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Controversial PatriotApp lets citizens alert feds

Though it only bundles available Web hotlines, some liken it to "Big Brother"

A safe and secure society is at the heart of the new PatriotApp for iPhones, and while it's quickly gaining popularity, it's also attracting scorn from people who disagree with the controversial law on which it is based.

Launched in September, the PatriotApp allows people to report criminal or suspicious activity to several federal agencies, including the FBI, EPA, CDC and GAO (Government Accountability Office), the office responsible for investigating public funds. It also includes RSS feeds for the FBI's Most Wanted list and the Department of Homeland Security's threat level, and allows people to report workplace harassment and discrimination.

The app doesn't grant a user privileged access to these agencies; rather, it bundles each group's Internet tip line (ITL) — the website feature used to report incidents — and makes them mobile-phone friendly, and even enables users to send pictures. While it offers users a direct portal to each site's ITL, the user must still go through the same process — and obey the same policies and warnings — as they would if accessing the site on a computer.

Playing off the Patriot Act name, "the app was founded on the belief that citizens can provide the most sophisticated and broad network of eyes and ears necessary to prevent terrorism, crime, environmental negligence, or other malicious behavior," according to Patriotapps.com.

Before delving into a discussion about the PatriotApp, Dr. Roy Swiger, one of the app's co-creators, acknowledged the inherent controversy in an app that models its mission on the Patriot Act.

"Some bloggers don't think this is a good idea, they're likening it to Nazi Germany," Swiger told SecurityNewsDaily. "But a lot of folks are very positive." Backing that point up, Swiger said since the app was made free last Friday (Dec. 10), it has been downloaded about 400 times a day.

The PatriotApp, Swiger said, isn't meant to be a " Big Brother"-type surveillance tool that lets people report anything they deem "suspicious." Rather, its aim is to use modern mobile technology to give people easier access in the event of a true crisis.

"I look at this basically as an instrument that can be used by folks to rapidly get tips online for various agencies all in one organized place," Swiger told SecurityNewsDaily. "We're not doing anything that's not already available. I look at this as the next logical step, especially in this day and age."

Before cell phones, if you were on the road and you saw a drunk driver, you would have to race to the nearest payphone and report it to the police, Swiger said. But cell phones have removed that step and now people can report such an incident as it happens. This is how he envisions people using the PatriotApp.

"That's what this is about, it's about using state-of-the-art technology and information sharing and trying to do good," Swiger said. "We wanted to show that you could use an app for something that's important, not just entertainment."

In the future, Swiger hopes the PatriotApp can be used implemented to allow people to report health epidemics in real time.

"I really think this is a game-changer," he said.

A game-changer, and potentially a fire starter, critics say. John Pike, a national security analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, believes the access granted by the PatriotApp could potentially bog down sites such as the FBI, impeding them from operating as effectively as they could.

"I think the FBI has already been flooded with useless tips from various public and government sources that have wasted a vast amount of their time to no avail," Pike told SecurityNewsDaily.

Pike said that NSA surveillance of domestic phone conversations is a strong deterrent to preventing and intercepting potential terrorist acts. "Previously, the challenge of discovering the telephone number for the FBI would have been a deterrent to many people. But with this app, any idiot can play Junior G-man," he said.

Swiger and co-creator Charles Reinighaus understand where the naysayers are coming from, but they stand behind the PatriotApp, and believe not only in its inherent mission, but in the responsibility of people to use it correctly.

"All we did was leverage current existing government outlets. If government was truly focused on open access, they would've done the same thing," Reinighaus told SecurityNewsDaily. "The whole intent is to benefit society and give citizens an active role in participating in their own security rather than abdicating themselves to government – to put the people back into ‘we the people.'"

Swiger supports the people," saying, "I've got confidence in the society we live in that people will use their best judgment. I don't think it will be abused."

The PatriotApp is available as a free download from the iTunes app store. For more information visit www.patriotapps.com.

