Nexus - 1701 - New Times Magazine-pages

Page Content (OCR)

GLOBAL NEWS COMPUTER SHOWS YOUR THOUGHTS ON SCREEN Scenes have discovered how to "read" minds by scanning brain activity and reproducing, as video ootage, images of what people are seeing or even remembering. The breakthrough raises the prospect of significant benefits, such as: allowing people who are unable oO move or speak to communicate via visualisation of their thoughts; recording people’s dreams; or allowing police to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness. However, it could also erald a new Big Brother era in which an individual's private houghts can be readily accessed by he authorities. The discoveries come amid a flurry of developments in the field of brain science. Researchers have also used scanning technology to measure academic ability, detect early signs of Alzheimer's and other degenerative conditions, and even predict the decision a person is about to make before they are conscious of making it. Such developments may have controversial ramifications. In Britain, {MRI scanning technology has been sold to multinational companies such as Unilever and McDonald's, enabling them to see how we subconsciously react to brands. In America, security agencies are researching the use o brain scanners for interrogating prisoners, and Lockheed Martin, the US defence contractor, is reported to have studied the possibility o scanning brains at a distance. This would allow an individual's thoughts and anxieties to be examined without their knowledge in sensitive locations such as airports. Russell Foster, a neuroscientist a Oxford University, said that rapid advances in the field are throwing up ethical dilemmas. (Source: Global Research, 10 November 2009, http://tinyurl.com/ycuhasy) authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority. While public authorities will not be able to view the contents of these emails or phone calls, they can see the Internet addresses, dates and times, and identify recipients of calls. The new rules, known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme, will not only force communications companies to keep their records for longer but to expand the type of data they keep to include details of every website their customers visit, meaning every online ‘click’, Firms involved in storing the data, including Orange, BT and Vodafone, will be reimbursed at a cost to the taxpayer of £2 billion over 10 years. (Source: The Daily Telegraph, London, 10 November 2009) MINI ICE AGE TOOK HOLD OF EUROPE IN MONTHS Tr most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated reveals that it took just months, not decades, for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. Around 12,800 years ago, the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze". It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream and lasted around 1,300 years. Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took a decade or so to GENETIC ANALYSIS HAS "NO CLINICAL RELEVANCE" IN PREDICTING DISEASE RISK Gonsis analysis is essentially useless in predicting a person's risk of cancer, heart attack and other common diseases, according to a set of commentaries published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The decoding of the human genome in 2003 led to a flood of research into the contributions that genetic variation might make to the risk of various chronic diseases that tend to develop late in life, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Since then, a number of for-profit companies have begun offering genetic screenings and disease risk SIM LOOKING ~ Te, £ ETTLE DOWN WITH A NICE LIGHT BUS... You THINK SHOULD Tet ne INTERNET @ Somervi //e assessments. "With only a few exceptions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics," said David B. Goldstein of Duke University, author of one of the commentaries. "The information has little or in many cases no clinical relevance.” (Source: Natural News, 9 November 2009, http://tinyurl.com/yjo3e5z) NEXUS ¢ 7 DECEMBER 2009 - JANUARY 2010 www.nexusmagazine.com