—a particle of light) exists only in a blurry, unpredictable state, with no well-defined location or motion until the moment it is observed. This is Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. Physicists describe the phantom, not-yet-manifest condition as a wave function, a mathematical expression used to find the probability that a particle will appear in any given place. When a property of an electron suddenly switches from possibility to reality, some physicists say its wave function has collapsed.
What accomplishes this collapse? Messing with it. Hitting it with a bit of light in order to take its picture. Just looking at it does the job. Experiments suggest that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to collapse a wave function and convert possibility to reality. When particles are created as a pair—for instance, two electrons in a single atom that move or spin together—physicists call them entangled. Due to their intimate connection, entangled particles share a wave function. When we measure one particle and thus collapse its wave function, the other particle’s wave function instantaneously collapses too. If one photon is observed to have a vertical polarization (its waves all moving in one plane), the act of observation causes the other to instantly go from being an indefinite probability wave to an actual photon with the opposite, horizontal polarity—even if the two photons have since moved far from each other.
In 1997 University of Geneva physicist Nicolas Gisin sent two entangled photons zooming along optical fibers until they were seven miles apart. One photon then hit a two-way mirror where it had a choice: either bounce off or go through. Detectors recorded what it randomly did. But whatever action it took, its entangled twin always performed the complementary action. The communication between the two happened at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. It seems that quantum news travels instantaneously, limited by no external constraints—not even the speed of light. Since then, other researchers have duplicated and refined Gisin’s work. Today no one questions the immediate nature of this connectedness between bits of light or matter, or even entire clusters of atoms.
Before these experiments most physicists believed in an objective, independent universe. They still clung to the assumption that physical states exist in some absolute sense before they are measured.
All of this is now gone for keeps.
WRESTLING WITH GOLDILOCKS
The strangeness of quantum reality is far from the only argument against the old model of reality. There is also the matter of the fine-tuning of the cosmos. Many fundamental traits, forces, and physical constants—like the charge of the electron or the strength of gravity—make it appear as if everything about the physical state of the universe were tailor-made for life. Some researchers call this revelation the Goldilocks principle, because the cosmos is not “too this” or “too that” but rather “just right” for life.
At the moment there are only four explanations for this mystery. The first two give us little to work with from a scientific perspective. One is simply to argue for incredible coincidence. Another is to say, “God did it,” which explains nothing even if it is true.
The third explanation invokes a concept called the anthropic principle,? first articulated by Cambridge astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1973. This principle holds that we must find the right conditions for life in our universe, because if such life did not exist, we would not be here to find those conditions. Some cosmologists have tried to wed the anthropic principle with the recent theories that suggest our universe is just one of a vast multitude of universes, each with its own physical laws. Through sheer numbers, then, it would not be surprising that one of these universes would have the right qualities for life. But so far there is no direct evidence whatsoever for other universes.
The final option is biocentrism, which holds that the universe is created by life and not the other way around. This is an explanation for and extension of the participatory anthropic principle described by the physicist John Wheeler, a disciple of Einstein’s who coined the terms wormhole and black hole.
SEEKING SPACE AND TIME
Even the most fundamental elements of physical reality, space and time, strongly support a biocentric basis for the cosmos.
According to biocentrism, time does not exist independently of the life that notices it. The reality of time has long been questioned by an odd alliance of philosophers and physicists. The former argue that the past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment. Physicists, for their part, note that all of their working models, from Isaac Newton’s laws through quantum mechanics, do not actually describe the nature of time. The real point is that no actual entity of time is needed, nor does it play a role in any of their equations. When they speak of time, they inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time.
To measure anything’s position precisely, at any given instant, is to lock in on one static frame of its motion, as in the frame of a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe a movement, you cannot isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Imagine that you are watching a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots and the arrow flies. The camera follows the arrow’s trajectory from the archer’s bow toward the target. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame of a stilled arrow. You stare at the image of an arrow in midflight. The pause in the film enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but you have lost all information about its momentum. In that frame it is going nowhere; its path and velocity are no longer known. Such fuzziness brings us back to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which describes how measuring the location of a subatomic particle inherently blurs its momentum and vice versa.
All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively and repeatedly being reconstructed inside our heads in an organized whirl of information. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states occurring inside the mind. So what is real? If the next mental image is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word time, but that does not mean there is an actual invisible matrix in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things. We watch our loved ones age and die and assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime.
There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We cannot pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is neither physical nor fundamentally real in our view. Rather, it is a mode of interpretation and understanding. It is part of an animal’s mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.
Most of us still think like Newton, regarding space as sort of a vast container that has no walls. But our notion of space is false. Shall we count the ways? 1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, as described by Einstein’s relativity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else. 2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, is in fact not empty but full of potential particles and fields. 3. Quantum theory even casts doubt on the notion that distant objects are truly separated, since entangled particles can act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy.
UNLOCKING THE CAGE
In daily life, space and time are harmless illusions. A problem arises only because, by treating these as fundamental and independent things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for investigations into the nature of reality. Most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical, without the other side, the living. By inclination and training these scientists are obsessed with mathematical descriptions of the world. If only, after leaving work, they would look out with equal seriousness over a pond and watch the schools of minnows rise to the surface. The fish, the ducks, and the cormorants, paddling out beyond the pads and the cattails, are all part of the greater answer.
Recent quantum studies help illustrate what a new biocentric science would look like. Just months? ago, Nicolas Gisin announced a new twist on his entanglement experiment; in this case, he thinks the results could be visible to the naked eye. At the University of Vienna, Anton Zeilinger’s work with huge molecules called buckyballs pushes quantum reality closer to the macroscopic world. In an exciting extension of this work—proposed by Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist—not just light but a small mirror that reflects it becomes part of an entangled quantum system, one that is billions of times larger than a buckyball. If the proposed experiment ends up confirming Penrose’s idea, it would also confirm that quantum effects apply to human-scale objects.
Biocentrism should unlock the cages in which Western science has unwittingly confined itself. Allowing the observer into the equation should open new approaches to understanding cognition, from unraveling the nature of consciousness to developing thinking machines that experience the world the same way we do. Biocentrism should also provide stronger bases for solving problems associated with quantum physics and the Big Bang. Accepting space and time as forms of animal sense perception (that is, as biological), rather than as external physical objects, offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for strange results in the two-slit experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe.
At a minimum, it should help halt such dead-end efforts as string theory.
Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do since Einstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago. Until we recognize the essential role of biology, our attempts to truly unify the universe will remain a train to nowhere.
Adapted fromBiocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books in May 2009.
Kaewong Boy: The double-slit experiment proves that the world we all lives in is a world of indefinite probabilities. And what happen next is restricted only on how we perceive what reality should be. Open up your mind and be free, for this is how we are meant to be... :p