Feds Use Facebook Narcissism to Reveal Marriage Fraud

10 Profound Innovations Ahead

iPhone Apps Review Read more at www.msnbc.msn.com

 

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Amplify’d from www.newscientist.com

Bereaved animals grieve – if their lifestyle allows it

WHETHER animals comfort dying comrades and show signs of grieving for the dead may depend on where they live, as well as on how compassionate they are.

Many primates carry the bodies of dead infants around with them for days or even weeks. Peter Fashing of California State University in Fullerton and colleagues have observed similar behaviour in a band of over 200 geladas (Theropithecus gelada), monkeys related to baboons, living on alpine grasslands in Ethiopia. Between 2007 and 2010 they saw 14 females carrying dead infants. Some abandoned the corpses within hours, but one female kept one for 48 days even though the flesh had rotted away from the skull (American Journal of Primatology, DOI: 10.1002/ajp.20902).

When Fashing looked at the groups of primates that have been seen carrying bodies for days at a time, he noticed that they all live in "somewhat extreme environments for primates". The geladas, along with corpse-carrying Japanese macaques and mountain gorillas, live in cold regions where decay is slow, while the chimpanzee group that engages in prolonged carrying lives in an arid region where bodies would quickly mummify.

Fashing thinks that animals that do not carry dead infants, or only do so for a short time, are no less sad about their bereavement. Instead, decay forces them to abandon the bodies sooner.

The idea is plausible, says Jim Anderson, a primatologist at the University of Stirling, UK. "Cold would slow down the corpse's decay, so the mother would treat it as if it was still alive."

Fashing's team also watched the geladas leave a sick mother and her infant behind to die when they left in search of food. By contrast, captive chimpanzees have been seen caring for a dying companion. This might be because chimps are more compassionate than geladas, or because the chimps had food nearby and didn't have to wander off.

However, both the chimp and the gelada observations are just one incident, cautions Alison Jolly of the University of Sussex, UK, so it can't tell us whether geladas really behave differently. Read more at www.newscientist.com

 

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8000 year-old Sun temple found in Bulgaria

Amplify’d from www.discoveryon.info

8000 year-old Sun temple found in Bulgaria

The oldest temple of the Sun has been discovered in northwest Bulgaria, near the town of Vratsa, aged at more then 8000 years, the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) reported on December 15 2010.

The Bulgarian 'Stonehenge' is hence about 3000 years older than its illustrious English counterpart. But unlike its more renowned English cousin, the Bulgarian sun temple was not on the surface, rather it was dug out from under tons of earth and is shaped in the form of a horse shoe, the report said.

The temple was found near the village of Ohoden. According to archaeologists, the prehistoric people used the celestial facility to calculate the seasons and to determine the best times for sowing and harvest. The site was also used for rituals, offering gifts to the Sun for fertility as BNT reported. This area of Bulgaria was previously made famous because remnants of the oldest people who lived in this part of Europe were found. Archaeologists also found dozens of clay and stone disks in the area of the temple. "The semantics of the disks symbolise the disk of the Sun itself, which means that this is the earliest ever temple dedicated to the worship of the Sun God, discovered on our lands," archaeologist Georgi Ganetsovski told the BNT. Read more at www.discoveryon.info

 

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Amplify’d from www.telegraph.co.uk

French village which will 'survive 2012 Armageddon' plagued by visitors

The mayor of a picturesque French village has threatened to call in the army to seal it off from a tide of New Age fanatics and UFO watchers, who are convinced it is the only place on Earth to be spared Armageddon in 2012.

Bugarach, population 189, is a peaceful farming village in the Aude region, southwestern France and sits at the foot of the Pic de Bugarach, the highest mountain in the Corbières wine-growing area.

But in the past few months, the quiet village has been inundated by groups of esoteric outsiders who believe the peak is an "alien garage".

