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While many pastors and parents have heard horror stories about children straying into dark corners online, few are aware of just how common these problems have become ”” even in their sanctuaries and homes.

This is the kind of danger and sin that religious leaders often fear discussing, precisely because these realities have not remained bottled up in the secular world. Thus, Heil urged his listeners to ponder the following statistics in his presentation, drawn from mainstream research in the past year:

Ӣ Two-thirds of Americans under the age of 18 have reported some kind of negative experience while online. Only 45 percent of their parents are aware of this.

Ӣ Forty-one percent of children say they have been approached online by some kind of stranger, possibly an older predator.

Read it all, another from the long line of should-have-already-been-posted material.

In the 21st century, parenthood and paranoia often walk hand in hand.

For some, the blessed event is followed by high-tech surveillance – a monitoring system tracks the baby’s breathing rhythms and relays infrared images from the nursery. The next investment might be a nanny cam, to keep watch on the child’s hired caregivers. Toddlers and grade schoolers can be equipped with GPS devices enabling a parent to know their location should something go awry.

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Confined to their hospital beds, patients can only fantasize about stripping off all the wires that connect them to monitors and bolting for the door.

Suppose, however, that all of a convalescent patient’s electrode patches were consolidated into a single, nearly invisible and weightless version ”” as thin as a temporary, press-on tattoo. And suppose that a tiny radio transmitter eliminated the need for any wires tethering the patient to monitoring machines.

“Epidermal electronics” ”” a term coined by researchers who have produced prototype devices at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ”” may enable constant medical monitoring anywhere.

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An engineered virus, injected into the blood, can selectively target cancer cells throughout the body in what researchers have labelled a medical first.

The virus attacked only tumours, leaving the healthy tissue alone, in a small trial on 23 patients, according to the journal Nature.

Researchers said the findings could one day “truly transform” therapies.

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A flash memory material based on graphene has been created for the first time and shows big advantages over current state-of-the-art technology. The material is almost twice as energy efficient compared to the industry standard and can store double the information.

Graphene has long been tipped as the material which will eventually replace silicon semiconductors in electronics. Compared with competitor materials graphene should be cheaper, more robust and highly efficient.

Read it all and there is more from the BBC there.

Almost half of UK internet users are going online via mobile phone data connections, according to the Office for National Statistics.

45% of people surveyed said they made use of the net while out and about, compared with 31% in 2010.

The most rapid growth was among younger people, where 71% of internet-connected 16 to 24-year-olds used mobiles.

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A Glasgow-based company has installed its first commercial “alkaline hydrolysis” unit at a Florida funeral home.

The unit by Resomation Ltd is billed as a green alternative to cremation and works by dissolving the body in heated alkaline water.

The facility has been installed at the Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St Petersburg, and will be used for the first time in the coming weeks. It is hoped other units will follow in the US, Canada and Europe.

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The Chinese have long understood that America’s sea control in the western Pacific has been the military foundation of its strategic primacy in Asia, and that the US Navy’s carriers are the key. They have therefore focused the formidable expansion of their naval and air forces over the past 20 years on trying to deprive the US of sea control by developing their capacity to sink American carriers. In this they appear to have been strikingly successful, to the point that US military leaders now acknowledge that their sea control in the western Pacific is slipping away.

But for China, depriving America of sea control is not the same as acquiring it themselves. Its naval strategy has focused on the much more limited aim that strategists call ”sea denial”: the ability to attack an adversary’s ships without being able to stop them attacking yours. These days, sea denial can be achieved without putting ships to sea, because land-based aircraft, long-range missiles and submarines can sink ships much more cost-effectively than other ships can. This is what China has done.

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Internet entrepreneur Nicholas Merrill was working in his Manhattan office when an FBI agent in a trench coat arrived with an envelope.

It was fall 2004, and federal investigators were using new legal authority they had acquired after Sept. 11, 2001. Merrill ran a small Internet service provider with clients including IKEA, Mitsubishi and freelance journalists.

The agent handed Merrill a document called a National Security Letter, which demanded that he turn over detailed records on one of his customers. The letter wasn’t signed by a judge or prosecutor. It instructed him to tell no one….

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It may be OK, finally, for people to admit that they don’t know things for sure ”” whether it’s about quarks, light, God or the best way forward for the nation’s economy.

At 80, Polkinghorne doesn’t let his own doubts keep him from believing, any more than he let his doubts about quantum physics keep him from solving problems. He still prays, still celebrates the Eucharist, still believes in some kind of life eternal.

As for belief in God, “It’s a reasonable position, but not a knock-down argument,” he said. “It’s strong enough to bet my life on it. Just as Polanyi bet his life on his belief, knowing that it might not be true, I give my life to it, but I’m not certain. Sometimes I’m wrong.”

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The number of people living to advanced old age is already on the rise. There are some 5.7 million Americans age 85 and older, amounting to about 1.8% of the population, according to the Census Bureau. That is projected to rise to 19 million, or 4.34% of the population, by 2050, based on current trends. The percentage of Americans 100 and older is projected to rise from 0.03% today to 0.14% of the population in 2050. That’s a total of 601,000 centenarians.