According to them, extraterrestrials are quietly waiting in a massive cavity beneath the rock for the world to end, at which point they will leave, taking, it is hoped, a lucky few humans with them.

Most believe Armageddon will take place on December 21, 2012, the end date of the ancient Maya calendar, at which point they predict human civilisation will come to an end. Another favourite date mentioned is 12, December, 2012. They see Bugarach as one of perhaps several "sacred mountains" sheltered from the cataclysm.

"This is no laughing matter," Jean-Pierre Delord, the mayor, told The Daily Telegraph.

"If tomorrow 10,000 people turn up, as a village of 200 people we will not be able to cope. I have informed the regional authorities of our concerns and want the army to be at hand if necessary come December 2012."

Mr Delord said people had been coming to the village for the past 10 years or so in search of alien life following a post in an UFO review by a local man, who has since died. "He claimed he had seen aliens and heard the humming of their spacecraft under the mountain," he said.

The internet abounds with tales of the late President François Mitterrand being curiously heliported on to the peak, of mysterious digs conducted by the Nazis and later Mossad, the Israeli secret services.

A visit to Bugarach is said to have inspired Steven Spielberg in his film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind – although the actual mountain he used is Devil's Tower in Wyoming. It is also where Jules Verne found the entrance and the inspiration for A Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Recently, however, interest in the site had skyrocketed, said the mayor, with online UFO websites, many in the US, advising people to seek shelter in Bugarach as the countdown to Armageddon commences.

"Many come and pray on the mountainside. I've even seen one man doing some ritual totally nude up there," said Mr Delord.

Sigrid Benard, who runs the Maison de la Nature guesthouse, said UFO tourists were taking over. "At first, my clientele was 72 per cent ramblers. Today, I have 68 per cent 'esoteric visitors'," he said.

Several "Ufologists" have bought up properties in the small hamlet of Le Linas, in the mountain's shadow for "extortionate" prices, and locals have complained they are being priced out of the market. Strange sect-like courses are held for up to €800 a week. "For this price, you are introduced to a guru, made to go on a procession, offered a christening and other rubbish, all payable in cash," said Mr Delord.

Valerie Austin, a retired Briton from Newcastle who settled in Bugarach 22 years ago who said the alien watchers were spoiling the village atmosphere.

"You can't go for a peaceful walk anymore. It's a beautiful area, but now you find people chanting lying around meditating. Everybody has the right to their own beliefs, but the place no longer feels like ours." She said alien watchers planted strange objects on the mountainside.

Recently she found a black virgin statuette cemented to the rock face.

Although she described the alien claims as "total rubbish", she said there was nevertheless something special about the place.

"It has a magnetic force in the scientific sense of the word. There is a special feeling here, but if I really believed the world were about to end, I'd have a whale of a time over the next two years" rather than look for salvation, she said. Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk

 

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Scientists find evidence for 'chronesthesia,' or mental time travel

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Scientists find evidence for 'chronesthesia,' or mental time travel

Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future. Image credit: Lars Nyberg, et al. ©2010 PNAS.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person's decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical "travel" occurs.

The researchers, Lars Nyberg from Umea University in Umea, Sweden; Reza Habib from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; and Alice S. N. Kim, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, have published their results in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.

"In cognitive neuroscience, we know quite a bit (relatively speaking) about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined space," he said. "We know essentially nothing about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined time. When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were ‘there,’ as an observer or participant ('episodic memory'), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question we are asking is, how do you know that it happened at a time other than 'now'?"

In their study, the researchers asked several well-trained subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.

The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future).

Because mental time is a product of the human brain and differs from the external time that is measured by clocks and calendars, scientists also call this time “subjective time.” Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it.

Some previous research has questioned whether the concept of subjective time is actually necessary for understanding similarities in brain activity during past and future thinking compared with thinking about the present. A few past studies have suggested that the brain’s ability for scene construction, and not subjective time, can account for the ability to think about past and future events. However, since scene construction was held constant in this study, the new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future.

“Until now, the processes that determine contents and the processes that determine time have not been separated in functional neuroimaging studies of chronesthesia; especially, there have been no studies in which brain regions involved in time alone, rather than time together with action, have been identified,” Tulving said. “The concept of ‘chronesthesia’ is essentially brand new. (You find a few entries on it in Google, but not on Web of Science.) Therefore, I would say, the most important result of our study is the novel finding that there seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present. That is, we found some evidence for chronesthesia. Before we undertook this study it was entirely possible to imagine that we find nothing!”

He added that, at this stage of the game, it is too early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future.

“Our study, we hope, is the first swallow of the spring, and others will follow,” he said. “Our findings, as I alluded to above, are promising, but they have to be replicated, checked for validity and reliability, and, above all, extended to other conditions and situations, before we can start thinking about their implications and applications (of which it is easy to think of many).” Read more at www.physorg.com

 

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Scott Corrales writes about Nazis in South America.

Amplify’d from www.fatemag.com

Dark Migration

On Sunday, July 11, 2004, the Chilean newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias published a brief interview with an author whose book had created a stir throughout South America. Abel Basti’s Bariloche Nazi openly suggested that the German Führer Adolf Hitler did not die in a Berlin bunker, but managed to escape to South America along with his mistress Eva Braun. Both spent their last days in the Argentinean mountain resort of San Carlos de Bariloche in the Andes.

According to Basti, Hitler died in 1960. No date for Braun’s death has been put forth. One of the locations identified as a hideaway for Hitler in Argentina is the San Ramón estancia or ranch, owned by the German principality of Schaumburg-Lippe. Another is the Inalco Mansion on the shores of Lake Nahuel Huapi.  Hitler’s days in Argentina were apparently uneventful. He went for long hikes along the shores of Nahuel Huapi and took in the clean Andean air. His trademark mustache shaven and his hair gone gray, the architect of millions of deaths had settled down as a householder.

If Hitler did, in fact, live out his final years in South America, how did he get there from the bunker in Berlin where he is believed to have committed suicide?

Rogue Submarines

After the fall of Germany, the British Admiralty had issued a command to all German submarines in the high seas advising them to hoist a black flag or emblem after surfacing and to turn themselves in at the nearest port. This directly countermanded coded message 0953/4, the Nazi fleet’s last official communication, which advised U-boat commanders of the surrender and directed that their vessels be scuttled before falling into enemy hands.

As of May 29, 1945, the seas were believed to have been cleared of Nazi subs, until one of them pulled into the Portuguese port of Leixoes. The Allied Command began to wonder if Hitler could have escaped aboard one of his subs. A few weeks later, the U.S Navy reported that four or five U-boats remained unaccounted for. Hunted and running out of fuel, it was a matter of time before the dead-enders turned up. But where?

On July 10, the Argentinean submarine base at Mar del Plata was surprised by the arrival of U-530, commanded by Otto Vermouth. A month later, U-977 under the command of Heinz Schaeffer surfaced off the Argentinean coast and surrendered to two coastal patrol vessels engaged in exercises.

Were there more rogue submarines somewhere in the South Atlantic Ocean?

In the late summer of 1945, Basti alleges, two former crewmen of the battleship Graf Spee (scuttled outside the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1939 to keep it from being captured by the British Navy) traveled to an undisclosed location in Patagonia to rendezvous with a submarine carrying some very important exiles from the shattered Third Reich.

Basti continues: “The sailors say that they slept in a Patagonian ranch and in the early morning hours were on hand to receive the submarines. They brought trucks and loaded baggage and people onto them. One researcher spoke with the sailors—now deceased—and they confirmed the story.”

The convoy of Kriegsmarine U-boats consisted of ten vessels carrying at least 60 passengers each, Adolf Hitler among them. According to Basti, the sailors went public with their story in 1950.