But many scientists think that this is just the beginning; they are working furiously to make it possible for human beings to achieve Methuselah-like life spans. They are studying the aging process itself and experimenting with ways to slow it down by way of diet, drugs and genetic therapy. They are also working on new ways to replace worn-out organs””and even to help the body to rebuild itself. The gerontologist and scientific provocateur Aubrey de Grey claims that the first humans to live for 1,000 years may already have been born.

The idea of “conquering” aging has raised hopes, but it has also spurred a debate about whether people should actually aspire to live that long.

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A drone operated by the C.I.A. killed Al Qaeda’s second-ranking operative in the mountains of Pakistan this month, an American official said Saturday, further weakening a terrorism network shaken by the killing of Osama bin Laden this year.

The official said that a drone strike on Aug. 22 killed Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who in the past year had taken over as Al Qaeda’s top operational planner. Mr. Rahman was in frequent contact with Bin Laden in the months before the terrorist leader was killed in May by a Navy Seals team, intelligence officials have said.

American officials described Mr. Rahman’s death as particularly significant compared with those of other high-ranking Qaeda operatives because he was one of a new generation of Qaeda leaders who the network hoped would assume greater control after Bin Laden’s death.

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Slightly more voters continue to classify themselves as pro-choice rather than pro-life when it comes to abortion, but a majority still believes it is morally wrong.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters say, generally speaking, on the issue of abortion, they consider themselves pro-choice. Forty-three percent (43%) describe themselves as pro-life.

Pro-choice voters have slightly outnumbered pro-lifers in surveys for several years. Still, 55% believe abortion is morally wrong most of the time, a finding that shows little change since April 2007.

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Picture this: You stop in front of a digital advertising display at a mall and suddenly an ad pops up touting makeup, followed by one for shoes and then one for butter pecan ice cream.

It seems to know you’re a woman in your late 20s and, in fact, it does. When you looked at the display, it scanned your facial features and tailored its messages to you.

Once the stuff of science fiction and high-tech crime fighting, facial recognition technology has become one of the newest tools in marketing, even though privacy concerns abound.

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A 2010 survey found that as many as 48% of women and 23% of men said that they are interested in having cosmetic surgery.

Celebrities, like Heidi Montag, are now forthright about having had cosmetic surgery. Many other celebrities, both men and women, have been rumoured to have had cosmetic surgery. One website suggests which stars are desperately in need of plastic surgery.

The acceptability of plastic surgery is on the rise in every economic tier in American society. In fact, another survey done by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery in 2010 showed that 48% of respondents making less than $25K per year approve of cosmetic surgery. As incomes rise, so do the approval ratings, with 62% of those making over $75K per year approving of cosmetic surgery….

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A shadowy Islamist insurgency that has haunted northern Nigeria ”” surviving repeated, bloody efforts to eliminate it ”” appears to be branching out and collaborating with Al Qaeda’s affiliates, alarming Western officials and analysts who had previously viewed the militants here as a largely isolated, if deadly, menace.

Just two years ago, the Islamist group stalking police officers in this bustling city seemed on the verge of extinction. In a heavy-handed assault, Nigerian soldiers shelled its headquarters and killed its leader, leaving a grisly tableau of charred ruins, hundreds dead and outmatched members of the group, known as Boko Haram, struggling to fight back, sometimes with little more than bows and arrows.

Now, insurgents strike at the Nigerian military, the police and opponents of Islamic law in near-daily assaults and bombings, using improvised explosive devices that can be detonated remotely and bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Western officials and analysts say. Beyond the immediate devastation, the fear is that extremists bent on jihad are spreading their reach across the continent and planting roots in a major, Western-allied state that had not been seen as a hotbed of global terrorism.

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Q. Was the application process difficult?

A. We had to sign so many documents that my hand hurt after I was done. I had to pledge not to open a zoo, swimming pool or aquarium. It struck me as strange. Yes, it’s the bank’s duty to do due diligence, but this was just a silly restriction.

Q. But there was a happy ending, right?

A. Yes, after being turned down by 15 banks, it was a personal relationship that introduced us to a regional bank in New Jersey that gave us a $200,000 loan.

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Eating processed meats and red meat regularly increases your risk of type 2 diabetes, a large study shows.

Harvard School of Public Health researchers analyzed dietary-intake data from more than 200,000 people in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and the Nurses’ Health Studies. The participants have been tracked for a decade or more.

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Though not widely offered by U.S. doctors, gender-detecting blood tests have been sold online to consumers for the past few years. Their promises of early and accurate results prompted genetics researchers to take a closer look.

The authors say the results suggest blood tests like those studied could be a breakthrough for women at risk of having babies with certain diseases, who could avoid invasive procedures if they learned their fetus was a gender not affected by those illnesses. But the study raises concerns about couples using such tests for gender selection and abortion.

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Bradley Alford, a money manager in Atlanta, just hit the panic button.