Allied forces reconstructed the trajectory of the U-977 from its departure from Norway on May 2, 1945, to its arrival in Argentinean territorial waters in August thanks to the U-boat’s log. Captain Schaeffer and his crew had sailed underwater from Bergen to the South Atlantic without surfacing.

Was this submarine part of the ten-ship convoy that the nameless sailors of the Graf Spee had received in Patagonia?

A book written in 1956 by Jochen Brennecke, another crewman of the Graf Spee, described having loaded half a dozen trucks with a series of boxes stamped geheime Reichssache, which had been unloaded from submarines off the Argentine coast, and later taken to an estancia or ranch deep in Patagonia. Other authors have suggested that these boxes contained nearly 90 kilos of platinum and 2,000 kilos of gold and precious jewels that formed part of the Waffen-S.S.’s treasure: enough to finance a war of resistance from a hidden location.

Stories like this one, or their variants, have been told for the past 50 years. The Führer and his closest advisors board a submarine (the Baltic port of Kiel is often mentioned as the point of departure) and take off for parts unknown, usually Antarctica or some South American location (Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, or perhaps even Chile) from which the Reich could reorganize and strike back at the world. Some versions posit that advanced technology in the form of “flying saucers” was brought along during the escape, and that the blond haired, blue-eyed saucernauts were perfect Aryans achieved through advanced genetic engineering.

But what Abel Basti probably doesn’t know (and what many Nazi history buffs have probably overlooked) is that Hitler had cast a predatory eye on Latin America long before the rise of the thousand-year Reich. According to an article in Executive Intelligence Review by William F. Wertz, Jr., titled “The Nazi-Instigated National Synarchist Union of Mexico,” the Führer’s greater geopolitical strategy included Latin America as a fertile and very enticing part of the world to be brought to heel.

According to Wertz, Hitler believed that the Mexican Republic was “the best and richest country in the world, with the laziest and most dissipated population under the sun…a country that cries for a capable master. With the treasure of Mexican soil, Germany could be rich and great!” The source of this quote is Hermann Rauschning, the governor of Danzig who left the Nazi cause in 1934 and who is better known in conspiracy and paranormal circles as the source of information about Hitler’s terrifying contacts with extrahuman forces.

Hitler did not envision hundreds of thousands of infantrymen and mechanized divisions crossing the Atlantic to win this prize, rather, his plan was to make use of German nationals already living in Latin American countries, subverting the local political process with the assistance of the German industrial and economic presence in Latin America. It isn’t clear if he ever imagined having to take refuge in the lands he saw as ripe for the taking.

In the Shadow of the Swastika

Argentina remained neutral throughout World War II, though there was strong pro-Axis sentiment in the country. The Secretary of War at the time was Juan Domingo Perón, the legendary strongman whose wife was immortalized by a Broadway musical. In 1945. Perón countermanded an order given to the Argentinean Navy to intercept Kriegsmarine elements attempting to round Cape Horn and escape into the Pacific Ocean, presumably toward Axis Japan. The Argentinean fleet was instructed to return to its base at Port Belgrano. That very spring, Peron’s wife, the glamorous María Eva (“Evita”) Duarte, had received considerable deposits in her name from the Transatlantic German Bank, the Banco Germánico, and the Tornquist Bank. A year later, Evita Perón visited Genoa to play an instrumental role in getting Martin Bormann into Argentina.

The long, hot summer of 1945 was a busy one indeed. Gestapo chief Heinrich Miller emerged from a submarine at Orense Beach in southern Buenos Aires province while other U-boats were reportedly seen at Claromecó and Reta. In his book ODESSA al Sur (The Southern Odessa), Jorge Camarasa states: “Someone had told me that Heinrich Miller had come ashore at Orense in 1945, and that the trawler Ottolenghi had transferred him to Necochea, from where he headed to [the town of] Coronel Pringles to organize the escape of sailors from the Graf Spee who were interned in the old Sierra de la Ventana hotel.” Could some of these sailors have formed part of Hitler’s welcoming committee, as described in Bariloche Nazi?

Camarasa worked closely with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Buenos Aires on the extradition of Nazi war criminals, and his research turned up some fascinating information. Over 50 documents from Argentina’s naval authorities were found regarding reports of U-boats on the Patagonian littoral in a 40-day period, including a landing in Quequén and multiple sightings off the coastal towns of Comodoro Rivadavia, Ingeniero White, and San Antonio Oeste. Camarasa believes that another landing occurred near the current location of Villa Gessell, where small numbers of personnel debarked with boxes of unknown content and remained there for a certain time before leaving to other destinations, perhaps elsewhere in South America.

In the 1990s, the World Jewish Congress pressured then-president Carlos Menem to declassify all information regarding the presence of Nazi war criminals in Argentina, but it would not be until May 2003 that President Néstor Kirchner ordered his Ministry of the Interior to look into the “dark migration” of war criminals to his country, a task which started with the opening of that department’s files. Entry cards for one Helmut Gregor (an alias employed by “Doctor Death,” Josef Mengele), for example, report his arrival in Buenos Aires in 1949 aboard a Panamanian freighter, describing him as a 38 year-old Catholic lathe operator from Germany.

Another investigative journalist, Uki Goñi, unearthed more leads on the Nazi migration southward and the complicity of government functionaries in allowing the entry not only of former Gestapo, SS, and military personnel, but also members of the Croatian Ustasche (at least 15 war criminals among 7,000 immigrants).

Two to four years after the U-boat landings, “superstars” like Adolf Eichmann and Erich Priebke began to arrive in Argentina, allegedly aided by members of the Catholic clergy, particularly an Italian bishop who facilitated their escape through the port city of Genoa.

Children of the Reich

In 1956, a land purchase took place in the Chilean locality of La Parra, some 400 kilometers south of Santiago de Chile. The buyer was a man named Paul Shafer, who quickly established the “Sociedad Benefactora y Educacional Dignidad” as a settlement for a small knot of European emigrés. Before long, the tiny settlement had evolved into a major center of activity, complete with an airstrip, several factories, filling stations, trucks, schools, and its own power station. It became known as “Colonia Dignidad” and become the focus of Nazi activity in Chile, playing a major role in aiding the Pinochet dictatorship.

This was just part of a process that had been taking place for decades. The first National Socialist organization in Chile was established in the town of Osorno in April 1931; within eight years, the Chilean Nazi Party had over 1,000 card-carrying members, most of them influential figures from the spheres of business and politics.

Chile is also the home of one of the most notorious proponents of “Esoteric Hitlerism,” former diplomat and author Miguel Serrano. Serrano’s career brought him into contact with Indian traditions while he served as Chile’s ambassador to India in the 1950s, soaking in the same Tibetan lore and wisdom that had so fascinated European Nazis. He later went on to hold a number of prestigious positions with the United Nations.

Serrano’s works of occult fascism appeared as a trilogy whose first book, published in 1984, bears the title Adolfo Hitler, el último avatara (Hitler, the last avatar) and tries to establish a link between Nazism and the Germanic mystical tradition, the Knights Templar, the ancient Aryans, and the belief in underground civilizations of supermen like Agarttha. In Serrano’s viewpoint, his ideology seeks to perform the holy task of keeping the world safe from a Zionist-Masonic plot for world domination and enshrining the sacred teachings handed down from the hidden realm presided over by the “King of the World.”

Written by Scott Corrales, a long-time contributor to Fate. He is the editor of Inexplicata: The Journal of Hispanic Ufology. Published in FATE Jan/Feb 2009. Read more at www.fatemag.com

 

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The Weirdest Indicators of Serious Medical Risks

As databases of information about people’s lifestyles and medical ailments grow, ever-stranger omens of our health seem to emerge.