No, really. Mr. Alford just hit the key on his computer that initiates the Wall Street equivalent of the nuclear option: Sell everything.
He was acting on orders from two wealthy clients who became so alarmed by the troubled outlook that they simply wanted out. Over the last 10 days or so, they asked him to sell all of their stocks and invest in a mutual fund he oversees that is somewhat insulated against a potential market collapse.

“I have never, ever done it before,” says Mr. Alford, who is the chairman of Alpha Capital Management and has been managing money for 22 years. “This was unprecedented.”

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Philosophers, scientists and theologians have sought to define the relationship between faith and science (somewhat unsuccessfully) since the earliest of times. Emerging biotechnologies of the 21st century serve to further demonstrate the complex, and unavoidable, interplay between science, faith and ethics. The issues emerging from the advent of reproductive technologies, stem cell therapies and genetic engineering technologies, for example, are not trivial, and are issues faced
increasingly by members of our congregations and society in general. The challenge of pastoral leadership lies in both discerning the times in which we live and providing guidance rooted in sound scholarship and faith. Our conference this year thus seeks to explore the challenges of ministering in a scientific world, and the theological, social and ethical issues relevant to such an enterprise.

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[Cofer Black]… referenced last year’s Stuxnet computer worm, which some researchers think was designed to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“I’m here to tell ya … the Stuxnet attack is the Rubicon of our future,” he said. “I don’t necessarily understand how this was executed, but the important points are (that) it was really expensive, so a nation-state had to be involved.”

Hacking, once see as “college pranks,” has moved “into physical destruction of a national resource,” he said. “This is huge.”

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On April 18th, the DEVGRU squad flew to Nevada for another week of rehearsals. The practice site was a large government-owned stretch of desert with an elevation equivalent to the area surrounding Abbottabad. An extant building served as bin Laden’s house. Aircrews plotted out a path that paralleled the flight from Jalalabad to Abbottabad. Each night after sundown, drills commenced. Twelve SEALs, including Mark, boarded helo one. Eleven SEALs, Ahmed, and Cairo boarded helo two. The pilots flew in the dark, arrived at the simulated compound, and settled into a hover while the SEALs fast-roped down. Not everyone on the team was accustomed to helicopter assaults. Ahmed had been pulled from a desk job for the mission and had never descended a fast rope. He quickly learned the technique.

The assault plan was now honed. Helo one was to hover over the yard, drop two fast ropes, and let all twelve SEALs slide down into the yard. Helo two would fly to the northeast corner of the compound and let out Ahmed, Cairo, and four SEALs, who would monitor the perimeter of the building. The copter would then hover over the house, and James and the remaining six SEALs would shimmy down to the roof. As long as everything was cordial, Ahmed would hold curious neighbors at bay. The SEALs and the dog could assist more aggressively, if needed. Then, if bin Laden was proving difficult to find, Cairo could be sent into the house to search for false walls or hidden doors. “This wasn’t a hard op,” the special-operations officer told me. “It would be like hitting a target in McLean”””the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.

This is not short but it is well worth the time. Read it all–KSH.

In barely a decade Google has made itself a global brand bigger than Coca-Cola or GE; it has created more wealth faster than any company in history; it dominates the information economy. How did that happen? It happened more or less in plain sight. Google has many secrets but the main ingredients of its success have not been secret at all, and the business story has already provided grist for dozens of books. Steven Levy’s new account, In the Plex, is the most authoritative to date and in many ways the most entertaining. Levy has covered personal computing for almost thirty years, for Newsweek and Wired and in six previous books, and has visited Google’s headquarters periodically since 1999, talking with its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and, as much as has been possible for a journalist, observing the company from the inside. He has been able to record some provocative, if slightly self-conscious, conversations like this one in 2004 about their hopes for Google:

“It will be included in people’s brains,” said Page. “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.”
“That’s true,” said Brin. “Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them”¦..”

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Drive through northern Pennsylvania and you’ll see barns, cows, silos and drilling rigs perched on big, concrete pads.

Pennsylvania is at the center of a natural gas boom. New technology is pushing gas out of huge shale deposits underground. That’s created jobs and wealth, but it may be damaging drinking water. That’s because when you “frack,” as hydraulic fracturing is called, you pump thousands of gallons of fluids underground. That cracks the shale a mile deep and drives natural gas up to the surface ”” gas that otherwise could never be tapped.

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While smartphone users worry about mobile hacking and other security threats that are making news these days, psychologists and others are concerned about another equally troubling issue — the growing obsession among people who would much rather interact with their smartphones than with other human beings.

“Watching people who get their first smartphone, there’s a very quick progression from having a basic phone you don’t talk about to people who love their iPhone, name their phone and buy their phones outfits,” said Lisa Merlo, director of psychotherapy training at the University of Florida.

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China has moved to shut down several fake Apple stores found in Kunming city.

Three of the elaborate fake stores, which mimicked the look of the real thing, came to the world’s attention after being exposed on a blog.

Following the publicity, trade officials investigated and found five stores in Kunming posing as official Apple retail outlets.

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