Today’s computer-powered studies allow researchers to look beyond obvious health risks of the past. New analyses show, for example, that finger length, grip strength and even height may be reliable predictors of cancer, longevity and heart disease.

But not all statistically-based findings are created equal, said Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University and director of research for STATS.org.

“It’s easy to get results that look impressive by trying a whole bunch of things on large databases of information. Things pop out, but they can be completely spurious because of chance,” Goldin said. “It’s now a fairly common thing to see something published and have someone say that it’s not true.”

Although the ease of mining medical databases for results can outpace scientists’ abilities to review them (clinical trial journals alone publish about 75 in-depth studies every day, yet only 11 reviews of these studies), some do stand up to statistical and cause-and-effect scrutiny.

We recap here some of the weirdest, yet credible, indicators of medical risks ever discovered.

Finger Length

At least two genes — HOXA and HOXD — control testicle development in the womb, and testicles in turn create testosterone. But these two genes also mandate hand development, especially the index and ring fingers.

The discovery has spawned odd testosterone-based hypotheses about what the ratio of the two fingers means, from sexual fitness and exam performance to personality and sporting ability.

the proposals have fallen short of any meaningful significance, but an upcoming study in the British

Most of the proposals have fallen short of any meaningful significance, but an upcoming study in the British Journal of Cancer suggests there is a significant link to prostate cancer: If the index finger is longer than the ring finger, a man is less likely to develop the cancer.

“It seems strange, but this isn’t guesswork,” said Rosalind Eeles, cancer geneticist at the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR) in London and co-author of the study.

Eeles and her team compared more than 1,500 men with prostate cancer against more than 3,000 random men. Ignoring family history and other factors, men older than 60 years with a longer index finger were 33 percent less likely (on average) to develop prostate cancer. Younger men with a longer index finger fared even better, with an 87 percent average reduction in risk.

The association still needs to be tried against other populations to be a meaningful assessment of prostate cancer risk, but Goldin said “its speed and non-invasiveness does have something going for it.”

“It’s way too early to say how much hand screening could help,” said Elizabeth Rapley, a molecular geneticist and spokesperson for ICR. “If anything, it gives us more of a handle on how prostate cancer starts, that testosterone may have big role in the development of the disease.”

Grip Strength

According to a 25-year study of more than 6,000 men aged 45 through 68, grip strength was the best predictor of how well they’d avoid being disabled later in life. The weakest-gripping men suffered twice the disabilities of strongest grippers. And in a separate study of older men and women, good grip strength was correlated with longer lifespan.

But correlation is not causation. The best bet to living a long life, according to a plethora of research, is eating well, exercising regularly and avoiding harmful habits like smoking.

Flossing

The crud between your teeth may seem innocuous, but study after study has shown chronic infections of the mouth (also called periodontal diseases) increase the risk of circulatory woes, including coronary heart disease.

Mouth bacteria sneaking into the blood via the gums, the thinking goes, may lead to more heart-clogging arterial plaques. Inflammation caused by such a persistent infection may also prime the body for heart attacks.

Travel

If you’re close to an airport and can fly cheap, you may get to see more of the world, but this could also increase your risk of developing skin cancer.

During a British economic rebound in the 1970s, Rapley said, people enjoyed the jump in their money’s value by traveling abroad.

“Many of them went to the beaches of Spain and spent a lot of time in the sun,” she said. “We now see an increase in the rate of melanoma in that population.”

Birth Order

First-born boys may be more likely to develop testicular cancer later in life.

“Lots of series of studies suggest the first child is exposed to higher levels of estrogen, which gives greater risk of testicular cancer. But this has never been definitively proven,” Rapley said.

Chemicals similar to estrogen are one major suspect for the doubling of testicular cancer in the past 40 years (an increase not from improved screening, she said). Estrogen analogs may get into food and water supplies, for example, from the pesticides they’re found in.

Perhaps the strongest medical risk of early birth order is childhood leukemia. It develops more often in older siblings and seems to be tied to socioeconomic status. Rapley suspects immune-system training may also be part of the explanation.

“There are suggestions that it may have to do with exposure to viruses and colds and bacteria,” she said. Siblings aren’t around to give them as much exposure, she said, so “kids who go to child-care at an early age are less likely to develop leukemia than kids kept at home.”

In assessing any database-powered medical study, Goldin said it’s important to look for large sample sizes, proposed causes, accounting for chance and extraneous effects, and acknowledgment of other hypotheses. But putting a health risk into perspective is perhaps the most important thing of all.

“There’s a lot of medicine where it’s just not clear how helpful it is to know something,” Goldin says. “If you’re doubling your risk of one in a million, for example, that’s still two in a million. Unless it’s got some significant impact to way we evaluate treatment, it’s hard to see any benefit.” Read more at www.wired.com

 

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Giant Storks May Have Fed on Real Hobbits Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/09/giant-storks-fed-

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Giant Storks May Have Fed on Real Hobbits

The extinct giant stork Leptoptilos robustus would have dwarfed the "hobbit" Homo floresiensis living on the Indonesian Island of Flores.

In the "Lord of the Rings" books, hobbits were rescued by giant eagles, but real-life hobbits might have been hunted by giant storks, scientists find.

The fossil remains of what may have been a hobbit-like species of human were discovered in 2003 at the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. In that cave, scientists also unearthed a large number of bird fossils -- including 20,000- to 50,000-year-old wing and leg bones from what appears to have been a stork nearly 6 feet tall (1.8 meters).

"From the size of its bones, we initially were expecting a giant raptor, which are commonly found on islands, not a stork," said Hanneke Meijer, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

The carnivorous giant (Leptoptilos robustus) was a hitherto unknown species of marabou stork, among the largest birds alive on the planet. [Image of giant stork]

Meijer and her colleague, Rokus Awe Due, detailed their findings online Nov. 24 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

"Flores lacked any large-bodied mammalian predators -- no hyenas, lions, wolves or dogs -- so we think, in their absence, birds like storks moved in to fill that role," Meijer told LiveScience. It was likely a ground-bound hunter, as its bones were thick, giving the bird an estimated weight of 35 pounds (16 kilograms).

The extinct predator could have fed on fishes, lizards and birds, "and possibly in principle even small, juvenile hobbits, although we have no evidence for that," she said. "These birds are opportunistic carnivores -- if you give them plenty of prey items, they'll hunt all of them."

There are no signs yet of whether hobbits returned the favor by hunting these birds. "No cut marks are seen on any of its bones," Meijer said.

Flores was home to a wide variety of dwarf and giant species, a common occurrence on islands. Among Flores' inhabitants were the pygmy elephant Stegodon and the Komodo dragon, the world's largest living lizard. Many of the prehistoric animals there went extinct about 17,000 years ago, coinciding with a volcanic eruption that might have taken place on the Indonesian island of Bali, as well as shifts to a wetter climate and the arrival of modern humans.

"We're not certain as yet precisely why they all went extinct," Meijer said.

Meijer and her colleagues now plan to investigate all of the bird fossils in the cave to figure out when species arrived or evolved and when they went extinct. "This could give us a better idea of what evolutionary forces are at work there, not only on birds, but also hobbits," she said.

It remains uncertain why the cave housed so many bird fossils. "We hope a detailed study of all the layers of bones there could help explain why all these animals ended up there," Meijer said.

As for the realm of fantasy, "stories like 'Lord of the Rings' do add a nice fantasy touch to my work," Meijer said. "I have looked into legends of Indonesia to see if there were any stories of giant birds and didn't find any."

*   10 Things That Make Humans Special   *   From Lucy to the Hobbits: Top 10 Missing Links   *   Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans Read more at www.foxnews.com

 

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